Transcriber Notes

• Obvious printer typos and punctuation errors fixed.
• The page number in the index for an entry “Anne, Queen, reign of” has been corrected from 672 to 272.
• The name Serenus has been changed to Severus on pp. 5-6 and his year of death at York changed from 241 to 211 on p. 6. The year of 1588 for the festival day of St. Giles on p. 115 changed to 1558. The year of 1630 on p. 124 for Montrose's execution changed to 1650. The year of 1560 on p. 132 for fire at Holyrood Palace during Cromwell's time changed from to 1650.
• Otherwise, variations in spelling and hyphenation, and other possible typos or errors in dates have been left as in the original.
• The text has quotations from centuries when words were spelled differently than today. The spelling in these quotations has been left as is.
• If the device allows, some full page illustrations can be clicked on to view a larger version.

BYGONE SCOTLAND.

WEST FRONT OF HOLYROOD ABBEY CHURCH.

Bygone Scotland:
HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL.

BY

DAVID MAXWELL, C.E.

“Stands Scotland where it did?”

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BRYCE, LOTHIAN STREET.

HULL:

WILLIAM ANDREWS & CO., THE HULL PRESS.

LONDON:

SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LD.

1894.

Preface.

For a country of comparatively small extent, and with a large proportion of its soil in moor and mountain, histories of Scotland have been numerous and well-nigh exhaustive. The present work is not a chronicle of events in order and detail, but a series of pictures from the earlier history, expanding into fuller narratives of the more striking events in later times. And it includes portions of contemporaneous English history; for the history of Scotland can only be fully understood through that of its larger and more powerful neighbour.

The growth of a people out of semi-barbarism and tribal diversity, to civilization and national autonomy, is ever an interesting study. This growth in Scotland included many elements. The Roman occupation of Southern Britain banded together for defence and aggression the northern tribes. For centuries after the Roman evacuation the old British race held the south-western shires, up to the Clyde; the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria extended to the Frith of Forth; there were Norse settlements on the eastern coast, in Orkney, and the Hebrides. Of the various races out of which the Scottish nation was formed, the Picts were the most numerous; but the Scots—a kindred race, wanderers from Ireland—were the more active and aggressive—came to assume the general government, and gave their name to the whole country north of the Solway and the Tweed.

It is interesting to trace how, in unsettled times, the burghs developed into little, distinct communities, largely self-governed. And the religious element in Scotland has been a powerful factor in shaping the character of the people and of the national institutions; the conflict of the Covenant was the epic in Scottish history. The rebellion of 1745, as the last specially Scottish incident in British history, is properly the closing chapter in Bygone Scotland.

D. M.

Hull Literary Club,

St. Andrew’s Day, 1893.

Contents.

BYGONE SCOTLAND.

The Roman Conquest of Britain.

We cannot tell—it is highly improbable that we ever shall know—from whence came the original inhabitants of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. Men living on the sea-coasts of the great quadrant of continental land which fronts these islands, would, when the art of navigation got beyond the raft and canoe, venture to cross the narrow seas, and form insular settlements. It is indeed possible that, before that subsidence of the land of Western Europe which separated our islands from the mainland and from each other, was effected by the slow but ever-acting forces of geology, men were living on the banks of ancient rivers which are now represented by the Clyde, the Thames, and the Shannon.

The authentic history of Britain dates from the Roman invasion; before this event all is myth and legend. Half a century before the commencement of our era, Julius Cæsar, whilst consolidating in strong and durable Roman fashion his conquest of Gaul, was informed by certain merchants of the country that on the other side of the narrow sea which bounded them on the north, there was a fertile land called Britain, or the land of tin. With his legions, in the trireme galleys of the period, Cæsar crossed the narrow sea, and, so far as he went, he conquered the land.

The inhabitants were in a rude condition of life; semi-barbarous perhaps, but certainly the peoples of Fingal and Ossian in the north, and of Caractacus and Boadicea in the south, had advanced far beyond simple savagery. Climatic and geographical influences had moulded into a robust, if a fierce and stubborn type, the common materials of humanity. The ancient Britons had, in their ideas of government, advanced beyond mere clan chieftainship. Their annals, in stone cairns and the songs of bards, commemorated bygone battles and deeds of warrior renown. They had a religion with its trained priesthood—it was not a religion of sweetness and light, but of ferocity and gloom, of human sacrifices, and mystical rites. Its temples and altars were clusters of huge stones, arranged in forest glades on some astronomical principles. The Druidic faith was one of the many offshoots of ignorant barbarism, in which the celestial orbs and the forces in terrestrial nature—lightning and tempest—life and fire—were deified. Its priesthood was a close order, holding in their mystical gripe the minds and lives of the people. It has been said that the ancient Britons were such firm believers in a future state, that they would even lend each other money, to be repaid in the spiritual world. Their language was a dialect of the Gaelic—the language spoken in more ancient times over the greater portion of Western Europe.

The Roman invasion under Julius was little more than a raid. He marched his legions as far inland as the Thames, and again retired to the coast; he left Britain without forming a Roman settlement, and for nearly a hundred years the island remained free, and did a considerable maritime trade with Gaul and Scandinavia. In A.D. 43, the fourth Roman emperor, Claudius, with a large army, invaded Britain. The native tribes, although generally inimical to the Romans, had no concerted action amongst themselves, were often, indeed, at war with each other; and thus the disciplined soldiers of Rome had a comparatively easy task, although they had many fierce encounters with native bravery and hardihood. One British chief, Caractacus, held out the longest. He was the King of the Silurians, the dwellers in South Wales and its neighbourhood. For several years he withstood the masters of the world, but was ultimately defeated in battle, and he and his family were sent prisoners to Rome.

On the eastern coast, in what is now Suffolk and Norfolk, was a tribe called the Icenians. This tribe, under Boadicea, the widow of one of its kings, made, in the absence of the Roman governor, Suetonius, raids upon London, Colchester, and other Roman towns. When Suetonius returned, he defeated Boadicea in a battle near London. She killed herself rather than submit. Agricola succeeded Suetonius as governor, and he pushed the Roman Conquest northwards to a line between the Firths of Forth and Clyde. Beyond this line the Romans never made permanent conquests. Along this line Agricola built a chain of forts as a defence of the Roman province against incursions from the northern tribes, and as a base of operations in attempting farther conquests. In a campaign in the year 84, he was opposed by a native force under a chief called Galgacus. A battle was fought amongst the Grampian Hills, near Blairgowrie, with a hardly-won victory to Agricola. It was such a victory as decided him to make the Tay the northern boundary of Roman occupation. But Roman fleets sailed round the northern shores,—planting the Imperial Standard on Orkney,—and returned, having proved that Britain was an island.

The northern portion of the island, beyond the line of forts, was then called Caledonia; border fighting was the rule, and the “barbarians from the hills” made frequent raids into the Romanized lowlands. Indeed, not only had the Romans to build a wall connecting the forts of Agricola, but also, as a second line of defence, one between the Tyne and the Solway Firth. The two walls prove the determination of the Romans to maintain their British conquests, and also at what a high rate they estimated the native resistance.

In 208, Severus had to re-conquer the country between the walls, restoring that of Agricola, and he carried the Roman eagles to the farthest points north which they ever reached. The remains of Roman roads through Strathearn to Perth, and thence through Forfar, the Mearns, and Aberdeen to the Moray Firth, belong to this period; and they represent attempts to subdue the whole island. Dion, the Roman historian, ascribes the failure of this attempt to the death of Severus at York, in 211. He describes the Caledonians as painting on their skins the forms of animals; of being lightly armed; making rapid dashes in battle; of having no king, only their tribal chieftains. In 305, Constantius defeated the tribes between the walls; they are called in the Roman records, “Caledonians and other Picts;” the latter name being then used for the first time, and as being the more generic appellation. In 360, the Scots are named for the first time. They and the Picts made a descent upon the Roman province, and this is spoken of in terms which imply that they had previously passed the southern wall.

For about 366 years the Romans held sway in Britain; if we think of it, for as long a period as elapsed between Henry the Eighth’s publishing his treatise in defence of the seven Romish sacraments, and the jubilee of Queen Victoria. The conquest of an inferior by a superior race is generally fraught with progressive issues to the conquered people. In the roads and architecture, the laws and the civic institutions of the country, the Romans left lasting memorials of their British rule. Towns rose and flourished; marshes were drained; the land was cultivated; low-lying coast lands were, by embankments, protected from the sea; trade advanced; Christianity and Roman literature were introduced.

As a constituent portion of the empire, Britain occupies a place in Roman history. A Roman commander in Britain, Albinus, had himself nominated emperor. He carried an army into Gaul, but was there beaten and slain in a battle with the rival emperor, Severus. Severus himself died at York, then called Eboracum; and, in 273, Constantine, since styled The Great, was born in that city, his mother, Helena, being British. Constantius, the father of Constantine, had a long struggle for the possession of Britain with Carausius, a Belgian-born Roman general, who, in 286, rebelled against the authority of the empire. The usurper formed a navy, with which he for eight years prevented Roman troops from landing on our shores, but he lost his life through treachery, and once more the imperial eagles floated over Britain. For a time Britain might be said to be the head-quarters of the empire. Residing principally at York, Constantius gave his commands to Gaul and Spain, to Italy itself, to Syria and Greece. It was in Britain that on the death of his father, in 306, Constantine was proclaimed emperor. He was the first Christian emperor, and all the emperors who succeeded him professed Christianity, except Julian, who, returning to the old gods, was called The Apostate; but Julian was really a wiser ruler and a better man than many of those who called themselves Christian. The new religion became the official faith of the empire. Not much is known with certainty of the early British church, but there are said to have been archbishops in the three chief cities, London, York, and Caerleon.

The grand old Latin language, containing in its literature the garnered up thoughts and attainments of centuries, spread its refining influences wherever the Roman camp was pitched. Latin was the official language in Roman Britain, and it would be known and probably spoken by the well-to-do Britons in the towns. But it never amalgamated with the old Celtic-Welsh of the common people. Celtic, although in many respects a well-constructed language, is not a pliant one—is not adapted for readily intermingling with other tongues. It has in its various dialects, which have through the succeeding centuries maintained their existence in Wales, in Ireland, and in the Highlands of Scotland, kept itself altogether apart from the English language; and it has given comparatively few of its words to the modern tongue.

In the third century the Roman empire was in its decline, and hastening to its fall. Constantine transferred the seat of government to Byzantium, and that city was thenceforth named from him, Constantinople; and then the Roman power was divided—there were eastern emperors and western emperors. In the Patriarch of the Greek Church residing in Constantinople and the Pope of the Catholic Church in Rome, we have that division perpetuated to this day.

The Romans had never been able to conquer more than small portions of the great country in Central Europe which lies north of the Danube and east of the Rhine, which we now call Germany. One Teutonic chief called Arminius, afterwards styled The Deliverer, destroyed a whole Roman invading army. Towards the end of the fourth century the Teutonic nations began to press into the Roman empire, and one by one the provinces were wrested from it by these incursions. The Romans hired one tribe against another; but stage by stage the empire shrank in its dimensions, until it came to be within the frontiers of Italy; and still the barbarians pressed in.

On the 24th day of August, 410, the evening sun was gilding the roof of the venerable Capitol, and peace and serenity seemed to hover over the eternal city. But at midnight the Gothic trumpets sounded as the blasts of doom. No devoted Horatius now kept bridge and gate as in the brave days of old. Alaric, “the curse of God,” stormed the city, to burn and slay and inflict all the horrors of assault; but sparing Christian churches, monks and nuns. It is said that forty thousand slaves in the city rose against their masters.

From the spreading of the Teutonic tribes, new nations were formed in Western Europe. The Franks pressed into Northern Gaul. Their name remains in Franconia, and in that portion of Gaul called France. In Italy, Spain, and Acquitaine, the Goths and other Teutonic peoples mingled with the Romans. From the Latin language, corrupted and mixed up with other tongues, arose the Italian, Spanish, Provençal, and French languages, all, from the name of Rome, called the Romance languages. The eastern empire still went on; in the sixth century it recovered for a time Italy and Africa. Its people called themselves Romans, but were not so much Roman as Greek. After a lengthened decline, its last fragments were destroyed by the Turks, who took Constantinople in 1453.

Britain as a Roman Province.

It was fortunate for Britain that it came under the rule of Rome, not in the time of the Republic, when the conquered peoples were ruined by spoliation and enslavement; nor yet in the earlier years of the empire, a time of conflict and unsettlement, but after the death of the infamous Caligula, when Claudius had assumed the purple. At the beginning of the second century the Roman Empire was, under Trajan, at its culminating point of magnitude and power. Trajan was succeeded by Hadrian, whose governmental solicitude was shown in continuous journeying over his vast empire; and by the general construction of border fortification, of which the wall in Britain, linking the Tyne with the Solway Firth, is an example. Antoninus followed Hadrian, and of him it has been said: “With such diligence did he rule the subject peoples that he cared for every man of them, equally as for his own nation; all the provinces flourished under him.” His reign was tranquil, and his fine personal qualities obtained for him the title of Pius. Of course for Britain it was the rough rule of military conquest; but it prevented tribal conflicts, secured order, and encouraged material development; corn was exported, the potter’s wheel was at work, there was tin-mining in Cornwall, and lead-mining in Northumberland and Somerset; iron was smelted in the Forest of Dean.

But distance from the seat of government, as well as its murky skies, and wintry severity—no vines, no olive or orange trees in its fields—made Britain an undesirable land for Roman colonisation; it was held chiefly as a military outpost of the empire.

Whilst the more intimate Roman rule in South Britain gave there its civilizing institutions, its Latin tongue, its arts, laws, and literature, and in the fourth century Christianity, these results became less emphasized northwards—hardly reaching to the wall of Hadrian. The country between the walls remained in the possession of heathen semi-barbarians, scarcely more civilized or trained in the arts of civil government than were the Celtic tribes of the north. There were no Roman towns, and very few remains of Roman villas have been found, beyond York: remains of roads and camps, of altars and sepulchral monuments are found. To the south of York, Britain was a Roman settlement; north of York it was a military occupation.

