Away wes sons off ale and brede
Off wyne and wax, off gamyn and glé;
Our gold wes changed in to lede,
Cryst, born in to Vyrgynyté,
Succoure Scotland and remede
That stad is in perplexyté.
It was in the great hall of the Castle that the treacherous “Black Dinner” was held in James II.’s minority. It was in the great hall that many of the Scottish Parliaments met, for they were always held wherever the King happened to be at the moment, and the King often happened to be in Edinburgh Castle. Here, then, gathered all those grave or stormy Parliaments of Scottish nobles, presided over by a gallant Stuart. Here they discussed the affairs of the brave and troubled kingdom; here they doomed men to death or exile; here they planned wars with the “auld enemy”; here they passed those laws which were “good laws, had they been kept.”
It was in this great hall that Charles I. sat, surrounded by Scottish and English nobles, on a June evening in 1633, at a great banquet given by the Earl of Mar in his honour, the day before he was crowned at Holyrood. It was here that, a few years later, Alexander Leslie, the Covenanting General, gave a banquet to Cromwell and the Covenanting lords, whilst a blue banner waved above them bearing the angry legend, “For an Oppressed Kirk and a Broken Covenant.”
There is another room in the Castle, a smaller room, in which tangible symbols of the days of Scottish independence can be seen. There, under a vaulted roof, on a table covered with glass and set within an iron cage, are the Scottish Regalia. The dim light reveals the rubies and sapphires and diamonds and the big pearls set in the ancient golden diadem of the crown, of date unknown, but which must have rested on the head of the Bruce and have been worn by each of the Stuarts. It was James V., the “Red Tod,” who added to the old diadem the two arches of gold, surmounted by globe and cross; and it was in 1685 that, the former cap of purple having become faded and threadbare during the concealment of the Regalia in the Civil War times, the rather theatrical tiara of crimson velvet, ermine, and pearls was substituted. This is the crown worn by the hapless Mary, Queen of Scots, and that crowned her infant son, James VI., after her forced abdication. This is the crown that was set on the head of Charles I. at Holyrood; and this is what was so pointedly alluded to by the preacher as “a tottering crown,” the last time it was ever worn by a king of Scotland—when Charles II. was crowned and scolded and lectured at Scone. “The Presbyterian solemnity with which it was given to Charles II.,” says Mr. Robert Chambers,[4] “was only a preface to the disasters of Worcester; and, afterwards, it was remembered by this monarch, little to the advantage of Scotland, that it had been placed upon his head with conditions and restrictions which wounded at once his pride and his conscience.”
By the side of the cushion on which the crown rests lies the slender chased sceptre, three little statues on the top—the Virgin, St. Andrew, and St. James—surmounted by a crystal globe. This sceptre, in the hands of the Chancellor of Scotland, has touched each of the acts of the Scottish Parliaments, in token of royal assent. The mace has also a crystal globe, said to have decorated a still more ancient Scottish sceptre. A crystal or beryl of this kind, called in Gaelic “Clach-Buaidh” (stone of victory), tradition avers to have been the badge of the Arch Druid. Its position on the mace and sceptre is, therefore, a symbolic emblem of dateless antiquity. The rich Italian sword of State was a gift from Pope Julius II. to James IV. in 1507. “Taking these articles in connection with the great historical events and personages that enter into the composition of their present value,” writes Mr. Robert Chambers,[5] “it is impossible to look upon them without emotions of singular interest; while at the same time their essential littleness excites wonder at the mighty circumstances and destinies which have been determined by the possession, or the want of possession, of what they emblematise and represent.”
One other romance of the Castle remains to tell—a stout and tangible romance—“the great iron murderer, Muckle Mag,” as Cromwell’s list has it. Mons Meg is thirteen feet long, and weighs four thousand stones. She is the most ancient cannon but one in Europe, and she is a travelled cannon. She accompanied James IV. in 1497 to the siege of Norham (James IV. was fond of ordnance, and forged the “seven sisters of Borthwick” lost at Flodden), and in the Lord High Treasurer’s accounts of her travelling expenses on this occasion she is spoken of with an easy familiarity—
| Item, to the menstralis that playit befoir Mons down the gait | XIIjs. |
| Item, giffen for VIIj of cammas, to be Mons a clath to covir hir | IXs. IIIjd. |
| Item, for ijc spikin nalis, to turs with Mons | IIjs. |
In 1758 she laboriously journeyed as far as England under the mistaken impression that she had become unserviceable, and there for seventy-five years formed one of the sights shown in the Tower of London. In 1829 Sir Walter Scott personally insisted on the return home of what was so dear to the national pride, and the portly prodigal was met at Leith by three troops of cavalry and the 73rd Regiment, and escorted back to the Castle in triumph to the tune of the pipes. With seven huge stone cannon-balls lying beside her, “after life’s fitful fever” she stands on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and looks across the new city to the Forth.
CHAPTER II
HOLYROOD, THE PALACE AND THE ABBEY:
THE SIX ROYAL JAMESES; MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS; AND PRINCE CHARLIE
The moon passed out of Holyrood, white-lipped, to open sky;
The night wind whimpered on the Crags to see the ghosts go by;
And stately, silent, sorrowful, the lonely lion lay,
Gaunt shoulder to the Capital and blind eyes to the Bay.
Will H. Ogilvie.
THERE are two Holyroods—Holyrood Abbey, dating back to the twelfth century, and founded by David I.; and Holyrood House, the palace of the Stuarts, dating from fully three centuries later. The Abbey had always contained royal apartments, and had been a place of royal residence in turn with the Castle; and so it was natural that the tradition should be retained, and the royal palace built in connection with the splendid old Abbey. Of the once great and wealthy Abbey of Holyrood only a ruined fragment remains, open to the sky; and of the palace only part of the large sixteenth-century royal residence remains, included in a smaller seventeenth-century building.
In the foreground of the picture are the embrasured battlements of the Argyle Battery, at the end of which, over the steps, rises the spire of Tolbooth Church. On a lower level of the Castle, to the spectator’s left, is an iron cage used for beacons. Above this cage and facing the Mound are the Royal Institution and National Gallery, and immediately above the latter is the Scott Monument. The row of trees fronting the tall buildings denote the position of Princes Street