So by descent the same should spring of thee,
By grace of God against this good new year.’
The poet here undoubtedly had in view a prediction which occurs in a rude metrical tract printed at Edinburgh by Robert Waldegrave in 1603, under the title, ‘The Whole Prophesies of Scotland, England, and somepart of France and Denmark, prophesied by mervellous Merling, Beid, Bertlingtoun, Thomas Rymour, Waldhave, &c., all according in one.’[16] These so-called prophecies are unintelligible rhapsodies about lions, dragons, foumarts, conflicts of knights, of armies, and of navies—how there should be fighting on a moor beside a cross, till by the multitude of slain the crow should not find where the cross stood—how the dead shall rise, ‘and that shall be wonder’—how
‘When the man in the moon is most in his might,
Then shall Dunbarton turn up that is down,
And the mouth of Arran both at one time,
And the lord with the lucken hand his life shall he lose—’
and much more of the like kind.
1561-2.
From the style of the verse, which is in general alliterative, as well as some of the allusions, it may be surmised that these prophecies were written in the minority of James V., on the basis of obscure popular sayings attributed to Merlin, Rymour, and other early sages. The special passage which Alexander Scott refers to was in Rymour’s prophecies, but also given in a slightly different form in those of Bertlingtoun: