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.

I prefer to note here quainter and humbler memorials. James had a curious, if fitful, interest in art and letters. The picturesque Pitscottie boldly affirms him “ane singular guid chirurgione.” In the book of the royal expenses we have some curious entries. A fine pair of teeth had an unholy attraction for him. He would have them out, on any or no pretext. “Item, ane fellow because the King pullit furtht his teith, xviii shillings.” “Item, to Kynnard, ye barbour, for twa teith drawn furtht of his hed be the King, xviii sh.” History does not record what the “fellow” or the “barbour” said on the subject, or whether they were contented with the valuation of their grinders, which was far from excessive since the computation is in Scots money, wherein a shilling only equalled an English penny. The barber, moreover, according to the practice of the time, was a rival artist, but—speculation is vain; though it will be observed that instead of the patients feeing the Royal physician, they were themselves feed to submit to treatment. This same Lindsay of Pitscottie is also our authority for another story to the full as quaint. James desired to know the original language of mankind. He procured him two children—human waifs and strays were plentiful in old Scotland; provided them with a dumb woman for nurse, and plumped the three down on Inchkeith, that tiny islet in the Forth a little way out from Leith. Our chronicler is dubious as to the result. “Some say they spak guid Hebrew, but I know not by authoris rehearse.” The “guid Hebrew,” if it ever existed, died with them. Nor is there any trace of a Scots Yiddish, a compound whereof you shudder at the bare conception.

Under James V. we have the popular legend of Howieson already referred to. James, or all tradition errs, was given to wandering in disguise through his kingdom to see how his subjects fared or to seek love adventures, or perhaps for both. The King of the Commons, as his folk called him, took things as they came and life as he found it. The story goes that he was courting some rustic damsel in Cramond village when he was set upon by a band of enraged rivals or relatives. He defended himself on the narrow bridge that then crossed the Almond, but spite his efficient swordplay was like to get the worst of it when a rustic, one Jock Howieson, who was working near at hand, came to his aid and laid about him so lustily with his flail that the assailants fled. There was some talk of a reward, and Jock confessed that his dearest wish was to own the land which he tilled. The stranger, without revealing his identity, or, rather, concealing it under the title of the Gudeman of Ballengiech (the traditional name adopted by James in his wanderings and derived from a road or pass at Stirling Castle), made an appointment with his preserver at Holyrood Palace. Jock turned up in due course, and was promised an interview with the King, whom he would recognise as the only man with his bonnet on. Jock, with rustic humour, replied that either he himself or his friend must be the King since they were the only two that were covered. A grant of the land, which conveniently turned out to be Crown property, speedily followed on the condition that when the King came that way Jock or his descendant should present him with a vessel of water wherein to wash his hands. “Accordingly in the year 1822 when George IV. came to Scotland the descendant of John Howieson of Braehead, who still possesses the estate, which was given to his ancestor, appeared at a solemn festival and offered His Majesty water from a silver ewer that he might perform the service by which he held his lands.” Thus Sir Walter Scott in the Tales of a Grandfather. It seems that in 1822 the proprietor was William Howieson Crawford, Esq. of Braehead and Crawfordland. One fancies that the good Sir Walter jogged, if one may say so, Mr. Crawford’s memory, and possibly arranged both “the solemn festival” and “the silver ewer.” This entertaining legend has not escaped—how could it?—sceptical modern critics. It is shown that not for centuries after James did the story take coherent shape, and that as handed down it can scarce have happened. What can you say but that in some form or other it may have had a foundation in fact? That if it is not possible conclusively to prove, neither is it possible clearly to disprove, and finally it is at least ben trovato.

In setting down one or two anecdotes of James V.’s Queens I am on surer ground. In 1537, James was married to Magdalen, daughter of Francis I., in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. They reached Scotland on the 27th of May. As the Queen landed she knelt down and kissed the soil, a pretty way of adopting her new fatherland that touched those hard Scots as it still touches us, but on the 10th of July the poor child, she was not complete seventeen, was lying dead at Holyrood. It was a cold spring: the Castle was high and bleak, Holyrood was damp and low. She was a fragile plant and she withered and faded away, for us the most elusive and shadowy of memories, yet still with a touch of old-world sweetness. All the land grieved for that perished blossom. It was the first general mourning known in Scotland, and there was in due time “the meed of some melodious tear” from George Buchanan and David Lindsay.