In spite of its roads, its towns, and its mines, Britain was still, at the close of the Roman rule, a wild, half-reclaimed country; forest and wasteland, marsh and fen occupied the larger portion of its surface. The wolf was still a terror to the shepherd; beavers built their dams in the marshy streams of Holderness.

Unarmed, and without any military training, feeling themselves weak and helpless in the presence of the dominant race, the Britons of the province were yet sufficiently patriotic, to give negative help at least to the Pictish tribes who were ever making incursions into the district between the walls, and even at times penetrating into the heart of the province. One of these inroads in the reign of Valentinian all but tore Britain from the empire: an able general, Theodosius, found southern Britain itself in the hands of the invaders; but he succeeded in driving them back to their mountains, winning back for Rome the land as far as the wall of Agricola, and the district between the walls was constituted a fifth British province, named after the Emperor, Valentia.

And whilst the Pictish clans were thus making wild dashes over the walls, the sea-board of the province was harrassed by marauders from the sea. Irish pirates called Scots, or “wanderers,” harried the western shores; whilst on the eastern and southern coast, from the Wash to the Isle of Wight, a stretch of coast which came to be called the Saxon Shore, Saxon war-keels were making sudden raids for plunder, and for kidnapping men, women, and children, to be sold into slavery. They also intercepted Roman galleys in the Channel, which were engaged in commerce, or on imperial business. In the year 364, a combined fleet of Saxon vessels for a time held the Channel.

And now the Romanized British towns began to shew their lack of faith in imperial protection, by strengthening themselves by walls. A special Roman commander was appointed, charged with the defence of the Saxon shore. The shore was dotted by strong forts, garrisoned by a legion of ten thousand men. The thick forests which lined the coast to the westward of Southampton water were considered sufficient guards against invasion in that quarter. As long as the Romans remained in Britain they were able to repel the attacks of their barbarous assailants. But when the fated hour came—when Rome in her death-struggle with the Teutonic hordes, whose gripe was at her throat in every one of her dominions in western Europe, and even in Italy itself, had to recall her troops from Britain—then the encircling foes closed in upon their prey.

In withdrawing, in 410, his troops from Britain, the Emperor Honorius, grandson of the general Theodosius we have mentioned, told the people in a letter to provide for their own government and defence. We may imagine how ill prepared, after ten generations of servitude, the Romanized Britons were for such an emergency. But they had fortified towns with their municipal institutions, and under the general sway of Rome they had lost their tribal distinctions, and become a more united people; and not in any one of the Romanized lands which became a prey to the barbarians did these encounter so prolonged and so energetic a resistance as in Britain. For some thirty years after the Roman evacuation of the province, it held out or maintained a fluctuating struggle with its enemies. The Scoto-Irish bucaneers were not only continuing their raids upon the western coast, but they planted settlements in Argyle to the north of Agricola’s wall, and in Galloway—between the two walls. And the Picts were ever making incursions from the north. The policy was tried of hiring barbarian against barbarian. The Picts were the nearest and most persistent danger; and the marauders from over the North Sea,—Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, were, if not hired as mercenaries, permitted to hold a footing in the land, as a defence against Pictish invasion. About 450, three keels filled with Jutes, under two brothers, Hengist and Horsa, with a white horse as their cognisance, came by invitation from their own home—which is from them called Jutland—and landed on the Isle of Thanet on the eastern Kentish shore, making this their base for further conquests.

The Anglo-Saxons in Britain.

The Teutonic nations from mid-Europe which, in their various tribes, conquered Italy, Spain, and Gaul, had had previous intercourse with the empire. Many had become Christians, and in their conquests they did not destroy. Their kings ruled the invaded lands, and their chiefs seized large portions of soil; but they adopted the provincial Latin tongues, and the general government was by Roman law. The clergy were mostly Romans, and they retained considerable power and estates. Thus the Goths, Visigoths, and Vandals did not become the peoples of the countries which they overran. The Teutonic element was absorbed into the national elements, largely resembling what afterwards took place in England, under the Norman Conquest.

But it was very different in Britain. Its Teutonic invaders—Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, had lived outside the influence of the empire; and indeed we know very little about them before they came to Britain. With the landing of Ella, in 477, Anglo-Saxon history may be said to begin. They were still heathens, and they knew nothing, and they cared nothing for the arts, the laws, or the language of Rome. Their object was not merely rule and authority over the Romanized Britons, but their destruction, and the entire occupation of the land. As they conquered, they killed the Britons or made them slaves, or drove them into Cornwall and Wales in the west, and into Caledonia in the north. They came over the North Sea in families, and thus propagated largely as an unmixed Anglo-Saxon race. But doubtless there were many more men than women in their bands, and there would be marriages with native women. Thus strains of British and Roman blood were left in the new occupants of what came to be England, and the lowlands of Scotland. The Anglo-Saxon tribes in Britain thus became a nation with its own language and laws, manners and customs. From the name of one tribe—the Angles—the southern and larger portion of the island came to be called England. English is the common language of Britain, and of its many off-shoots scattered over the habitable globe.

Kent—the nearest British land to the continent—bore the first brunt of Anglo-Saxon, as it had done of Roman, conquest. Then came Sussex (South Saxon). But the third settlement, that of Wessex (West Saxon), was a far larger one; taking in at least seven shires. It began in Hampshire, under Cedric, and his son Cynric—then styled Ealdermen—and gradually extended over all south-western Britain, and stretching northwards over Oxford and Buckingham shires. This was the era assigned to the legendary British King Arthur, fighting strongly for his native soil and his Christian faith, against the heathen invaders.

Another, the fourth Saxon kingdom, was that of Essex. And then there were three Anglian kingdoms—East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia. East Anglia comprised Suffolk (South-folk), Norfolk (North-folk), and Lincolnshire. Northumbria included the country north of the Humber, as far as the Frith of Forth. That portion of Northumbria now known as Yorkshire was then called Deira, with York, then named Eboracum, its chief town; the portion north of the Tees was named Bernicia. The kingdom of Mercia, that is, of the March, had its western frontier to Wales, being thus the midlands of England.

And besides South Wales, including Cornwall, Devonshire, and the greater portion of Somersetshire, the old race still held a large district to the north of Wales, called Strathclyde, taking in Galloway and other districts in the south-east of what is now Scotland; together with Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire, down to the river Dee, and the city of Chester; they, even to the end of the sixth century, held portions of west Yorkshire, including Leeds.

The Anglo-Saxon occupation having thus at the close of the sixth century resolved itself into seven independent governments, is hence called the Heptarchy. But the division was not a lasting one. The conquerors, although a kindred race—with one understood language—and one old Scandinavian faith, were far from being a homogeneous people. They had tribal proclivities, and were generally at war with each other—“battles of kites and crows,” Milton wrote. At times one king was powerful, or of such personal superiority to his neighbours, that he assumed a suzerainty over them, and was called a Bretwalda. But the Anglo-Saxon kings were not autocrats; they had to consult their Witans—their council of “witty or wise ones.” And there was in society the elements of what came to be feudalism. The King had his Thanes, or Earls; and these had their churls, who, holding lands under their lords, were expected to follow him in the wars. And there was slavery; men were made slaves who committed crimes, or were taken prisoners in war.

The seventh century witnessed in Anglo-Saxon Britain the conversion from the old Norse belief in Odin, Thor, and Fries to the Christian faith. Not from their British slaves, nor from the independent British of Wales and Strathclyde, did the new faith reach them. In 597, Pope Gregory sent Augustine and a number of other monks to preach Christianity in England. The most powerful ruler in Britain at this time was the Kentish king, Ethelbert; he was Bretwalda, exercising some authority over all the kings south of the Humber; and he had married a Frankish wife who was a Christian. The King received the missionaries kindly; and they preached to him and his chief men through interpreters. In a short time the King and a number of his people were baptized. Augustine made Canterbury his headquarters, and it has ever since been the chief See of the Anglican Church.

In 635, Oswald, King of Northumbria, routed a British Strathclyde army, largely shattering this kingdom of the older race; it was as much as the Welsh could do to hold the country west of the Severn.

In this seventh century, Devon and the whole of Somersetshire became English. Oswald was now Bretwalda, and Northumbria, in the struggles for supremacy of the Saxon kingdoms, was for a generation the foremost power. It also became Christian, but more from the labours of Scottish missionaries from Iona, than from the successors of Augustine.

In early life, Oswald, during an exile amongst the Scots, had visited Iona, and there became acquainted with Christianity. On his return he founded a monastery on Lindisfarne, thence called Holy Isle; a Scottish Bishop, Aidan, he placed at its head; a succeeding Bishop, Cuthbert, was the most famous of the saints of Northern England. And the Christianity which came to Scotland from Ireland through Columba, himself a Dalriadan Scot, differed in many ways from that which had come from Rome. Not only did they differ in ritual, in dates of festivals, and in the shape of the monkish tonsure, but in what was of more political importance—ecclesiastical discipline and organization. The Church of Augustine implied dioceses, bishops in gradation of rank and authority, culminating in the Bishop of Rome as the head of the Church. The Church of Columba was a network of monasteries, a missionary church full of the zeal of conversion, but wanting in the power of organization. And thus there was conflict between the two churches, and this conflict was an important factor in the political history of the times. Ultimately the policy of Rome prevailed. The country was divided into dioceses, the loose system of the mission-station sending out priests to preach and baptize as their enthusiasm led them, gave place to the parish system with its regular incumbency, and settled order.

In the beginning of the ninth century the strife for headship over the others, which had been long waged by the kings of the stronger kingdoms, was terminated by the Northumbrian Thanes owning Egbert, King of Wessex, as their over-lord. Egbert defeated the Britons in Cornwall, brought Mercia under his rule, and united all the territories south of the Tweed. The Kings of Wessex were henceforth, so far as Anglo-Saxon rivals were concerned, Kings of England.

The Rise of the Scottish Nation.

In the second century, Ptolemy, the Egyptian astronomer, composed the first geography of the world, illustrated by maps. He would probably get his information about Britain—which was still called Albion—from Roman officers. What is now England, is shown with fair accuracy; but north of the Wear and the Solway it is difficult to identify names, or even the prominent features of the country; and the configuration of the land stretches east and west, instead of north and south.

The Celts were not indigenous to Britain. It is hardly possible to trace in any—in the very earliest peoples, of whom history or archæology can speak—the first occupants of any one spot on the earth. Science is ever pushing back, and still farther back, the era of man’s first appearance as fully developed man upon the globe. And in his families, his tribes, and his nations, man has ever been a migrant. Impelled by the necessities of life, or by his love of adventure or of conquest, he has changed his hunting and grazing grounds, made tracks through forests, sought out passes between mountains; and the great, all-encompassing sea has ever been a fascination; the sound of its waves a siren-song inciting him to make them a pathway to new lands beyond his horizon. Before the Celtic Britons dwelt in this island in the northern seas, which they have helped to a great name, there were tribes here who had not yet learned the uses of the metals, whose spear-heads and arrow-tips were flints, their axes and hammers of stone. But the Celts were of that great Aryan race, tribes of which, spreading westwards over Europe, had carried with them so much of the older civilization of Persia, that they never degenerated into savagedom. The Britons were probably in pre-Roman times the only distinctive people upon the island.

How came the Celts to Britain? Probably colonies from Old Gaul first took possession of the portions of Britain nearer to their own country; and gradually spreading northwards, came in time to be scattered over what is now England and Wales, and the Lowlands of Scotland. Ireland being in sight of Britain from both Wigton and Cantyre, adventurers would cross the North Channel, and become the founders of the Irish nation.

The Picts—a Latin name for the first northern tribes whom the Romans distinguished from the Britons—called themselves Cruithne. Their earliest settlements in and near Britain appear to have been in the Orkneys, the north-east of Ireland, and the north of Scotland. They must then have made considerable advancement in the art of navigation. At the time of the Roman invasion, the southern Britons called the dwellers in the northern part of the island Cavill daoin, or “people of the woods,”—and thus the Romans named the district Caledonia. It has been surmised that the Picts of ancient Caledonia were a colony of Celtic-Germans; for such offshoots from the parent race occupied portions of central Europe. There was the same element of Druidism; but the Druids in Caledonia declined in influence and authority at an earlier date than did their brethren in Wales and South Britain. The bards took their place in preserving and handing down—orally and in verse—the traditions of their tribes—the heroism and virtues, the loves and adventures, of their ancestors. It may be noted that whilst in this early poetry the spirits of the dead are frequently introduced, and the powers of nature—sun, moon, and stars, the wind, the thunder, and the sea—are personified, there is no mythology,—no deities are called in to aid the heroes in battling with their foes.

By the end of the Roman occupation, the Caledonian Picts had spread down east and central Scotland as far as Fife. And there are Pictish traces in Galloway on the west coast; probably a migration from Ireland. After the Romans left, the Picts, in their southern raids, so often crossed and made use of Hadrian’s wall, that the Romanized-Britons came to call it the Pictish wall. Their language was a dialect of Celtic, afterwards coalescing with, or being absorbed in, the Gaelic of the Scots, and which came to be the common tongue in the Highlands and western isles; but it was never a spoken tongue in the Scottish Lowlands.

The Scots are first found historically in Ireland; and they were there in such numbers and influence, that one of the names of Ireland from the sixth to the twelfth century was Scotia. Irish traditions represent the Scotti as “Milesians from Spain;” Milesia was said to be the name of the leader of the colonizing expedition. But their Celtic name of Gael sounds akin to Gaul. Their history in Ireland forms an important factor in the annals of that country. Those of the Irish people who considered themselves the descendants of the earlier colonists of the island never came heartily to recognise as fellow-countrymen,—although these had been for many generations natives of the land,—the descendants of those who settled at a later date. On the other hand—and similarly keeping up old race hatreds and lines of demarcation—the descendants of the later settlers looked upon themselves as a superior race, and never heartily called themselves Irishmen. This restricted and mock patriotism, aggravated by religious differences, has almost made of the Irish people two nations.

