JAMES GRAHAM, MARQUIS OF MONTROSE.
Even though when search was made at the restoring of the church and the erection of the effigy the remains could not be found, there has been that justification by procession and by faith, that justification of loyalty that we remember when we remember Montrose—
"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch,
To gain or lose it all."
Holyrood
Holyrood, ruined as it is, empty as it is, spurious as it is, still can house the Stewarts. Nowhere else are they so completely and splendidly Stewart. It is the royalest race which ever played at being sovereign; in sharp contrast with the heavier, more successful Tudors; crafty but less crafty than the Medici; amorous but more loyal than the Bourbons.
Never did kings claim sovereignty through a more divine right—and only one (whisper sometimes intimates that he was not Stewart, but substitute; but he left a Stewart descent) failed to pay the penalty for such assertion. It was the splendour which was Stewart while they lived, the tragedy that was Stewart when they came to die, which makes them the royal race.
There were born in Holyrood not one of them, unless it be James V. But almost all of them were married in Holyrood, held here their festive days, and, not one of them died in Holyrood. It is their life, the vivid intense flash of it, across those times that seem mysterious, even legendary in remembered times north of the Border. Life was a holiday to each of the Stewarts, and he spent it in the palace and in the pleasance of Holyrood.
The Abbey, with the monastery which was attached to it, begins far back before the Stewarts. It was founded by David I, the abbey-builder. Legend has it that he went a-hunting on a holy day, and straying from the "noys and dyn of Bugillis," a white stag came against him. David thought to defend himself, but a hand bearing a cross came out of the cloud, and the stag was exorcised. David kept the cross. In dream that night within the castle he was commanded to build an abbey where he had been saved, and the hunting place being this scant mile and a quarter from the castle—then a forest where now it is treeless—David placed this convenient abbey where it has stood for six centuries, defying fire and war and reformation, until the citizens of Edinburgh ravaged it when the roof fell in in the middle of the eighteenth century.
There is a curious feeling when one crosses the Girth stones at the lower end of the Canongate. It is a century and more since this was sanctuary. But it is impossible to step across these stones, into the "Liberty of Holyrood," and not wonder if there may not perhaps be some need in your own soul of sanctuary. Thousands and thousands of men—"abbey lairds" as they were pleasantly called—have stepped across this line before me, through the centuries. Who am I to be different, unneedful? May I not need inviolate sanctuary? May it not be that at my heels dogs some sinister creditor who will seize me by the skirts before I reach the boundary beyond which there is no exacting for debt? A marvelous thing, this ancient idea of sanctuary. It made an oasis of safety in a savage world. Surely it was super-christian. And here, at Holyrood, as the medieval statute declares, "qukilk privelege has bene inviolabie observit to all maner of personis cuman wythin the boundes ... past memorie of man." What has the modern world given itself in place of ancient sanctuary? Justice, I suppose, and a jury trial.