To-day the silly sheep are cropping grass about the scant stones that once sheltered kings and defied them; and ash trees are the sole occupants of the once royal dwelling. To the American there is something of passing interest in the present seat of the Duke of Roxburgh, Floors castle across the Teviot. For the house, like many another Scottish house, still carries direct descent. And an heiress from America, like the heiress from Northumberland, unites her fortune with this modern splendour—and admits Americans and others on Wednesdays!
The town of Kelso is charming, like many Tweed towns. It lies among the wooded hills; there is a greater note of luxury here. Scott called it "the most beautiful if not the most romantic village in Scotland." Seen from the bridge which arches the flood, that placid flood of Tweed, and a five-arched bridge ambitiously and successfully like the Waterloo bridge of London, one wonders if after all perhaps Wordsworth wrote his Bridge sonnet here—"Earth hath not anything to show more fair." Surely this bridge, these spires and the great tower of the Abbey, "wear the beauty of the morning," the morning of the world. The hills, luxuriously wooded, rise gently behind, the persistent Eildons hang over, green meadows are about, the silver river runs—and the skies are Scottish skies, whether blue or gray.
The Abbey, of course, is the crown of the place, bolder in design and standing more boldly in spite of the havoc wrought by men and time, and Hertford and Henry VIII; calmer than Melrose, less ornamental, with its north portal very exquisite in proportion.
The Abbot of Kelso was in the palmy early days chief ecclesiastic of Scotland, a spiritual lord, receiving his miter from the Pope, and armoured with the right to excommunicate.
There have been other kings here than David and the Abbot. The latter days of the Stewarts are especially connected with Kelso, so near the Border. Baby James was hurried hither and crowned in the cathedral as the III after Roxburgh. Mary Queen lodged here for two nights before she rode on to Berwick. Here in the ancient market-place, looking like the square of a continental town, the Old Chevalier was proclaimed King James VIII on an October Monday in 1715, and the day preceding the English chaplain had preached to the troops from the text—"The right of the first born is his." Quite differently minded from that Whig minister farther north, who later prayed "as for this young man who has come among us seeking an earthly crown, may it please Thee to bestow upon him a heavenly one."
When this Rising of the Forty Five came, and he who should have been Charles III (according to those of us who are Scottish, and royalist, and have been exiled because of our allegiance) attempted to secure the throne for his father, he established his headquarters at Sunilaw just outside Kelso; the house is in ruins, but a white rose that he planted still bears flowers. To the citizens of Kelso who drank to him, the Prince, keeping his head, and having something of his royal great uncle's gift of direct speech, replied, "I believe you, gentlemen, I believe you. I have drinking friends, but few fighting ones in Kelso."
Scott knew Kelso from having lived here, from going to school here, and it was in out of the Kelso library—where they will show you the very copy—that he first read Percy's Reliques.
"I remember well the spot ... it was beneath a huge platanus, in the ruins of what had been intended for an old fashioned arbour in the garden.... The summer day had sped onward so fast that notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the dinner hour. The first time I could scrape together a few shillings I bought unto myself a copy of the beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently or with half the enthusiasm."
Was it not a nearer contemporary to Percy, and a knight of romance, Sir Philip Sidney, who said, "I never read the old song of Percie and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet"?
For myself I have resolutely refused to identify the word, Platanus, lest it should not be identical with the spot where I first read my Percy.