Thus a Stuart king showed himself a traitor by becoming assassin, setting a doubly bad example, which his descendants followed only too often. They seemed to have kept the taint of their ancestor in their blood, until the people of England had perforce to behead one and drive out the other. The original Chapel Royal, erected in 1594 by that Stuart who became the first English king with the name of James, is now a storeroom and armory. It completes the series of apartments which the tourist cares to enter and examine.
It is not the interior architecture of Stirling Castle that repays the cultivated visitor, but rather the view from the battlements, over the glorious and eloquent landscape of mid-Scotland. A small opening in the parapet wall of the garden, termed the “Lady’s Lookout,” furnishes for us our best point of view. Westward are the Highland Mountains and between us and them lies the Vale of Menteith. Farther toward the setting sun, robed in its azure hue, rises Ben Lomond which mirrors itself in the loch of the same name, while Ben Venue, Ben A’in, Ben Ledi, and the cone of Ben Voirlich, followed in succession, the chain ending with the humbler summit of Uam-var. All of these we saw in imagination, long ago, when, while reading Scott, they rose in mind before us to “sentinel enchanted land.” North and east are the Ochil Hills and the windings of the Forth, while southward are the Campsie Hills. From the town at our feet the turnpike road draws the eye along to the ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey, while reared aloft is the Wallace Monument and within view are the Abbey Craig and the Bridge of Alan.
As we look at the old cannon, now serving for ornaments and mementoes, we ask, Who, when this castle of Stirling was built, could have conceived the power of artillery in our century? Scott tells, in his picturesque way, of a cannon ball shot against a party of rebels on their way to Edinburgh; but to-day one need only mount a fifteen-inch rifled cannon or a sixteen-inch mortar on these ramparts, to tumble down the whole structure by mere concussion and recoil. Yet in the old days of catapults and smooth-bore cannon, it was quite possible for “gray Stirling, Bulwark of the North,” to command the point between the Highlands and the Lowlands. By stationing a party at the Ford of Frew, near Aberfoyle, the main passage from the mountain district was completely closed. Thus it was true that the Forth on which Stirling Castle was situated “bridled the wild Highlander.”
It is said that the merry King James V (1512–42) put on various disguises, in order to ramble incognito about his realm to see that justice was regularly administered—and also to indulge in gallantry. Sir Walter Scott, in “The Lady of the Lake,” pictures him as the Knight of Snowdon, who meets and kills Roderick Dhu and rewards Ellen Douglas and Malcolm Graham.
On such occasions, the king took his name from Ballingeich, a place near the castle. It is said that the two comic songs, “The Gaberlunzie Man” and “The Jolly Beggar” were founded on the success of this monarch’s amorous adventures when travelling in the disguise of a beggar.
Around the castle is an excellent path, called “the Back Walk,” furnished by a citizen long ago, and a stone seat has been erected to accommodate the aged and infirm who resort to this spot. The guide in the castle points out many another spot, around which romantic or historical associations cluster, though as a rule these are more interesting to a native than to a foreign tourist.
Looking at the Grey Friars’ Church, built in 1494 by James IV and added to by Archbishop Beaton, uncle of the cardinal, we find a type of architecture peculiar to Scotland; that is, of the later pointed Gothic. Though contemporary with the depressed, or perpendicular, style of architecture in England, this edifice might appear a century older than it is. The later forms of English Gothic architecture, however, were never adopted in Scotland, for the Scots preferred to follow the taste of their friends in France rather than that of their enemies in England. Here King James I of Great Britain was crowned, John Knox preaching the coronation sermon. It was this same James, “the wisest fool in Christendom,” under whose reign the Bible was again translated,—then a “revised,” but now, for centuries, the “accepted” version,—and to whom the translators dedicated that presentation address which to Americans is positively disgusting in its fulsome laudation.
From the fact that the nobles and gentry, on the estates adjoining provincial towns, had their winter residence in the city also, we find to-day, on either side of the Main Street of Stirling, what were once ancient mansions. These are now tenanted by humbler occupants. They show turrets and the crow-step gables, like those we meet with so frequently in Holland. The man who reared one of these dwellings foresaw the mutability of all things earthly and even in time the probable fall of his house. He seemed to read that law of Providence which raises the beggar from the dunghill and depresses the kings from their high seats to the level of common folks—as was sung long ago by the Virgin Mary and which under the old Manchu dynasty of China was enacted into a law. In the Central Empire every generation of the Imperial family stepped down one degree lower, until, in the ninth generation, they were able to claim the status and honors of the commoner.
In modern English, the quaint inscription on the Stirling mansion would read:—
“Here I forbear my names or arms to fix,