Before a year had passed away, to wit, in June 1538, James had brought another mate to Scotland, a very different character, known in our history as Mary of Guise, the famous mother of a still more famous daughter, Mary Queen of Scots. James V.’s widow was Queen Regent during most of the minority of her child, and she held her own with unfailing courage and ability. If she tricked and dodged she was like everybody else. In that bitter fight neither Catholic nor Protestant were over-scrupulous; she was on the unpopular and finally on the losing side, but she fought as steadfastly and stoutly for what gods she had as Knox himself, and she was not one of the royal authors. Her story is told for us mainly by her enemies, and chief of all by John Knox, the most deadly among them.

In 1556 he addressed a letter to her, by desire of the Congregation, exhorting her to renounce the errors of Rome; she handed this to Beaton, Bishop of Glasgow. “Please you, my Lord, to read a pasquil.” Knox, a humorist himself, was peculiarly sensitive to scornful irony, and of that two of his contemporaries had a peculiar gift, the Queen Regent, Mary of Guise, and the Secretary, Maitland of Lethington. He never forgot nor forgave these thrusts, and he cordially hated both. This does not justify his vicious and one-sided account of the death-bed of this Royal lady in 1560: “God, for his greit mercyis saik, red us frome the rest of the Guysiane blude. Amen. Amen.” Such were the folk of the time. In 1560 the Congregation made an attack on Leith, which was held by the French. They failed: the French, Knox tells us, stripped the slain and laid them along the wall. When the Regent looked across the valley at this strange decoration she could not contain herself for joy, and said, “Yonder are the fairest tapestrie that ever I saw. I wald that the haill feyldis that is betwix this place and yon war strowit with the same stuffe.” I am quite ready to believe this story. On both sides death did not extinguish hatred, not even then was the enemy safe from insult. Does not Knox himself tell us with entire approval how his party refused the dead Regent the rights of her church, and how the body was “lappit in a cope of lead and keipit in the Castell” for long weary months till it could be sent to France, where the poor ashes were at length laid to rest in due form?

Whatever the creed of either side, both in practice firmly held that Providence was on the side of big battalions. Almost of necessity the Regent was continually scheming for troops and possession of castles and so forth. Some quaint anecdotes are told of her dealings with Archibald, sixth Earl of Angus, grandson of old “Bell the Cat,” and gifted like him with power of emphatic utterance. Angus had married, in 1514, Margaret, the widow of James IV. For some time he was supreme in Scotland and was at the lowest a person to be reckoned with. In his passages of wit with the Regent she comes off second best, but then again the account is by Hume of Godscroft, historian and partisan of the house of Douglas. The time had not yet come for Kings to subsidise letters. Once Mary told Angus that she proposed to create the Earl of Huntly, his rival, a duke. “By the might of God”—his oath when angry—“then I will be a drake.” He was punning on duke, which is Scots for duck, and meant to say that he would still be the greater, though possibly the Queen required a surgical operation before she understood. Once he came to pay his compliments to her in Edinburgh at the head of a thousand horsemen. She angrily reproved him for breach of the proclamation against noblemen being so attended; but Angus had his answer ready. “The knaves will follow me. Gladly would I be rid of them, for they devour all my beef and my bread, and much, Madam, should I be beholden to you, if you could tell me how to get quit of them.” Again, when she unfolded to him a plan for a standing army, he promptly said, “We will fight ourselves better than any hired fellows,” she could hardly reply that it was against disturbing forces like his own that she longed for a defence. She proposed to garrison Tantallon, that strong fortress of the Douglas which still rises, mere shell though it be, in impressive ruin on the Lothian coast opposite the Bass Rock. Angus had his goshawk on his wrist, and was feeding it as he talked with the Queen, and one notes that it seemed quite proper for nobles to go about so accompanied. He made as if he addressed the bird, “Greedy gled, greedy gled, thou hast too much already, and yet desirest more”: the Queen chose not to take the obvious hint, but persisted. Angus boldly faced the question. “Why not, Madam? Ah yes, all is yours, but, Madam, I must be captain of your muster and keeper of Tantallon.” Not that these epigrams altered the situation, rather they expressed it. Even in the hostile narrative your sympathies are sometimes on the side of Mary of Guise. In 1558 a calf with two heads was shown to her, apparently as a portent of calamity, like the bos locutus est of Livy, but what it exactly meant no one could say. “She scripped and said it was but a common thing,” in which, at any rate, she has the entire approval of the modern world.

