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Meanwhile the Douglases, for long the most powerful House in Scotland, the rivals of the Crown, were crushed by James II, and of the Douglases, Sir George, of Springwood Park, is descended from the House of Cavers, (on Teviot, below Hawick), scions sprung from Archibald, natural son of the Earl of Douglas who fell at Otterburne (1388) and is immortal in the ballad. The whole land is full of scenes made famous by the adventures of these ancient clans; they may be tracked by blood from Hermitage Castle to the dowie dens of Yarrow and the Peel Tower on the Douglas burn.
Sir Herbert Maxwell, in "The Story of the Tweed" (p. 139) not unnaturally laments the "sadly suburban" name of Springwood Park, standing where it ought not, in place of the ancient name of Maxwell, originally "Maccus whele," "the pool of Maccus," on Tweed.
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Maccus was a descendant of the primeval Maccus, who, before the Norman Conquest, signed himself, or was described, as Maccus Archipirata, "the leading pirate." To a later Maccus David I gave the salmon fishing at Kelso; the pool, called "Maccus whele" became Maxwell, and the lairds "de Maxwell." The Maxwells moved to the western Border to Caerlaverock and into Galloway; and of all this history only the name, "Max wheel," of a salmon cast below the pretty bridge of Kelso, is left.
The name Kelso is of Cymric origin: calch myadd. "Chalk hill." To be sure, as the man said of the derivation of jour from dies, the name is diablement change en route. The ruins of Kelso Abbey are the chief local remains of the Ages of faith. When David I, not yet king, brought French Bénédictines to Scotland, he settled them in Ettrick Forest. Here they raised the schele chirche—the Monastery, on a steep hill above Ettrick (now Selkirk), and here they "felt the breeze down Ettrick break" with its chill showers, and wept as they remembered pleasant Picardy; the climate of Selkirk being peculiarly bitter. David, when king, moved his Benedictines to the far more comfortable region of Kelso, or "Calkow," where they began to build in 1128. The style of their church is late Norman, and the tower was used in war as a keep in the fierce wars of Henry VIII. The place was gutted and the town burned by Dacre, in 1523; and suffered again from Norfolk, in 1542, and Hertford in 1545. Henry VIII chivalrously destroyed this part of the border from the cottage to the castles of the Kers and the pleasant holy places of the Church, during the childhood of his kinswoman, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. His aim was always to annex Scotland; and, of course, to introduce the Gospel. In 1545, after overcoming the garrison of the church tower, Hertford's men wrecked the whole place, leaving little more than we see to day; though that little is much compared with what the Reformers have left of St. Andrews and Lindores.
Kelso saw more than enough of very ugly fighting in those days; not even her monks stood aloof when blows fell fast and their cloisters were threatened. In 1545, twelve monks and ninety laymen gallantly held the Abbey against the English, and when at length Hertford's guns created a practicable breach, they retreated to the church tower. Hill Burton says, in his History of Scotland, that then "the assault was given to the Spaniards, but, when they rushed in, they found the place Kelso Abbey. cleared.
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The nimble garrison had run to the strong square tower of the church, and there again they held out. Night came before they could be dislodged from this their last citadel, so the besiegers had to leave the assault till the morning, setting a good watch all night about the house, which was not so well kept but that a dozen of the Scots in the darkness of the night escaped by ropes out at back windows and corners, with no little danger of their lives.
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When the day came, and the steeple eftsoons assaulted, it was immediately won, and as many Scots slain as were within." So may Kelso Abbey be said to have been finally wrecked; though, fifteen years later, the Reformers did their own little bit of work in the same line.
The Abbey buildings, however, or part of them, continued to be used long after this date; from 1649 to 1771 the transept, roughly ceiled over, served as the parish church, but it was given up in the year last mentioned owing to a portion of the roof falling in whilst service was being held. The kirk "skailed" that day in something under record time; Thomas the Rhymer's prediction that "the kirk should fall at the fullest" was in the people's mind, and they stood not much upon the order of their going.
Kelso was the most southern point reached by Montrose in his efforts to join hands w ith Charles the First after his year of victories. The Border chiefs who had promised aid all deserted him; the Gordons and Colkitto had left him, and he marched north to the junction of Ettrick and Tweed and the fatal day of Philiphaugh.
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In 1745, Kelso for two days saw Prince Charlie, in his feint against General Wade; from Kelso he turned to Carlisle, his actual, and by no fault of his, hopeless line of invasion of England. The Prince's own strategy, as he wrote to his father, was "to have a stroke for't," as near the Border and as promptly as possible He therefore wished to cross the Tweed near Kelso, and beat up the quarters of the senile Marshal Wade at Newcastle. If he discussed Wade to the same tune as he had settled Cope, English Jacobites might join him. Holding Newcastle, he could thereby admit French reinforcements, while, if defeated, he was near the sea, and had a better route of retreat than if he were defeated going by Carlisle and the western route, in the heart of England. His council of chiefs, unhappily, forced him to take the western route. Halting at Kelso, he sent the best of the Border cavaliers, Henry Ker of Graden, to make a feint on Wade; he rode as far as Wooler, near Flodden. Next day the Prince marched up Teviot, and up Jed, to Jedburgh, with the flower of the fighting clans; then up Rule water, another of the tributaries of Tweed, to Haggiehaugh on the Liddell, and so into England near Carlisle. Of old he would have picked up the Kers, Elliots, and Scotts; Haggiehaugh, where he slept, is Larriston, the home of the Elliot chief, "the Lion of Liddes-dale." But the tartans waved and the bagpipes shrilled in vain, and the Blue Bonnets did not go over the Border. One of the writers of this book possesses the armchair in which the Prince rested at Haggiehaugh.
It was at Kelso, one remembers, that Sir Walter Scott first met James Ballantyne, with whose fortunes his own were afterwards to become so inextricably blended. Scott was then but a growing boy f his health had been giving trouble, and he was sent by his father to stay for six months with an aunt "who resided in a small house, situated very pleasantly in a large garden to the eastward of the churchyard of Kelso, which extended down to the Tweed." During the time of Scott's stay, Ballantyne and he were class-mates under Mr. Lancelot Whale, master of the Kelso Grammar School. The acquaint ance then formed was never quite broken off, and all the world knows the story of its outcome.
We now follow Prince Charles into
"Pleasant Teviotdale, a land
Made blithe with plough and harrow,"
a rich, well-wooded grassy land, cultivated of old under the Benedictines of Kelso.
Little more than a mile from that town, by the road leading to St. Boswells up Tweed's southern bank, on a wooded ridge overhanging Teviot and separated from Tweed by but a narrow flat haugh, stands all that is left of Roxburgh Castle,—a few isolated portions of massive wall defended on the north and, east sides by a ditch.