Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets

There seems no reason why James should have so entirely lost heart. There had already been moments in his life when he had suffered sore discouragement and overthrow, yet never had been overcome. But now it is clear he felt himself at the end of his resources. How could he ever hold up his head again? a man who could not keep his own kingdom from invasion, or avenge himself upon his enemies! After he had lingered a little in Edinburgh, where the Queen was now near the moment which should give another heir to Scotland, he left the capital—perhaps to save her at such a time from the sight and the contagion of his despair—and crossed the Firth to Falkland, a place so associated with stirring passages in his career. But there his sickness of heart turned to illness of body; he became so "vehement sick" that his life was despaired of; he was "very near strangled to death by extreme melancholie." One hope remained, that the Queen might restore some confidence to his failing strength and mind by an heir to the crown, another James, for whom it might be worth while to live. James sent for some of his friends, "certain of his lords, both spiritual and temporal," to help him to bear this time of suspense, and advise him what might yet be done to set matters right, who surrounded him, as may be imagined, very anxiously, fearing the issue.

"By this the post came out of Linlithgow showing the King good tidings that the Queen was delivered. The King inquired whether it was man or woman. The messenger said it was ane fair dochter. The King answered and said, 'Farewell! it came with ane lass, and it will pass with ane lass,' and so commended himself to Almighty God, and spoke little from thereforth, but turned his back to his lords and his face to the wall."

Even at this bitter moment, however, the dying Prince was not left alone with his last disappointment. Cardinal Beatoun, whose influence had been so inauspicious in his life, pressed forward, "seeing him begin to fail of his strength and natural speech," and thrust upon him a paper for his signature, "wherein the Cardinal had writ what he pleased for his own particular weill," evidently with some directions about the regency, that ordeal which Scotland, unhappily, had now again to go through. When James had put his dying hand to this authority, wrested from him in his last weakness, a faint light of peace seems to have fallen across his death-bed.

FALKLAND PALACE

"As I have shown you, he turned him upon his back, and looked and beheld his lords around about, and gave ane little lauchter, syne kissed his hand and gave it to all his lords about him, and thereafter held up his hands to God and yielded the spirit."

There are many pathetic death scenes in history, but few more touching. His father, after a splendid and prosperous life, had fallen "in the lost battle, borne down by the flying;" he, after a career almost as chivalrous and splendid and full of noble work for his country, in a still more forlorn overthrow; his hopes all gone from him, his strength broken in his youth. Nothing, it would seem, could save these princes, so noble and so unfortunate. It was enough to bear the name of James Stewart to be weighed down by cruel Fate. But before his spirit shook off the mortal coil a ray of peace had shot through the clouds; he looked upon the anxious faces of his friends, some of whom at least must surely have been true friends, bound to him by comradeship and brotherhood, with that low laugh which is one of the most touching expressions of weakened and failing humanity—love and kindness in it, and a certain pleasure to see them round him; and yet to be free of it all—the heavy kingship, the hopes that ever failed, the friends that so rarely were true. The lips that touched that cold hand which he kissed before he gave to them must have trembled, perhaps with compunction, let us hope with some vow of fidelity to his memory and trust.

Thus died the last of the five Jameses—the last in one sense of that unfortunate but gallant line. A life more swept by storms, more rent asunder by conflicting passions and influences, more tragic still and passionate than theirs, was to part them from the singularly changed, modified, and modernised successors who, with a difference, were to wear yet drop this ancient crown. The Stewarts after Mary are no longer like those that went before. James's dying words came in some curious fashion true, though not as he thought. It came with a lass and it went with a lass that ancient crown. When another James reached the throne Scotland was no more as it had been.

