then listened with bent knee and bared head whilst she sang and played to him. The marriage took place at Holyrood with much magnificence; and Dunbar the Laureate wrote “The Thristle and the Rois.” All this life and poetry and splendour glowed in Holyrood, in a braver and a warmer time than ours,—perhaps the brightest age Edinburgh has known. Little wonder that Dunbar pitied his royal master when he had to leave it even for a visit to Stirling, and wrote greeting to him from—
We that here in Hevenis glory
. . . . . . . . . .
I mean we folk in Paradyis
In Edinburgh with all merriness.
But bright things come quickly to confusion. As always, the undoing of the brave little land was brought about by England. Ten years after that marriage day at Holyrood there gathered at midnight, in the moonshine at the city Cross of Edinburgh, a spectral throng of heralds and pursuivants. Trumpets sounded, and the terrified spectators heard a ghostly voice read “the awful summons” to King James and to his Scottish chivalry: the long death-roll of all who were to fall at Flodden. Outside the city, on the Boroughmuir (part of the old hunting-ground of the forest of Drumsheugh, now a built-over suburb, but whose every inch is historic ground) lay the whole encamped host of the Scottish army. When the sun next morning rose in the August sky, it lit up a thousand pavilions white as snow, a thousand streamers flaunting over them, and reared in their midst the huge royal banner of Scotland, with its “ruddy lion ramped in gold,”—all in readiness to start on the fatal march towards Flodden. The army moved on southward, leaving every home, from the palace to the hovel, bereft of father and sons: and the women waited.
Suddenly the stillness was broken, as the first wind whispers over the land and troubles the trees with warning of a storm; and the people—the women and the old men and the children—looked into one another’s blanched faces and ran out into the street to learn the truth. One man, escaped from the field of carnage, had brought the tidings to Edinburgh. And then the storm burst.
Woe, and woe, and lamentation!
What a piteous cry was there!
Widows, maidens, mothers, children,
Shrieking, sobbing in despair!
Through the streets the death-word rushes,
Spreading terror, sweeping on—
“Jesu Christ! Our King has fallen—
O Great God, King James is gone!
Holy Mother Mary, shield us,
Thou who erst did lose thy Son!
O the blackest day for Scotland
That she ever knew before!
O our King—the good, the noble,
Shall we see him never more?
Woe to us, and woe to Scotland!
O our sons, our sons and men!
Surely some have ’scaped the Southron?
Surely some will come again?”
Till the oak that fell last winter
Shall uprear its shattered stem,
Wives and mothers of Dunedin,
Ye may look in vain for them![13]
All this Edinburgh has seen and known and felt. Remember it, as you walk in her streets to-day—it is not good for us for the heroic to be forgotten.
And how did Edinburgh take the blow? The first sound the people heard, breaking through their cries of grief, was a Proclamation that “all maner of personis ... haue reddye thair fensible geir and wapponis for weir,” for defence of the town, and that “wemen of gude pas to the kirk and pray.”[14] An indomitable race, that nothing could crush! The arms in readiness were not needed, however; England was too crippled to move.
After another long minority, such as had occurred with each of the Jameses, the wax candles at Holyrood once again lit up Court scenes. The royal palace, the building of which had been begun about 1503 by James IV.,[15] had been inhabited in the interval by the Duke of Albany, the Regent, during his sojourns in Scotland, who had, no doubt, brought his French ideas of elegance to bear on it. James V.,—the “Red Tod” of so many adventures,—who had been born within its walls, held his councils and his Court there, and, between 1529 and 1535, completed the building begun by his father, and spoilt by the English soldiers. To Holyrood, when he was but two-and-twenty, James V. brought his fragile little French bride, Madeleine, daughter of Francis I., whom he had married in Nôtre Dame at Paris. The poet Ronsard was a twelve-year-old page in the Queen’s train when she came to Holyrood; and another in her train was the founder of the great Scottish family of Hope, including that Sir Thomas Hope who was King’s Advocate in Charles I.’s time. The gentle French princess, when she landed with James at Leith on the 19th of May 1537, was already dying of consumption. She stooped and kissed the “Scottis eard” when she set foot on it; and seven weeks afterwards, within Holyrood Abbey, she was laid pitifully beneath the same kindly “Scottis eard.”
Thief! saw thou nocht the great preparatives
Of Edinburgh, the noble famous town?
Thou saw the people labouring for their lives
To mak triumph with trump and clarioun:
Sic pleasour never was in this regioun
As suld have been the day of her entrace,
With great propinis given to her Grace.
Provost, Bailies, and Lordis of the town,
The Senatours, in order consequent,
Cled into silk of purpur, black, and brown;
Syne the great Lordis of the Parliament,
With mony knichtly Baron and Banrent,
In silk and gold, in colours comfortable:
But thou, alas! all turnit into sable.[16]