The Scotti must have made considerable settlements in North Britain in the second or third century, or they would not have been in a position to join the Picts in attacks upon the Roman province in the fourth century. When we come to enquire who were the peoples associated with the Christian missionary Columba in the latter half of the sixth century, we find that the districts bordering the east coast down to the Firth of Forth, and the central Highlands, with the chief fort at Inverness, were peopled by Picts; and that Scots were in Argyle and the Isles as far north as Iona. Their settlement around the shores of Loch Linnhe—the arm of the sea at the entrance to which Oban now stands—became in time a little kingdom called Dalriada, which gradually shook off the over-lordship of the Scotic kings in Ireland, and maintained itself against the Picts on its northern and eastern borders. A British king ruled in Strathclyde, which included the south-west of Scotland up to the Clyde; and, bordering on Strathclyde, Anglo-Saxon Northumbria included the east of Scotland up to the Forth. Up to this time the Celts in North Britain had left no written history behind them; indicating that they were less civilized than their Welsh and Irish kin. It is in the annals of Beda and other Anglo-Saxon writers that we find anything like trustworthy history after the departure of the Romans. The Romanized Britons got Christianity from their rulers, but subjection to the Bishop of Rome was not transmitted with the faith. The British bishops, at their meeting under St. Augustine’s oak, declined to submit to the missionary from Rome.

It is usually said that Scotland gave Patrick to Ireland. It was a strange kind of giving. Shortly after the Roman exodus, amongst a number of Britons taken captive by a Scotti-Irish raid on the banks of the Clyde, was a young lad of sixteen, who was sent as a slave to tend sheep and cattle in Antrim. The people round him were idolators; but in the solitude of the pastures he nursed the Christian faith of his childhood, and burned with the zeal of a young apostle for the conversion of the land. For ten years he remained in captivity, then he made his escape, and after many wanderings, reached his old home. Ordained a priest, and in time a bishop, he set manfully to realize in Ireland the dream of his youth, and he had abundant success. He founded churches, seminaries, and monasteries; the new faith spread like wildfire over the land.

And a century later, in 563, thirty-three years before the Roman mission of Augustine, Ireland sent over Columba to Britain. He, with twelve companion monks, founded on the little isle of Iona a monastery, which became the centre of Christianity in North Britain. The Scotti who had settled in the neighbouring islands, and on the nearest mainland, were already Christians. But Columba visited and converted the Pictish King Bruda, and founded a number of churches and monasteries. Than Iona there is no spot of greater historical interest in the United Kingdom; but none of the ecclesiastical ruins found there date from Columba. The first buildings were of wood, but the original foundations in Skye and Tiree were his work. Columba was also a warrior, taking a strong part in several campaigns in Ireland, as a liegeman of the Scotic King. The disciples of Columba were called Culdees, meaning, from their monastic life, “sequestered persons.” The Pictish bard Ossian is said, when blind and in old age, to have met and conversed with one of these Culdees. After ten years of prosperous rule in Iona, Columba contributed to start into greater unity and more vigorous life the Scotic settlement of Dalriada. He consecrated a young chieftain, Aedhan, as king; and Aedhan drove the Bernicians from the debatable land south of the head-waters of the Forth, and formed a league of Scots and Strathclyde Britons against Northumbria itself. But the league was, in 603, defeated by the Northumbrian King Ethelfrith in a great battle. The Scots were thrown back into their Highland fastnesses, and Beda says, writing a hundred years later, “From that day to this no Scot King has dared to come into battle with the English folk.” Ethelfrith, by another victory over the Welsh at Chester, in 611, and further successes up to Carlisle, divided by a great gap the Kingdom of Strathclyde from North Wales, and it became tributary to Northumbria. On the decline of Northumbria, in the eighth century, Strathclyde re-asserted its independence; and, in a restricted sense, its extent, more nearly answered to its name, “The Valley of the Clyde.” With Galloway, it continued under its own rulers, until, in the tenth century, it was connected with the Kingdom of Scone by the election to its throne—if it could afford a throne—of Donald, brother of Constantine II., King of Scots.

The Picts whom Columba converted appear to have been then consolidated under one monarch, Brude; his rule was from Inverness to Iona on the west; on the north to the Orkneys—probably including Aberdeen; its southern boundary is undefined. Of succeeding kings to Brude, there is a list of names; but little is known of the men themselves until, in 731, we come to Angus Mac-Fergus. In reprisal for the capture of his son by Selvach, King of the Dalriad Scots, he attacked Argyle, and reduced the whole western highlands. The Strathclyde Britons were assailed by a brother of Angus, in 756, and their chief town, Alclyde, destroyed. In the beginning of the ninth century, the seat of the Pictish government appears to have migrated from Inverness into Perthshire,—Scone becoming its political capital.

The history of the Dalriadan Scots, although interwoven with that of the Picts, and meeting at many points with the histories of the Britons of Strathclyde, and the Angles of Northumbria, is yet misty and legendary. True, there is a list of kings, and their stalwart portraits hang in the great hall of Holyrood; so extensive is this list, that if they had reigned for anything like an average period, it would carry the history back to about three hundred years B.C.

We find something like a trustworthy beginning in Fergus, the son of Earac, in 503. From this date for upwards of two hundred years, down to Selvach, who was conquered by the Pictish King Angus Mac-Fergus, there is from the Irish Annals, and the Church History of Beda, a reasonable certainty. After this there is another century of hazy legend. If, as seems probable, Dalriada continued through the latter seventy years of the eighth, and the first half of the ninth century, under Pictish rule, it is not easy to see how, in the middle of the ninth century, Kenneth Mac-Alpine, called in the Irish Annals a king of the Picts, founded, as there is no doubt he did, a line of Scottish monarchs on the throne of Scone. One hypothesis is, that Kenneth was the son of a Pictish king by a Scottish mother, and by the Pictish law, the mother’s nationality determined that of the children. Whatever the circumstances of the case, the accession of Kenneth Mac-Alpine represents an era in Scottish history. There was thenceforth such a complete union of Scots and Picts, that as separate races they lost all distinctiveness. But it certainly appears that, both by numerical superiority and historical prestige, the country should have been Pictland, rather than Scotland.

The kingdom of Kenneth included central Scotland from sea to sea, Argyle and the Isles, Perthshire, Fife, Angus, and the Mearns. Lothian was still Northumbrian. The Vale of the Clyde, Ayr, Dumfries, and Galloway, were under a British king at Dumbarton. There were several independent chieftains in Moray and Mar; and Orkney and the northern and north-western fringes of the country, were dominated by Norsemen.

The Danish Invasions of Britain.

In the first quarter of the ninth century, invaders from lands farther north than Jutland—hence called Norsemen—played broadly the same parts in Britain as the Angles and Saxons had played three hundred years previously. These Norsemen, in their war galleys, prowled over the Northern Seas, plundering the coasts, and making first incursions and then settlements in Muscovy, Britain, and Gaul. They discovered and colonised Iceland. Many centuries before Columbus, they had sailed along the coast of North America, and even attempted settlements thereon. On the northern coast of France, Normandy, under its powerful dukes, had become almost an independent state.

In their English invasions they are commonly called Danes, but in their own homes they formed three kingdoms, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Probably the invaders of England were mainly Danes. They were still “heathens,” i.e., of the old Scandinavian faith; and they held the Christian faith in supreme detestation. They were daring, fierce, and cruel; but still people of a kindred race, speaking dialects of the same Teutonic tongue; and when they settled in the land and became Christians, their language and manners differed so little from those of the Anglo-Saxons, that they did not remain a separate nation, as the Anglo-Saxons did from the British. It was more as if another Teuton tribe had come over and become joint occupants of the land. But, to begin with, they came as plunderers, taking their booty home. They ravaged Berkshire, Hampshire, and Surrey, destroying churches and monasteries. They invaded and took possession of East Anglia. They penetrated into Mercia; at Peterborough they burned the minster, slaying the abbot and his monks. They made extensive settlements in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

In 876, the Danes invaded Wessex, of which Alfred—one of the grandest names in old English history—was then King. Alfred had to fight the invaders both on sea and land. In and about Exeter there were several engagements, resulting in the Danes agreeing to leave Alfred’s territories. Two years later they broke truce, made a sudden incursion to Chippenham, and became for a time masters of the west country. This is the time assigned to the neatherd-cottage negligence of Alfred, in allowing the cakes to burn in baking, whilst sheltering amongst the wood and morasses of Somersetshire. After a time he organised a sufficient army to meet, fight with, and beat the Danes—they gave him oaths and hostages against further disturbance, and their King Guthrum—thence called Athelstan—with thirty of his chief followers were baptized. But the Danes now held East Anglia, Northumbria, and large portions of Essex and Mercia,—indeed more than one-half of what is now England. Alfred being in peace during the latter years of his reign, devoted himself to works of governmental utility, he made a digest of the laws, and saw that justice was impartially administered; and he was the father of the English navy. His mind was cultured with the best learning of the times, and he made Anglo-Saxon translations of the Psalms, of Æsop’s Fables, and of Bede’s Church History.

In the first year of the tenth century, Alfred’s son, Edward (styled the Elder, so as not to confuse him with later Edwards), began a reign of twenty-five years. He was a strong king; through all his reign he had conflicts with the Danes, who had settled in the north and east of England; always beating them, and then having to quell fresh insurrections. And he made himself Over-King of the Scots and Welsh; so he was the first Anglo-Saxon king who became lord of nearly all Britain. Wessex, Kent, and Sussex he had inherited, Wales, Strathclyde, and Scotland acknowledged him as Suzerain. His son, Athelstan, succeeded him in 925; and the King of England now held such a high place among the rulers of Western Europe, that several of his sisters married foreign kings and princes. In 937 a great battle was fought in the North, when a combination of Scots under Constantine, and Danes and Irish under Anlaf, were defeated with much slaughter by Athelstan. It is called by the old chroniclers the Battle of Brunanburg, but the locality is uncertain. Constantine and Anlaf escaped; but Constantine’s son was killed, as, says the old chronicler, were “five Danish Kings and seven Jarls.”

Athelstan died in 941. Two of his brothers, and one brother’s son occupied the throne successively during the next eighteen years. Then, in 959, Edgar, a grandson of Alfred, then only sixteen years of age, was by the Witan made King. He was called The Peaceable; during his reign of sixteen years, no foe, foreign or domestic, vexed the land. Northumbria, extending as far north as the Forth, with Edwinsburh its border fortress—garrisoned by Danes and Anglo-Saxons—having long been a trouble to the Kings of Wessex, Edgar divided the earldom. He made Oswulf Earl of the country beyond the Tees—including the present county of Northumberland; and Osla, Earl of Deira, where the Danes had ruled, with York for his chief town; but the Danes were allowed to live peaceably under their own laws. And Edgar granted Lothian, containing the counties of Linlithgow, Edinburgh, and Haddington, to Kenneth, King of Scots, to be held under himself. And thus Lothian was ever after held by the Scottish Kings, and its English speech became the official language of Scotland. With Strathclyde, west of the Solway, under a Scottish prince, the map of the Kingdom of Scotland was now broadly traced out.

Edgar commuted the annual Welsh tribute to 300 wolves’ heads. He appointed standard weights and measures, maintained an efficient fleet, and was altogether a fine example of a man who—although of small stature and mean presence—by vigour of mind and will, ruled ably and well in rude times. He was really Basileus,—lord-paramount of all Britain. After his coronation at Bath, which was not before he had reigned thirteen years—he sailed with his fleet round the western coasts. Coming to Chester, it is related that eight Kings, viz.: Kenneth of Scotland, Malcolm of Cumberland, Maccus of the Western Isles, and five Welsh princes did homage to him. They are said to have rowed him in a boat on the Dee—he steering—from the palace of Chester to the minster of St. John, where there was solemn service; and then they returned in like manner.

But these halcyon days for England of peace and settled government ended with Edgar. He died in 975, leaving two sons—Edward by a first wife—Ethelred by a second. Edward succeeded, but reigned only four years, being assassinated at the instigation of his step-mother, who desired the crown for her son. Edward was in consequence styled The Martyr. Ethelred was named The Unready. He was weak, cowardly, and thoroughly bad; his long reign of thirty-eight years, was one duration of wretchedness and confusion. He had hardly begun to reign when the foreign Danes began to be troublesome, and this time it was a farther stage of invasion: they meant not plunder or partial settlement, but conquest!

In the first quarter of this tenth century, the Northmen had taken possession of a large district on the north of France. Their leader, Rolf Ganger, became a Christian—or at least was baptized as such,—married the daughter of Charles the Simple, King of the West Franks, and was, as Duke of Normandy, confirmed in his possessions—a territory on either side of the Seine, with Rouen for its capital. And after this, the Danes and other Northmen, in their expeditions against England, had assistance from their kinsfolk in Normandy.

Ethelred tried first to bribe the Danes to leave him in peace; and for the money for this purpose he levied the first direct tax imposed upon the English nation. It was called Dane-gild, and amounted to twelve pence on each hide of land, excepting lands held by the clergy. But the idea was a vain one, for whilst the tax was vexatious, the pirate-ships still swarmed along the English shores. In 1001, the Danes, under King Sweyn, attacked Exeter, but were repulsed by the citizens. Then—beating an English army—they ravaged Devon, Dorset, Hants., and the Isle of Wight; loading their ships with the spoils. Next year Ethelred gave them money; but finding this of no use, he devised the mad and wicked scheme of ordering a general massacre of the Danes residing in England. On St. Bryce’s Day this massacre, to a large extent, took place; it included aged persons, women, and children. Gunhild, a sister of Sweyn’s, was one of the victims. Burning for revenge, Sweyn again invaded England. Exeter he now took and plundered, and again marched eastwards through the southern shires. He was generally successful, for there was treason and incompetency amongst the English leaders; and the unpopularity of Ethelred was a down-drag on the English cause. Year after year, Sweyn’s fleets appeared on the fated coasts, and the Danes marched farther and farther inwards. Through East Anglia they went into the heart of England, burning Oxford and Northampton.

In August, 1013, Sweyn sailed up the Humber and Trent to Gainsborough. Here he had submission made to him of the Earl of Northumbria, and of the towns of Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford, and Derby. He then marched to Bath, where the western Thanes submitted to him, and then London submitted. Ethelred and his queen fled to Normandy, Emma, the Queen, being the Duke’s sister, and Danish Sweyn was virtually King of England. But he did not long enjoy his conquest; early in 1014 he died at Gainsborough.