It may seem a fantastic chronology to end here the records of the Stewards of Scotland: but it is I think justified by this change, which altered altogether the character of the history and the circumstances of the monarchs. Henceforward new agencies, new powers, were at work in the little proud and self-contained kingdom, which had maintained its independence and individuality so long. Torn asunder by rival influences, by intrigues incessant and profound, by that struggle between the old and the new which was never more desperate than in her bosom, and which, being a religious change chiefly, was one of life and death: and with a monarch no longer native, but of foreign training and thoughts, even if she had not been a woman and half a Tudor, the little ship of State, the gallant little nation, plunged amid waves and billows, not unfamiliar, indeed, but fiercer and wilder than ever before, with winds so much increased in force as they raged over wider seas.

The Stewards of Scotland here ended their special trust and gave in their account. No race was ever more unfortunate, but I think we may say that none more nobly endeavoured to discharge that high commission. With one exception, and that doubtful—for a man may be weak and may not be brave without being a bad man or even king—every bearer of this fated name laboured with courage and constancy at the great work of elevating his country. "Another for Hector!" cried the Highland warrior when his young chief was in danger, and all the world has read the story with moistened eyes. Another for Scotland! had been the cry of the house of Stewart throughout more than a century. As one man fell he handed the sword to another; to an infant hand trained amid feuds and anarchy, but always clasping, as soon as it had force enough, the royal weapon with royal courage and meaning. None of the Jameses lived beyond the earliest chapter of middle age; all of them succeeded in early youth, most of them in childhood; and, with but that uncertain exception of James III, every one of them was actuated by a noble patriotism, and did his devoir manfully for the improvement and development of his country. They were noble gentlemen one and all: the bigotry, the egotism, the obstinacy of the later Stewarts were not in them. Knights and paladins of an age of romance, they were also stern executors of justice, bold innovators, with eyes ever open to every expedient of progress and prosperity. Their faults were those faults of a light heart and genial temperament, which are the most easily understood and pardoned. Under their sway their country and their little capital came to be known over Christendom as not unworthy to hold place among the reigning kingdoms and cities through which the stream of chivalry flowed. They invented the trade, the shipping, the laws and civic order of Scotland. Among her heroes there are none more worthy of everlasting remembrance. They fulfilled their stewardry with a unity of purpose and a steadfastness of aim which, when we take into account the continually recurring lapses of long minorities, is one of the wonders of the time. Edinburgh grew under their sway from an angry village, lying between a fierce castle and a rich monastery, little distinguished above its peers, less favoured than Stirling, less wealthy than the town of St. John, to one of the most noted of cities, picturesque and splendid, full of noble houses, the centre of national life and government. And it is curious to record that no one of the monarchs who brought it such nobility and fame left any sadness of death to the associations of Edinburgh. They lived and were wedded and filled with the brightness of their happier moments the town which afforded so beautiful a scene for all rejoicings: they died on the field of battle or in other places in conflict or violence or despair. But Edinburgh only retains the brighter memories, the triumphal processions, the bridal finery, the jousts and the feasts, the Parliaments and proclamations of laws and high alliances. The reigns of the Jameses contain the history of her rise, her splendour, her climax of beauty and stateliness, without any association of downfall or decay.

PART III

THE TIME OF THE PROPHETS

CHAPTER I

UNDER THE QUEEN REGENT

There is perhaps among the many historical personages attached by close association to Edinburgh no one so living, so vigorous, so present, as the great figure of the Reformer and Prophet, who once filled the air with echoes of his vehement and impassioned oratory, who led both Lords and Commons, and mated with princes on more than equal terms, the headstrong, powerful, passionate Preacher, who was at once the leading spirit of his time and its most vigorous chronicler. To fill the circle of association, he alone, of all the animated groups who withstood or who followed him, has left us not only a number of books which disclose his mind with all its powers and imperfections, but the very dwelling in which he passed at least the latter part of his life, intact and authentic, a memorial more striking and attractive than any "storied urn or animated bust." Nor are even the associations of burial wanting; for though it is no longer within the solemn enclosure of a churchyard, and there is no certainty that the stone which is supposed to mark the position of the Reformer's grave is historically exact, it is yet sure enough that near by, within reach of the doors of his ancient church, beneath the pavement trodden by so many feet, his remains repose in the centre of the life of the Scottish capital, a position more appropriate than any other that could be imagined. Thus by life and by death this singular and most evident and unmistakable man, still alive in every lineament, is connected with the city in which his life was passed, and in the history of which he can never be forgotten. There may be doubts about other localities, and it may be difficult to identify the houses which have been inhabited and the floors that have been trod by other distinguished personages. Crowding footsteps of the poor have obliterated the record in many a noble house abandoned by history; even the fated steps of the Queen save in one bloodstained closet have left but little authentic trace. But Knox is still present with all the force of an indestructible individuality—in the existing life of the country which took so strong an impression from him, and in the absolutely personal facts of the church in which he preached, the house in which he lived, the stone under which he lies.

