"He passed to Edinburgh," adds the chronicler, "and there remained eight days with great dollour and lamentation for the tinsell (loss) of his lieges and shame to himself." Discouragement beyond the reach of mortal help or hope seemed to have taken hold of the unfortunate King. He saw himself alone, no one standing by him, his nobles hostile, his people indifferent; he had vowed that Scotland should not be broad enough to hold both them and him, but he had no power to carry out this angry threat. His life had been threatened in mysterious ways; he had lost his children, his confidence in himself and his fortunes; last and worst of all, he was dishonoured in the eyes of the world. His army had refused to advance, his soldiers to fight. He was the King, but able to give effect to none of a king's wishes—neither to punish his enemies nor to carry out his promises. He who had done so much for his realm could do no more. He who had ridden the Border further and swifter than any man-at-arms to carry the terror of justice and the sway of law—who had daunted the dauntless Highlands and held the fiercest chiefs in check—who had been courted by pope and emperor, and admired and feasted at the splendid Courts of France—he who had been the King of the Commons, the idol of the people—was now cast down and miserable, the most shamed and helpless of kings.
There seems no reason why James should have so entirely lost heart. There had already been moments in his life when he had suffered sore discouragement and overthrow, yet never had been overcome. But now it is clear he felt himself at the end of his resources. How could he ever hold up his head again? a man who could not keep his own kingdom from invasion, or avenge himself upon his enemies! After he had lingered a little in Edinburgh, where the Queen was now near the moment which should give another heir to Scotland, he left the capital—perhaps to save her at such a time from the sight and the contagion of his despair—and crossed the Firth to Falkland, a place so associated with stirring passages in his career. But there his sickness of heart turned to illness of body; he became so "vehement sick" that his life was despaired of; he was "very near strangled to death by extreme melancholie." One hope remained, that the Queen might restore some confidence to his failing strength and mind by an heir to the crown, another James, for whom it might be worth while to live. James sent for some of his friends, "certain of his lords, both spiritual and temporal," to help him to bear this time of suspense, and advise him what might yet be done to set matters right, who surrounded him, as may be imagined, very anxiously, fearing the issue.
"By this the post came out of Linlithgow showing the King good tidings that the Queen was delivered. The King inquired whether it was man or woman. The messenger said it was ane fair dochter. The King answered and said, 'Farewell! it came with ane lass, and it will pass with ane lass,' and so commended himself to Almighty God, and spoke little from thereforth, but turned his back to his lords and his face to the wall."
Even at this bitter moment, however, the dying Prince was not left alone with his last disappointment. Cardinal Beatoun, whose influence had been so inauspicious in his life, pressed forward, "seeing him begin to fail of his strength and natural speech," and thrust upon him a paper for his signature, "wherein the Cardinal had writ what he pleased for his own particular weill," evidently with some directions about the regency, that ordeal which Scotland, unhappily, had now again to go through. When James had put his dying hand to this authority, wrested from him in his last weakness, a faint light of peace seems to have fallen across his death-bed.
FALKLAND PALACE
"As I have shown you, he turned him upon his back, and looked and beheld his lords around about, and gave ane little lauchter, syne kissed his hand and gave it to all his lords about him, and thereafter held up his hands to God and yielded the spirit."
There are many pathetic death scenes in history, but few more touching. His father, after a splendid and prosperous life, had fallen "in the lost battle, borne down by the flying;" he, after a career almost as chivalrous and splendid and full of noble work for his country, in a still more forlorn overthrow; his hopes all gone from him, his strength broken in his youth. Nothing, it would seem, could save these princes, so noble and so unfortunate. It was enough to bear the name of James Stewart to be weighed down by cruel Fate. But before his spirit shook off the mortal coil a ray of peace had shot through the clouds; he looked upon the anxious faces of his friends, some of whom at least must surely have been true friends, bound to him by comradeship and brotherhood, with that low laugh which is one of the most touching expressions of weakened and failing humanity—love and kindness in it, and a certain pleasure to see them round him; and yet to be free of it all—the heavy kingship, the hopes that ever failed, the friends that so rarely were true. The lips that touched that cold hand which he kissed before he gave to them must have trembled, perhaps with compunction, let us hope with some vow of fidelity to his memory and trust.
Thus died the last of the five Jameses—the last in one sense of that unfortunate but gallant line. A life more swept by storms, more rent asunder by conflicting passions and influences, more tragic still and passionate than theirs, was to part them from the singularly changed, modified, and modernised successors who, with a difference, were to wear yet drop this ancient crown. The Stewarts after Mary are no longer like those that went before. James's dying words came in some curious fashion true, though not as he thought. It came with a lass and it went with a lass that ancient crown. When another James reached the throne Scotland was no more as it had been.
It may seem a fantastic chronology to end here the records of the Stewards of Scotland: but it is I think justified by this change, which altered altogether the character of the history and the circumstances of the monarchs. Henceforward new agencies, new powers, were at work in the little proud and self-contained kingdom, which had maintained its independence and individuality so long. Torn asunder by rival influences, by intrigues incessant and profound, by that struggle between the old and the new which was never more desperate than in her bosom, and which, being a religious change chiefly, was one of life and death: and with a monarch no longer native, but of foreign training and thoughts, even if she had not been a woman and half a Tudor, the little ship of State, the gallant little nation, plunged amid waves and billows, not unfamiliar, indeed, but fiercer and wilder than ever before, with winds so much increased in force as they raged over wider seas.