And Clyde below runs silent, strong, and deep,
The hardy peasant, by oppression driven
To battle, deemed his cause the cause of Heaven;
Unskilled in arms, with useless courage stood,
While gentle Monmouth grieved to shed his blood.”
So writes the author of “The Clyde”; and in spite of the beauty of the scene, the old associations of Bothwell Brig and its vicinity are with broil and wrong and bloodshed. Below the scene of Monmouth’s victory are sylvan banks consecrated to the memory of forsaken love—“O Bothwell bank, thou bloomest fair!” And lower down, facing each other from vantage ground on opposite sides of the stream, are the grand ruins of old Bothwell Castle and the remains of Blantyre Priory.
Between these two sentinels of the past—the crumbling but still massive feudal towers of the Douglases on their bold green bank, and the meagre fragment of the monastic house perched on its red sandstone cliff—runs the smooth deep current of the Clyde, inspiring, as Wordsworth has said, “thoughts more in harmony with the sober and stately images of former times, than if it had roared over a rocky channel, and forced its sound upon the ear.” The castle, both from the mass and height of its huge walls and round towers and turrets, and from its situation, is still magnificent in its decay. It has had many masters, among them that Aymer de Valence who held Clydesdale for the English and planned the capture of Wallace. Edward I. and Edward III. have sojourned in it. But its best remembered owners are the Black Douglases. They swore indifferently by “St. Bride of Bothwell” and by “St. Bride of Douglas.” In the beautiful choir of the old collegiate church, now forming part of the church of the parish, reposes the dust of chiefs of the name; and descendants of the old race still hold the lands and woods around Bothwell Castle. In St. Bride’s too, in 1400, a couple of years after its erection, took place in an “unhappy hour” the fateful marriage between David, Duke of Rothesay, and Marjory, the daughter of “Archibald the Grim,” Earl of Douglas. A more pleasant association with Bothwell Church is the birth, in the manse here, of Joanna Baillie, the poetess, who has preserved in her verse fond remembrances of the “bonnie braes” and “sunny shallows” of the Clyde, where she spent her childhood.
Photo: F. W. Bergman, Hamilton.