Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets. Mrs. Oliphant
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are told, with readiness, certain of the greatest nobles in the kingdom being appointed in their various districts to the office of collecting. That the Church should have taken her share in the payment of this tax says much for the loyalty of the Scotch priesthood and their unity with the people at this crisis of the national history. In the second year, however, grumblings arose. It is comprehensible that a nation unaccustomed to this pressure should respond to it in a moment of enthusiasm, yet become uneasy under the repetition when the enthusiasm had probably died away, especially if a fear arose that it might become permanent. King James, however, adopted a course not at all usual with governments when the power to exact has once been placed in their hands. When the popular murmur came to his ears he stopped at once the unpopular demand. How the paying of the ransom was carried on, and how the maintenance of the King's state we need not inquire. The Crown lands were no doubt extensive still. Some years later another experiment of the same kind was made; the new tax, however, being only twopence in the pound, and its object the payment of expenses of a mission sent to France to negotiate a marriage between the baby-princess Margaret and the equally juvenile dauphin—an object which does not appear to have appealed to the sympathies of the people, since we are told that it was the cause of immediate murmurs, the King not only stopped the unpopular tax but returned the money to those who had paid it—a most admirable but seldom followed example.
The curious system afterwards employed by all the Scots kings of tours or "raids" of justice throughout the kingdom seems to have originated in James's energetic reign, but he carried not only the officers of the law, but occasionally his entire Parliament with him, moving about to the different centres of Scotland with great impartiality. Sometimes they met at Edinburgh, in the Great Parliament Hall in the Castle, and made "many good laws if they could have been kept," says the chronicler; sometimes at Perth, a favourite residence of the King; and on one memorable occasion so far north as Inverness, where, impatient of continual disquietude in the Highlands, James went to chastise the caterans and bring them within the reach of law. This he did with a severe and unsparing hand, seizing a number of the most eminent chiefs who had been invited to meet him there, and executing certain dangerous individuals among them without mercy. These summary measures would seem to have borne immediate fruit in the almost complete subjugation of the Highlands. But it was hard to reckon with such a restless element as the clans, and hanging and heading were very ineffectual measures among people with whom "another for Hector" was the simplest suggestion of natural law.
It was after this stern Parliament of Inverness that there occurred at Edinburgh one of the most curious and picturesque scenes that it is possible to imagine. One of the chiefs tried at that assize was the greatest and most important of all, the Lord of the Isles, sometimes called Donald and sometimes Alexander by the chroniclers, who on his promise to amend his ways, and no longer harbour caterans or head forays, was, no doubt out of respect for his almost princely position, set at liberty. But no sooner was the fierce chieftain set free, "within a few days after," says the chronicler, than he took and burnt the town of Inverness, in which the Parliament had been held, and showed his impenitence by an utter abuse of the mercy accorded to him. When, however, he heard that the King himself with all the forces of the kingdom was coming against him, Donald hastily disbanded his men and took refuge in the watery fastnesses of his islands: and it would seem that he must have felt the tide of national sentiment to be against him, and his power not equal to make any stand against all the force of peaceful and law-abiding Scotland under the energetic new King. The wily Highlander made his submission in the way which, no doubt, he thought most likely to disarm authority and gain exemption. He choose Easter day, the greatest of religious festivals, for his appearance as a penitent, and in the middle of the service in the Chapel of Holyrood appeared suddenly, almost without clothing, and knelt down before the King "where he was sittand at his orison," praying for grace in the name of Him who rose from the dead that day. So strange an interruption in the midst of all the glories of the Easter mass throws a strange and wild light upon the varieties of national life in Scotland. That half-savage figure, with plaid and weapons cast aside, defenceless, at the King's mercy, in all the primitive abandonment yet calculation of early patriarchal times; while all that the art and culture of a splendid age could do to give magnificence to the most imposing ceremonial of the Church surrounded this strange apparition, the incense rising, the music pealing, the Court in all its glory of flashing jewels and splendid stuffs filling the lofty area. Like some wild god of the mists suddenly gleaming through the fragrant smoke between the bishop's white robes and the kneeling King, what a strange interruption to the mass! The King, at the request of the Queen we are told, gave him his life, as the adjuration addressed to him and all the force of the surroundings gave James little choice but to do; for he could not have offended the sentiment of his people by refusing the boon which was demanded in that Name, however doubtful he might be of the expediency of granting it. "Then the King began to muse," says Boece. He must have been devout indeed to have been able to return to the course of the service with the Islesman before him on his knees, and all that wild half of the kingdom, with its dangerous habits and fierce tribal laws, thus suddenly made visible—a spectre which had often before troubled the King's peace. James had not to learn for the first time that apparent submission from such a suppliant did not necessarily mean any real change, and must have thoroughly felt the hollowness of that histrionic appearance and all the difficulties which beset his own action in the matter. The conclusion was, that the life of the Lord of the Isles was spared, but he was committed to safe keeping in the strong Castle of Tantallon, with, however, the unfailing consequence, that his brother took the field with all his caterans in his stead.
James reigned in Scotland for thirteen years—a reign full of commotion and movement, by which many in high place were humiliated, the spoils of the feudal tyrants taken from them, and the wrongs of the suffering commonalty redressed, proceedings which procured for the King many enemies among the nobility before the force of popular sentiment was strong enough to balance this opposition by its support. He began in Scotland that struggle which for some time had been going on in England against the power of the nobles, who were still in the north something like a number of petty kings ruling in their own right, making little account of national laws, and regarding the King with defiance as almost a hostile power. One of the greatest risks of such a struggle is that it raises now and then a fiery spirit stung by the sense of injury and the rage of deprivation into a wild passion of revenge which bursts every restraint. The Grahams of Strathearn in the north had fallen specially under the rectifying process of James's new laws of property: and out of this house there suddenly arose the tragic figure of an avenger whose brief but terrible career occupies but a single page in history, yet contains all the elements of a fatal drama. Sir Robert Graham, of whose antecedents there is little record, was not the head of the house, but a younger brother of daring character, and one of those fanatics of race to whom the glory of their house is a religion. The first we hear of him is a sudden appearance in the Parliament of January 1435, when he made a fiery and violent speech, ending by an impeachment of the King himself for injustice and robbery. Such an assault would find little support in the public assembly of the States, in the awe of the royal presence, and Graham had to escape for his life, finding means of flight into the Highlands, the ever-ready refuge for rebels. There he launched wild threats against James, which the King, probably well accustomed to missiles of the kind, paid little attention to. The monarch was warned too, we are told, by another wild apparition, which suddenly appears out of the mists for this purpose—a Highland witch of the order of those who drove Macbeth's ambition to frenzy, but whose mission now was to warn James of the mischief brewing against him. The King was brave and careless, used to the continual presence of danger, keeping his Christmas merrily at Perth with all the sports and entertainments with which it was possible to cheat the gloomy weather, and made little but additional mirth both of the prophecy and the threats. Evidently the Court found pleasure in the fair city on the Tay. They were still lingering there, having taken up their residence in the monastery of the Black Friars, at the end of February. In Scotland as elsewhere the great religious houses seem to have been the best adapted to give hospitality to kings. It was long after this date before anything that could be called an independent royal residence was built at Holyrood itself: for generations the King and Court were but guests in the stately abbey, which was, like the monastery of the Black Friars, so convenient and commodious a house both for entertainment and shelter that its great chambers became the natural, as they were the most stately and pleasant, lodging that