But not all the Castle prisoners had the luck to escape; and some of the memories of the Castle are of dark and dreadful tragedies. Numberless wretches must have languished, their miseries and tortures unknown and unrecorded, in dungeons cut out of the rock, or in noisome dens and cells. The fates of some of those of higher rank are matters of history. It was on the Castle Hill, in the reign of James V., that the beautiful Lady Glammis, on an accusation of treason too readily believed against a Douglas,[3] was burnt alive at the stake in sight of her husband and her little son, Lord Glammis, who were imprisoned in the Castle. The husband, mad with grief and horror, tried to escape during the night that followed, and was dashed to pieces on the cliffs.
The Castle is associated with the name of Mary, Queen of Scots, as closely as with that of Saint Margaret,—two Queens so very different, and yet both Queens of Scotland, and each the mother of a race of Kings. The tourist, when he passes from the dark little Oratory into the room in which James VI. was born, steps across the centuries from the beginning of Scottish history to the close of Scottish history.
It was amid all the unhappiness of Queen Mary’s life and the troubles of her reign, shortly after the brutal scene of Riccio’s murder in her presence, that the Queen was advised, by the Lords of Council, to remain in the Castle until after the birth of her child. Here, then, in the palace of the Castle, can still be seen the tiny, irregularly shaped chamber, scarcely nine feet square, in which King James VI. of Scotland and I. of England was born. And here, from the one small window overlooking the Grassmarket, tradition says that the new-born infant was lowered in a basket to the Catholic friends waiting for him below.
In the days of the last Stuarts, the two Argyles, father and son, were both prisoners in the Castle before their executions; and, after the Stuart dynasty had fallen, the Jacobites often felt the hospitality of Edinburgh Castle. The better class in Edinburgh were very Jacobite in their leanings and sympathies,—Jacobite almost to a man, certainly to a woman. In George I.’s reign many a loyal Scot suffered torture, imprisonment, and death in the Castle; and women of gentle birth were among the Jacobites who endured barbarous treatment for their loyalty to the fallen race.
With every century the outward aspect of the Castle has changed, so that its jagged outline to-day, blotted against the sunset sky, is utterly different from what dwellers in Edinburgh of any other century would have known. But still, looking up at the perpendicular cliffs of the Castle Rock and the strong walls and towers and fortifications that seem part of them, one can picture all those stirring scenes,—the imprisoned “maydens” of dim, legendary days; Queen Margaret and the escape through the miraculous mist; the many sieges; the starving patriotic garrisons; the prisoners in their dungeons; the wild escapes ending in liberty or in death; the brilliant scenes during the reign of James IV., that royal “knight errant,” who sat amid his knights and ladies to watch the tournaments below the Castle walls, and presented a lance tipt with pure Scottish gold to the winner.
Within the Castle much remains. Queen Margaret’s chapel is the oldest bit; but there are also the palace