To estimate the share he had in the foundations of that modern Scotland which has so increased and thriven since his day, is perhaps more hard now than it was even eighty years ago, when his biography was written by Dr. M'Crie to the great interest and enthusiasm of the country. The laws of historical judgment are subject to perpetual change, and the general estimate of the great personages of the past has undergone various modifications since that time. Perhaps even the Church is less sure of her share in the record, less certain of the doom once so unhesitatingly denounced against "the Paip that Pagan fu' of pride"; less confident of her own superiority to all other developments of Christianity. The least enlightened are no longer able to feel with a good conscience, as our best instructed fathers did, that an important part of religious liberty was freedom to curse and pull down every tenet other than their own. No belief has been more obstinate or is more time-honoured: but in theory at least it has been much subdued in recent times, so that few of us are able to hold by our own side with the perfect confidence which once we felt. And in these changing views, and in the impulse towards a greater catholicity of feeling which has sprung up in Scotland, the influence of that uncompromising teacher to whom reform was everything, who had no prepossession in favour of what was old and venerable, but desired with all the fervour of his fiery soul to make everything new, has doubtless waned, save to that sacred simplicity of ignorance which forms no judgment. But nothing can obliterate the person and strenuous being of John Knox, or make him a less interesting figure on the crowded and tragic stage of that epoch which he dominated and chronicled. And nothing can unlink the associations which make him ever present and living in Edinburgh, which was the capital and centre of his kingdom as much as of any king who ever breathed.

John Knox was in every sense of the words a son of the soil, yet came of a not unknown family, "kent folk" of East Lothian: if not lairds of any great heritage, yet possessing lands and living sufficient to entitle them to consideration. They were able to give him the best education of the time, which he completed at the University of Glasgow under the teaching of Major or Mair, the same whom George Buchanan accompanied to France; so that both these great men, as well as various nobles and ecclesiastics of the time, were his fellow-students, trained under the same influence. Whether Knox followed Major to St. Andrews as Buchanan followed him to Paris is not known; but he would seem to have lectured on philosophy in St. Andrews at the beginning of his career. It might be that he was himself present, and heard some of the bold and familiar addresses of the wandering friars, the first rude champions of Reform, whose protest against the wickedness of the bishops and the extortions of the clergy he quotes with so much enjoyment of their rough humour, in the beginning of his history; or even might have witnessed the lighted pile and felt across his face the breath of that "reek" which carried spiritual contagion with it, as it flew upon the keen breeze from the sea over that little centre of life, full of scholars and wits, and keen cynical spectators little likely to be convinced by any such means. It is curious to hear of Major for instance, one of the Sorbonne, a doctor of Paris and man of the world, as present at all those proceedings, listening to Friar William's denunciation of the priests, to which he gave his assent as "a doctrine that might weill be defended, for it contayned no heresye"—and in very different circumstances to the sermons of Rough, addressed to the slayers of the Cardinal, and to the calling of Knox himself, a crisis of popular emotion and vehement feeling. Such a man as Major, a son of the Renaissance, no Reformer nor careful of any of these things, must have looked on with strange feelings at all the revolutions accomplished before him, the rude jests and songs, the half-jocular broadly humorous assaults, the cry of heresy, the horror of the burnings, the deadly earnest of both preacher and people after Beatoun's well-deserved but terrible end which cut all compromises short. One wonders what thoughts were going on in the mind of the old scholar who kept his place in his stall as well when mass was sung as when every trace of that "idolatrous sacrifice" had been trodden under foot. Would it be more or less the same to him whatever they preached, those wild religionists, who tore each other in pieces? did he look on with a secret smile at the turmoil they made, as if it mattered which was uppermost, with a natural horror at the fierce flames of the human sacrifice, yet consent in his mind that if they could so stamp the heresy out which would otherwise destroy them, the bishops were only logical to do it? while on the other side there was not much in point of natural justice to be said against Norman Leslie and his men who slew the Cardinal. Such spectators there must have been in no small number, affording a curious rim and edge of observers to all that the more active and violent might do or say. But these lookers-on have said nothing on the subject, or their mild voices have been lost in the clangour of actors vehement and earnest. It has been reserved for our age to bring these dispassionate or, as we are apt to think, cynical observers into the front rank.

