courtmen, and craftsmen fine,
Doctors in jure and medicyne:
Divinours, rhetours, and philosophours:
Astrologists, artists, and oratours:
Men of armes and valliant knights:
And mony other goodly wights:
Musicians, minstrels, and merry singers,
Chevalouris, callandaris, and flingars,
Cunyeours, carvours, and carpenters,
Builders of barks and ballingars,
Masouns, lying upon the land,
And ship wrights hewing upon the strand,
Glasing wrights, goldsmiths, and lapidaris,
Printers, paintours, and potingaris.
And the King who presided over all this, if but half of De Ayala’s praises be true, was himself as skilled in the arts of peace as of war, spoke eight languages, and said “all his prayers.”[11] Holbein’s miniature is a witness of his personal beauty. All agree that he was a fearless rider, a chivalrous knight, and a brave man. But he was sensitive, subject to sudden fits of depression alternating with his gay humour, and it is told of him that, though he had been but a boy when his father’s estranged nobles had used him as a figure-head for their rebellion, yet he always wore to the day of his death a hidden chain round his body, in constant penance for his father’s death.
In his thirtieth year King James married little Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. of England. The marriage was brought about by the persistence of Henry VII., and was nowise according to the inclinations of the Scottish King, who evaded it for several years after it was first proposed to him. But State reasons prevailed, and at last James gave way. The bridegroom was thirty and the bride was fourteen. But, if James was a tardy wooer, the florid little Tudor had nothing to complain of in the chivalry of the welcome she received from the courteous and sensitive Stuart.
In August 1503 she was brought to Scotland, with a train of knights and nobles, and James rode as far as Dalkeith to meet her, “gallantly dressed in a jacket of crimson velvet bordered with cloth of gold.”[12] Before the procession entered the city the King mounted in front of his bride on her palfrey—his own charger being too restive to bear a double burden—and so they rode into the decorated and expectant capital, where the people filled the windows, and gaily dressed ladies thronged the “fore-stairs”—open stairways outside the houses—and all shouted or waved their loyalty and their welcome. Tournaments and shows took place; and, when they were alone, the king played to the little princess on the virginal, and
Holyrood Palace stretches across the picture east and west, and is dominated by Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags. The dark turret at the west end of the nearest and north wing contains the private supper-room of Queen Mary, the room from which the Italian Rizzio was taken to his death. The end of the south wing shows beyond, and through a gap in the mean buildings, occupying the foreground of the picture, is seen the open space in front of the Palace, the restored fountain, and the entrance to a carriage road called the Queen’s Drive. The conical roofs of the towers of the Guard House appear to the extreme right. The gable and east window of the Chapel Royal (part of the ancient Abbey), together with the tower, show at the eastern extremity of the north wing.
then listened with bent knee and bared head whilst she sang and played to him. The marriage took place at Holyrood with much magnificence; and Dunbar the Laureate wrote “The Thristle and the Rois.” All this life and poetry and splendour glowed in Holyrood, in a braver and a warmer time than ours—perhaps the brightest age Edinburgh has known. Little wonder that Dunbar pitied his royal master when he had to leave it even for a visit to Stirling, and wrote greeting to him from—
We that here in Hevenis glory
… … . …
I mean we folk in Paradyis
In Edinburgh with all merriness.
But bright things come quickly to confusion. As always, the undoing of the brave little land was brought about by England. Ten years after that marriage day at Holyrood there gathered at midnight, in the moonshine at the city Cross of Edinburgh, a spectral throng of heralds and pursuivants. Trumpets sounded, and the terrified spectators heard a ghostly voice read “the awful summons” to King James and to his Scottish chivalry: the long death-roll of all who were to fall at Flodden. Outside the city, on the Boroughmuir (part of the old hunting-ground of the forest of Drumsheugh, now a built-over suburb, but whose every inch is historic ground) lay the whole encamped host of the Scottish army. When the sun next morning rose in the August sky, it lit up a thousand pavilions white as snow, a thousand streamers flaunting over them, and reared in their midst the huge royal banner of Scotland, with its “ruddy lion ramped in gold,”—all in readiness to start on the fatal march towards Flodden. The army moved on southward, leaving every home, from the palace to the hovel, bereft of father and sons: and the women waited.
Suddenly the stillness was broken, as the first wind whispers over the land and troubles the trees with warning of a storm; and the people—the women and the old men and the children—looked into one another’s blanched faces and ran out into the street to learn the truth. One man, escaped from the field of carnage, had brought the tidings to Edinburgh. And then the storm burst.
Woe, and woe, and lamentation!
What a piteous cry was there!
Widows, maidens, mothers, children,
Shrieking, sobbing in despair!
Through the streets the death-word rushes,
Spreading terror, sweeping on—
“Jesu Christ! Our King has fallen—
O Great God, King James is gone!
Holy Mother Mary, shield us,
Thou who erst did lose thy Son!
O the blackest day for Scotland
That she ever knew before!
O our King—the good, the noble,
Shall we see him never more?
Woe to us, and woe to Scotland!
O our sons, our sons and men!
Surely some have ’scaped the Southron?
Surely some will come again?” Till the oak that fell last winter Shall uprear its shattered stem, Wives and mothers of Dunedin, Ye may look in vain for them![13]
All this Edinburgh has seen and known and felt. Remember it, as you walk in her streets to-day—it is not good for us for the heroic to be forgotten.
And how did Edinburgh take the blow? The first sound the people heard, breaking through their cries of grief, was a Proclamation that “all maner of personis … haue reddye thair fensible geir and wapponis for weir,” for defence of the town, and that “wemen of gude pas to the kirk and pray.”[14] An indomitable race, that nothing could crush! The arms in readiness were not needed, however; England was too crippled to move.
After