Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets

by Mrs. Oliphant

The complete downfall which overtook this great house after the young King's abandonment of it is very remarkable, and shows how important was the royal position, notwithstanding the manner in which it had been exploité, and the mere nominal power of its actual possessor. The house of Angus crumbled into the dust as soon as their young prisoner escaped their hands. They took refuge in England, where they vainly attempted on various occasions to negotiate for their return, but with no success. The name continued obnoxious to James during his whole life. Sir Walter has done his best to rehabilitate that name in the noble Douglas of The Lady of the Lake, who has been identified with Archibald of Kilspindie, "the uncle of the banished Earl," the story of whose appearance at the games at Stirling is said to have some foundation of reality. But the historians of the house, who alone mention this, state the facts in a very different way.

Thus the Angus branch of the Douglas family fell, as the Earls of Douglas had fallen, and for a generation there was little heard of it save in mutterings of treason in moments of difficulty, which never came to much—until in the following reign the indomitable race rose again in another branch and under another name, and furnished in the Regent Morton one of the strongest as well as the most questionable figures of a deeply disturbed time. Never was a race more difficult to subdue.

The escape of James from Falkland took place between Easter and June in the year 1527. In 1528, the Douglases being clean swept out of the country, the young King went on a professed hunting expedition to the Borders, where, besides innumerable deer, its ostensible reason, his ride through the southern district carried punishment and death to many a Border reiver and especially to the famous John or Johnnie Armstrong, the Laird of Kilnokie, and chief or at least best-known representative of his name. Whether it was wise policy to hang the reiver who was the terror of the Borders, yet "never molested no Scottis man," it is not necessary to decide. He was a scourge to the English, of whom it was said that there was none from the Scottish Border to Newcastle who did not "pay ane tribute to be free of his cumber." Johnnie Armstrong had the folly to come into the King's presence with such a train, his men so completely armed and so many in number, as to compete with royal magnificence, not very great in Scotland in those days. "What wants yon knave that a king should have?" said the young James, who had certainly had enough of such powerful subjects: and he would not listen to either excuse or explanation from the Borderer, whose defiance as he was led to his execution, and the wail of his wild followers after him, sounds still in the stirring strains of song and ballad. No doubt it was justice that James did—but justice somewhat stern and out of time.

The young Court now blazing out into full splendour, with a legitimate head and every prospect of prosperity, became again the resort of foreign chivalry and magnificent envoys, among them a legate from the Pope to assure the allegiance of James to the Holy See, which his uncle of England had deserted. Henry at the same time did not neglect by constant messengers and vague promises, now of the hand of the Princess Mary, now of an English dukedom, to secure his nephew to his side. After that princess, whom her father tried his utmost to put out of the succession by divorcing her mother, James was the next heir, and Henry did not forget that possibility. The hand of the young princess had already been several times offered to the Scots King without any certainty either in the proposal or its acceptance. One cannot help wondering what might have been the issue had that unhappy Mary, to whom history has given so grim a nickname, been thus wedded in early youth to a gracious and gallant Stewart. In all history there occurs by times a gleam like this of possible deliverance from fate, an opening by which the subjects of tragedy might have secured an escape had they but known. One wonders had she thus escaped the wrongs and bitterness of her early career whether Mary would have got free from those traces of blood and madness which have left so dark a shadow upon her name; or whether, in the conflict that was to follow, her fierce Tudor passion would have embittered every strife. It is wonderful to think that she might have been the mother of that other Mary so different yet still more sadly fated, who in that case never could have been the Mary Stewart she was. We are led to something like a reductio ad absurdum by such speculations, very vain yet always attractive as they are. James was eager to marry at the earliest possible moment, and all would have welcomed the marriage with his kinswoman.