The first scene in which John Knox comes prominently into sight of the world occurs in the midst of that small but urgent and much-agitated society on the fierce little headland by the sea, in the great and noble cathedral which for most of the intervening time has been nothing but ruins. We must in imagination rebuild these lofty walls, throw up again the noble piers and clustered pillars, and see the townsfolk streaming in—a crowd more picturesque in garb than any Scots assembly nowadays, with its provost and councillors in their municipal finery: and the grave representatives of the colleges filing in to their stalls—very grave now, we may well believe, with many a look at the group of gentry, among whom were half a dozen men whose hands were stained with the blood of the Cardinal. No doubt to these spectators, beyond even the great volume of sound which pealed upward from that vast company, in some popular hymn or ancient war-cry of a psalm, the stir of the languid besieging army outside, and the guns of the French Fleet, already on its way to avenge Beatoun and crush this nest of heretics out, sounded ominous in the background. Among the congregation was a dark, vehement man, full of repressed fervour and energy, with two or three lads by his side, of whom he had charge—strange tutor! flames of zeal and earnestness burning in his deep-set eyes; the mark of the tonsure (if it was ever there, which is a doubtful question) obliterated by long disuse; a man known by the congregation as a zealous instructor of youth, catechising his boys publicly of afternoons in the cathedral, vacant then of the many services, the vespers and benedictions, of the superseded faith.

Knox's gifts and qualities were already well known; he had been a devoted friend and follower of Wishart, the martyr whose memory was still fresh in the minds of all men; and these public examinations of the three boys, and the expositions he addressed to them, but which many of mature age also gathered to hear, had given the many competent judges then assembled in the beleaguered city a practical knowledge of his gifts and endowments. And Rough, who filled the post of preacher in St. Andrews, was not a man of learning, and in consequence would seem to have been troubled by disputatious members of the priesthood, eager, not unnaturally, to defend their own tenets, and with all the authorities at their fingers' ends. In this strait John Knox was entreated to accept the charge of the congregation, but in vain. Perhaps the memory of Wishart's charge to him, "Return to your bairns," was still in his ears; perhaps the reluctance and hesitation of a man who felt himself incompetent for so great a responsibility—though it is strange to associate any idea of shrinking from responsibility with such a dauntless spirit, and he was by this time a man of forty-two, with a matured mind and some experience of life. At all events he "utterlie refused": he "would not run where God had not called him." This being so, there was no alternative but to take him by surprise and force him into the position which all desired him to assume. And this was the step which was accordingly taken by the assembly of the Reformers in St. Andrews, an assembly in which were many well-known and distinguished men, so illustrious a councillor as Sir David Lindsay, the poet and Lyon-King of Scotland, being one of the gentlemen and commoners who decided upon this dramatic and picturesque call.

