Court scenes. The royal palace, the building of which had been begun about 1503 by James IV.,[15] had been inhabited in the interval by the Duke of Albany, the Regent, during his sojourns in Scotland, who had, no doubt, brought his French ideas of elegance to bear on it. James V.—the “Red Tod” of so many adventures—who had been born within its walls, held his councils and his Court there, and, between 1529 and 1535, completed the building begun by his father, and spoilt by the English soldiers. To Holyrood, when he was but two-and-twenty, James V. brought his fragile little French bride, Madeleine, daughter of Francis I., whom he had married in Nôtre Dame at Paris. The poet Ronsard was a twelve-year-old page in the Queen’s train when she came to Holyrood; and another in her train was the founder of the great Scottish family of Hope, including that Sir Thomas Hope who was King’s Advocate in Charles I.’s time. The gentle French princess, when she landed with James at Leith on the 19th of May 1537, was already dying of consumption. She stooped and kissed the “Scottis eard” when she set foot on it; and seven weeks afterwards, within Holyrood Abbey, she was laid pitifully beneath the same kindly “Scottis eard.”
Thief! saw thou nocht the great preparatives
Of Edinburgh, the noble famous town?
Thou saw the people labouring for their lives
To mak triumph with trump and clarioun:
Sic pleasour never was in this regioun
As suld have been the day of her entrace,
With great propinis given to her Grace.
Provost, Bailies, and Lordis of the town,
The Senatours, in order consequent,
Cled into silk of purpur, black, and brown;
Syne the great Lordis of the Parliament,
With mony knichtly Baron and Banrent,
In silk and gold, in colours comfortable:
But thou, alas! all turnit into sable.[16]
James V. had not a happy reign. His boyhood had been one of restraint under the tyranny of nobles; and, after eight years of putting his kingdom into order and subduing the troublesome Douglases, his journey to France to seek a bride had thus ended tragically in her death. The vagaries of his mother, Margaret Tudor, who, after her husband’s fall at Flodden, had emulated her brother Henry VIII. in her marriages and divorcings and remarryings, must have made her a domestic trouble to her son; and abroad, constant wars with England broke his spirit. Four years after his second wife, Mary of Lorraine, had landed at Crail to become Queen of Scotland, James V., though not yet thirty years old, was a miserable, half demented, sorely stricken man, dragging himself home on the tidings of the disastrous defeat of Solway Moss, first to Edinburgh, and then to the greater seclusion of Falkland. There, hearing of the last trouble of all, that the child to whom Mary of Lorraine had given birth at Linlithgow was a daughter, he, like Ahab of old, turned his face to the wall. “It cam’ wi’ a lass, and it’ll gang wi’ a lass—and the deil gang wi’ it!” he cried: and so the Red Tod died.
The next scene at Holyrood is twenty years after, and the palace in the plain, and the Castle on the height, and the city between, are all covered with a thick, heavy white mist, like that which shrouded Malcolm Canmore’s children as they escaped from the Castle with their mother’s coffin. The “haar” has crept up from the Firth of Forth, and the Firth of Forth is lost in impenetrable fog; but this time it is not a ferry-boat bearing a dead Queen across to Dunfermline, but a State galley bringing a living Queen home from France.
Mary Stuart, surrounded by her Scottish and French retinue, and with three of her French Guise and Lorraine uncles on board, and her four Scottish Marys in attendance, sailed up the Firth of Forth on Tuesday, 19th of August 1561, in so dense a mist that none could see from the stern of the vessel to her prow. “Si grand brouillard,” the horrified Sieur de Brantôme called it. Truly, if Queen Margaret’s haar was miraculous, Queen Mary’s haar was prophetic; for little indeed did the Stuart Princess see of what lay before her in Scotland.
The people of Leith and Edinburgh were taken by surprise, not having expected their Queen for another week, and nothing was ready for her reception—except the haar. She rode in state to Holyrood next day. The “grand brouillard” would have prevented her from seeing anything except a vista of mist and drizzle, and no doubt she was glad to dismount and find herself in the light and warmth of the palace, with her four Marys and her French-speaking courtiers gazing curiously about them at their new surroundings.
It was not many hours before Queen Mary was to learn to how different a Scotland she had come from the Catholic Scotland her father and grandfathers had known. After she had supped, and whilst the bonfires still burnt on Arthur’s Seat, and the crowds were dispersing home through the foggy streets, the weary Queen wished to rest. Suddenly a noise;—a crowd of about five hundred people had gathered below the palace windows, and were serenading the Catholic Queen by singing her Protestant psalms to the accompaniment of fiddles. “Vile fiddles and rebecks,” Brantôme designates them; and adds that the crowds sang “so ill and with such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what music, and what a lullaby for the night!” Yes, Sieur de Brantôme! And what a different picture from that of James IV. kneeling bareheaded before little Margaret Tudor whilst she played to him on the virginal!
So, with a “grand brouillard,” with a serenade of psalms ill sung to fiddles, and with a riot in her chapel during Mass, Queen Mary’s life and troubles at Holyrood began.
Although the first stress of the religious revolution had greatly changed the daily life and the characters of the people, it had as yet not spoilt Holyrood Abbey, and Queen Mary saw it as the royal Jameses had seen it, in all its grandeur of size and its grace of early Norman architecture, as it had been built by David I. The armies of Henry VIII., it is true, had recently plundered and burnt it; but English fire never made much impression on Scottish stone.
The palace of Holyrood adjoining the Abbey was built round a great square court, with a towered and pinnacled frontage facing a huge outer courtyard separating the palace precincts from the fringes of the town, and at the back meeting the Abbey. The whole palace and its extensions and smaller courts were set in walled grounds, stretching to the base of Arthur’s Seat. These included pleasure gardens, plantations, and buildings, among which was the quaint building still called “Queen Mary’s Bath.” The north-west corner of the palace proper terminated in a turreted tower which contained Queen Mary’s rooms, and this tower, rebuilt by James V. on the foundations of James IV.’s building, still forms part of the modern Holyrood, and in it, to-day, Mary’s life stands revealed. In these rooms she moved and smiled, spoke and wept. Here it was that she tried, with her beauty and her wit and her courtesy and her wonderful power of forbearance, to soften her rude nobles and turn their harsh disapproval into loyalty. Here, in the audience chamber, the first two of her famous interviews with John Knox took place. In Queen Mary’s day most of the ground now devoted to the formal grass and gravel of unused palace gardens was covered by the great Abbey. It was at the High Altar of this Abbey, where the Royal Jameses had led their very youthful brides, that Queen Mary, dressed in a robe of black velvet, was married, between five and six o’clock one Sunday morning in July, to her cousin Lord Darnley, a dissipated boy of nineteen. It was in the tiny little room leading off the Queen’s room, where the lifted tapestry still shows the entrance to the secret stair between her room and Darnley’s, that she sat at supper on the night of Riccio’s murder. With her were her sister the Countess of Argyle, and several of the Household, including the lay Abbot of Holyrood, and the Queen’s Secretary, the doomed Riccio. Darnley entered and seated himself. At that signal suddenly there broke in upon them the brutal Lord Ruthven, followed by the other assassins, and seized the Italian favourite who was clinging to the Queen’s skirts for protection and crying “Sauve ma vie, Madame! sauve ma vie!” The table was thrown down on the Queen as they struggled, and one of the murderers levelled a pistol at her. They dragged the bleeding body out, across the Queen’s bedroom to the entrance of the presence chamber, where they despatched him with “whingers and swords,” and the blood from his fifty-six wounds soaked through the wooden floor. All that night the outraged Queen was