"Oh, lang will his lady
Look frae the Castle Doune,
Ere she see the Earl o' Moray
Come sounding through the toun."
The Bonnie Earl was murdered at Donibristle Castle, on Inverkeithing Bay across the Forth from Edinburgh, where the King sent his lordship—"oh, woe betide ye, Huntly"—to do the deed. It was our same kingly James VI, and I like to think that his life had its entertaining moments, even if Anne of Denmark did have to look long and longingly down from the battlements of Doune.
The lookout to the north is called the Victoria—as if to link Victoria with Mary! But the old queen was proudest of her blood from the eternally young queen. An inscription on the wall registers the fact that Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort visited the castle in 1842.
And not any sovereign since until 1914.
I had reached the city in the mid-afternoon, unconscious of royalty, that is, of living royalty, as one is in Scotland. It seems that the king and queen, George and Mary, were making a visit to Stirling. Consequently there were no carriages at the station—and one must be very careful how one walked on the royal crimson carpet. Two small boys who scorned royalty, were impressed into service, to carry bags to the hotel. But the press of the people was too great. The king and queen had issued from the castle, were coming back through the town
"The castle gates were open flung,
The quivering drawbridge rock'd and rung,
And echo'd loud the flinty street
Beneath the coursers' clattering feet,
As slowly down the steep descent
Fair Scotland's King and nobles went."
I took refuge in a bank building, and even secured a place at the windows. For some reason the thrifty people had not rented these advantageous casements. The king and queen passed. I saw them plainly—yes, plainly. And the people were curiously quiet. They did not mutter, they were decorous, there was no repudiation, but—what's a king or queen of diluted Stewart blood to Scotsmen of this undiluted town?
That afternoon in the castle I understood. An elderly Scotsman—I know of no people whom age so becomes, who wear it with such grace and dignity and retained power—looking with me at the memorial tablet to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, in the west lookout, explained—"It's seventy years since royalty has been here. Not from that day to this."
It seems that on the old day, the day of 1842, when royalty rode in procession through the streets of Stirling, the commoners pressed too close about. It offended the queen; she liked a little space. (I remembered the old pun perpetrated by Lord Palmerston, when he was with Queen Victoria at the reviewing of the troops returned from the Crimea, and at the queen's complaining that she smelled spirits, "Pam" explained—"Yes, esprit de corps.") So she returned not at all to Stirling. I could wish King Edward had, the one Hanoverian who has succeeded in being a Stewart.
The view is almost as commanding from Ladies Rock in the old cemetery, whither I went, because in the very old days I had known intimately, as a child reader, the "Maiden Martyr," and here was to find her monument.