They were all met to the preaching upon a certain day, the date of which is not given, but which was presumably in the summer of 1547, Knox having arrived with his pupils in St. Andrews in the Easter of that year. The principal persons present were aware of what was coming, and probably the mass of the congregation knew that some event more than ordinary was preparing, which would quicken the eagerness of their attention. The sermon was upon the right of the congregation to the services of "any man in whom they espied the gifts of God," and the risk on his part of refusing their call. Mair, sitting by in his doctor's gown, though he had committed himself to no religious heresy, had discoursed much to his students upon the rights of the people as the source of power—a doctrine, indeed, which Knox did not hold in that naked form, though most probably he had been influenced by these teachings towards the still more tremendous form of doctrine which sets forth the voice of the Christian people as representing the voice of God. And no doubt up to this point he gave his adhesion to the words of the preacher. But when Rough had reached the crown of his argument he suddenly turned to where Knox sat and addressed him individually, while the people held their breath.

"Brother," he said, "ye shall not be offended albeit that I speak unto you that which I have in charge even from all those that are here present: which is this. In the name of God and of His Son Jesus Christ, and in the name of those that presently call you by my mouth, I charge you that ye refuse not this holy vocation, but that as you tender the glory of God, the increase of Christ His kingdom, the edification of your brethren, and the comfort of me, whom ye understand well enough to be oppressed by the multitude of labours, that you take upon you the public office and charge of preaching even as ye look to avoid God's heavy displeasure and desire that He shall multiply His grace with you." And in the end he said to those present, "Was not this your charge to me? and do ye not approve this vocation?" They answered, "It was, and we approve it." "Whereat the said John, abashed, burst forth in most abundant tears and withdrew himself to his chamber."

It would be difficult to find a more striking scene. Any sudden incident of an individual character thus occurring in a public assembly calls forth a thrill of interest, and gives at once to the most disconnected crowd a pictorial unity. The interest and excitement in those roused and eager eyes, the crowd all turned towards the astonished subject of this appeal, the soft young faces making a little circle round him, half terrified, half flattered by the sudden consciousness that all eyes were turned towards them, would make a fine theme for a historical painter. And "the said John, abashed," finding no refuge in the great excitement and surprise of the moment, he so stern and so strong, but in tears! It was thus that the ministry of the great Reformer began.

It is unnecessary to follow in detail a career so well known. Every particular of it, and even the sermons with all their heads, may be found in the Historie of the Reformation in Scotland, which yields in interest, in picturesqueness and the most living and graphic power of narrative, to none of the primitive chronicles. No professional word-painter has ever put a dramatic scene, a contention, a battle, such as those which were everyday occurrences in Scotland at that time, upon paper with more pictorial force, or with half the fervour of life and reality. The writer goes through all the gamut of popular passion. He exults sometimes fiercely, laughs sometimes coarsely, throws in "a merry jest," which is often grim with savage humour; but throughout all is always real, always genuine, writing not impartially, but with the strong conviction and sentiment of a man elucidating matters in which he has been himself a prominent actor. The arguments of his adversaries when he enters upon a public controversy are unaccountably feeble, which perhaps may be explained by the fact that the friars were not much accustomed to controversy, perhaps by the natural bias of a controversialist to lessen the force of his antagonists' arguments; and he does not pretend to contemplate his adversaries, either spiritual or political, with any tolerance, or permit any possibility that they too might perhaps mean well and have a righteous intention, even though it was entirely opposed to that of John Knox: such ideas had no currency in his day. That Mary of Guise might really mean and wish to avoid bloodshed, to strike no blow that was not inevitable, to keep the breach from being widened by actual civil war; and that the policy of temporising as long as that was possible was anything but wicked wiles and intentions of betrayal, was an idea which he would seem to have been incapable of conceiving. This is a drawback perhaps common to every struggle so important and fundamental as was the strife which began to rage in Scotland. Had we a history compiled by the spectators to whom we have referred it would probably, unless nature gave them an exceptional keenness of vision, be wanting in those qualities of animation and force which he who is confident of having every good influence on his side, and nothing but the powers of evil against him, is likely to possess. Major indeed was a historian, but he did not meddle with the history of his own time; and Buchanan, while separated from the reader by the bonds and cerements of his Latin, and therefore shut out from a popular audience, is as great a partisan as Knox.