Her daughter Mary gave Edinburgh the most exciting, romantic, interesting, and important time in the city’s annals. It was scarcely six years in all (19th August 1561-16th June 1567), but those were crowded years: the comparatively gay time at first; the marriage with Darnley; the assassination of Rizzio; the murder of Darnley; her seizure by Bothwell; her marriage to Bothwell; the surrender of Carberry, with her departure for Loch Leven. I scarce know what to select. On 15th April 1562 Randolph writes: “The Queen readeth daily after her dinner, instructed by a learned man, Mr. George Buchanan, somewhat of Livy.” You wish it had been Virgil, because you are sure scholar and pupil had tried the Sortes Virgilianæ with results even more pregnant than happed to Mary’s grandson Charles I., at Oxford, in the time of the civil wars, and the mere mention of George Buchanan is fateful. He, at any rate, was an earnest and high-minded man, and he employed all the grace of his Latin muse to say delightful things about her on more than one occasion, and he had, in after years, every term of invective to hurl at her also in Latin, but prose this time, and he felt himself justified in both. The modern point of view which would find her almost certainly guilty of being an accessary before the fact to the slaughter of Darnley, that would also find that the circumstances were so peculiar, that she was by no means altogether blameworthy, was not the conception of her own day. She was guilty, and therefore a monster of wickedness; or she was innocent, and therefore a martyr: those are the sharply opposed views. It was not an age of compromise or judicial balance. Take another incident. Rizzio’s murder was on 9th March 1566. Immediately after she won over Darnley, mixed up with the affair as he had been. The pair escaped from Holyrood in the midnight hours, through the burial vaults and tombs of the palace. Darnley made some sudden and half-involuntary reference to the freshly-turned grave of Rizzio that lay right in their path. Mary gripped his arm and vowed, in what must have been a terrible whisper, that ere a year had passed “a fatter than he should lie as low.” Kirk-o’-field was on 10th February 1567.

I prefer here to deal with trivialities, not tragedies. How curiously from the first she occupied the thoughts of men: ere she was a month old grave statesmen were busy match-making! In 1558 she married the Dauphin, afterwards Francis II. When the news came to Edinburgh it was felt that some celebration was necessary. “Mons Meg was raised forth from her lair” and fired once. The bullet was found on Wardie Muir, two miles off, and bought back by a careful Government to serve another occasion. We are told the cost of the whole affair was ten shillings and eight pence, no doubt Scots currency, and without any doubt at all the most frugal merry-making in history. I will relate this other comic interlude of the night of her arrival at Holyrood. Knox tells the story of her landing with his never-failing graphic force: the thick and dark mist that covered the earth, a portent of the evil days to come, “the fyres of joy” that blazed through it all, “and a company of the most honest with instruments of musick and with musitians gave their salutationis at hir chamber wyndo. The melody (as she alledged) lyked hir weill and she willed the same to be contineued some nightis after.” Knox is a little doubtful as to the sincerity of her thanks. Brantôme was of the Queen’s company, and the gay Frenchman gives us a very different account of the proceedings. “There came under her window five or six hundred rascals of that town, who gave her a concert of the vilest fiddles and little rebecs, which are as bad as they can be in that country, and accompanied them with singing Psalms, but so miserably out of time and concert that nothing could be worse. Ah, what melody it was! What a lullaby for the night!” One of the Queen’s Maries remembered and applied a favourite text of Montlin, Bishop of Valence, on which they had heard more than one sermon: “Is any merry, let him sing Psalms.” If she showed herself a Scot by her Biblical quotation, you guess she revealed her French upbringing in an infinitely expressive shrug and grimace; but for that night even Mary’s spirit was broken. She found no place for mirth and could scarce refrain from tears, yet she had the courage on that and other mornings gracefully to thank the musicians; only she shifted her bedroom to the floor above, and slept, you believe, none the worse for the change. The drop in material comfort, not to speak of anything else, must have been enormous, from gay, wealthy, joyous France to this austere, poverty-stricken land and people. Did not some mad scheme for instant return move through her brain? No, for after all she was a Queen and a Stuart, and it is mere commonplace to say that she never failed to confront her fate.

