Let us now look to the manner in which the death of Duncan is spoken of by the most ancient authorities. Old Andrew Wyntoun, Prior of St Serfs on Lochleven, who has never yet, to our great wonder, been upheld as one of the greatest poets of his own or any other age,—perhaps we may undertake the task some day, let our readers judge by the extracts on the present occasion with what prospect of success:—Wyntoun narrates the event with the true simplicity of genius, in these two lines:—
"He murthrified him in Elgyne,
His Kynrik he usurped syne."
This is distinct enough, in all truth: there is no ambiguity, or room for critical doubt; nor is his fellow annalist, Fordun, less distinct, for he speaks of the slain monarch as occisus scelere. But these chroniclers wrote between three and four centuries after the event they commemorate, standing chronologically almost as near our own day as Macbeth's; and when we look into those far older, if not contemporary, annals, which narrate successive events in the briefest possible shape, we find that they contain nothing to indicate that Duncan's death took place in any more atrocious manner than the multitudinous slaughters of kings, with which their narratives are often as crowded as a Peninsular campaign gazette with killed officers. Thus, the register of the Priory of St Andrews simply states, that Duncan interfectus est. It is true that the Latin language is deficient in any word to express murder as distinguished from other kinds of slaughter. Trucido is the verb we have been accustomed to associate most nearly with the idea of assassination; but in one of the most circumspect and prosaic of the old annals, that of Tighernac, this very word is applied to the death of Macbeth himself. Blackstone notices the circumstance that the English lawyers had to coin, for their own special use, the substantive murdrum and the verb murdrare; equally creditable to their good taste in Latinity and to the social condition of their country. In fact, the Romans looked upon death, in any form, as so bad a business, that they cared little for making nice distinctions about the motive that had occasioned it, or the manner in which it was effected; and it was a condition so generally disliked, that, if any man was absurd enough voluntarily to place himself in it, neither the law nor public opinion troubled itself to express disapproval, either by driving a stake through the body or in any other way. Undoubtedly there were justifiable slaughters and unjustifiable; but the practice of single combat had not arisen to draw a strong and distinct line between death in a fair tournament or duel, and secret assassination. A recollection that this was also the social state of Scotland in the days of Macbeth, will help us far better towards the truth than a criticism on the ambiguous Latin words. It was between that age and the period of Wyntoun and Fordun that single-combat chivalry and the laws of honour had grown up; so, while the older chroniclers had simply to say that the man was killed, without troubling themselves about the manner, those of later date were moved to divide the deaths into two departments—the killed in combat and the murdered. More, probably, by chance than design, the fate of Duncan was put into the latter category; and then a super-structure of particulars was raised upon it—for it must be observed, that the romantic incidents of the slaughter were added at a still later period than that of Fordun or Wyntoun—by Boece and Hollinshed. Here, then, is our case, as lawyers say: Macbeth, in right of his wife, was a claimant of the crown. He kills the existing holder; but there is nothing in the older accounts of the affair to show that he did so otherwise than in the fair course of war. It was what the old civilians would have called a casus belli,—an expression which, by the way, we find some accomplished editors using as the Latin for a justification of war. The murder is found only in the later chronicles, which, in all parts of their narrative, have covered their more sober predecessors with a coating of fabulous details like the stalactites of a dripping cave. However the real fact may have stood, we have no statement of Macbeth having murdered Duncan until between three and four centuries after the event. Why,—the case looks vastly better than we thought it did when we began with it; we have some thoughts of believing our own theory, which is more than ever we knew a historical critic do, within the range of our personal observation.
Having so disposed of this question, we are inclined to amuse our readers with some further notices—real and unreal—about Macbeth. Wyntoun gives us a strange wild legend of his supernatural parentage, beginning
"Bot, as we fynd be some stories,
Gotten he was in fairly wys;
His modyr to woods made oft repaire,
For the delyte of halesome air;
Swa sho passed upon a day
'Til a wood her for to play,
Scho met of cas with a fair man
(Never nane so fair as sho thought than
Before than had sho seen with sight)
Of beauty pleasand, and of hycht
Proportioned wele in all measure,
Of limb and lyth a fair figure."
Such is the description of the putative father of Macbeth. In the sententious explanation of Wyntoun, who scorned expletives, "he the devil was;" and so he told the wandering damsel—
"And bade her nought fleyed to be of that,
But said that her son should be
A man of great state and bounty;
And na man sould be born of wife
Of power to reve him of his life.
And of that deed in taknyng,
He gave his leman then a ring,
And bade her that sho sould keep that wele,
And hald for his love that jewel."
Wyntoun's melodious verses were lying in a dusty parchment manuscript when Shakspeare wrote; we know not if he had access to the volume, nor have we any strong reason for presuming that he would have perused it if he had. It would be too adventurous to predict whether, knowing the legend, he would have considered any reference to it as consistent with the character of his drama; but it is curious to observe, that the tale appears to have been in the eye of Sir Walter Scott, when he wrote the history of Brian the Hermit, in the Lady of the Lake, beginning—
"Of Brian's birth strange tales were told:
His mother watch'd a midnight fold."
We shall now indulge our readers with a glance at a totally different feature in the career of Macbeth. It appears that he was a very able financier. We presume that he was his own First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer: yet in his days there was no pressure on the money-market; there was no drain of gold; there was no restriction of issue; no great houses suspended payment; there were no rumours of turns-out and distress in the manufacturing districts; there was no Highland destitution. Our proof of this position lies in two lines of our illustrious poet Wyntoun, which contain as much as a smaller genius could have crowded into a volume on "The state and progress of Scotland during the reign of Macbeth; with an account of the arts, industry, and manufactures of the country; returns of the exports and imports, and of the goods entered for home consumption, with the annual gross and net revenue from customs and excise, post-office, assessed taxes, hereditary revenue, and other miscellaneous sources, during that reign: dedicated, by permission, to the Statistical Society." Wyntoun's simple statement is—