The opening in the terrace on the left of the picture shows a staircase descending to the playground of the school. Most of the Castle is seen, including the Half-Moon Battery, and part of the south retaining wall of the Esplanade. A figure in a master’s gown occupies the foreground.
and the great hall. This great hall was used for all State ceremonials, banquets, and gatherings. It was here, in all likelihood, that Alexander III. held that Council in the Castle on that stormy day in March 1286 before he took horse and rode through the darkness and storm towards Kinghorn, where the bride he had married a few months before awaited him,—rode till, close to his journey’s end, his horse stumbled—a stumble that cost Scotland dear, for it plunged her into two and a half centuries of incessant war.
Quhen Alysander oure Kyng wes dede
That Scotland led in luve and lé
Away wes sons off ale and brede
Off wyne and wax, off gamyn and glé;
Our gold wes changed in to lede,
Cryst, born in to Vyrgynyté,
Succoure Scotland and remede
That stad is in perplexyté.
It was in the great hall of the Castle that the treacherous “Black Dinner” was held in James II.’s minority. It was in the great hall that many of the Scottish Parliaments met, for they were always held wherever the King happened to be at the moment, and the King often happened to be in Edinburgh Castle. Here, then, gathered all those grave or stormy Parliaments of Scottish nobles, presided over by a gallant Stuart. Here they discussed the affairs of the brave and troubled kingdom; here they doomed men to death or exile; here they planned wars with the “auld enemy”; here they passed those laws which were “good laws, had they been kept.”
It was in this great hall that Charles I. sat, surrounded by Scottish and English nobles, on a June evening in 1633, at a great banquet given by the Earl of Mar in his honour, the day before he was crowned at Holyrood. It was here that, a few years later, Alexander Leslie, the Covenanting General, gave a banquet to Cromwell and the Covenanting lords, whilst a blue banner waved above them bearing the angry legend, “For an Oppressed Kirk and a Broken Covenant.”
There is another room in the Castle, a smaller room, in which tangible symbols of the days of Scottish independence can be seen. There, under a vaulted roof, on a table covered with glass and set within an iron cage, are the Scottish Regalia. The dim light reveals the rubies and sapphires and diamonds and the big pearls set in the ancient golden diadem of the crown, of date unknown, but which must have rested on the head of the Bruce and have been worn by each of the Stuarts. It was James V., the “Red Tod,” who added to the old diadem the two arches of gold, surmounted by globe and cross; and it was in 1685 that, the former cap of purple having become faded and threadbare during the concealment of the Regalia in the Civil War times, the rather theatrical tiara of crimson velvet, ermine, and pearls was substituted. This is the crown worn by the hapless Mary, Queen of Scots, and that crowned her infant son, James VI., after her forced abdication. This is the crown that was set on the head of Charles I. at Holyrood; and this is what was so pointedly alluded to by the preacher as “a tottering crown,” the last time it was ever worn by a king of Scotland—when Charles II. was crowned and scolded and lectured at Scone. “The Presbyterian solemnity with which it was given to Charles II.,” says Mr. Robert Chambers,[4] “was only a preface to the disasters of Worcester; and, afterwards, it was remembered by this monarch, little to the advantage of Scotland, that it had been placed upon his head with conditions and restrictions which wounded at once his pride and his conscience.”
By the side of the cushion on which the crown rests lies the slender chased sceptre, three little statues on the top—the Virgin, St. Andrew, and St. James—surmounted by a crystal globe. This sceptre, in the hands of the Chancellor of Scotland, has touched each of the acts of the Scottish Parliaments, in token of royal assent. The mace has also a crystal globe, said to have decorated a still more ancient Scottish sceptre. A crystal or beryl of this kind, called in Gaelic “Clach-Buaidh” (stone of victory), tradition avers to have been the badge of the Arch Druid. Its position on the mace and sceptre is, therefore, a symbolic emblem of dateless antiquity. The rich Italian sword of State was a gift from Pope Julius II. to James IV. in 1507. “Taking these articles in connection with the great historical events and personages that enter into the composition of their present value,” writes Mr. Robert Chambers,[5] “it is impossible to look upon them without emotions of singular interest; while at the same time their essential littleness excites wonder at the mighty circumstances and destinies which have been determined by the possession, or the want of possession, of what they emblematise and represent.”
One other romance of the Castle remains to tell—a stout and tangible romance—“the great iron murderer, Muckle Mag,” as Cromwell’s list has it. Mons Meg is thirteen feet long, and weighs four thousand stones. She is the most ancient cannon but one in Europe, and she is a travelled cannon. She accompanied James IV. in 1497 to the siege of Norham (James IV. was fond of ordnance, and forged the “seven sisters of Borthwick” lost at Flodden), and in the Lord High Treasurer’s accounts of her travelling expenses on this occasion she is spoken of with an easy familiarity—
| Item, to the menstralis that playit befoir Mons down the gait | XIIjs. |
| Item, giffen for VIIj of cammas, to be Mons a clath to covir hir | IXs. IIIjd. |
| Item, for ijc spikin nalis, to turs with Mons | IIjs. |