The Spell of Scotland Part 24

Soon after you enter the gate you come upon the dungeon of Roderick Dhu, and here you get the beginnings of that long song of the Lake, which lies to the west, when Allan Bane tunes his harp for Roderick--

"Fling me the picture of the fight, When my clan met the Saxon's might, I'll listen, till my fancy hears The clang of swords, the crash of spears!"

You may look into the Dougla.s.s room, where James II stabbed the Earl of Dougla.s.s (1452). It is a dark room for a dark deed. And the guide repeats Dougla.s.s's refusal to the king:

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Stirling Castle_]

"No, by the cross it may not be!

I've pledged my kingly word.

And like a thunder cloud he scowled, And half unsheathed his sword.

Then drew the king that jewel'd glaive Which gore so oft had spilt, And in the haughty Dougla.s.s heart He sheathed it to the hilt."

The Dougla.s.ses, we see, still thought themselves "peer to any lord in Scotland here," and the provocation to the Stewart, merely a second Stewart, must have been great--"my kingly word"! and a "half sheathed"

sword! Perhaps we shall have to forgive this second James about whom we know little but this affair, who seems as ineffective a monarch as James the Second of two centuries later.

It is rather with Mary, and with her father and her son, that we a.s.sociate Stirling. James V took his commoner t.i.tle of "the Gudeman of Ballengeich" from here, when he went abroad on those errantries which all the Stewarts have dearly loved. At Stirling it seems more possible that James V did write those poems which, yesterday in Edinburgh I felt like attributing to James IV. North of the bridge there is a hill, Moat Hill, called familiarly Hurley Haaky, because the Fifth James enjoyed here the rare sport of coasting down hill on a cow's skull. The Scot can derive coasting from "Hurley" and skull from "Haaky"--a clever people!

Queen Mary was brought to Stirling when a wee infant and crowned in the old High church, September 9, 1543--and cried all the time they were making her queen. Surely "it came with ane la.s.s and it will pa.s.s with ane la.s.s." It was from Stirling that she was taken to France, and when she returned she included Stirling in her royal progress. I cannot think she was much here. Mary was not dour. Still, historic rumour has her married here, secretly to Darnley, and, in the rooms of Rizzio! And she came here once to see her princely son, hurriedly, almost stealthily, as if she felt impending fate.

That son was much here. Stirling was considered a safer place for James VI than Edinburgh, and then, of course, it was such a covenanted place.

James was baptized here also, and his Royal Mother was present, but not Darnley. He refused to come, but sat carousing--as usual--in Willie Bell's Lodging, still standing in Broad Street, if you care to look on it. Young James merely looked at the ceiling of the High church, and pointing his innocent finger at it, gravely criticized, "there is a hole." James was crowned in the High church, Mary being at Loch Leven, and the coronation sermon was preached by Knox, who "enjoyed the proudest triumph of his life." Then, I know, baby James had to sit through a two or three hour sermon. For once I am sorry for him.

From the courtyard one sees the iron bars in the palace windows placed there to keep James from falling out--and others from stealing in? And here in the royal apartments, King James was taught his Latin and Greek like any other Scots boy, and by that same George Buchanan who was his mother's instructor--and her defamer. Perhaps he was the author of the betraying Casket letter; in spite of Froude's criticism based on internal evidence, that only Shakespeare or Mary could have written it.

I can almost forgive Buchanan, for at one time when James was making more noise than beseemed a pupil of Buchanan, this schoolmaster birched him then and there, whereupon the royal tear fell, and the royal yowl was lifted--and Lady Mar rushed in to quiet this uproarious division in the kingdom.

The archives of Stirling were once rich in Scottish records. But General Monk removed them to London when he moved on that capital with the king also in his keeping. Years and years after, when Scotland demanded back her records, they were sent by sea, the s.h.i.+p foundered, and sunk--and we have a right to accept legend as history in this land of lost records.