In this respect, however, as in almost every other, Scotland was now at a turning-point of the utmost importance in her career. For the first time her politics had begun to be troubled by the possibility of an alliance with England more strong and lasting than the brief periods of truce which had hitherto existed between two nations whose principle and tradition were those of enmity. A perpetual peace had indeed been sworn and signed at the time of the marriage of Margaret Tudor with James IV, but how little lasting that had been is amply demonstrated by the fact that no such crushing defeat had ever been inflicted upon Scotland as that of Flodden, in which the King and the great part of his nobles perished. Perhaps it was the germ of the design to attract the lesser country into the arms of the greater by friendship rather than to set her desperately at bay against all peaceful influences, which had prevented the successful army from taking advantage of the victory; but certainly through all the distracted period of James's minority efforts had been made by constant envoys to acquire a share in the councils of the country, such as had hitherto been considered the right of France, who was the old and faithful ally as England was "the auld enemy" of the Scots. The alliance with France had been taken for granted on all sides. That Scotland should harass England in every war between that country and her continental neighbour was a foregone conclusion, and it was something still more sure, a proverb on the English side, that when France was to be assailed the right thing was to begin with Scotland. The position of Henry as brother of the Scottish Queen, and the nearest relative of James, who, under circumstances not at all unlikely to occur, might be his heir, gave the English king now a natural right to interfere; and it is conceivable that had this right been exercised more wisely it might have led to fortunate issues. But unhappily King Henry had associated his influence with that of Angus, taking the part of his sister's discarded husband with great determination, and apparently without any sympathy in those changes in Margaret's affections which so much resembled his own. Angus was to Scotland the representative of the English alliance, and as everything connected with Angus had now become hateful to James, it followed that his uncle's desire to obtain an influence over him, which was not accompanied by any substantial marks of kindness towards himself, did not meet with much success: though it might have been otherwise had the vaguely-proposed marriage been carried out. But one can scarcely be sorry that the noble and graceful James should have escaped such an alliance.

LINLITHGOW PALACE

Other and still more serious matters were now, however, surging upwards in both England and Scotland, which doubled the silent struggle between the old ally and the new. On the side of France was the old religion, the Church which at this period was the strongest of the Estates of Scotland, richer than any of the others, and possessing almost all the political ability of the time: on the side of England a new, scarcely recognised, but powerful influence, which was soon to attain almost complete mastery in Scotland and shatter that Church to pieces. In the beginning of James's reign this new power was but beginning to swell in the silent bosom of the country, showing here and there in a trial for heresy and in the startling fires of execution which cut off the first martyrs for the reformed faith. But there is no evidence to show that James, a young man full of affairs much more absorbing than religious controversy, with more confidence, politically at least, in the Church than in any other power of his realm, had ever been awakened to the importance of the struggle. The smoke of those fires which blew over all Scotland in potent fumes from St. Andrews, on the further side of the Firth; and from Edinburgh, where on the Castle Hill in the intervals of the tiltings and tourneys, the Vicar of Dollar for example, of whose examination we have a most vivid and admirable report, full of picturesque simplicity, not without humour even in the midst of the tragedy, was burnt—along with several gentlemen of his county: does not seem to have reached the young King, absorbed in some project of State, or busy with new laws and regulations, or inspecting the portraits of the great ladies among whom he had to choose his bride. There is a curious story communicated in a letter of one of the English envoys of the period of his conversation with a Scotch gentleman, in which we find a description of James listening to a play represented before the Court at the feast of the Epiphany, 1540, in the Castle of Linlithgow. This play is believed to have been Sir David Lindsay's Satire on the Three Estates, one of the most effective attacks upon the corruptions of the Church which had ever been made, and setting forth the exactions of the priests from the peasantry and the poor at every event of their lives, as well as the wealth and wickedness of the monastic communities, of which Scotland was full, and which had long been the recognised object of popular satire and objurgation. The performance would seem to have had as great an effect upon the young King as had the play in Hamlet upon the majesty of Denmark. James turned to Beatoun (the Cardinal, nephew and successor of Archbishop James) the Chancellor in indignant remonstrance. Were these things so? and if they were, would not the bishops and other powerful ecclesiastics join to repress them? Let them do so at once, cried the sovereign: or if not he should send half a dozen of the proudest of them to King Henry to be dealt with after his methods. Even Churchmen had occasionally to brook such threats from an excited prince. Beatoun answered with courtier-like submission that a word from the King was enough, upon which James, not wont to confine himself to words, and strong in the success with which he had overcome one of his Estates, the lords, now so quiet under his hand, replied that he would not spare many words for such an issue. This characteristic scene is very interesting. But probably when the memory of what he had heard faded from the busy King, and the tumult of public events gained possession again of his ear and mind, he forgot the sudden impression, or contented himself with the thought that Beatoun and the bishops must put order in their own affairs. Pitscottie tells us in respect to a projected visit to England, vaguely thought of and planned several years before this time, that "the wicked bishops of Scotland would not thole" a meeting between James and Henry. "For the bishops feared that if the King had met with King Henry that he would have moved him to casten down the abbeys, and to have altered the religion as the King of England had done before. Therefore the bishops bade him to bide at home, and gave him three thousand pounds of yearly rent out of their benefices." It is to be feared that history has no evidence of this voluntary munificence, but James found the ecclesiastical possessions in Scotland very useful for the purposes of taxation, and in this respect did not permit Beatoun to have his own way.

