Edinburgh. Rosaline Masson
in the centre of the picture. To the right of Calton Hill on the distant horizon appears the Bass Rock, to the left the coast of Fife with a portion of the island of Inchkeith.
When Edinburgh was only a castle rising out of woods and morasses, with a cluster of wooden, thatched huts below it, all the land lying between the Castle and Arthur’s Seat was part of the unhewn forest of Drumsheugh; and there, where the red elk and the Caledonian boar roamed under primeval oaks, the pious Celtic kings of Scotland were wont to take their pleasure in the chase. David, the last of Malcolm’s five sons who reigned, rode out from the Castle one day, followed by his courtiers, to go a-hunting—this in spite of the protests of his confessor, for it was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and a day rather for vigil than for sport. Good fortune could not attend the King in so rebellious a mood. He became separated from the “noys and dyn of bugillis” of the royal hunt, and suddenly found himself alone and confronted by a huge white stag, which, furious and at bay, turned and attacked him. King David defended himself with his short hunting sword, and would have fared but ill had not a miracle happened—a hand from the clouds placed a cross in his hand, before which sacred emblem the white stag fled. And that night, as the awed and wearied monarch slept in the Castle, St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, appeared to him, and told him to found yet another monastery on the scene of the miracle. So Holyrood Abbey was founded, and the canons lived in the Castle till their Abbey was ready for them, in all its beauty, in the valley close at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. But David I. of Scotland must not be remembered only as a “sair sanct for the crown,” chidden by his confessor and founding abbeys in obedience to dreams, but as “the beld[6] of all his kyn,” who by his munificence to the Church protected the land from ravage, and fostered arts and learning; who fought with England till Scotland included Durham, Northumberland, and Westmoreland; and who left Scotland peaceful and prosperous. It was in his reign that St. Giles’s assumed the dignity of a parochial Church. The little rough huts of the dwellers in the town, which would naturally have clustered near the Castle to the east—its one not precipitous side, and where was its main entrance—would now tend to straggle down towards the Church and the Abbey, and so began that long street from the Castle to Holyrood—that curious steep mediæval street down the ridge, so characteristic of Old Edinburgh to this very day.
The Celtic dynasty had inherited from Saint Margaret their dutiful generosity to the Church; and in their reigns Holyrood Abbey became very rich and important, and the Augustine canons of Holyrood were permitted to build the Canongate round about, and to rule it as a separate burgh.
But, with the death of Alexander III., the last of the Celtic dynasty, troubled times began for Scotland. First came the patriotic struggle of Sir William Wallace against the English oppression. Then came days of civil wars of the Bruce and that splendid hero the Black Douglas, and all the selfish tyranny of Edward I. of England, ending in the legacy he left to Scotland—a century and a half of incessant war.
Those were days when no man had time to lay his hand to the plough, and no woman bore a son but he was reared a fighter and a hater; when English armies or rude bands of raiders would trample down the growing grain; when, the sound of the axes scarcely still, the little thatched homes of the wooden city would be wantonly kindled and left in smoking ashes and desolation. During all this time, neither was the Abbey of Holyrood spared by the “auld enemy.” In 1322 Edward II. laid it in ashes; and when David II., son of the Bruce, was buried before the High Altar, the silver shrine above it no longer held the miraculous Cross, for it had fallen into the hands of the English at Durham, and had there remained, a venerated exile in their Cathedral.
With the Stuart dynasty, in Holyrood as everywhere else, the age of romance began.
It was in 1429, five years after King James I. had come to Scotland, that a very dramatic scene took place in the Abbey. The King and Queen and Court were present at Mass in Holyrood Church on the Feast of St. Augustine. Suddenly the chanting of the priests broke off as the solemn ceremony was interrupted by the apparition of a half-clad man before the High Altar, who, holding a naked sword by the blade, knelt and presented it to the amazed King. This was the Lord of the Isles, one of the most powerful of the wild Highland chieftains whom James had been trying to subdue, and who had lately taken arms against the King, and burnt Inverness to the ground. In this savage and poetic way did the great ruined Chieftain give in his desperate submission, and tradition continues the poetry by insisting that it was at the intercession of Queen Jane that his life was spared.