Canute, the son of Sweyn, was a man of strong will, and he had already achieved warrior renown: but he had a severe struggle before he secured his father’s conquests. First, after Sweyn’s death, the Witan, after extorting promises that he would now govern rightly, recalled King Ethelred. Receiving better support, and his son Edmund, named Ironside, being an able commander, he defeated Canute, who had to take to his ships. Then Ethelred died, and Canute returned. There was much fighting,—London being twice unsuccessfully assaulted by the Danes,—and then the rival princes, Edmund and Canute, had a conference on a little island in the Severn. They agreed to a division of the kingdom,—the Saxon district to be south,—and the Danish district to be north of the Thames. A few weeks after the treaty, Edmund died, and although he left a young son Edward, Canute became sole monarch. For twenty-four years,—1017 to 1041,—England was under Danish rule. Canute married Emma, the widow of King Ethelred, and he further tried to win over his English subjects by sending home all Danish soldiers, except a bodyguard of 3000 men. Besides England, he ruled over the three Scandinavian kingdoms in the north, and is said to have exacted homage from Malcolm, King of Scotland, and his two under-kings. He was the first Danish King who professed Christianity. He introduced the faith into Denmark, and himself made a pilgrimage to Rome. He reigned nineteen years, dying in 1036.

After Canute’s death, the Witan divided England into two portions. The counties north of the Thames, including London, were assigned to Harold, a son of Canute by his first wife; and the district south of the river to Hardicanute, his son by Emma. Harold died in 1039, and Hardicanute became sole King. He died two years later, and before he was buried, his half-brother Edward, the son of Ethelred and Emma, and thus a descendant of Alfred, was chosen King.

The Last Two Saxon Kings of England.

A notable personage, Earl Godwin, was the chief influence in this reversion to the old race. Who was Earl Godwin? In 1020, Canute, having come to trust his English subjects, and wishing to mix the two nations in the administration of affairs, created Godwin Earl of the West Saxons. He was an able administrator, an eloquent speaker, of high courage, and these qualities generally exerted for the freedom and independence of his country; and he came to have the greatest personal influence of any man in England. Little is known with certainty of his birth, but he married Gytha, the sister of Ulf, a Danish Earl, who had married a sister of Canute, and whose son, Sweyne, became after the death of Hardicanute, King of Denmark. Godwin had several children, all of whom occupy conspicuous places in the history of this eleventh century; the second son, Harold, being the last of the Saxon Kings of England.

Earl Godwin became the King’s chief minister, and the King married his daughter Edith. The King lived an ascetical, monkish life, and they had no children. Edward had been born in England, but on the deposition of his father Ethelred, his mother Emma took him to the court of her brother Robert, Duke of Normandy; and he had lived there through the reigns of Canute and Harold, coming back to England with Hardicanute. He was thus thoroughly Norman-French in his speech and his manners,—very fond of his young cousin, Duke William, and he now gathered French people about him, and promoted them to office and estate. The French language and fashions prevailed at Edward’s court; and in this language lawyers began to write deeds, and the clergy to preach sermons. These foreign modes, so different from the English, gave great displeasure to the old nobles; and Earl Godwin—although three of his sons had been advanced to earldoms—rebelled against the King’s authority. After some fighting, the Earl’s army deserted him at Dover, and he had to seek refuge in Flanders. His daughter, the queen, was deprived of her lands, and sent to a nunnery of which the King’s sister was abbess.

At the outbreak of the revolt, Edward asked aid from William; the aid was not required, but William, then twenty-three years of age, came, with a retinue of knights to his cousin’s court. They were hospitably entertained, and it is said that the King promised to bequeath his crown to William.

Things did not go on well during Godwin’s absence, so when, in 1052, he and his sons appeared with a fleet in the Channel, there was an under-current of mutiny in the King’s ships under their French commanders. “Should Englishmen fight with and slay Englishmen, that outlandish folks might profit thereby?” So the King had to take Godwin back into his honours and estates: but he died next year, leaving to Harold his titles, and his place as foremost man in England.

And now the dangers of a disputed succession loomed over England. The Witan advised Edward to send for Edward, the son of Edmund Ironside, then an exile in Hungary. Edward came with his family—a son Edgar, and three daughters: but he died shortly after his arrival. About this time Harold was shipwrecked on the Norman coast; William kept him prisoner for some time, and under circumstances of fraud and chicanery, an oath was extorted from him to favour William’s pretensions to the English throne. Edward died on 5th January, 1046, at the age of 65. He was buried next day in Westminster Abbey, which he had built. There, in the centre of the magnificent pile, is his shrine, for, about a century after his death, he was canonised, and awarded the title of Confessor.

And now, who was to be chosen King of England? For a choice had to be made. Edgar the Atheling was quite young, and was hardly English—having been born and brought up in a foreign land; so, in these unsettled times, he was not thought of. The Witan were obliged to do what had never previously been done in English history, and has never been done since (except partially, in the case of calling William of Orange to reign jointly with his wife Mary),—to choose a King not of the blood royal.

But it was not a difficult choice. Amongst the nobles of England, one man, Harold, stood foremost, both in strength of position and in personal qualifications. He had now for years been the chief administrator—a born ruler of men—energetic yet prudent—valiant without ferocity; and he had been the later recommendation of Edward as his successor. So, on the very day of Edward’s burial, Harold was crowned in the same Abbey, King of England.

Harold’s troubles began almost from the day of his coronation. William sent demands for the crown; Edward had promised it to him, the King’s nearest of kin, and Harold had sworn over concealed relics, to help him to it. It was replied that the crown was not disposable by Edward; all he could do was to recommend a successor to the Witan; and this he had done in favour of Harold: Edward’s kinship to William was on the maternal side, not on that of the blood-royal of England: and as to Harold’s oath, it was extorted by force and fraud, and was entirely nil in that it pledged Harold to do what he had no right to do,—the diversion of the crown from the will of the English people. William stormed and threatened, and, in building ships and organising troops, made active preparations for the invasion of England.

Harold set about preparations for the defence of his kingdom. He spent the summer in the south, getting ready a fleet and army. He had to wait too long for William; provisions falling short in the beginning of September, he had to disband the most of his troops. And meantime another foe, and this one of his own house, was intriguing against him—his brother Tostig. Harold had given Tostig the earldom of Northumberland; but he reigned so badly that the people rose and expelled him,—Harold sanctioning the expulsion. Tostig now went to Harold Hardrada, the King of Norway, and induced him to invade England. A fleet was sent up the Humber; York was captured, and there Harold Hardrada was proclaimed King. But English Harold—hastily getting an army together, met the invaders at Stamford Bridge; and there, on September 25th, a fierce battle was fought,—ending in victory for England; the Norwegian King and the traitorous Tostig both being slain.

But in meeting the Norwegian invasion, the Anglo-Saxons lost England. Four days later, William, with a banner consecrated by the Pope, landed near Pevensey in Sussex. Harold was seated at a banquet in York when the evil news reached him. And now, the last in a life of turmoil, Harold began his march through England; collecting on his way what troops he could, he reached the hill Senlac, nine miles from Hastings, on the 13th of October. Here he marshalled his army—nearly all on foot—and next day the Normans attacked him. It was a well-contested fight; but discipline and knighthood prevailed. The setting sun witnessed a routed English army, its leader slain, and the Norman William, conqueror of England.

The eleventh century, so momentous in English history, was also an important one in the history of Scotland. The Norse energy and ability to rule shewed itself in the Earls of Orkney, who dominated the Hebrides, and Ross, Moray, Sutherland, and Caithness. About 1010, Earl Sigurd married the daughter of King Malcolm II. In 1014, Sigurd went over to Ireland, to aid the Danish kings there against Brian Boru. In a battle at Clontarf, the Danes were defeated—Sigurd being slain—and the Celtic dynasty was restored. Sigurd’s territories were divided amongst two sons by a former marriage, and an infant son, Thurfinn, by Malcolm’s daughter; to the last was assigned the earldom of Caithness. In 1018—taking advantage of the distracted state of England in this, the first year of Canute’s reign—Malcolm invaded upper Northumbria; by a victory at Carham, near Coldstream on the Tweed, the Lothians were brought more under his rule. But after Canute’s return from his pilgrimage to Rome, he invaded Scotland, and received the submission of Malcolm and two under-kings, Mælbæthe and Jehmarc.

Malcolm II. was succeeded by his grandson Duncan,—a daughter’s son by a secular abbot of Dunkeld. Duncan’s right was disputed by his cousin Thurfirm, who was now Earl of Orkney. Duncan went north to check the advance of his kinsman, and was defeated near the Pentland Firth. But an invasion of Danes under King Sweyn on the coast of Fife, and which was probably made in aid of Thurfirm, was defeated by Macbeth, an able general of Duncan’s, and who, it is said, was also a grandson of Malcolm’s, by another daughter. Duncan was probably—as in Shakespeare’s great drama—killed by Macbeth. Certainly, to the exclusion of Duncan’s two sons, Malcolm and Donaldbane, Macbeth seized the crown. He reigned seventeen years—1040 to 1057—being contemporary with the Confessor,—a glowing description of whom, posing as a saint with miraculous powers of healing, occurs in Shakespeare’s play. When, on the return of Earl Godwin from exile, there was a general exodus of the Normans, whom Edward had placed in high positions, many of them went to Scotland, and were well received by Macbeth. He appears historically, in spite of our great poet’s portraiture of him, to have been an able monarch; and he might be said to represent Celtic supremacy in Scotland, as against the tendency to subvert it by Anglo-Saxon alliances. Duncan had married the daughter of Siward, Earl of Northumbria, and Macbeth had to resist the attacks of Siward on behalf of his grandson Malcolm. Malcolm spent his boyhood in Cumbria, and his youth at the court of the Confessor. He appealed to Edward for help to gain his father’s throne, and by an English army under Siward, and Macduff, the powerful Thane of Fife, and Tostig, the son of Earl Godwin, Macbeth was overthrown and slain.

Malcolm III., named Canmore—“big-head”—reigned thirty-five years, 1058 to 1093. The Norman victory at Hastings brought to the Scottish court, then at Dunfermline, a number of English refugees—these were a leaven of higher culture and refinement amongst the rude thanes and chieftains, and tended to further the advance of civilization, of letters and the arts of life, throughout the northern kingdom. And numbers of Normans also came and took service under Malcolm—and thus it came about that not only in England, but in Scotland also, most of the noble families have in them a strain of Norman blood.

Amongst the refugees were Edgar Atheling and his sisters, grand-children of Edmund Ironside. Malcolm married Margaret, the eldest sister; she was a noble woman, learned, pious, and charitable, doted upon by her husband, and ever influencing his fierce nature for good. Thus connected by birth with the heir of the old race of English Kings, Malcolm invaded Northumberland on behalf of Edgar; but William was too strong for him, and in turn invaded Scotland. William marched as far north as Abernethy, where he forced Malcolm to do him homage. William never really subjugated Northumbria north of the Tyne, but built Newcastle as a border fortress. After the death of William in 1087, Malcolm made other invasions of Northumbria, and to consolidate the possession of Lothian, he removed the seat of government to Edinburgh. In 1093, he made a desperate attempt to gain the counties of Northumberland and Cumberland; but, whilst besieging the border fortress of Alnwick, he was attacked, defeated, and killed by a Norman army.

The marriage of Henry, the youngest son of the Conqueror, with Matilda, daughter of Malcolm, and niece of Edgar Atheling, united the Norman and the older English royal lines. Henry’s son William was, in 1120, drowned in “The White Ship,” and his only other child, Maud, was thus the rightful heir to the throne. But the proud Norman barons had not been used to female rule; so, after Henry’s death, in 1135, Stephen, a son of the Conqueror’s daughter Adela, was made King.

David I., youngest son of Malcolm Canmore, succeeding his two elder brothers, was at this time King of Scotland, and he took up the cause of his niece Maud. In 1138 he invaded Northumberland, penetrating into Yorkshire. At Northallerton he was met and defeated in a battle called “Of the Standard.” It is said that he was gaining the day, when an English soldier cut off the head of one of the slain, placed it on a spear, and called out that it was the head of the King of Scots, thus causing a panic in the Scottish army which the King, riding amongst it without his helmet, vainly tried to overcome. After peace, David was allowed to retain Northumberland and Durham, excepting the fortresses of Newcastle and Bamborough. He was so good a king that after his death, in 1153, he was canonised.

David was succeeded by his twelve years old grandson, Malcolm. He was, from his gentle disposition, called The Maiden. He was greatly attached to the English King, Henry II., accompanying him to France as a volunteer in his army. Malcolm’s Scottish subjects were afraid of the influence of the older sovereign. Homage rendered by the Scottish kings for their possessions in England, was always liable to be construed into national homage; and it was notified that Malcolm had gone beyond mere homage, and had absolutely resigned these possessions. So Malcolm had a strong message from Scotland, asking him to return; this he did, was again in favour with his people, but died in 1165, being then only twenty-four years old.

He was succeeded by his brother William. He was called The Lion because he used as his armorial bearing a red lion—rampant—that is in heraldry, standing upon its hind legs; and this has ever since been the heraldric cognizance of Scottish royalty. In 1174, for the recovery of his ancestral possessions in Northumberland, William invaded England. One day riding in a mist with a slender retinue, he came upon a body of four hundred English horse. At first he thought that this was a portion of his own army; seeing his mistake he fought boldly, but was overpowered and made prisoner. He was taken to Northampton and conducted into King Henry’s presence, with his feet tied together under his horse’s belly. Now Henry had just been to Canterbury doing penance at the tomb of the murdered Thomas à Becket; he had walked barefoot through the city, prostrated himself on the pavement before the shrine, passed the whole night in the church, and in the morning had himself scourged by the priests with knotted cords. And now, as a token that his penance had reconciled him to heaven, and obtained the saint’s forgiveness, here was his enemy, the King of Scots, delivered into his hands.