It were easy and useless to dwell on the glaring contrasts in character between Mary and her son James, between the most tragically unfortunate and the most prosaically fortunate of the Stuarts. Such contrasts between the character and fate of parent and child are not uncommon in daily life. The first day of James on earth was memorable for the dramatic meeting of his father and mother. He was born in Edinburgh Castle, in the little room that is shown you there, between nine and ten on the morning of Wednesday, 19th June 1566. About two in the afternoon Darnley came to see his child. Like everybody else in Edinburgh, he had known of the event for hours, since a few minutes after the birth heavy guns, almost at Mary’s bedside and without a word of protest from the courageous woman, had roared out their signal to the capital that well-nigh went mad on the instant with joy and pride. The nurse put the child into Darnley’s arms. “My Lord,” said Mary simply and solemnly, “God has given you and me a son.” Then she turned to Sir William Stanley: “This is the son who I hope shall first unite the two kingdoms of Scotland and England.” The Englishman said something courteous about the prior rights of Mary and Darnley, and then Mary wandered off into the Rizzio business only three months before. What would have happened if they had then killed her? You fancy the colour went and came in Darnley’s face. “These things are all past,” he muttered. “Then,” said the Queen, “let them go.” As James grew up he became well-nigh the most eminent of royal and noble authors, and that strange mixture of erudition, folly, wisdom, and simplicity which marks him as one of the oddest characters in history. He was great in nicknames and phrases, and the nicknames stuck and the phrases are remembered. “Tam o’ the Coogate” for the powerful Earl of Haddington; “Jock o’ the Sclates” for the Earl of Mar, because he, when James’s fellow-pupil, had been entrusted by George Buchanan with a slate thereon to note James’s little peccadilloes in his tutor’s absence; better than all, “Jingling Geordie” for George Heriot the goldsmith. What a word picture that gives you of the prosperous merchant prince who possibly hinted more than once that he could an he would buy up the whole Court! That well-known story of ostentatious benevolence can hardly be false. George visited James at Holyrood and found him over a fire of cedar wood, and the King had much to say of the costly fuel; and then the other invited him to visit his booth hard by St. Giles’, where he was shown a still more costly fire of the Royal bonds or promissory notes, as we might call them in the language of to-day. We know that the relations between the banker and his Royal customer were of the very best; and how can we say anything but good of Heriot when we think of that splendid and beautiful foundation that to-day holds its own with anything that modern Edinburgh can show? As for his colloquial epigrams, there is the famous account of David I. as a “sair sanct” for the Crown; his humorous and not altogether false statement, when the Presbyterian ministers came to interview him, “Set twal chairs, there be twal kings coming”; his description—at an earlier date, of course—of the service of the Episcopal Church as “an evil said mass in English wanting nothing but the liftings”; his happy simile apropos of his visit to Scotland in 1617 of his “salmon-lyke” instinct—a great and natural longing to see “our native soil and place of our birth and breeding.” No wonder he got a reputation for wisdom! A quaint anecdote dates his renown in that regard from a very early period indeed. On the day after his birth the General Assembly met, and were much concerned as to the religious education of the infant. They sent Spottiswoode, “Superintendant of Lothian,” to interview the Queen on the subject. He urged a Protestant baptism and upbringing for the child. Mary gave no certain answer, but brought in her son to show to the churchmen, and probably also as the means of ending an embarrassing interview. Spottiswoode, however, repeated his demand, and with pedantic humour asked the infant to signify his consent. The child babbled something, which one of the hearers at least took for “Amen,” and “Master Amen” was the Court-name for Spottiswoode ever after.

