Duke of Edinburgh

“ His majesty hasted to Edinburgh to meet with the duke, and at his coming saluted and entertained him ... as appertained to his rank. The duke made a progress from Holyroodhouse to the other side of the Forth, the first night to Ravensheugh, Lord Sinclair’s house, and from thence to Balcomie, Pittenweem, Anstruther, St Andrews, Dundee, Foulis, Stirling, and Linlithgow, and returned again to Edinburgh. ”

“ The various movements of the insurgent party were met in every direction by a systematic resistance, the details of which have been minutely detailed by historians, and belong not to a narrative which is chiefly of a personal nature.
On the fourteenth of September, the Duke of Argyle, Commander in Chief of his Majesty's Forces in Scotland, and General of the army, arrived in Edinburgh. The interest of this able and powerful nobleman in the Western Highlands, his zeal for the Protestant succession, were sufficient reasons for his appointment to this important office. ”

“ The Countess of Mar, daughter of Esme, Duke of Lennox, died of a deadly brash in Sir Thomas’s house in the Cowgate, May 11, 1644.
It is worthy of notice that the Hopes are one of several Scottish families, possessing high rank and great wealth, which trace their descent to merchants in Edinburgh. ”

“ In 1542 he was made warden of the Scottish marches, raised to the peerage as Viscount Lisle, and appointed great admiral for life. He now sailed to Newcastle, where he took on board his fleet the Earl of Hertford, afterwards Duke of Somerset, who was commander-in-chief in the horrible expedition of fire and sword of that year, in which many of the southern Scottish monasteries were destroyed and Edinburgh was burned to the ground. ”

“ The first known appearance of the post-reformation theatre in Edinburgh was in the reign of King James VI., when several companies came from London, chiefly for the amusement of the Court, including one to which Shakespeare is known to have belonged, though his personal attendance cannot be substantiated. There was no such thing, probably, as a play acted in Edinburgh from the departure of James in 1603 till the arrival of his grandson, the Duke of York, in 1680. ”

“ When the lords on 24 July signed the articles agreeing to vacate Edinburgh on certain conditions, Huntly and James Hamilton, duke of Chatelherault, agreed to undertake to join the lords if the queen regent ‘broke any one joyt of the appointment then made’ (ib. p. 379) . While the queen regent's party held Edinburgh, he endeavoured to persuade the reformers to permit mass to be said before and after their sermons, but, finding that they would not agree, promised that they should be in no way molested (ib. p. 391) . ”

“ To overawe, as is supposed, the friends of the king, or to prevent the convention from being overawed by the troops in the castle, the Duke of Hamilton and his friends, a few days before the meeting of the convention, introduced a considerable number of armed men into Edinburgh, some of whom were concealed in cellars and houses, ready to act as occasion might require. ”

“ If ever a man deserved such a death, I think Archbishop Sharp did.
It made a great noise directly, and the Merry Monarch—strongly suspected of having goaded the Scottish people on, that he might have an excuse for a greater army than the Parliament were willing to give him—sent down his son, the Duke of Monmouth, as commander-in-chief, with instructions to attack the Scottish rebels, or Whigs as they were called, whenever he came up with them. Marching with ten thousand men from Edinburgh, he found them, in number four or five thousand, drawn up at Bothwell Bridge, by the Clyde. ”

“ The army by land was estimated at ten thousand men. The Queen Regent and some others of her faction had passed to the Castle of Edinburgh. At Preston the English were met by the Duke's Grace, the Earl of Argyll (Huntly came not until the siege was confirmed) , Lord James, the Earls of Glencairn and Monteith, Lords Ruthven, Boyd, and Ochiltree, and all the Protestant gentlemen of West Fife, Angus, and Mearns. ”

“ The judges were tampered with by private solicitation. Decisions went in favour of the man of most personal or family influence. The following anecdote of the reign of Charles II. rests on excellent authority: ‘A Scotch gentleman having entreated the Earl of Rochester to speak to the Duke of Lauderdale upon the account of a business that seemed to be supported by a clear and undoubted right, his lordship very obligingly promised to do his utmost endeavours to engage the duke to stand his friend in a concern so just and reasonable as his was ”

“ The versatile youth having survived the solemn impression made on his mind by his nocturnal counsellor, was as ready as ever to listen to the rebellious advice of the nobles, who, trusting to their power over him, had secretly kept together the army, which they had merely cantoned in various parts of the south. The monarch had scarcely rested himself in the Castle of Edinburgh, when he was informed that the same fierce faction had resumed their ambitious schemes, and were again assembled, with the prince at their head, in more formidable array than before. ”

“ And in this the palace is typical. There is a spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead ”

“ The scenery was very fine, for the country was then more thickly wooded almost than now, and afar off shone the rugged outline of Edinburgh, rearing up on its ridgy hills, with the great square spire of its cathedral, and the lofty towers and bastel-houses of its castle, clustering on lofty and perpendicular rocks. Close by the road, arose the double peaks of Craiglockhart; one covered with pastures of emerald green, the other bluff with whin-tufted basalt, and crowned with gloomy firs; while, following its winding and devious course, the Leith brawled and gurgled over its pebbled bed. ”

“ In the first place, of the unbroken line of Stuart sovereigns of Scotland, all, from the poet King James I. to Queen Mary, are famed alike for their beauty and their intellect. Their Edinburgh dwellings were the Castle and Holyrood. Then there is a long train of great Scottish nobles and clergy who lived in Edinburgh and helped to rule Scotland. There is a goodly company of learned men—prose writers, politicians, historians, “humanists,” mathematicians. In the earlier centuries they were mostly Catholic Churchmen ”

