Edinburgh. Rosaline Masson

her into collops and cast her over the wall if she attempted to speak to them.” All this a few months before the birth of her child.

      Stern swords are drawn, and daggers gleam—her words, her prayers are vain—

       The ruffian steel is in his heart—the faithful Rizzio’s slain!

       Then Mary Stuart brushed aside the tears that trickling fell:

       “Now for my father’s arm,” she said, “my woman’s heart, farewell!”[17]

      A year later, on the night of Sunday, 9th February 1567, there were doings grave and gay in Edinburgh. Darnley lay “full of small-pox in a velvet-hung bed in an upper storey of the Prebendaries’ chamber at Kirk-o’-Field. The infant Prince James slept in his carved cradle at Holyrood. Bastian, one of the Queen’s servants, was celebrating his marriage in the palace. The “Queen’s Grace” went from her husband’s sick-room, afoot under a silken canopy, with a guard of Archers, “with licht torches up the Blackfriar Wynd,” to attend the masque at Holyrood in honour of the marriage. Lord Bothwell, disguised in “a loose cloak such as the Swartrytters wear,”[18] skulked with his accomplices in the shadows of the Cowgate. And then—“a little after two hours after midnight, the house wherein the King was lodged was in an instant blown in the air,”—and Darnley was dead.

      It was to Holyrood that Darnley’s body was brought, and the Queen lay in a darkened room and her voice sounded “very doleful.” Well it might, for the vicious Darnley dead and embalmed was to prove a greater curse to her than had proved the vicious Darnley living.

      It was in the old Chapel at Holyrood, at two o’clock on a May morning three months later, that Queen Mary was married to Bothwell, “not with the Mass, but with preaching,” by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney. “At this marriage there was neither pleasure nor pastime used, as use was wont to be used when princes were married.”[19] There were at least two causes and

      

THE APARTMENTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS IN HOLYROOD PALACE

      An ancient bed hung with faded crimson silk stands in Queen Mary’s bed-chamber, together with chairs and other furniture of a later date. Under the raised tapestry on the far side of the room is an open door, through which is entered the private supping-room of Queen Mary, and from which the Italian Rizzio was dragged to his death by the conspirators. They gained admittance to the apartments by the small door closely adjoining the supping-room. The ceiling of the bedroom is of wood, divided into panels, decorated with initials and coats-of-arms.

      just impediments why those two persons should not have been joined together in holy Matrimony; but none declared them.

      It was to Holyrood that Queen Mary was brought on foot at eight o’clock on the evening of the day after the battle of Carberry Hill; after the parting with Bothwell; after the hootings and hideous insults of the mobs gathered in the windows and on the fore-stairs as she rode vanquished through her capital. She had spent the night “in the Provost’s lodging” in the town. Thence she was brought to Holyrood for a wretched interval before she was forced to ride, “mounted on a sorry hackney,” at a furious pace all the June night, between the coarse and brutal Ruthven and Lindsay, “men of savage manners, even in that age,” says Mignet, to Lochleven and captivity.

      After the days of the hapless Queen Mary the history of Holyrood consists only of a series of more or less dramatic scenes. The first three of these are in James VI.’s reign, and end the days when Holyrood was the home of a Royal race. James VI.’s two sons, Prince Henry, afterwards the friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, and Prince Charles, afterwards Charles I., were christened at Holyrood. All the earls of James VI.’s creation were created at Holyrood. And it was into the courtyard of Holyrood, on Saturday evening the 26th of March 1603, when the King and Queen had supped and retired, and “the palace lights were going out one by one,” that Sir Robert Carey clattered, half dead with fatigue and excitement, having ridden from London to Edinburgh in three days, and dropt on his knees before the King and cried, “Queen Elizabeth is dead, and your Majesty is King of England.”

      Did the shades of all the brave and splendid Scottish kings hover near as the words were spoken? Bruce, who fought at Bannockburn—Bruce, whose daughter Marjory was the mother of the first Stuart king; all the Stuarts, down to the gallant James who had ridden into his capital with his Tudor bride behind him on the palfrey, and had fallen on the field of Flodden; their son who, with Tudor blood in his veins, had died cursing England, and whose daughter the English Elizabeth had beheaded—did all their shades hover near as the words were spoken in Holyrood? James VI., eighth of the line from the High Steward of Scotland, knew himself to be King of the “auld enemy”—and the lights of Holyrood went out one by one.

      But as, at the end of the play, the curtain is raised once or twice after it has fallen, and the scene-shifters stand back in the wings whilst the gaily dressed figures bow before an applauding audience, so the curtain has been raised once or twice on Holyrood to the sound of the multitude huzzaing. One such occasion was when Charles I. was crowned at Holyrood. A brilliant day for Edinburgh—a revival of the royal pageantries once so familiar in her streets; a long procession from the Castle to Holyrood between lines of soldiers in white satin doublets and black velvet breeches and plumed hats; a long procession of nobles on horseback, of heralds and trumpeters, of bishops with lawn sleeves, of civic dignitaries in scarlet and ermine; a flash of colour winding down the mediæval street, as of old, from the Castle to the Palace—and then Charles returned to England, and the curtain fell.

      It was Charles II., the Merry Monarch, who rebuilt Holyrood and gave it its present aspect. His own desire was to erect a large new palace, such as Charles I. had contemplated building. In the Bodleian Library at Oxford is a plan of the second storey, dated October 1663, and endorsed “the surveyes and plat mead by John Mylne, his Majestie’s Mr. Massone,” and to it is attached by sealing-wax a piece of paper, on which is written: “This was his Majesties blessed fatheres intentione in anno 1633.”[20]

      James VII., while Duke of York, held Court in Holyrood and restored the Abbey Church, and had Mass celebrated in it for his Catholic subjects. News of the landing of William of Orange gave lawlessness the leave, and the Presbyterian mob sacked the Chapel, burnt the Altar and organ at the City Cross, and desecrated the royal vault, tearing open the leaden coffins of the dead Kings and Queens of Scotland. But in 1745 the curtain rose once again, and for the last time, on the Stuart drama.

      Edinburgh was filled with loyal Highlanders, was noisy with the skirling of pipes and the din of bugles, and Edinburgh folk went decorated with white cockades, and the air was charged with excitement. There rode up to the door of Holyrood that “gallant and handsome young Prince, who threw himself on the mercy of his countrymen, rather like a hero of romance than a calculating politician.”[21] How did they receive him?—