Henry shewed no generosity towards his captive. He demanded to have homage paid him as Lord Paramount of Scotland. In his prison, first at Richmond, and then at Falaise in Normandy, William’s spirit was so far broken that he acceded to Henry’s demands, and the Scottish parliament, to obtain the release of their king, ratified a dishonourable treaty. At York the required homage was publicly paid; and for fifteen years it continued in full force. But in 1189, Henry’s son, Richard, the Lion-hearted, on the eve of his crusade to the Holy Land,—desirous to place his home affairs in safety during his absence, renounced the claim of general homage extorted from William,—reserving only such homage as was anciently rendered by Malcolm Canmore.

And in almost unbroken peace between the two countries for upwards of a century, the generous conduct of Richard bore good fruit. Then a course of accidents, which nearly extinguished the Scottish royal family, gave an English monarch the opportunity for reviving old pretensions to supremacy, and was thus the cause of renewed wars and national animosities.

William died in 1214, and was succeeded by his son, Alexander III. He reigned thirty-five years, and being of good parts, and with considerable force of character, did much for the progress of Scotland in the arts of civilization. He was succeeded in 1249 by his son, Alexander III., then only eight years of age. He married the daughter of Henry III., but the children of the marriage died young. The chief trouble of his reign was from Norwegian invasions, but in 1263 Alexander defeated Haco, King of Norway, at Largs, at the mouth of the Firth of Clyde. By this victory Scotland obtained possession of the Hebrides and the Isle of Man. Alexander was accidentally killed in 1263; riding too near the edge of a cliff on the Fifeshire coast, near Kinghorn, in the dusk of the evening, his horse stumbled and threw him over the cliff.

How Scotland became a Free Nation.

We are not attempting to present a detailed history of Scotland: such a history has both a general and a national value, and there has been no lack of writers of ability to give to it their best of thought and of research. But as having been a supreme crisis in this history, and as having placed Scotland high on the list of free nations, we give a brief summary of events at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century.

The English King, Edward the First, who has been called the greatest of the Plantagenets, was led to undertake the conquest of Scotland. He found that insurgent spirits amongst his own subjects therein found refuge, and that France—the natural enemy of England—was generally in alliance with Scotland. His designs on Scotland had three separate phases. First: King Alexander the Third of Scotland having died without immediate issue, the crown devolved upon his grand-daughter, Margaret, daughter of Eric, King of Norway. The young princess is called in history the Maid of Norway. Edward proposed a marriage between her and his own eldest son, also named Edward. A treaty for this marriage was entered into. It was one of the might-have-beens of history; had it taken place, and been fruitful, the union of the crowns might have been anticipated by over three centuries, and the after-histories of the two countries very different. But on her voyage to take possession of her crown, Margaret sickened; she landed at Orkney, and there died, September, 1290.

Then there were various claimants to the crown, the rights of the claimants dating back several generations. All having their partizans, and anarchy and conflict appearing imminent, it was agreed that Edward should be arbitrator. He here saw an opening for the revival of what might now have been thought the obsolete claim of the English sovereign to be recognised as Lord Paramount of Scotland. Two of the candidates, Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale, and John Baliol, Lord of Galloway, were found to be nearer in blood to the throne than all the others. Both of them traced their descent from daughters of David, Earl of Huntingdon, brother of King William, called The Lion. Edward gave his decision in favour of Baliol, as being descended from the elder daughter; but he declared that the crown was to be held under him as feudal superior; and Baliol did homage to Edward as to his lord sovereign, and was summoned as a peer to the English Parliament.

EDWARD I.

Edward soon shewed that his claim was not to be a merely formal one; he demanded the surrender of three important Scottish fortresses. Baliol would himself have submitted to this arrogant demand, but at the instigation of the nobles he sent a refusal, and a formal renunciation of his vassalage. In a war which in 1294 broke out between France and England, Scotland allied itself with France. Then Edward assembled a powerful army and invaded Scotland. He gained a victory near Dunbar, and made a triumphant march through the Lowlands. The country was divided within itself; the powerful Bruce faction was arrayed against that of Baliol. Baliol made a cringing submission to Edward; and Bruce sued for the nominal throne, as tributary sovereign of Scotland. “Think’st thou I am to conquer a kingdom for thee?” was Edward’s stern reply; and he forthwith took measures to make evident his purpose of keeping Scotland to himself. He appointed an English nobleman his viceroy, garrisoned the fortresses with English troops, and removed to London the regalia and the official records of the Kingdom, and also the legendary stone upon which the Scottish Kings had sat on their coronation. It was the very nadir in the cycle of Scottish history.

Then came revolts, with varied measures of success. A notable hero, Sir William Wallace, whose name yet lives in Scottish hearts as the very incarnation of patriotism and courage, took the leadership in an all but successful insurrection. But the larger, better appointed, and better disciplined armies of Edward again placed Scotland under his iron heel. Brave Wallace was, through treachery, taken prisoner, carried up to London, and tried for treason at Westminster Hall. “I never could be a traitor to Edward, for I was never his subject,” was Wallace’s defence: the English judges condemned him to a traitor’s death. With the indignities customary in these semi-barbarous times, he was executed on Tower Hill, 23rd August, 1305.

Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, a grandson of the Bruce who was Baliol’s rival for the Crown, had been one of Wallace’s ablest lieutenants. He had a fine person, was brave and strong, was moreover prudent and skilful, fitted to be a leader of men, both in the council and on the battle-field. He had the faults of his times—could be passionate, and in his passion cruel and relentless. He now aimed at the sovereignty, and within a year of the death of Wallace, had himself, with a miniature court and slender following, crowned King at Scone. When Edward heard of this he was exceedingly wroth, and would himself again go into Scotland and stamp out all the embers of rebellion. In 1307, he did accompany an army through Cumberland, to within three miles of the Scottish border. But ruthless and determined in spirit, he was now old and feeble in body, and

“Hate and fury ill-supplied

The stream of life’s exhausted tide.”

He was stricken by mortal sickness and died, 6th July, 1307. Before he died he made his son promise to carry his unburied corpse with the army until Scotland was again fully conquered. The Second Edward did not carry out that savage injunction, but had his father buried in Westminster Abbey, where his tomb styles him, with greater truth than is found in many monumental inscriptions, “The hammer of Scotland.”

For years Bruce was little other than a guerilla chief, sometimes even a fugitive, hiding in highland fastnesses, or in the Western Isles. He was under the pope’s excommunication, for that in a quarrel within the walls of a consecrated church in Dumfries he had slain Sir John Comyn, who had also certain hereditary claims to the throne. But he was possessed of wonderful perseverance. Edward II. had, by the withdrawal of his father’s great army of invasion, encouraged the Scottish hopes of independence. In different parts of the country there were partial insurrections against English rule and English garrisons. In March, 1313, by a sudden coup, Edinburgh Castle was taken. Gradually the greater number of the Scottish nobles, with their retainers, declared for Bruce. By the early spring of 1314, all the important towns except Stirling had passed out of English possession; and it was to be given up unless relieved before midsummer.

Such a state of things would not have come about in the days of the elder Edward, before he would have been with an army in Scotland, to drive back the tide of insurrection. Now, instigated by his counsellors to save Stirling, Edward the Second assembled one of the largest armies which had ever been under the command of an English King. One hundred thousand men are said to have crossed the Scottish border, the flower of English chivalry—the best trained archers in the world—soldiers from France, Welsh and Irish, a mighty host. Bruce with all his efforts could not bring into the field more than one disciplined soldier for every three such in the enemy’s ranks; but there were many loose camp-followers, half-armed and undisciplined, who, if their only aim was plunder, could yet harass and cut off stragglers of an army on the march. Bruce himself was a consummate general, possessing the entire confidence of his men; he had the choice of his ground, and he had as lieutenants his brave brother Edward, his nephew Randolph, and his faithful follower Lord James Douglas, all commanding men with whom they had in previous hard fights stood shoulder to shoulder and achieved victory.

On the afternoon of the 23rd of June, 1314, the mighty English host rolled on in splendid order, towards the plain near Stirling, where Bruce, taking every advantage of the ground, had posted his army. In the evening there were a few skirmishes, and the Bruce had a personal encounter with, and slew an English knight, De Bohun. Such an act—if it could have been honourably avoided—was not generalship, but in those days personal prowess in the field was an essential for leadership.

On the next morning, before daybreak, the battle began, it is named “of Bannockburn,” from a small stream, the Bannock, on the right of Bruce’s position. We have no need to say that, despite of numbers and discipline being on the side of the English, and courage a common quality in both armies, it was a decisive Scottish victory. The causes of this result are not far to seek; Bruce was the better general, and he had a position from which he could bring a superior force to bear upon any single point of attack. The course of the English cavalry lay through morass and broken ground; and by pitfalls and barriers, Bruce had made this ground more difficult and dangerous. He closed at the earliest possible moment with those terrible foes at a distance—the English archers; his object was to throw the enemy into confusion at some one point, knowing how such confusion spreads itself. The very numbers of the English told against their united action—more than the half of them were never actually engaged in the fight. And when some early advantages showed in favour of the Scots, their motley crowd of camp followers thought that victory was assured, and, eager for plunder and revenge, they burst down the slopes with wild shouts and gesticulations. And thus a partial confusion in the English ranks became a general panic, a rout, and a “save-himself-who-can” flight from the field. With the Douglas in hot pursuit, Edward rode across the country to Dunbar, where he found a small vessel by which he sailed to England.

And thus—by one day’s devoted patriotism, by steady valour and skilful generalship, as Scottish historians say,—by hap-hazard, stratagem, and surprise, as others have alleged, Robert Bruce secured his crown, and could now really be called Rex Scotorum, King of Scots. And Scotland itself rose, by that day’s event, from the dust of conquest and depression into a free and independent state, to be governed by its own laws and ruled by its own princes. There have been since that day some disastrous Scottish defeats by English arms, and Scotland has often felt itself in the shadow of a superior power; but the halo of Bannockburn has never been obscured. It was not only a glorious day for Scotland, but an auspicious one for England also; the Scottish people could, after a preliminary union of the two crowns in a sovereign common to both countries, frankly, and on equal terms, join with England in a national union; together, hand in hand, going down the stream of history; in weal and in woe standing by and aiding each other.

Scotland in the Two Hundred Years following Bannockburn.

Never in all its previous history had Scotland been so united within itself, or held so important a place amongst other nations, as during the reign of Robert Bruce.

In what are called the dark ages of Europe, feudalism was a general institution amongst the western nations. The Conqueror introduced this phase of society into England; and it soon thereafter spread into Scotland, where clanship had been its forerunner. Under the feudal system, the King was chief; the land of the nation was nominally his, to bestow in large estates on the nobles and great barons; these became his vassals, under tenure obligations to do him homage, to take part, with their retainers, in his wars, and to attend and take part in the Great Councils which he summoned. The lesser barons, or fief-holders met in their districts or shires, and chose from amongst themselves deputies or representatives. And the Great Council contained besides, representatives of the clergy, and of the chartered boroughs. In England the national Council was divided into two separate houses, namely, that of Peers, where the members sat by personal right, and that of Commons, who were members by representation. In Scotland there was a single house: nobles and prelates, representatives of shires, and delegates from boroughs, all sat together, took a common share in the debates, and all votes were of equal account. Acts were made into law, and powers were granted for raising money, by the bills passed in Parliament, being assented to by the sovereign. The form of assent was touching the bills with the sceptre.

And the old Scottish statute book is replete with wise, well-considered laws. But from the powers assumed by the nobles, each virtually claiming absolute authority within his own domains, the administration was woefully defective. The nobles were, moreover, often engaged in deadly feuds against each other; perpetuating family quarrels through generations, and at times powerful houses would coalesce against sovereignty itself.

In the English quarrels which arose, a Scottish army would be composed of brave and hardy fighting men, trained to arms, and devoted to their immediate leaders. But the leaders were jealous of, and many of them inimical to each other; so could not act in concert, and a battle under such circumstances would be a disaster and a disgrace. A great personality, like that of Robert the Bruce, could over-master the discordant elements, and make his own authority paramount; but amongst his successors there were several weak monarchs, unable to beat down personal rancour and ambition in the council and in the camp. And one great curse to Scotland in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, was the comparatively large number of regencies, from the under ages of monarchs at their accession to the throne,—thus creating jealousy, rivalry, and partizanship amongst the more powerful nobles.

The burghs had risen in population and importance, generally clustering round the larger religious houses. Men not connected with the land either as proprietors or retainers, congregated together for mutual trade and mutual protection. The sovereigns encouraged this growth, as affording a readier means of raising revenue, and as an equipoise to the power of the nobles; granting the towns chartered privileges, which constituted them royal burghs. The citizens elected their municipal Council; the chief magistrate was styled Provost, the others Bailies. Many burghs were defended by walling, and the citizens were trained to arms; they had to defend the burgh, and, in levies, to help the King in his wars.

In the midland shires law and order obtained generally, but in the Highlands and their adjacent islands, and in the frontier shires, there was, as a rule, lawlessness and disorder. The halo of romance, largely kindled by the genius of Sir Walter Scott, hovers round the Scottish Highlands. The

“Land of green heath and shaggy wood,

Land of the mountain and the flood”

bred a stalwart race of brave men, with persistent loyalty in their hearts to their clanship, and to the hills and glens which were to them their fatherland; but they long continued in semi-barbarism, separated by race and language from the comparatively civilized Lowlands, with little of national patriotism, and a great distrust of the—to them distant—sovereignty of Holyrood. They often, as did their forefathers in the time of the Romans, a thousand years previously, made plundering incursions into the Lowlands; but they had continual clan-quarrels amongst themselves, which helped to keep them in their native wilds, and the government would foment these quarrels, and even, to their mutual destruction, employ one clan against another. So late as the reign of James IV. an Act of Parliament, for the better government of the Highlands and Islands, states that for want of justices and sheriffs, these districts had become almost savage.

And the border counties—on both sides of the hardly defined line of demarcation—were also in an unsettled state. They, too, had their family clanships, their hereditary feuds, their predatory raids. There was a sort of debatable land of moor, forest, and morass, where neither national nor forest-law was paramount. On both sides Wardens of the marches were appointed, with a mutual understanding to prevent border-raiding. But the Wardens themselves were generally heads of the great neighbouring families, and they often broke their own laws, by sheltering or encouraging offenders. Altogether the picture which we gather from the history of Scotland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is not a pleasant one to dwell upon.