When the young King was in his twenty-fourth year he found himself able—many previous negotiations on the subject having come to nothing—to pay a visit to the Continent in his own person in order to secure a wife. It is a greater testimony to the personal power and vigour of James than any mere details could give that, within eight years of the time when, a boy of sixteen, he had escaped from the power of the Douglas, it should be possible for him to leave, after all the wild anarchy of his minority, a pacificated and orderly kingdom behind him, in the care of a Council of Regency, while he went forth upon a mission so important to himself. He had altogether extinguished and expelled the house of Douglas; he had subdued and repressed other turbulent lords, and convinced them that his authority was neither to be neutralised nor made light of; he had settled and calmed the Border by the most decisive means; and he was now free to show himself in the society of kings, and win his princess, and see the world. He had been already the object of many overtures from contemporary Powers. The Emperor and the Pope had both sent him envoys and conciliated his friendship; and in the imperial house itself as well as in many others of the highest rank there had been ladies proposed to share his crown. The one more immediately in view when he set out on his journey was a daughter of the Duke of Vendôme. The defeat of Charles V before Marseilles took place almost simultaneously with James's arrival, and the Scotch chroniclers do not lose the opportunity of asserting that it was the coming of the King of the Scots with a supposed army of twenty thousand men to the succour of France which was the reason of the Emperor's precipitate withdrawal. Pitscottie narrates, with more evident truthfulness, how the Frenchmen on the Norman coast were alarmed by the ships, fearing it to be an enemy which hove in sight, "for there were many strangers in his companie, so that he appeared ane great army." But the sight of the red lion of Scotland changed their alarms into joy, and they welcomed the Scots King and party, "at the New Haven beside Diep," with much rejoicing. He would seem to have pushed across France to the Court of Vendôme without pausing to pay his respects to the King at Paris; and we find his movements recorded in a romantic tale, which is neither contradicted nor supported by other authorities, but likely enough to a romantic young prince upon a love-quest. According to this description James did not assume his proper character but appeared only as one among the many knights, who probably represented themselves, to make his feint successful, as merely a party of cavaliers seeking adventure and the exercises of chivalry. He intended thus to see, while himself unknown, "the gentlewoman who sould have been his spouse, thinking to spy her pulchritud and behaviour unkenned by her."

"Notwithstanding this fair ladie took suspition that the King of Scotland should be in the companie, wherefore she passed to her coffer and took out his picture, which she had gotten out of Scotland by ane secret moyane, and as soon as she looked to the picture it made her know the King of Scotland incontinent where he stood among the rest of his companie, and past peartlie to him, and took him by the hand, and said, 'Sir, ye stand over far aside; therefore, if it please your Grace, you may show yourself to my father or me, and confer and pass the time ane while.'"