One may use Stirling Castle for lovelier ends than history or battle, for temporal ends of beauty--which is not temporal. Else would the prospect from these ramparts not linger immortally in the memory and flash upon the inward eye as one of the most wonderful views in all the world.

From Queen Mary's Lookout there is the King's Park, with the King's Knot, the mysterious octagonal mound; it may have looked lovelier when Mary looked down on its flower gardens and its orchards, but this green world is sightly.

From the battlements above the Dougla.s.s garden there is a magnificent survey; the rich Ca.r.s.e of broad alluvial land with the Links of the Firth winding in and out among the fields, s.h.i.+ning, and steely, reluctant to widen out into the sea. The Ochils from the far background, and nearer is the Abbey Craig, thickly wooded and crowned by the Wallace monument, which while it adds nothing to the beauty of the scene, would have made such a commanding watch tower for Wallace. Just below is the old Bridge which--not this bridge, but it looks old enough with its venerable five hundred years--divided the English forces. Near by, on one of the Links, stands the tower of Cambuskenneth Abbey, a pleasant walk through fields and a ferry ride across the Forth, to this memoried place, which once was a great abbey among abbeys; I doubt not David founded it. Bruce once held a parliament in it. Now it is tenanted chiefly by the mortal remains of that Third James who took flight from Sauchieburn, and whose ghost so haunted his n.o.bles for years after.

Queen Margaret also lies here, she who sat st.i.tching, st.i.tching, st.i.tching, while those same n.o.bles raged through Linlithgow and sought their king. Cambuskenneth--the name is splendid--is but a remnant of grandeur. But there are a few charming cottages nearby, rose-embowered, perhaps with roses that descend from those in Mary's garden.

Across to the north is the Bridge of Allan, come to be a celebrated watering place--

"On the banks of Allan Water None so fair as she."

Far across to the north is Dunblane, with a restored-ruined cathedral--

"The sun has gone down o'er the lofty Ben Lomond And left the red clouds to preside o'er the scene, While lanely I stray in the calm simmer gloamin'

To muse on sweet Jessie the flower o' Dunblane."

In the green nestle of the woods, away to the right, are the battlements of Doune--

"Oh, lang will his lady Look frae the Castle Doune, Ere she see the Earl o' Moray Come sounding through the toun."

The Bonnie Earl was murdered at Donibristle Castle, on Inverkeithing Bay across the Forth from Edinburgh, where the King sent his lords.h.i.+p--"oh, woe betide ye, Huntly"--to do the deed. It was our same kingly James VI, and I like to think that his life had its entertaining moments, even if Anne of Denmark did have to look long and longingly down from the battlements of Doune.

The lookout to the north is called the Victoria--as if to link Victoria with Mary! But the old queen was proudest of her blood from the eternally young queen. An inscription on the wall registers the fact that Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort visited the castle in 1842.

And not any sovereign since until 1914.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DOUNE CASTLE.]

I had reached the city in the mid-afternoon, unconscious of royalty, that is, of living royalty, as one is in Scotland. It seems that the king and queen, George and Mary, were making a visit to Stirling.

Consequently there were no carriages at the station--and one must be very careful how one walked on the royal crimson carpet. Two small boys who scorned royalty, were impressed into service, to carry bags to the hotel. But the press of the people was too great. The king and queen had issued from the castle, were coming back through the town

"The castle gates were open flung, The quivering drawbridge rock'd and rung, And echo'd loud the flinty street Beneath the coursers' clattering feet, As slowly down the steep descent Fair Scotland's King and n.o.bles went."

I took refuge in a bank building, and even secured a place at the windows. For some reason the thrifty people had not rented these advantageous cas.e.m.e.nts. The king and queen pa.s.sed. I saw them plainly--yes, plainly. And the people were curiously quiet. They did not mutter, they were decorous, there was no repudiation, but--what's a king or queen of diluted Stewart blood to Scotsmen of this undiluted town?