In the same year the twin infant sons of James I. were born in Holyrood Abbey; and, seven years later, when Queen Jane had fled to Edinburgh Castle with her eldest son after the murder of the King at Perth, it was at Holyrood Abbey that the little James II. was hastily crowned. It was at Holyrood Abbey that James II. was married to Mary of Gueldres. Their son, James III., was also married at Holyrood Abbey, to that Margaret of Denmark who sailed into Leith with her Danish fleet, and made Scotland the richer by the Orkneys and Shetlands as her marriage portion.
In the brilliant reign of their son, James IV., Edinburgh consisted of a steep ascent of “stane-sclated” houses climbing the mile and a quarter of ridge from Holyrood to the Castle; and the closes and the pleasure gardens of the “lands” ran down to the edge of the Nor’ Loch, which lay dark and deep, and guarded the town on the north. The city wall, built in 1240 to keep out the “auld enemy,” guarded the town to the south, and climbed over the ridge and met the loch, leaving Holyrood out in the cold—for consecrated ground was considered safe, and in no need of lay assistance. And here Holyrood lay, the huge Norman Abbey with its open arches, Salisbury Crags and the green slopes of Arthur’s Seat behind it, and country in front of it stretching down to the shores of the Forth.
James IV. was crowned at Scone; but it was at Edinburgh he usually held his Court, and what a brilliant Court it must have been! To Edinburgh, as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, there journeyed, in James IV.’s days, knights from all over Europe, to take part in the famous tournaments held below the Castle Rock or on the open spaces beside Holyrood, and to try and win the lance tipped with pure Scottish gold with which the King rewarded the best tilter. There gathered in Edinburgh, in the days of James IV., not only the flower of chivalry, but men of science, and men of art, and men of learning. Up at the Castle, Borthwick, the Master Gunner, was forging the “Seven Sisters” under James’s supervision. Down at Leith the King delighted in visiting the shipping yards, and seeing the great progress of Scottish trade. At the Provost’s house at St. Giles’s, young Gavin Douglas, son of the great Earl of Angus, was translating Virgil into Scottish verse. In the city, Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar were sending forth that new wonder into the land—printed books. James not only granted them a patent to print, but endowed their types and bought their books; and in 1510 he granted the estate of Priestfield[7] to Walter Chepman, who paid the crown suit for it by “delivery of a pair of gloves on St. Giles’s day.”[8] Sir Andrew Wood, that splendid old sailor and gallant figure in Scottish history, must have been often seen about the streets of Edinburgh and at the Court, and must often have held consultation with the King about James’s darling scheme of a Scottish Navy. Lingering with groups of courtiers in the beautiful precincts of Holyrood, there were many of the great Scottish nobles whose town houses were in the Edinburgh closes—Angus and Argyle, Mar and Morton, and fifty more. There was the much-travelled friar and Laureate, William Dunbar, “flyting” with his rival poet, “gude Maister Walter Kennedy.” “As a courtier,” writes Mr. Oliphant Smeaton in his Life of Dunbar,[9] “Dunbar boarded at the King’s expense, and received each year his robe of red velvet fringed with costly fur. He was required to be present at every public function, and, if it presented scope for poetic treatment, to render it into verse. This was the office of a ‘King’s Makar’ or Laureate.” There was Warbeck, the pretended Duke of York, plotting in the shadows and wearying the chivalry of James. There was Don Pedro de Ayala, the courtly Spanish Ambassador (who had come on the pretext of offering James a Spanish princess as his Queen, well aware that there was no Spanish princess), and who was writing home to Ferdinand and Isabella enthusiastic descriptions of King James, Scotland, and the Scottish people. “The kingdom is very old, and very noble, and the king possesses great virtues, and no defects worth mentioning.”[10] “An open and magnificent court,” Drummond of Hawthornden acknowledges it; and Dunbar gives a picture of the diversity of men that James