James deserved to be called the British Solomon, but then how did it happen that the man had such a knack of making himself ridiculous? On the night of the 23rd July 1593 the madcap Francis Earl of Bothwell made one of his wild raids on Holyrood. James came out of his chamber in terror and disorder, “with his breeks in his hand”; trembling, he implored the invaders to do him no harm. “No, my good bairn,” said Bothwell with insolence (the King was twenty-seven at the time); and as a matter of fact no harm was done him. Fate tried the mother of James and the son of James far more severely than it ever tried James himself, and Mary Stuart and Charles the First managed things so ill that each in the end had to lay the head on the block, but no one ever spoke to them like that, and they never made themselves ridiculous. Mary was never less than Queen and Charles was never less than King, and each played the last scene so superbly as to turn defeat and ruin into victory and honour, and if you say it was birth and breeding and the heritage of their race how are you to account for the odd figure in between? Here is another trivial anecdote. On Tuesday, 5th April 1603 James set forth southward to take possession of his English throne. As Robert Chambers points out, here was the most remarkable illustration of Dr. Johnson’s remark that the best prospect a Scotsman ever saw was the high road to England. Not very far from Holyrood stood splendid Seton Palace, and as James and his folk drew near they crossed another procession. It was the funeral train of the first Earl of Winton, who had been an attached adherent of James’s mother. One of the Queen’s Maries was a Seton, and James, as was right and proper, made way and halted till the procession of the mightier King Death had passed. He perched himself in the meantime on the garden wall, and you think of him hunched up there “glowering” at the proceedings. On his return to Scotland James spent at Seton Palace his second night after crossing the Tweed, and it was here he received Drummond of Hawthornden’s poem of Forth Feasting. There was unbounded popular rejoicing, though not without an occasional discordant note; for the Presbyterian Scot was terribly suspicious. It happened that one of the royal guards died during the visit. He was buried with the service of the English Church, read by a surpliced clergyman; there was an unseemly riot, and the parson if he escaped hard knocks got the hardest of words. He was William Laud, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. Let me end those stories of James with one of a lighter character. I have spoken of James’s schoolfellow, the Earl of Mar. He was left a widower, his wife Ann Drummond having died after giving birth to a son. An Italian magician had shown him, as in a glass darkly, the face of his second spouse. He identified the figure as that of Lady Mary Stuart of the Lennox family, who would have none of him; for the Drummond baby would be Earl of Mar, whilst hers would only be Mr. Erskine. Jock o’ the Sclates was so mortified at the refusal that he took to his bed, and seemed like to make a mortal though ridiculous exit; but the King came to encourage him. “By God, ye shanna dee, Jock, for ony lass in a’ the land!” In due course James brought about the marriage, which turned out well for all concerned.

The Kings after James had but a very remote and chance connection with Edinburgh. There are golfing anecdotes of Charles I. and James II., and there is not even that about Charles II. Charles I. when in Edinburgh was fond of the Royal game on the links at Leith, then the favourite ground for the sport. It was whilst so engaged he heard the news of the massacre in Ireland, and not unnaturally he threw down his club and hastily quitted the links. The anecdote of James II. is of a more detailed character, for Golfer’s Land, grim and battered, still stands in the Canongate. When James held court at Holyrood as Duke of York, he was given to golfing on the links. He had a match with two English noblemen, his fellow-player in the foursome being John Patterson, a poor shoemaker in the Canongate, but a superb golfer. If you don’t know the story, at least you anticipate the result. The Englishmen were shamefully beaten, and the stake being too small game for Royalty, Patterson netted the proceeds, with which he built Golfer’s Land. The learned Dr. Pitcairne adorned it with a Latin inscription, and all you can say is you hope the legend is true. Another story of James tells how one of the soldiers on duty at Holyrood, mortal tired or perhaps mortal drunk, was found asleep at his post. Grim old Tom Dalzell was in charge, and he was not the man to overlook such an offence, but marked out the culprit for instant execution. The Duke, however, intervened and saved the man’s life. I am glad to tell those stories of James, who as a rule fares so ill at the hands of the historians.

Although I have said nothing of Charles II., his statue perhaps deserves a word. It stands in Parliament Square, between St. Giles’ and the Parliament House. The local authorities were once minded to set up the stone image of Cromwell in that same place, indeed the stone had been got ready when the Restoration changed the current of their thoughts, and after an interval of twenty-five years they put up one to Charles II. instead, the only statue that old Edinburgh for many a long day possessed.