That afternoon in the castle I understood. An elderly Scotsman--I know of no people whom age so becomes, who wear it with such grace and dignity and retained power--looking with me at the memorial tablet to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, in the west lookout, explained--"It's seventy years since royalty has been here. Not from that day to this."

It seems that on the old day, the day of 1842, when royalty rode in procession through the streets of Stirling, the commoners pressed too close about. It offended the queen; she liked a little s.p.a.ce. (I remembered the old pun perpetrated by Lord Palmerston, when he was with Queen Victoria at the reviewing of the troops returned from the Crimea, and at the queen's complaining that she smelled spirits, "Pam"

explained--"Yes, esprit de corps.") So she returned not at all to Stirling. I could wish King Edward had, the one Hanoverian who has succeeded in being a Stewart.

The view is almost as commanding from Ladies Rock in the old cemetery, whither I went, because in the very old days I had known intimately, as a child reader, the "Maiden Martyr," and here was to find her monument.

There are other monuments, none so historic, so grandiose, so solemn.

The friends of a gentleman who had died about mid-century record that he died "at Plean Junction." Somehow it seemed very uncertain, ambiguous, capable of mistake, to die at a Junction out of which must run different ways.

And one man, buried here, was brought all the way, as the tombstone publishes, from "St. Peter, Minnesota." It's a historic town, to its own people. But what a curious linking with this very old town. I thought of a man who had hurried away from Montana the winter before, because he wanted to "smell the heather once more before I die." And he had died in St. Paul, Minnesota, only a thousand miles on his way back to the heather.

Viewed from below, the castle is splendid. The road crosses the bridge, skirts the north side of the Rock, toward the King's Knot; a view-full walk, almost as good, almost, as Edinburgh from Princes Gardens; this green and pastoral, that multicoloured and urban. The whole situation is very similar, the long ridge of the town, the heaven-topping castle hill. Stirling is the Old Town of Edinburgh minus the New Town. And so we confess ourselves modern. Stirling is not so lovely; yet it is more truly, more purely Scottish. Edinburgh is a city of the world. Stirling is a town of Scotland.

CHAPTER XI

THE WEST COUNTRY

_Glasgow_

I cannot think why, in a book to be called deliberately "The Spell of Scotland," there should be a chapter on Glasgow.

I remember that in his "Picturesque Notes," to the second edition Robert Louis Stevenson added a foot-note in rebuke to the Glaswegians who had taken to themselves much pleasure at the reservations of Stevenson's praise of Edinburgh--"But remember I have not yet written a book on Glasgow." He never did. And did any one ever write "Picturesque Notes on Glasgow"?

I remember that thirty years ago when a college professor was making the "grand tour"--thirty years ago seems as far back as three hundred years when James Howell was making his "grand tour"--he asked a casually met Glaswegian what there was to be seen, and this honest Scot, pointing to the cathedral declared, "that's the only aydifyce ye'll care to look at."

I should like to be singular, to write of picturesque points in Glasgow.

But how can it be done? Glasgow does not aspire to picturesqueness or to historicalness. Glasgow is content, more than content, in having her commerce and her industry always "in spate."

Glasgow is the second city of size in the United Kingdom, and the first city in being itself. London is too varied and divided in interests; it never forgets that it is the capital of the world, and a royal capital.

Glasgow never forgets that it is itself, very honestly and very democratically, a city of Scots. Not of royal Stewarts, and no castle dominates it. But a city made out of the most inveterate Scottish characteristics. Or I think I would better say Scotch. That is a practical adjective, and somewhat despised of culture; therefore applicable to Glasgow. While Scottish is romantic and somewhat pretending.

Glasgow is the capital of the Whig country, of the democratic Scotland of covenanting ancestry. Glasgow is precisely what one would expect to issue out of the energy and honesty and canniness and uncompromise of that corner of the world. Historically it belongs to Wallace, the commoner-liberator. And if Burns is the genius of this southwestern Scotland, as Scott is of the southeastern, it is precisely the difference between the regions; as Edinburgh and Glasgow differ.