“ On the third of November, the Prince marched from Dalkeith on foot, at the head of the Clans, who were commanded under him by Lord George Murray. The acclamations of the people of Edinburgh, who flocked in crowds to witness the departure of the army, were loud and friendly. Yet it is remarkable, that in spite of his long residence in that city, in spite of his hereditary claims on its inhabitants, and of the popularity of his manners, the party of the Prince in that capital never increased in proportion to his expectations. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Hymettus is rather loftier than the Pentland-hills, and Pentelicus farther off and grander than Arthur’s seat, but the old castle of Edinburgh is a noble and peculiar feature of its own, and soars up against the sky, with its pinnacle-placed turrets, superbly magnificent. The Forth has a high shore on either side, and, with the island of Inchkeith in its broad bosom, it looks more like a lake than an arm of the sea.
It is odd what strange links of acquaintance will develop between people thrown together in the most casual manner, and in the most out-of-the-way places. ”

“ Rob Roy and Helen Macgregor and Fergus M‘Ivor and Flora M‘Ivor are mere creatures of melodrama, but the Bailie and Mattie and Jeanie Deans and Davie Deans and the Antiquary and Edie Ochiltree and Andrew Fairservice and Mause and Cuddie Hedrigg are real beings of flesh and blood. We have met them or their likes on the muir or at the close fit, or on the High Street or in the kirk.
Twenty years passed, and a British Sovereign again comes to Scotland. On the 1st of September in 1842 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert arrived at Granton. They duly proceeded towards Edinburgh. ”

“ If we may believe, notwithstanding the protest of that much-deceived antiquary the Laird of Monkbarns, that these fair and forlorn ladies were the first royal inhabitants of the Castle of Edinburgh, we may imagine that they watched from their battlements more wistfully than fearfully, over all the wide plain, what dust might rise or spears might gleam, or whether any galley might be visible of reiver or rescuer from the north. ”

“ The reign of James IV. is full of picturesque incident. There are stories of brilliant tournaments at Edinburgh, where he sat on a ledge of the Castle rock and presided over the sports of a glittering throng gathered from far and near. There are the splendid records of his marriage with Margaret, Henry VII.’s daughter, the marriage that a hundred years afterwards was to unite the Crowns, the marriage whose fateful import even then was clearly discerned; and there is the tragic close at Flodden, of which, in the scanty remnants of the Flodden Wall, Edinburgh still bears the tangible memorials. ”

“ No houses opposite: only large gardens, beautifully kept, sloping gracefully away to the bottom of a valley, whence the ground rises almost perpendicularly, bearing on its summit houses of a prodigious height. It is the old town of Edinburgh, where everything will bring back memories of Mary Stuart and the novels of Scott. On the right the famous castle perched on a sheer rock nearly four hundred feet high; the whole bathed in a blue-grey haze that forms a light veil to soften its colouring and contour. It is impossible to imagine a more romantic sight in the midst of a large modern city. ”

“ The open ground—a scene of warfare during the sieges of the fortress, often a place of execution in rude times—the place, too, where, by a curious legal fiction, the Nova Scotia baronets were enfeoffed in their ideal estates on the other side of the Atlantic—was all that Edinburgh possessed as a readily accessible promenade before the extension of the city. ”

“ On Friday, the 16th of August, the day after his landing, the King remained at Dalkeith-house, and resigned himself to the simple recreations of rural retirement. The reception which he had met with upon his landing, and the orderly and decorous appearance of his Scottish subjects; the intellectual dignity of their manner, which regulated, and, at the same time, gave a deeper tone to their enthusiasm, were the frequent themes of his Majesty's conversation. The same evening, the citizens of Edinburgh did honour to his Majesty's arrival by a most brilliant and even gorgeous illumination.. ”

“ Indeed, not all the Queen's proverbial good luck in the matter could now or at any future time greatly modify the bane of open-air enjoyment amidst the beautiful scenery of Scotland—the exceedingly variable, even inclement, weather which may be met with at all seasons.
Saturday, the 3rd of September, afforded abundant compensation for all that had been missed on the Queen's entrance into Edinburgh. She paid an announced and formal visit from Dalkeith Palace to the town, in order to accomplish the balked ceremony of the presentation of the keys and to see the Castle on its historic rock. ”

“ The citizens hastened to construct a second line of wall, enclosing the Cowgate and the heights beyond, since occupied by Greyfriars churches and Heriot’s hospital, but still excluding the Canongate, as pertaining to the abbey of Holyrood. In the 16th century the movements connected with John Knox and Mary, queen of Scots, made Edinburgh a castle of much activity. ”

“ There is, of course, no single object in Edinburgh to compare with objects of traveler's interest farther south. The castle is not the Tower, Holyrood is a memory beside Windsor, St. Giles is no Canterbury, St. Mary's is not St. Paul's, the Royal Scottish art gallery is meager indeed, notwithstanding certain rare riches in comparison with the National. ”

“ To Edinburgh, as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, there journeyed, in James IV.’s days, knights from all over Europe, to take part in the famous tournaments held below the Castle Rock or on the open spaces beside Holyrood, and to try and win the lance tipped with pure Scottish gold with which the King rewarded the best tilter. There gathered in Edinburgh, in the days of James IV., not only the flower of chivalry, but men of science, and men of art, and men of learning. ”

“ The admiration of an art critic of such rank was fatal. What could a loyal courtier do but beg His Majesty’s acceptance thereof? “Oh,” said the King, “he could not rob the family of so inestimable a jewel.” Royally spoken, and, you may be sure, gratefully heard. It is said the magistrates of Edinburgh employed Jamesone to trick up the Netherbow Port with portraits of the century of ancient Kings of the line of Fergus. Hence possibly the legend that he limned those same mythical royalties we see to-day at Holyrood Palace, though it is certain enough they are not his, but Flemish De Witt’s. ”