But there were rifts in the cloud. The first James, 1406 to 1437, has left a noble record as a man of knightly nature, a fine poet, and a wise ruler. When eleven years of age, he was put by his father, Robert III., on board of a vessel to sail to France, to save him from his uncle, the Duke of Albany, who had caused the death by starvation of his elder brother. The vessel was captured by the English, and the young prince was for eighteen years a prisoner. But he was well educated, and seems to have had great freedom of movement—even taking part in the French wars. He married Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, and nearly related to the royal family of England. In 1424, a ransom was negotiated; James was set at liberty, and he and his queen were crowned at Scone. Under him many wise laws were enacted for the proper administration of justice, and for the fostering of home trade and foreign commerce. His great task was in curtailing the powers assumed by the nobles. This made him enemies, and cost him his life. Temporarily occupying a house in Perth, a band of miscreants under Sir Robert Graham, who had recently been punished by the King for law-breaking, burst at night into the King’s chamber, and in his wife’s presence savagely slew him. The Queen took wild vengeance on the murderers.

The Older Scottish Literature.

Perhaps in no part of Scotland was there—even in the fourteenth century—pure Anglo-Saxon blood. The Lothians and the south-eastern shires had been a portion of the old kingdom of Northumbria, in which, with the Angles as a normal population, there had been large Danish settlements; and numbers of Normans also settled therein, both before and after the Conquest; whilst the descendants of the old Britons had peopled the south-western shires, from the Solway to the Clyde. Thus whilst the generally spoken language of the two countries was essentially the same, the literature of England would be more purely Teutonic; that of Scotland would include Celtic elements; but these elements would assert themselves more in qualifying the style of the literature than in the use of Celtic words.

Thus, Scottish poetry generally shows a passionate love of Nature; its picturesque descriptions and vivid colourings reaching or bordering upon exaggeration. Its humour is broad, and of coarsish fibre. And then the sentiment of patriotism has ever been more pronounced in Scotland than in England. As a rule, English Nationalism was, after the Norman Conquest, even in the most disastrous times, safe and self-assertive. On the other hand, Scottish Nationalism was at one period, for a time, entirely lost; it was often in extreme danger, and was saved only by extreme efforts,—as we might say, “by the skin of the teeth.” Can we wonder then that fervid patriotism pervades,—becomes obtrusive even, in Scottish literature; and that this literature almost deifies the National heroes?

Thus, amongst the earlier efforts in Scottish poetry replete with this glowing patriotism, we have Archbishop Barbour’s poem, The Bruce; Blind Harry’s History of Sir William Wallace; and Andrew of Wyntoun’s Chronykil of Scotland. We mentioned as a poet James I., he wrote The Kings Quhair (i.e., book); it is in Chaucer’s seven-line stanza, and contains the best poetry published in Great Britain, between that of Chaucer and the Elizabethan period. From a full heart he tells the story of his love; a love which brightened his life, and shone true at his death, when his queen did her best to save him from the daggers of the conspirators. The King,—whilst a prisoner in Windsor Castle,—saw from his window his future queen, walking in an adjacent garden.

“Cast I down mine eyes again,

Where as I saw, walking under the tower,

Full secretly, now comen here to plain.

The fairest, or the freshest younge flower

That ever I saw, methought, before that hour,

For which, sudden abate—anon astart—

The blood of all my body to my heart.

“And in my head I drew right hastily

And eftesoons I leant it out again,

And saw her walk that very womanly,

With no wight mo’, but only women twain,

Then gan I study to myself, and sayn,—

‘Ah, sweet! are ye a worldly creature,

Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature?

“‘Or, are ye god Cupidis own princess

And comin are to loose me out of hand?

Or, are ye very Nature the goddess,

That have depainted with your heavenly hand

This garden full of flowers as they stand?

What shall I think, alas! what reverence

Shall I outpour unto your excellence?’”

Another king, James Fifth of the name, was also a poet; he may be called the originator of that satirical humour in verse which afterwards characterized so many Scottish poets, including Robert Burns, the greatest of them all.

WILLIAM DRUMMOND.

After the union of the crowns, and the removal of the Scottish Court to London, in 1603, the old language came to be considered a provincial dialect. William Drummond, of Hawthornden (1585-1649), was the first notable Scottish poet who wrote well in modern English. He was imbued with true literary taste and feeling, and he ranks, as do subsequent Scottish writers, amongst British authors.

The Lowland folk-speech has really changed less from the Old English than the tongue of any other portion of the island; its glossary is very largely a key to Chaucer and Spenser, to Barbour and Andrew Wyntoun. As might have been expected, the folk-speech which is nearest to the English of modern literature is that of the more remote Highlands, as of Inverness and its surroundings. Where the old Gaelic has succumbed to book-learned English, there was no intermediate stage of the older tongue.

That the Scottish tongue is a fitting vehicle for pathos as well as for humour, scores of fine old songs are in evidence. Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral drama of the loves and lives of the Scottish peasantry in the beginning of the last century, is the best lengthy example we have of every-day folk-speech. Burns never hesitated, when it seemed to better suit his verse or his meaning, to introduce modern English words; Ramsay rarely does this. With Burns the Scottish dialect as the expression of high-class poetry, might well have ended; but it yet lingers on, chiefly in humorous songs and descriptions.

The Reformation in England and in Scotland.

In the progress of civilization, the middle of the sixteenth century may be taken as the turning point between the old past, with its feudalism, its authoritative church, its restricted culture, its antiquated science,—and the newer order of things from which has sprung the ever-expanding present. Since Guttenberg first used moveable types, a century had so far perfected his invention that books were becoming plentiful; and the one which is morally and socially, as well as religiously, the chief book in the world, had been translated into the mother-tongue of England. Towns were asserting their chartered privileges. The telescope was ransacking the heavens, and, for the first time, Magellan had circumnavigated the globe. Cannon were used in warfare, and iron had been smelted in England. The newspaper had been born; and Law was gradually gaining the ascendancy over disorder and old prerogative.

The Reformation of religion had established itself in Central and Northern Europe, and was now fighting its way in England and Scotland. But the battle with Papal authority and its dogmatic creeds was begun under very different circumstances, was carried on by very different methods, and had very different results in the two neighbouring countries.

How did the English Reformation come about? During nearly forty years in the first half of the sixteenth century (1509 to 1547) England was ruled by the last of her really despotic kings, Henry VIII. As everybody knows, Henry had a peculiar domestic experience,—he married in succession six wives. As fresh fancies took him, he rid himself of four of these—two by divorce, and two by the headsman’s axe. One wife, Jane Seymour, died in childbirth of his only son, who succeeded him as Edward VI. Wife No. 6, by her extraordinary prudence contrived to escape destruction, and survived the kingly monster. This is a harsh term for the historical father of the English church, and some modern historians of ability and repute have done their best—as has been done in the cases of Macbeth and Richard III., as these kings are portrayed by Shakespeare—to partially whitewash Henry. That he was, in common parlance, a great king, and a man of ability, of energy and decision, and that under him England prospered, and held an advanced position amongst the nations, few will dispute; but that he was a cruel, lustful, selfish tyrant seems equally undeniable. He made use of men and women as subservient to his will or his pleasure, and when his ends were so served, he ruthlessly destroyed them. His great minister, Wolsey, would not bend to his wishes in the matter of divorcing his first wife, so Wolsey was degraded, and in his old age sent into seclusion, to die of a broken heart. And in succession Thomas Cromwell, Sir Thomas More, and the Earl of Surrey, suffered the fate of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.

Henry, when a young man, opposed the Reformation. He wrote a book against Luther and his heresies, which so pleased the Pope that he granted Henry the title of Defender of the Faith. This papal title has passed down by inheritance through all succeeding English sovereigns; every coin from the mintage of Queen Victoria bears its initial letters.

Henry first married, under the Pope’s dispensation, the widow of his elder brother Arthur, Catherine of Arragon, by whom he had a daughter, afterwards Queen Mary. But the King fell in love—if, in the passions of such a man, the noble word love can be rightly used—with Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine’s lady attendants. To gain Anne, Henry, after a number of years of wedded life with Catherine, all at once became conscience-stricken that his marriage with her was an unlawful one; and he asked the Pope to recall his dispensation and annul the marriage. Now, Catherine was sister to the Emperor of Germany, Charles the Fifth, one of the Pope’s best supporters in these sad Reformation times. And, moreover, to have rescinded the dispensation would have been an admission of papal fallibility; so the Pope gave Henry a refusal.

Henry threw off his allegiance to the Pope, and had himself acknowledged by Parliament as the supreme head of the English Church. Powerful, unscrupulous, and popular, he confiscated church revenues, broke up monasteries, and by Act of Parliament, in 1537, completed politically the English Reformation. It was, so far as the King was concerned, a reformation only in name, for as to liberty of conscience, and the right of private judgment, he was as arrogant a bigot as any pope who ever wore the tiara. He vacillated in his own opinions, but enforced those he held at the time by such severe enactments, that many persons of both religions were burned as heretics.

And from the Anglican Church, so founded on despotism and intolerance, can we wonder that the shadow of Rome has never been thoroughly lifted? In the abstract it is essentially a close corporation of ecclesiastics, the mere people hardly counting as a necessary factor. Its sacraments have still miraculous or supernatural properties attached to them; no one must officiate therein who has not been ordained, and the assumed powers of ordination came through the Romish Church. From the older Church it adopted certain creeds, as dogmatic in their assertions, and intolerant in their fulminations, as were ever Papal Bulls or Decrees of Councils. Of course the mellowing influence of time, the broadening thoughts of later years, and the rivalship of Nonconformity, have done much to take out old stings and deaden old intolerance; whilst a cloud of witnesses for righteousness and progress in the Church itself, have raised it above its old self, and brought it in nearer touch with the spirit of the present age.

The history of the Scottish Reformation is an entirely different one. Instead of being originated and fostered by State authority, it was a fierce and obstinate battle with such authority. Scotland was then under one of its disastrous regencies, that of Mary of Guise, the widow of King James V., acting for her infant daughter Mary, known afterwards in history as the beautiful and unfortunate Queen of Scots. The Reformation in England had sent a wave of agitation into Scotland, and this wave advanced strongly as refugees from the cruel persecutions of Mary Tudor flocked into the Northern Kingdom; and as the Regent, with her coadjutor, the bigoted and relentless Cardinal Beaton, also began to persecute the new faith, and send its adherents to the stake; for it has ever been found to be a true saying, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” In revenge for the burning, in 1545, of one of the saintliest of men, George Wishart, a party of the Reformers murdered the Cardinal in his own castle of St. Andrews, from one of the windows of which he had gloated over the martyr’s cruel death.

In 1557, a number of the Reformers, including several noblemen, and styling themselves the Lords of the Congregation, entered into a mutual bond or covenant, “To defend the whole congregation of Christ against Satan and all his powers; to have prayers made and the sacraments administered in the vulgar tongue; in worship to use only the Bible, and the Prayer-book of Edward VI.” In 1559, the Regent, who was entirely under French influence, and had been gradually filling high offices with Frenchmen, and accumulating French troops, issued a proclamation, forbidding any one to preach or administer the sacraments without the authority of the bishops.

And at this period a sterling man fitted to be a leader in such turbulent times, John Knox, appears in the forefront of the conflict. He had been college-bred, and became a priest, but adopted the Reformation in its Calvinistic phase, and, as he had opportunity, disseminated the new tenets with eloquence and zeal. After Beaton’s death, his slayers, with others, and Knox amongst these, held out the castle of St. Andrews for fourteen months, but had to yield at last to their French besiegers, and were sent prisoners to France. Knox had to work in the galleys on the river Loire. But again he is in Scotland, preaching from place to place. After a powerful sermon against idolatry in a church in Perth, a priest began to celebrate mass. Heated by the glowing words of Knox, the people broke the images in the church. The Regent was very wroth, she deposed the Protestant provost of the city, and threatened it with French troops. The Congregation raised troops and appealed to Elizabeth, now on the English throne, for aid. Elizabeth sent some troops, and there was fighting with varied successes, until, by a treaty made in Edinburgh, the French agreed to abandon Scotland, and the Protestants were to be allowed the free exercise of their religion. In the Scottish Parliament of 1560 there was a solemn abjuration of the Pope and the mass. And the Geneva Confession of Faith was constituted the theological standard of the kingdom.

JOHN KNOX.

Differing from the English Church with its orders, its episcopacy, and its sovereign headship, the Scottish Reformers denied the authority of the sovereign, or secular government, to interfere in the affairs of the Church; determining that these affairs should be under the direction of a Court of Delegates, the greater number being chosen from the ministers, all of whom were of the same standing and dignity, and the remainder—with equal authority in the deliberations—of a certain number of the laity, called Elders, thus forming what is called “The General Assembly of the Church.” The sacraments were to be simple observances, spiritual only as they were spiritually received. Church edifices were regarded as merely stone and lime structures, having no claims to special regard, except during divine service. So to these Reformers, defacing in the churches what had been considered sacred statuary and ornamentation, even to the sign of the cross, was deemed a ready mode of testifying against Popish superstitions. As to the abbeys and monasteries—“Pull down the nests,” said stern John Knox, “and the rooks will fly away.”

Thus the Kirk of Scotland was essentially democratic in its origin, and, although always rigid and often intolerant, it has in the main so continued. Its theological tenets, although wordy and abstruse, were a whetstone to the intellect, and helped to develope a serious and thoughtful, a reading, and an argumentative people. Shepherds meeting each other on the hillsides, weavers with their yarn at the village beetling-stone, would, like Milton’s angels:—

“Reason high

Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,

Fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute.”

The English Church, on the other hand, did not encourage doctrinal discussion, but simple faith in its articles, and obedience to its rubric.

JOHN KNOX’S HOUSE.

But—which we would hardly have expected from its complex system of faith, and its niceties in phraseology—the Presbyterian Kirk produced zeal and earnest devotedness in the Scottish people. Without ordination by a bishop, whose orders were presumed to have come in direct succession from the Apostles, the ministers were held in high reverence and esteem; without printed prayers its common members learned to pray. It had its army of martyrs; except amongst Puritan Nonconformists, the Scottish Covenanters have hardly their English representatives.