Kings and Queens came and went for the better part of a century, but none of them came to Edinburgh, or even to Scotland, for you cannot count the fugitive visit of the Old Pretender as anything at all. It was not till Prince Charles Edward Stuart made the memorable descent on the capital in the ’45 that I can again take up the easy thread of my narrative. Here anecdotes are abundant, but the most too well known for quotation: they tell of the cowardice of the citizens and the daring simplicity of the Highlanders. The capture of the city was without opposition. A burgher taking a walk saw a Highlander astride a gun, and said to him that surely he did not belong to the troops that were there yesterday. “Och no,” quoth the Celt, “she pe relieved.” According to all accounts, the invading army behaved well. An exception was the man who presented a musket at the head of a respectable shopkeeper, and when the trembling cit asked what he wanted, replied, “A bawbee.” This modest request being instantly complied with, they parted the best of friends. The demands of others did not rise beyond a pinch of snuff, and one hopes it was not required in an equally heroic manner. The day of Charles’s entry, his father as King and himself as Regent were proclaimed at the Cross by the heralds in their antique garb and with their antique rites, and conspicuous among the attendant throng was the beautiful Mrs. Murray of Broughton on horseback with a drawn sword, covered with white cockades, the conspicuous Stuart emblem. With her it was the one supreme moment of a life that was presently obscured in shadows. Her husband’s reputation as traitor still lay in the future. You remember how Scott’s father, Whig as he was, dashed to pieces the cup that Murray had touched, so that neither he nor any of his family might ever use it? At that same Cross, not many months after, the standards of the clans and of Charles were burnt by the hangman and Tron men or sweeps by the order of Cumberland, the least generous of foes. In the crowd there must have been many who had gazed on the other ceremonial. What a complete circuit fortune’s wheel had made! Amidst the festivities of Holyrood those things were not foreseen. Then came Prestonpans, with many a legend grave or gay. I will not repeat in detail those almost threadbare stories of the Highland estimation of the plunder: how that chocolate was Johnny Cope’s salve, and the watch that stopped was a beast that had died, and a pack-saddle was a fortune, and so forth. Here is perhaps the quaintest anecdote of misadventure. Two volunteers, one of them destined to the bench as Lord Gardenstone, were detailed to watch the precincts of Musselburgh. They were both convivial “cusses”: they knew every tavern in Edinburgh and every change-house in the far and near suburbs: they remembered a little den noted for its oysters and its sherry—possibly an odd combination, but the stomachs of young Edinburgh were invincible. At any rate, they made themselves merry. But there were limbs of the law, active or “stickit,” on the other side, and one as he prowled about espied the pair, and seized them without difficulty as they tried to negotiate that narrow bridge which still crosses the Esk at Musselburgh. They were dragged to the camp at Duddingston, and were about to be hanged as spies, but escaped through the intercession of still another lawyer, Colquhoun Grant, an adherent of the Prince. This same Colquhoun was a remarkable person, and distinguished himself greatly at Preston. He seized the horse of an English officer and pursued a great body of dragoons with awe-inspiring Gaelic curses. On, on went the panic-stricken mob, with Grant at their heels so close that he entered the Netherbow with them, and was just behind them at the Castle. He stuck his dirk into the gate, rode slowly down the High Street, ordered the Netherbow Port to be thrown open, and the frightened attendants were only too glad to see the back of him. In after years he beat his sword to a ploughshare, or rather a pen, and became a highly prosperous Writer to the Signet of Auld Reekie. It is related by Kay that Ross of Pitcarnie, a less fortunate Jacobite, used to extract “loans” from him by artful references to his exploits at Preston and Falkirk. The cowardice of the regular troops is difficult to account for, but there was more excuse for the volunteers, of whom many comical stories are told. The best is that of John Maclure the writing-master, who wound a quire of writing-paper round his manly bosom, on which he had written in his best hand, with all the appropriate flourishes, “This is the body of John Maclure, pray give it a Christian burial.” However, when once the Prince was in, the citizens preserved a strict neutrality. Of sentimental Jacobites like Allan Ramsay we hear not a word: they lay low and said nothing. What could they do but wait upon time? One clergyman was bold enough, at any rate, namely, the Rev. Neil M‘Vicar, incumbent of St. Cuthbert’s, who kept on praying for King