QUEEN MARY.
At Berwick John Knox united himself in marriage with Margaret Stewart, member of the royal house of Stewart, cousin, if at some remove, from that Stewart queen who belonged to "the monstrous regiment of women," and to whose charms even the Calvinist John was sensitive. One remembers that at Berwick John was fifty, and Margaret was sixteen.
There is not much in Berwick to hold the attention, unless one would dine direct on salmon trout just drawn frae the Tweed. There are memories, and modern content with what is modern.
Perhaps the saddest eyes that ever looked on the old town were those of Queen Mary, as she left Jedburgh, after her almost fatal illness, and after her hurried ride to the Hermitage to see Bothwell, and just before the fatal affair in Kirk o' Field. Even then, and even with her spirit still unbroken, she felt the coming of the end. "I am tired of my life," she said more than once to Le Croc, French ambassador, on this journey as she circled about the coast and back to Edinburgh.
She rode toward Berwick with an escort of a thousand men, and looked down on the town from Halidon Hill, on the west, where two hundred years before (1333) the Scots under the regent Douglass had suffered defeat by the English.
It was an old town then, and belonged to Elizabeth. But it looked much as it does to-day; the gray walls, so recently built; the red roofs, many of them sheltering Berwickians to-day; the church spires, for men worshiped God in those days in churches, and according to the creeds that warred as bitterly as crowns; masts in the offing, whence this last time one might take ship to France, that pleasant smiling land so different from this dour realm. At all these Mary must have looked wistfully and weariedly, as the royal salute was fired for this errant queen. She looked also, over the Border, then becoming a hard-and-fast boundary, and down the long, long road to Fotheringay, and to peace at last and honour, in the Abbey.
It is well to stand upon this hill, before you go on to the West and the Border, or on to the North and the gray metropolis, that you may appreciate both the tragedy and the triumph that is Scotland's and was Mary's. The North Sea is turning purple far out on the horizon, and white sea birds are flying across beyond sound. The long level light of the late afternoon is coming up over England. In the backward of the Border a plaintive curlew is crying in the West, as he has cried since the days of Mary, and æons before.
Flodden
You may go westward from here, by train and coach, and carriage and on foot, to visit this country where every field has been a battlefield, where ruined peel towers finally keep the peace, where castles are in ruins, and a few stately modern homes proclaim the permanence of Scottish nobility; and where there is no bird and no flower unsung by Scottish minstrelsy, or by Scott. Scott is, of course, the poet and prose laureate of the Border. "Marmion" is the lay, almost the guide-book. It should be carried with you, either in memory or in pocket.
If the day is not too far spent, the afternoon sun too low, you can make Norham Castle before twilight, even as Marmion made it when he opened the first canon of Scott's poem—