John Knox largely impressed the Reformed Church with his own individuality. No doubt he was rigid, and, to our modern ideas, narrow-minded and intolerant. He would not have accomplished the work he did if he had not himself thoroughly believed in it, as the greatest work which then needed to be done. He has been blamed for speaking harsh words to Queen Mary; but he had to speak what he felt to be stern truths, for which honied words could hardly fit themselves. Mary, accustomed to fascinate the eyes and sway the wills of all who approached her, demanded of Knox:—“Who are you who dare dictate to the sovereign and nobles of this realm?” “I am, Madam,” answered Knox, “a subject of this realm.” A subject, and therefore a co-partner in the realm; to the fullest extent of his knowledge and his capabilities responsible for its right government; just as the Hebrew prophets claimed a right to stand before their kings, and, not always in smooth words, to denounce sin and hypocrisy, oppression, and backslidings from the law of God.

JOHN KNOX’S PULPIT, ST. GILES’S.
(From the Scottish Antiquarian Museum.)

For supporting the introduction of bishops into the Presbyterian Church, as impairing the republican equality of its ministers, Knox had bitterly rebuked the Regent Morton. But when, in November, 1572, the Regent stood by the grave of the Reformer, it was in a choking voice that he pronounced the grand eulogium:—“There lies he, who never feared the face of man.”

At the era of the Reformation no translation of the Scriptures had yet been printed in Scotland; what copies in the vernacular had been brought from England, were in the hands of the wealthy; indeed few of the common people could then have read them. The parish school as yet was not. The old church had not encouraged inquiry into the rationale of its dogmas, and although theological discussion was in the air, it had not penetrated into the lower strata of Scottish society. And thus the popular outburst against the old church was hardly founded on conscience and conviction; in its beginnings at least, it was more a revolution against priestly domination.

GRAVE OF JOHN KNOX.

But the cry of idolatry was raised. In the destruction of images in the churches, the leading reformers found the populace only too willing agents. Even architectural ornamentation—without religious significance—was removed or destroyed, the capitals of pillars were covered with plaster, the very tombs were rifled and defaced. The parish church had been the nucleus around which, for centuries, the veneration and the spiritual thought of past times had revolved, and now the idea of its “consecration” was to be banished from the popular mind. The reformers encouraged male worshippers to enter churches with their hats on—uncovering during prayer, psalm-singing, and scripture reading, and resuming their hats when the minister gave out the text for his sermon. When the discourse touched a popular chord, there was applause by clapping of hands and stamping of feet. Rome had demanded unquestioning submission to its authority,—an unreserved veneration for its ritual; and in breaking away from this bondage, the spirit of reverence was largely impaired.

Thus to other religionists, the form of worship in a Scottish church appeared bald and careless, hardly decorous. There was no private prayer on sitting down; in the public prayers, the stubborn presbyterian knee did not bend,—all stood upright, and the eyes would roam all over the church. In singing the psalms, there was no assistance from the swelling tones of an organ; gloves were put on during the benediction, and all were prepared for a hurried exit at its Amen. Funeral sermons, and even tomb-stones, were proscribed by the early reformers. One in King James’s English retinue, accompanying him in a visit to Scotland, remarked,—“The Scots christen without the sign of the cross; they marry without the ring; and bury without any funeral service.”

Although the old psalmist said,—“O sing unto the Lord a new song,”—the Presbyterians did not seem to think that anything had occurred in the following two thousand years, to incite to new songs of praise and thanksgiving: so they continued to sing only the Hebrew psalms. It was not until 1745 that the General Assembly authorized the use of Paraphrases,—that is, metrical versions of other portions of Scripture, but many congregations refused them. Now, there are authorized hymnals—the organ is again finding its place in the churches—and other changes have come about, bringing the form of service in nearer consonance with that of other churches, and with the more ornate tendency of the present times.

The Rival Queens—Mary and Elizabeth.

Mary’s evil fortunes began with her birth. Her dying father, heart-broken over a disastrous battle, lived only a week after his “poor lass,” as he called her, was born. Then Henry VIII. of England saw in this infant niece of his a means of uniting the two crowns, much in the way by which a wolf unites itself with the lamb it devours, by having a marriage contracted between her and his only son, Prince Edward. He sent negotiators to enforce, under threats, his project. There was much opposition amongst the Scottish nobility. It looked like surrendering their country to England. They said to Henry’s negotiators, “If your lad were a lass, and our lass were a lad, would you then be so earnest in this matter; and could you be content that our lad should, by marrying your lass, become King of England? No! your nation would never agree to have a Scot for King; and we will not have an Englishman as our King. And tho’ the whole nobility of the realm should consent thereto, yet the common people would rebel against it; the very boys would hurl stones, and the wives handle their distaffs against it.”

Henry was wroth exceedingly, threatened war, and demanded the custody of the child-Queen. To have him for an ally against the Queen-Regent and her minister, the persecutor Beaton, the Reformers temporized, and the Scottish Parliament consented to the match; Mary to be sent to Henry when she was ten years old.

In the meantime Henry got embroiled with France; and Scotland, under the influence of the Queen-Regent, allied itself with that country. Henry sent an army into Scotland. There were some Scottish successes; but at Pinkie, in 1547, the English general Somerset gained a complete victory. Before this event Henry had died; but his long cherished object, the possession of the child of Scotland, was still pressed, and now seemed on the point of attainment. But the Scottish people were irritated and alarmed to such a degree that they resolved to make the projected marriage impossible, by marrying their young mistress to the Dauphin of France, and sending her to be brought up at the French court. To this resolve Parliament gave a hasty assent; and in July 1548, the poor child, now in her sixth year, accompanied by her four Maries—girls her own age, of noble birth, her present play-fellows and future companions—was shipped off to France.

Prince Edward, who succeeded Henry as Edward VI., was twelve years of age when his father died, and he reigned only four years. Then there was the painful incident of Lady Jane Grey being pushed forward by her ambitious kindred as a claimant to the throne; the venture being death to her and to them. And then Henry’s daughter by his first wife became Queen. A rigid Catholic, she at once took steps, intolerant, relentless, and cruel, to re-establish the old faith. The savage persecutions of her reign have rendered it for ever infamous. She goes down through all time as the Bloody Mary. Smithfield blazed with the fires of martyrdom; five Protestant bishops were amongst the sufferers. Happily her reign was a brief one, lasting only five years; and they were for her years of domestic misery, her marriage with the Spanish King, Philip II., being an unhappy and unfruitful one.

Her half-sister Elizabeth, the issue of Henry’s marriage with Anne Boleyn, succeeded to the throne in 1558. Elizabeth had been brought up as a Protestant, had been kept a close prisoner during Mary’s reign,—narrowly escaping being herself a martyr. And now to maintain her claims to the throne, she had to depend upon her Protestant subjects; for the Catholics denied the validity of her father and mother’s marriage, and consequently denied her legitimacy and right to reign. They asserted that Mary Stuart of Scotland was the rightful heir, and as such entitled to their allegiance.

A brief explanation will show on what foundation the Stuart claim—afterwards allowed at the death of Elizabeth in favour of Mary’s son James—was based. At Bosworth Field, Richard III., of the house of York, was defeated and slain. The victor was Richmond of Lancaster, who thus became King Henry VII.; his son was Henry VIII., and his daughter Margaret married James IV., King of Scotland. The neighbouring Kings, James and Henry VIII., were thus brothers-in-law; none the less did they quarrel and go to war with each other, their hostilities ending, so far as James was concerned, with the battle of Flodden. Henry was then engaged in a war with France, and James was killed in the battle which his vanity had provoked, and which he generalled so badly. His son, James V., was Henry’s nephew, and full cousin to Henry’s children, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. Thus, failing direct legitimate heirs to the English throne, James’s daughter Mary was, in virtue of her descent as the grand-daughter of Henry VII., the nearest heir.

At Elizabeth’s accession, in 1558, Mary was sixteen years of age. As the wife of the Dauphin of France, the French monarchy put forward her claims as the rightful sovereign of England, and even had a coinage struck with her effigy thus designated. So Elizabeth feared and hated Mary as her rival; hated her yet more, with a woman’s spite, for her beauty and accomplishments. Soon Mary, by his early death, lost her husband, then King of France, and at nineteen years of age, in the splendour of her queenly beauty, she—regretfully for the land of her youth—returned to her native Scotland.

MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTLAND.
(From a painting by Zucchero.)

By her sweet presence, her courtesy, and winning manners, Mary largely gained the hearts of her people; but murmurings soon arose about her foreign ways, her foreign favouritisms, and her fidelity to her Catholic faith. And a cloud gathered over her domestic life. She had married a young nobleman, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. He was next to Mary in the hereditary line of succession to the English throne—as Mary was a grand-daughter of Margaret Tudor he was a grandson—by Margaret’s second marriage with the Earl of Angus. He was also a Catholic. Darnley seems to have been little other than a handsome, but petulant, ill-behaved, and ill-mannered boy, fitted, neither by intellect nor disposition, to be the husband and life-companion of such a proud, clever, and accomplished woman as Mary. Mary refused him the crown-matrimonial, and they very soon fell apart. Mary was not forbidden to have her private chapel; an Italian singer in this chapel, David Rizzio, became a favourite, he acted as her secretary, and was admitted into the inner circle of Holyrood. One evening the supper-party was broken in upon by Darnley and a number of his associates, and Rizzio was dragged out to the landing, and by several weapons barbarously stabbed to death. Mary’s fair countenance and gentle voice were mated with an iron will, persistent in carrying out her hatreds to the death. Darnley was murdered by a rude villain, Earl Bothwell, and Mary has never been satisfactorily cleared of complicity in the murder. Shortly afterwards she married this Bothwell—by force, her apologists say.

We shall not even briefly go over the oft-told tale of Mary’s after-life. As the incidents loom out of the tangled web, we feel, even through the centuries, as if we would fain arrest them by a warning voice, fain save that fascinating woman from her doom. We feel a yearning pity, almost akin to love, although stern justice gives her blame as a woman, a wife, and a Queen. That pitiful winter’s morning in Fotheringay Castle, in 1587, brought to Mary, by the headsman’s axe, a cruel death, but also a kind release from captivity and unrest.

And what of her rival queen and kinswoman, “that bright Occidental star,” Elizabeth? A woman with a strong masculine intellect, of dauntless courage, one fitted to rule and govern, and advance a nation. But unmistakably her father’s daughter, cruel, heartless, unforgiving, and thoroughly false: with a woman’s caprice exalting to supreme favouritism to-day, and striking down into the dust to-morrow. She signed Mary’s death-warrant, and, by grimaces and plainest hints, she made her people slay her own cousin. And when the deed was irretrievably done she went into a hypocritical paroxysm of well-acted anger and regret, and dealt round punishment for the act which she herself had compassed. These two women cited to the bar of judgment, Mary might well hide her face for many sins and frailties; but the better actor would try to stand up, boldly and unabashed. Our own hearts must answer which of the two we justify, rather than the other.

Old Edinburgh.

“Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!

All hail thy palaces and tow’rs,

Where once beneath a monarch’s feet

Sat legislation’s sov’reign powers!

There, watching high for war’s alarms,

Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar;

Like some bold vet’ran grey in arms,

And marked with many a seamy scar.”

So sang Burns, when “from marking wildflowers on the banks of Ayr,” he “sheltered,” and was feted and petted in the “honoured shade” of the capital of Scotland. And Sir Walter Scott, in describing Marmion’s approach to the city on a summer’s morning, cannot, from a full proud heart, refrain from introducing his own personality:—

“Such dusky grandeur clothed the height

Where the huge castle holds its state,

And all the steep slope down,

Whose ridgy back heaves to the sky,

Pil’d deep and massy, close and high—

Mine own romantic town!”

Doubtless, as a picturesque town, Edinburgh stands in the foremost rank. The natural configuration of the ground in ridges and hollows, and the commanding prospects from its heights of undulating landscape, of broad Frith, of distant hills, and of the adjacent Arthur’s Seat, like a couchant lion guarding the town, are striking, and stir up any poetic feeling that may be lurking in the heart. In the architecture there is a strange and incongruous mingling of the modern and the antique, of the genuine and the meretricious. There are many interesting historical memorials, and very many reminders of the everyday present. Buildings and monuments bring cherished and illustrious names to our mind; other names are obtruded which we would gladly forget. But no one can, from the Castle bastions, see the panorama of the city and its surroundings, without intense interest, and an admiration which will abide in the memory.

In 647, Edwin, the son of Ella, Saxon King of Northumbria, extended his conquests beyond the Forth. He re-fortified the rock-castle, called Puellerum, and to the little town which rose up around it, was given the name of Edwinsburgh. In 1128, Edinburgh was made a Royal burgh by David I. In 1215, a Parliament of Alexander II. met here for the first time. In 1296, the title of the chief magistrate was changed from Alderman to Provost.

In 1424, James I. was, at £40,000, ransomed from his long and unjust imprisonment in England: the towns of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Perth, and Dundee, guaranteeing the ransom. James had, on his parole, been free to move about England; and he soon saw how far behind her his own land was in agriculture and commerce. To amend this he made laws, which to us seem meddlesome and going into petty details, but doubtless were then useful and progressive. For the prevention of fires in buildings it was advisable to enact that “hempe, lint and straw be not put in houses aboone or near fires,” and that “nae licht be fetched from ane house to ane uther but within covered weshel or lanterne.” The lofty piles of buildings for which the older town of Edinburgh is now remarkable, were in the fifteenth century represented by wooden houses not exceeding two stories in height; for we find that in providing against fires, Parliament ordained that “at the common cost aucht twenty-fute ladders be made, and kept in a ready place in the town, for that use and none other.” From the murder of James I. in Perth, in 1456, Edinburgh dates as the capital, and where Parliaments were exclusively held.

In 1496, in order to qualify the eldest sons of barons and freeholders for exercising the functions of sheriffs (holding judicial powers in a Scottish county) and ordinary justices, it was enacted that such be sent to grammar schools, and there remain, “quhill they be competentlie founded and have perfite Latin; and thereafter to remain three zeirs at the schules of art and jure; so that they may have knowledge and onderstanding of the laws.” The population of Edinburgh was then about 8,000.

