Kirkmen, courtmen, and craftsmen fine,
Doctors in jure and medicyne:
Divinours, rhetours, and philosophours:
Astrologists, artists, and oratours:
Men of armes and valliant knights:
And mony other goodly wights:
Musicians, minstrels, and merry singers,
Chevalouris, callandaris, and flingars,
Cunyeours, carvours, and carpenters,
Builders of barks and ballingars,
Masouns, lying upon the land,
And ship wrights hewing upon the strand,
Glasing wrights, goldsmiths, and lapidaris,
Printers, paintours, and potingaris.
And the King who presided over all this, if but half of De Ayala’s praises be true, was himself as skilled in the arts of peace as of war, spoke eight languages, and said “all his prayers.”[11] Holbein’s miniature is a witness of his personal beauty. All agree that he was a fearless rider, a chivalrous knight, and a brave man. But he was sensitive, subject to sudden fits of depression alternating with his gay humour, and it is told of him that, though he had been but a boy when his father’s estranged nobles had used him as a figure-head for their rebellion, yet he always wore to the day of his death a hidden chain round his body, in constant penance for his father’s death.
In his thirtieth year King James married little Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. of England. The marriage was brought about by the persistence of Henry VII., and was nowise according to the inclinations of the Scottish King, who evaded it for several years after it was first proposed to him. But State reasons prevailed, and at last James gave way. The bridegroom was thirty and the bride was fourteen. But, if James was a tardy wooer, the florid little Tudor had nothing to complain of in the chivalry of the welcome she received from the courteous and sensitive Stuart.
In August 1503 she was brought to Scotland, with a train of knights and nobles, and James rode as far as Dalkeith to meet her, “gallantly dressed in a jacket of crimson velvet bordered with cloth of gold.”[12] Before the procession entered the city the King mounted in front of his bride on her palfrey—his own charger being too restive to bear a double burden—and so they rode into the decorated and expectant capital, where the people filled the windows, and gaily dressed ladies thronged the “fore-stairs”—open stairways outside the houses,—and all shouted or waved their loyalty and their welcome. Tournaments and shows took place; and, when they were alone, the king played to the little princess on the virginal, and
Holyrood Palace stretches across the picture east and west, and is dominated by Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags. The dark turret at the west end of the nearest and north wing contains the private supper-room of Queen Mary, the room from which the Italian Rizzio was taken to his death. The end of the south wing shows beyond, and through a gap in the mean buildings, occupying the foreground of the picture, is seen the open space in front of the Palace, the restored fountain, and the entrance to a carriage road called the Queen’s Drive. The conical roofs of the towers of the Guard House appear to the extreme right. The gable and east window of the Chapel Royal (part of the ancient Abbey), together with the tower, show at the eastern extremity of the north wing.