In 1758 she laboriously journeyed as far as England under the mistaken impression that she had become unserviceable, and there for seventy-five years formed one of the sights shown in the Tower of London. In 1829 Sir Walter Scott personally insisted on the return home of what was so dear to the national pride, and the portly prodigal was met at Leith by three troops of cavalry and the 73rd Regiment, and escorted back to the Castle in triumph to the tune of the pipes. With seven huge stone cannon-balls lying beside her, “after life’s fitful fever” she stands on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and looks across the new city to the Forth.
CHAPTER II
HOLYROOD, THE PALACE AND THE ABBEY:
THE SIX ROYAL JAMESES; MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS; AND PRINCE CHARLIE
The moon passed out of Holyrood, white-lipped, to open sky;
The night wind whimpered on the Crags to see the ghosts go by;
And stately, silent, sorrowful, the lonely lion lay,
Gaunt shoulder to the Capital and blind eyes to the Bay.
Will H. Ogilvie.
THERE are two Holyroods—Holyrood Abbey, dating back to the twelfth century, and founded by David I.; and Holyrood House, the palace of the Stuarts, dating from fully three centuries later. The Abbey had always contained royal apartments, and had been a place of royal residence in turn with the Castle; and so it was natural that the tradition should be retained, and the royal palace built in connection with the splendid old Abbey. Of the once great and wealthy Abbey of Holyrood only a ruined fragment remains, open to the sky; and of the palace only part of the large sixteenth-century royal residence remains, included in a smaller seventeenth-century building.