When, in 1503, Margaret, daughter of Henry VII., came to Scotland as the bride of James IV., the King met her at Dalkeith, and the royal lovers made their entry into Edinburgh, “the Kyng riding on a pallafroy, with the princesse behind him, and so through the toun.” Ten years later came, on the 10th September, the sad news of Flodden, fought on the previous day; when the brave but fool-hardy King, and the flower of Scottish manhood “were a’ wede away.” At first it was consternation and the confusion of despair; but soon order and new energy prevailed. Under pains of forfeiture of life and goods, all citizens capable of bearing arms were convoked to form, with the stragglers from Flodden, a fresh army: the older citizens were to defend the city. The women were, under a threat of banishment, forbidden to cry and clamour in the streets; the better sort were to go to church and pray for their country; and thereafter to mind their business at home, and not encumber the streets.

In 1543, under the regency of the Earl of Arran, an Act was passed permitting the scriptures to be read in the vulgar tongue, and the Reformation ideas began to be bruited about. Twelve years later, statues in St. Giles’ Church, of the Virgin and certain saints were destroyed; but the then Regent, Mary of Guise, by threatenings, given strength to by her French troops, contrived to keep down open revolt against the old faith. But in 1558, on the festival day of St. Giles, the patron saint of Edinburgh, and for which festival the priests and monks had made great preparation, it was discovered that the image of the saint had been taken from the church during the previous night, and thrown into the North Loch. The priests got a smaller statue from the Greyfriars, this the people called in derision “the bairn-saint.” The Queen-Regent was in the procession. She must have been a woman of strong character; in her presence all went smoothly, but having left, the populace tore the little St. Giles to pieces, hustling and dispersing the priests.

From the death of the Queen-Regent, and the withdrawal of the French troops in 1560, the Protestant cause was in the ascendancy. An Act was passed denouncing Popery, and sanctioning the hastily compiled Confession of Faith. Penalties on Catholic worship, very similar to those under which Protestants had groaned, and which they had bitterly denounced, were imposed. Any one celebrating mass or being present at its celebration, was to be punished by forfeiture of goods for the first offence, by banishment for the second, and by death for the third. Queen Mary, then in France, and her husband Francis, who held from Mary the crown-matrimonial of Scotland, refused to ratify the Acts, and insulted the messenger of the Parliament.

Next year, 1561, Mary, now a widow, and as such having lost her high position at the French court, returned to Scotland. She waited upon the deck of the vessel which was taking her from the land of her youth, until its shores faded from her tear-dimmed eyes. “Farewell, beloved France,” she sobbed, “I shall never behold thee again.” When, on the first day of September, she made her public entry into Edinburgh, never had the city shown such an exuberance of warm enthusiasm. The procession included all the foremost citizens, Protestant and Catholic, clad in velvet and satin; twelve citizens supporting the canopy over the triumphal car, where, like an Helen in her matchless loveliness, sat the young Queen. When on the following Sunday she attended mass at Holyrood, her Catholic servants were insulted, and the crowd could hardly be restrained from interrupting the service. And so began the hurley-burley, through six years little other than a civil war; a time of confusion, of plotting and counter-plotting, of intolerance, of malice and revenge; that fair figure with the dove’s eyes, but also with a determined will and an unswerving purpose, ever emerging into the foreground, now an object of admiration, and then for denunciation, but always for the highest interest and the profoundest pity.

After Marys enforced abdication in Lochleven Castle, on 29th July, 1567, her year-old son James was proclaimed King. The Earl of Morton, head of the powerful Douglas family, taking, in the child’s name, the usual coronation oaths. Mary’s half-brother, the Earl of Murray, became Regent. Three years later Murray, whilst riding in State through Linlithgow, was shot dead in revenge for a private injury. Then followed two years of discord and confusion from rival factions; and then, 1572, Morton became Regent, and was the master-power in the kingdom. For eight years he was the controlling influence. He was haughty and revengeful, and at the same time avaricious and corrupt; so he made many enemies, and these plotted his destruction. One day when the King, now fourteen years of age, was sitting in Council, one of James’s favourites entered the chamber abruptly, fell on his knees before the King, and accused Morton of having been concerned in the murder of the King’s father, Lord Darnley. Morton replied that instead of having been in the plot, he had himself been most active in dragging to light and punishing the conspirators. He now demanded a fair trial; but fair trials were not then general. Morton’s servants were put to the torture to extort damnatory evidence, and several known enemies were on the jury; so he was found guilty of having been “art and part” in Darnley’s murder. To the last he denied having advised or aided in the foul deed; but it is probable that he knew that it was in purpose. He suffered death by decapitation at Edinburgh, in June, 1581, the instrument of death being a rough form of guillotine, called the Maiden, which, it is said, he introduced into Scotland from Yorkshire. The gruesome machine is now in the Edinburgh Antiquarian Museum.

THE SCOTTISH MAIDEN.

In 1596, James, now thirty years of age, quarrelled with his capital. There was in all the Stuart kings a strong strain of the old faith in what hearts they had; or, there was at least a very strong dislike of the independent, self-assertive idea which was the basis of the Presbyterian Church. James granted certain favours, which we should now think simply common rights, to his Catholic nobles, and this roused the ire of the Kirk, then ever ready to testify against popery, to assert for itself the right of free judgment in religious matters, but practically to deny this right to others. A standing Council of the Church was formed out of Edinburgh and provincial Presbyteries; inflammatory sermons were preached, and the King, refusing to receive a petition demanding that the laws against papacy be stringently enforced, was mobbed, and seditious cries were raised.

JAMES THE SIXTH OF SCOTLAND AND FIRST OF ENGLAND.

James hastily removed the Court to Linlithgow, ordering the courts of law to follow him there; and he ordered the magistrates to seize and imprison the Council of Ministers as promoters of sedition. The magistrates, anxious to regain the King’s favour, were preparing to obey him when the ministers fled to Newcastle. The King’s unwonted promptitude and decision, seem to have borne down all opposition. On the 1st of January, 1596-7, he re-entered Edinburgh between a double file of guards, chiefly from the wild Highland and border clans, which lined the streets. The magistrates on their knees submitted to him in most abject terms, and many of the nobles pleaded for pardon. James was not a large-minded man,—the more humble they, the more inexorable he. He gave three of his lords charge of the city, declaring that it had forfeited all its corporate privileges, was liable to all the penalties of treason, and deserved to be razed to the ground. We learn that Elizabeth interceded for the penitent city, which, deprived of its magistrates, deserted by its ministers, and proscribed by the King, was in the lowest depth of despondency. James relented so far as to absolve the city on the payment of a fine of 20,000 marks, and the forfeiture to the crown of the houses of the recreant ministers.

Elizabeth died in March 1603, and James was at once proclaimed King of England, and warmly invited to take up his residence in London. On the Sunday previous to his departure he was present at the service in St. Giles’ Church. At the close of the service he rose and addressed the congregation in a speech full of kindly expressions, declaring his abiding affection and regard for his native land; and the sighs and tears of the people shewed how their hearts were moved by his words.

Fifteen years later, James was again in Edinburgh. His progress from Berwick was one continued ovation. In every town which he passed through, flattering panegyrics, in Latin or Greek, were addressed to him. As he entered Edinburgh by the West Port, he was met by the magistrates in their robes, and the town-clerk read a long address replete with compliments, so inflated and exaggerative, that the dedication to “the most high and mighty Prince James,” of the authorised translation of the Bible, reads comparatively flat and commonplace. Afterwards, the king was sumptuously entertained, and presented with 10,000 marks in a silver basin.

Just at this time, the invention of logarithms, by a Scotch laird, John Napier of Merchiston, near Edinburgh, was becoming known in the then comparatively restricted scientific world. Logarithms are prepared tables of numbers, by which complex problems in trigonometry, and the tedious extraction of roots, can be performed by the simpler rules of arithmetic. To the well-educated, they save much time and labour; in the art of navigation, they enable the mariner who may be unskilled in mathematics, to work out the most intricate calculations. In all vessels on the open seas, when observations can be taken, in all mathematical schools and astronomical observatories, logarithms are in daily use. As with other things, familiarity discounts our wonder at their aptitude and value; but the estimate by scientists of Napier’s invention is, that it ranks amongst British contributions to science, second only to Newton’s Principia. Kepler regarded Napier as one of the greatest men of his age; and in the roll of those who were foremost in establishing real science in Europe, his is the only name which can be placed alongside the names of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo.

The long sloping street called the Canongate, which reaches down from the centre of the Old Town to Holyrood, was, with its tributary lanes and closes, created a Burgh of Regality by King David the First. It was outside the walls of Edinburgh, and had its own Council of Bailies, Deacons of Trades, and Burgesses. The Canongate is full of old memories. There is the house of John Knox, the sturdy Reformer and typical presbyterian. There is the Tolbooth—the Heart of Midlothian. From the balcony of that old mansion, called Moray House, a gay party were, in 1650, with malicious and triumphant eyes, looking down upon a crowd through which was slowly wending a low cart, in which was ignominiously bound down that spent thunderbolt of war, Montrose—he is on his way to execution. Aye, but in after years two in that jubilant party—Argyles, father and son—will both also pass up that street amidst jeering crowds, and to similar fates.

THE CANONGATE TOLBOOTH.

Edinburgh Castle is the central feature of the city. Its site is on the summit of a huge isolated rock of eruptive basalt,—rising on the north side,—out of the valley, now a garden, which divides the new from the old town, to about 175 feet of perpendicular height. The castle, with the slopes, occupies fully six acres of ground, and includes barrack accommodation for 2,000 men; the armoury is calculated to contain 30,000 stands of arms. On the Argyle bastion there is a huge piece of old artillery called Mons Meg; it is constructed of wrought iron, and had burst at the muzzle at its last discharge. Its liner is formed of longitudinal bars,—these are strongly hooped; it is thus allied in construction to that of present ordnance, and, rude as the work is, it shows the comparative high state of iron manufacture amongst the Dutch several centuries ago.

The castle was used by Malcolm Canmore and his saintly queen, Margaret, as a royal residence. The oldest building on the plateau which crowns the rock, is St. Margaret’s Chapel, said to have been used by the queen. On two sides of the quadrangle called Palace Yard are an ancient hall which has just been restored, and a suite of residential apartments. In a small turret-chamber, Mary’s son, James, was born. In a well-protected room adjoining, the regalia of Scotland—crown, sceptre, sword of state, and other insignia—are shewn.

The ancient regalia were “conveyed, the wise it call,” out of Scotland by Edward I. Robert Bruce was crowned at Scone with only a makeshift crown; but it also fell into the hands of the English. The present crown is, from the style of its workmanship, supposed to have been made in the later years of Bruce’s reign. It was first used in the coronation of David II., in 1329. Later sovereigns added to the ornamentation. The sword of state was presented to James V. by Pope Julius II. There are also certain jewels which were restored to Scotland at the death of Cardinal York, the last of the Stuarts.

When Cromwell invaded Scotland, the regalia were, for security, taken by the Earl Marischal to his own strong castle of Dunottar, in Kincardineshire. When this castle was besieged by General Monk, the regalia—known to be there by the English—were, by a feminine stratagem, carried out by Mrs. Grainger, the wife of the minister of the neighbouring church of Kinneff. The minister buried them in the church, and there they remained until the Restoration.

At the Union, in 1707, the Scottish Estates passed a resolution that the regalia were never to be removed from Scotland. A hundred years after the whereabouts was unknown,—their very existence a matter of doubt. The following extract is from the article “Edinburgh,” in the “Edinburgh Encyclopedia,” edited by Sir David Brewster, published about 1815:—

“At the time of the Union, the Scottish regalia were, with much solemnity, deposited in a strong iron-barred room, entered from a narrow staircase; but most probably prudential reasons have long ago led to their destruction or removal. They were too dangerous insignias of royalty to lie within the reach of the disaffected during the rebellions of the last century. Towards its close, however, some doubts were raised, and a warrant to search was issued to certain official persons. Nothing was found but an old locked chest covered with dust, and the deputation did not think that they were authorized to break this open. So the search was abandoned, and an opportunity, not likely to recur, of ascertaining whether the regalia were really in existence, was lost.”

The italics are ours. In 1818, the regalia were found in a search ordered by George IV.—then Prince Regent—in that same old chest, which is still in evidence at the back of the jewel room.

SEAL OF HOLYROOD ABBEY.

Holyrood Palace, founded by David I., in 1158, was originally an abbey of St. Augustine canons. The ruins of the church evidence the grandeur of the ancient structure. Of a later date is the north-west wing of the palace,—a portion of which was a royal residence of successive sovereigns. One of the complaints against James III. was that he here preferred the society of poets and musicians, to that of the ruder nobility. James IV. was also partial to artists and literary men. In his Marmion, Sir Walter Scott has the quatrain:—

“Still is thy name in high account

And still thy verse has charms,—

Sir David Lindsay of the Mount,

Lord Lion King-at-arms!”

Sir David was in the first half of the sixteenth century the leading poet in Scotland. When a boy he was page of honour to the infant king, James V.,—carrying him on his back,—his playmate, and, in a sense, his tutor. Sir David addresses the king, giving some early reminiscences:—

“And the first words that thou gan’st mute

Were, ’pay Da Lin;” upon the lute

Then played I twenty springs and three,—

With whilk richt pleasurt thou would be.”

The suite of apartments occupied by Queen Mary are still left, with a portion of the old furniture and hangings. As we wander through the rooms, we can, in fancy, see Mary in the audience chamber, in one of her distressing interviews with the leaders of the Reformation,—when most unjustifiable demands were made on her that, against conscience and conviction, she should renounce the faith in which she had been nurtured,—should change her religion to accommodate the popular change. Or, in the private supper-room, see her and her ladies at their needlework; or hear one of these ladies sing an old Scots ballad of loves gone astray, and with a sad ending. Then Rizzio’s rich baritone rises in an Italian strain; and then there is on these stairs the trampling of armed men, and foul murder is done before the eyes of a queen and an expectant mother; and her life is never the same again.