her back to Scotland with him as his Queen. Thirteen years later he was assassinated in her presence at Perth. It was to Edinburgh Castle that she fled with her little son for safety after the tragedy. But “Fair and false and fickle is the South”; and, less than a year after the murder of the poet King, his “fairest and freshest youngé flower” married Sir John Stuart, the Black Knight of Lorn, and so passed out of view, leaving her little son to be wrangled over by the great rival barons of Scotland.
And now there took place in the Castle one of the most tragic scenes ever enacted there—the “Black Dinner.” The old Earl of Douglas, head of the great house of Douglas—ever in the history of Scotland struggling for supremacy with the royal house of Stuart—died, and was succeeded by his son, a youth of seventeen. When the young earl surpassed the King in the splendour of his state, and rode out with a retinue of two thousand lances, and sent ambassadors to the Court of France, the ten-year-old King “admired his bold and haughty ways”; but the King’s guardians thought it time to interfere. On the 24th of November 1440 the Earl of Douglas and his only brother and their old adviser, Sir Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld, were invited to a banquet at Edinburgh Castle, and their retinue were excluded. Whilst they feasted with the boy King and the Court, suddenly a black bull’s head was set before them. The warlike young Douglases instantly recognised and understood the ancient Scottish symbol of the death-doom, and sprang up, drawing their swords, but were overpowered by armed men, the poor little King being powerless to save them. After a form of trial for treason, the two brothers and Sir Malcolm Fleming were executed on the Castle Hill.
Edinburgh Castle, towne and toure,
God grant thou sink for sinne!
And that even for the black dinoir
Erl Douglas gat therin.
Another story of the Castle is that of the escape of the Duke of Albany, the brother of James III. Albany, imprisoned in the Castle on suspicion of treason, was to die next day. But Albany was twenty years old and full of life and daring; he had a faithful “chalmer chield”[2] in the Castle with him, and he had a strong castle at Dunbar, and knew he would be safe could he reach it. What more was needed? Just what was brought to him concealed within two flasks of French wine—a rope, and an unsigned message that a vessel lay awaiting him in the roads of Leith. The Captain of the Guard and three soldiers were invited to taste the French wine, and “the fire was hett and the wine was strong.” At a late hour Albany “lap from the board and stak the captain with ain whinger.” The drunken soldiers were then despatched, and Albany stole out and knotted the rope over two hundred feet of jagged cliff. The Groom of the Chamber went down first; but the rope was too short, and he fell. The young Duke returned from the cool night air to the hot scene of the butchery, and brought sheets to lengthen the rope. When he reached the bottom of the Castle Rock, this young Stuart who had just killed four men, and who was doomed to death next day, would not forsake a “chalmer chield” with a broken thigh-bone, but carried him on his shoulder the two perilous miles to Leith and safety.
And there to-day stands the Castle, so grim and old and full of memories; but down that northern cliff dangles no rope, and the two miles between the Castle and Leith are two miles of busy, crowded streets.
A few years later, James III. was himself a prisoner in the Castle; and, by a strange irony of fate, it was this same brother, the Duke of Albany, who helped him to escape—not in the same picturesque fashion he had adopted in his own case, for this time it was the provost and citizens who assisted in place of one “chalmer chield.” For their loyalty, the provost was rewarded with the “Golden Charter,” giving the city magistrates right of Sheriffdom within burgh, and the citizens received their “Banner of Blue,” embroidered by the Queen and her women.
But not all the Castle prisoners had the luck to escape; and some of the memories of the Castle are of dark and dreadful tragedies. Numberless wretches must have languished, their miseries and tortures unknown and unrecorded, in dungeons cut out of the rock, or in noisome dens and cells. The fates of some of those of higher rank are matters of history. It was on the Castle Hill, in the reign of James V., that the beautiful Lady Glammis, on an accusation of treason too readily believed against a Douglas,[3] was burnt alive at the stake in sight of her husband and her little son, Lord Glammis, who were imprisoned in the Castle. The husband, mad with grief and horror, tried to escape during the night that followed, and was dashed to pieces on the cliffs.
The Castle is associated with the name of Mary, Queen of Scots, as closely as with that of Saint Margaret—two Queens so very different, and yet both Queens of Scotland, and each the mother of a race of Kings. The tourist, when he passes from the dark little Oratory into the room in which James VI. was born, steps across the centuries from the beginning of Scottish history to the close of Scottish history.
It was amid all the unhappiness of Queen Mary’s life and the troubles of her reign, shortly after the brutal scene of Riccio’s murder in her presence, that the Queen was advised, by the Lords of Council, to remain in the Castle until after the birth of her child. Here, then, in the palace of the Castle, can still be seen the tiny, irregularly shaped chamber, scarcely nine feet square, in which King James VI. of Scotland and I. of England was born. And here, from the one small window overlooking the Grassmarket, tradition says that the new-born infant was lowered in a basket to the Catholic friends waiting for him below.
In the days of the last Stuarts, the two Argyles, father and son, were both prisoners in the Castle before their executions; and, after the Stuart dynasty had fallen, the Jacobites often felt the hospitality of Edinburgh Castle. The better class in Edinburgh were very Jacobite in their leanings and sympathies—Jacobite almost to a man, certainly to a woman. In George I.’s reign many a loyal Scot suffered torture, imprisonment, and death in the Castle; and women of gentle birth were among the Jacobites who endured barbarous treatment for their loyalty to the fallen race.
With every century the outward aspect of the Castle has changed, so that its jagged outline to-day, blotted against the sunset sky, is utterly different from what dwellers in Edinburgh of any other century would have known. But still, looking up at the perpendicular cliffs of the Castle Rock and the strong walls and towers and fortifications that seem part of them, one can picture all those stirring scenes—the imprisoned “maydens” of dim, legendary days; Queen Margaret and the escape through the miraculous mist; the many sieges; the starving patriotic garrisons; the prisoners in their dungeons; the wild escapes ending in liberty or in death; the brilliant scenes during the reign of James IV., that royal “knight errant,” who sat amid his knights and ladies to watch the tournaments below the Castle walls, and presented a lance tipt with pure Scottish gold to the winner.
Within the Castle much remains. Queen Margaret’s chapel is the oldest bit; but there are also the palace
The opening in the terrace on the left of the picture shows a staircase descending to the playground of the school. Most of the Castle is seen, including the Half-Moon Battery, and part of the south retaining wall of the Esplanade. A figure in a master’s gown occupies the foreground.
and the great hall. This great hall was used for all State ceremonials, banquets, and gatherings. It was here, in all likelihood, that Alexander III. held that Council in the Castle on that stormy day in March 1286 before he took horse and rode through the darkness and storm towards Kinghorn, where the bride he had married a few months before awaited him—rode till, close to his journey’s end, his horse stumbled—a stumble that cost Scotland dear, for it plunged her into two and a half centuries of incessant war.
Quhen Alysander oure Kyng wes dede