George during the whole time of the Jacobite occupation: “As for this young man who has come among us seeking an earthly crown, we beseech Thee that he may obtain what is far better, a heavenly one.” Archibald Stewart was then Provost, and he was said to have Jacobite leanings. His house was by the West Bow, and here, it was rumoured, he gave a secret banquet to Charles and some of his chiefs. The folk in the Castle heard of this, and sent down a party of soldiers to seize the Prince. Just as they were entering the house the guests disappeared into a cabinet, which was really an entrance to a trap stair, and so got off. The story is obviously false. Stewart was afterwards tried for neglect of duty during the Rebellion, and the proceedings, which lasted an inordinate time—the longest then on record—resulted in his triumphant acquittal. The Government had never omitted a damning piece of evidence like this—if the thing had happened. One comic and instructive touch will pave my way to the next episode. A certain Mrs. Irvine died in Edinburgh in the year 1837 at the age of ninety-nine years or so, if the story be true which makes her a young child in the ’45. She was with her nurse in front of the Palace, where a Highlander was on guard: she was much attracted by his kilt, she advanced and seized it, and even pulled it up a little way. The nurse was in a state of terror, but the soldier only smiled and said a few kind words to the child. The moral of this story is that till the Highlanders took the city the kilt was a practically unknown garment to the folk in the capital. Six years before Mrs. Irvine died, to wit in 1831, she saw the setting up at the intersection of George Street and Hanover Street of the imposing statue by Chantrey which commemorates the visit of George IV. to Scotland. This visit was from 14th August to 29th August 1822. Sir Walter Scott stage-managed the business, and Lockhart has pointed out how odd the whole thing was. Scott was a Lowlander, and surely better read than any other in the history of his country, and who better knew that the history of Scotland is the history of the Lowlands, that Edinburgh was a Lowland capital, that the Highlands were of no account, save as disturbing forces? Yet, blinded by the picturesque effect, he ran the show as if the Highlands and the Highlands alone were Scotland. Chieftains were imported thence, Scott was dressed as a Highlander, George was dressed as a Highlander, Sir William Curtis, London alderman, was dressed as a Highlander: the whole thing trembled on the verge of burlesque. The silver St. Andrew’s cross that Scott presented to the King when he landed had a Gaelic inscription! The King, not to be outdone, called for a bottle of Highland whisky and pledged Sir Walter there and then, and Sir Walter begged the glass that had touched the Royal lips, for an heirloom no doubt. He got it, thrust it into his coat-tail pocket, and presently reduced it to fragments in a moment of forgetfulness by sitting on it. There, fortunately, the thing was left: they did not try to reconstitute it, after the fashion of the Portland Vase in the British Museum. George IV. had a fine if somewhat corpulent figure (Leigh Hunt wrote to Archibald Constable at an earlier period that he had suffered imprisonment for not thinking the Prince Regent slender and laudable), and no doubt in the Highland garb he made a “very pretty man,” but the knight from London was even more corpulent, Byron sings in The Age of Bronze:

“Faar’s yer speen?” (Where’s your spoon?) said an envious and mocking Aberdeen bailie, to the no small discomfiture of the London knight, as he strutted to and fro, believing that his costume was accurate in every detail. Lockhart hints that possibly Scott invented the story to soothe the King’s wounded feelings. On the 24th of August the Provost and Magistrates of Edinburgh entertained the King in Parliament House to a great banquet. The King gave one toast, “The Chieftains and Clans of Scotland, and prosperity to the Land of Cakes.” He also attended a performance of Rob Roy at the theatre. Carlyle was in Edinburgh at the time, and fled in horror from what he called the “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms,” but everybody else seemed pleased, and voted the thing a great success. No doubt it gave official stamp to what is perhaps still the ordinary English view of Scotland. The odd thing is that Scott himself never grasped the Highland character—at least, where has he drawn one for us? 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. The Lord Provost and Bailies ought to have met them at Canonmills to present the keys of the city, but they were “conspicuous by their absence,” and the Royal party had to go to Dalkeith (like George the Fourth, they put up for the time in the Duke of Buccleuch’s huge palace there). The local wits waxed merry; they swore that my Lord Provost and his fellows had over-slept themselves, and a parody of a well-known song rang unpleasantly in civic ears: