I 9 8 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. verse split through both halves, insomuch that there were the Old-Light Burghers and the New-Light Burghers, the Old-Light Antiburghers, and the New-Light Antiburghers. Each protested in a general way against Popery and Prelacy, but was very vehement against the three quarters of what had once been itself, reserving its special anathe- mas for that from which it had just separated. 1 A deal of curious matter about the disputes among the Scots Protestants in France will be found in M. Michel's second volume. It was in reference to their contentious- ness that Andrew Rivet, a native of Poitou, himself a pretty eager controversialist, used an expression which has come into household use in the shape of the prcefervi- dum ingenium Scotomm, a slight variation of the original. 2 I propose now to leave the religious bodies themselves, and glance at a topic which will bring up the nature of the places in which they worshipped. Architecture, especially if it be of stone, is the most enduring memorial of the social conditions of any country. The buildings scattered over the surface of Scotland attest to this day 1 The Scots are called a priest - ridden people, yet their most esteemed jests are against the clergy, and the vehemence of the native sectarianism. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of competi- tion. When I name the late Alexander Stewart Logan, the Sheriff of Forfar, I will recall a sad remembrance of many a hearty laugh. He was a man of strange grotesque genius, and held a large social place ; yet he has left no mark behind him, save in the genial pages of Dr John Brown. Logan had good opportunities of picking up such stories, as he was the son of a Relief minister. One of them I remember, a very curious example of how far down sectarianism can go. Some boys were rioting in a Burgher church whether Old or New Light not known. The person in charge of the building having seized one of them, a shrill youthful cry comes from a corner " Hit him hard hit him hard ; his father's an ^w/z'-burgher ! " 2 After alluding to the acridness of the Scots controversies, Rivetus says, "Id praeterea observandum est, siquse durissimis persecutionum temporibus a Scotis et Anglis nonnullis temere scripta fuerunt, ea posse imputari non tam religioni quam nationum illarum, Scoticanse prsesertim fervido ingenio et ad audendum prompto ; quod tantum valde mitigatum fuisse accensa veritatis evangelicae luce, ex eo constat quod ex centum quinque regibus suis, usque ad Mariam, tres exaut- orarant, quinque expulerunt, et triginta duos necarunt." ' Riveti Jesuita Vapulans,' ch. xiii. 14. ARCHITECTURE. 199 with extraordinary precision the long severance from England and attachment to France. We have seen that when the Normans came to Scotland, they left their mark there, as they did everywhere, in feudal castles, bearing special types of the architecture of the period at which they penetrated so far northwards. These are just like the English castles of the same period. The churches, too, built before and during the war of independence, are the brethren of the English-Norman, and first pointed. The existing remains, as well as the local histories, show that the war and the poverty it caused throughout the land brought castle and church building to a stop for many a year, and when it was resumed, it diverged towards the example of France. For instance, among those re- mains of church architecture in Scotland which have not been adulterated by bad restorations, there are no in- stances of the Tudor, third pointed, or perpendicular style, so prevalent everywhere in England. This style came into use in England in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and continued until it was gradually absorbed by the revival of the classical forms. It has been called oc- casionally the Tudor or the Elizabethan style ; but these names were applied to it rather in its application to civil than to ecclesiastical buildings. Mr Rickman gave it the name of perpendicular, from the propensity of all the lines, whether those of pillars or of mullions, to go straight up and meet some arch or transom, instead of spreading themselves in the easy floral forms of the preceding age. It has also been called the third pointed, because the two epochs which preceded had got the name of the first and second pointed; and it is sometimes called depressed, because the favourite form of arch adapted to it has the ogee shape, as if it were the old pointed arch pressed down at the apex. Lastly, it is called the degenerate Gothic ; but people sometimes object to the applicability of the term, when they remember that Henry VII.'s Chapel, the hall of Christ Church, and many of the orna ments both of Oxford and Cambridge, have been built after this style. It will make the exclusion of this style from Scotland more distinct, to mention the one building THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Withdrawn .- BY JOHN-HILL URTON H C L M, L-L-D AUTHOR OF A HISTORY OF SCOTLAND THE BOOK HUNTER* THE REICN OF QbEE-V.Ahfttf ETC, WILLIAM BL-ACKWOOD: SONS : EDINBURGH LONDON S&*& MDCCCC a : ,-' , V 1 : ADVERTISEMENT. THE growth of this volume is similar to that of its predecessor, ' The Book - Hunter,' which was received with unexpected favour. The Author had at various times, through peri- odical literature and otherwise, offered some sug- gestions on the existence and character of certain unexplored recesses in historical literature. He found himself backed by friendly advisers in the opinion that it would be worth while to go over the ground more systematically, bring his suggestions to clearer conclusions, and see how far they could be assorted in systematic groups. The project was rendered all the more attractive by the new light thrown into corners previously obscure by the noble collection of documents issued under the direction of the Master of the Rolls in this country, and the investigations of accomplished archaeologists abroad. The Author found that the result could neither be reached in so brief a time nor packed in so small b VI ADVERTISEMENT. a compass as he expected, since new vistas, ever opening up, lured him further on. The book thus greatly changed its nature after the title had been announced. But although the first part, given up to an account of ' The Ancient League with France/ is passed before ' The Scot Abroad ' strictly commences, yet the title is not so illogical as it may seem, since the whole book refers to the relations of Scotland and Scotsmen with foreign countries. To go abroad merely for the purpose of dealing with one's countrymen dispersed in foreign lands, may appear as egregious an instance of nationality as any of those which the Author has hunted up for the amusement of his reader. He pleads as his excuse that, having devoted the time at his disposal to the reconstruction, from the beginning, of the History of Scotland in its present received shape, he has been tempted to leave from time to time the beaten road, and follow up the nearest openings into districts where he could wander at large, free from the responsibilities for exhaustive complete- ness which attend on history-making. He will be glad if the good-natured reader takes his offering in the same spirit, and treats it as a holiday ram- ble through some secluded scenes in history and literature. CONTENTS. THE ANCIENT LEAGUE WITH FRANCE. CHAPTER I. PAGE The Charlemagne and Achaius question settled The War of Independence The established quarrel with Scotland and England Its consequence in the League with France Wallace's share in the transaction The old treaties Social life in France during the Hundred Years' War The Con- stable Buchan The battles of Bauge, Crevant, and Verneuil The establishment of the Scots Guard Some of their feats, ....... 1-40 CHAPTER IT. Personal anecdotes of the Scots immigrants The Wolf of Badenoch's son The Albany and Darnley Stewarts The Hamiltons and Douglases Investment of the Scotch Duke of Touraine Notices of Scotsmen settled in France, and the families founded by them The settlement of the Scots com- pared with that of the Normans, . . . 41-73 CHAPTER III. The other side of the reciprocity Contrast between the Scot in France and Le Francais en Ecosse An ambassador snubbed French chevaliers treated to a Border raid The Admiral Vienne's expedition, and how it fared with him and viii CONTENTS. his followers The gladiatorial spectacle on the Inch of Perth Ferdinand of Spain's dealings with Scotland Rule of Albany, and its results A story of ecclesiastical patron- age The foreign friar of Tongueland The slaughter of La Bastie, ....... 74-105 CHAPTER IV. The birth of Queen Mary French writers on her life and character Her influence on the fate of Europe Catherine of Medici Their strife Mary's bequest to Philip The ap- parent supremacy of the Old League The underworkings that were destroying it French government in Scotland Reaction Recent revelations The Reformation in Scot- land, and how it came about The winding-up, . 106-160 CHAPTER V. Relics of the League in Scots habits and practices The law The Bonnet Vert and the Dyvour's Habit The States-Gen- eral and the Three Estates The Huguenots and the Cove- nanters Religious architecture The chateau and the castle The Eguimene and the Hogmanay The Fetes des Foux and the Daft Days French education and manners, 161-223 THE SCOT ABROAD. CHAPTER I. THE SCHOLAR AND THE AUTHOR. Justice to Ireland and her monks John Duns The Scotists and the Thomists Hector Boece and the fabulous histories Buchanan Thomas Dempster Specimens of the ardent nationality of Scots authors The effect of this on Scotland's position in history John Knox and his followers The writers on the other side Ecclesiastical squabbles A ramble among miscellaneous authors Scotsmen in for- eign universities Jurists Medical men The Aberdeen school, ... . 227-314 CONTEXTS. IX CHAPTER II. THE SOLDIER. The Dugald Dalgettys The divisions at home carried out abroad Scotsmen on both sides of the Thirty Years' War Monro Grey Hepburn The Leslies The Jacobite refu- geesThe Keith family The Earl Marischal The Field- Marshal The Seven Years' War and Frederick the Great Scotsmen in Russian adventures Patrick Gordon in search of employment His eminence in the Russian service Peter the Great Admiral Greig, .... 315*377 CHAPTER III. THE STATESMAN. Reputations, living and dead Gustavus Adolphus's Secretary- at-War Sir William Lockhart Lord Stair John Law William Paterson, ..... 378-435 CHAPTER IV. THE ARTIST. Glimpses of early art George Jamesone and his contempor- aries Aikman Hamilton Allan Ramsay Martin Jacob More Runciman Sir Robert Strange Early architects James Gibbs, ...... 436-477 INDEX, ....... 478 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE WITH FRANCE A SCOTS GUARD. THE ANCIENT LEAGUE WITH FRANCE. CHAPTER I. THE CHARLEMAGNE AND ACHAIUS QUESTION SETTLED THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE THE ESTABLISHED QUARREL WITH SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND ITS CONSEQUENCE IN THE LEAGUE WITH FRANCE WALLACE'S SHARE IN THE TRANSACTION THE OLD TREATIES SOCIAL LIFE IN FRANCE DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR THE CONSTABLE BUCHAN THE BATTLES OF BAUGE, CREVANT, AND VERNEUIL THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SCOTS GUARD SOME OF THEIR FEATS. I HAVE long thought that the story of the old League between France and Scotland is so significant of national character, is so fruitful in romantic personal incident, and held so powerful an influence on the destinies of Europe, that an account of it could not fail of interest in the hands of any one content merely to tell the facts and briefly explain the political conditions out of which they arose. Its own proper interest is so deep and true as to gain rather than lose when its history is stripped of the remote antiquity and other fabulous decorations by which enthusiastic national historians have attempted to en- hance it. We are told how the Emperor Charlemagne, having resolved to establish a vast system of national or imperial education, looked around for suitable professors A 2 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. to teach in his universities ; and perceiving Scotland to be the most learned of nations, and the most likely to supply him with t\\f-. r.oraoiodity he desired, he forthwith entered into a league with Achaius, the then ruling mon- arch of tljcat. 'ancient kingdom. Such is the account of the origin of the League with France, as told by Boece and our other fabulous chroniclers, and courteously ac- cepted on the side of France by Mezeray and his breth- ren, who seem gladly to welcome so valuable a piece of authentic information. No doubt one finds, on minute inquiry, that, contemporary with the reign of the Charle- magne of France and the Kaiser Karl of the Germans, there flourished a chief or a king, if you will called Eochy or Auchy, holding sway over some considerable portion of the Celtic people of the west, and probably living in a sort of kraal built of mud and wattles. But that the Emperor ever knew of his existence is not very probable ; and instead of receiving an embassy from Charlemagne as a contemporary monarch seeking the friendship of an honoured and powerful fellow-sovereign, Eochy doubtless owed it to his own insignificance, and his distance from the centre of European power, that he was not called upon to acknowledge the supreme authority of him who had resumed the empire of the world. In reality, it spoils the interest and significance of the alliance to attempt to trace it further back than those political conditions which, four hundred years later, gave it efficient purpose. These were the war of independence against the dominion of England, and the contemporary claims of the English kings on the succession to the throne of France. These concurring sources of contest rendered the League the most natural thing in the world. It enabled the kings of the house of Valois to fight their battle on British ground without sending an army there ; it provided to the Scots, whenever they could safely leave their homes, an opportunity for striking a blow at the enemy and oppressor of their land. To see the influence of this adjustment, not only on the nations immediately concerned, but on Europe at large, let us look a little more closely into details. Tak- EARLY SCOTLAND. 3 ing any old-established state, with a fixed natural boundary and distinct institutions of its own, it is difficult to realise in the mind the same area of territory and its people at a time when neither the boundaries nor the institutions existed. Our natural indolence makes us lean on these specialties as a means of obtaining clearness at an easy price to the intellect; and rather than leave them and grope at the truth, we carry them back step by step, until they have gone infinite ages beyond their real beginning. There is retribution for this as for other instances where indolent reliance supersedes independent judgment. Those of our historians who have had too much honesty to go headlong into the accepted fables of their prede- cessors, have had cruel difficulties in identifying ancient Scotland. At one time they find the territories of some Saxon king stretching to the Tay ; at another, the King of Scots reigns to the Humber, or farther. It would have saved them a world of trouble and anxiety to come at once to the conclusion that Scotland was nowhere that the separate kingdom marked off against England by a distinct boundary on the physical globe, as well as by a moral boundary of undying hatred, did not then exist. A common language stretched along from north to south, varying perhaps in its substance and tone by im- perceptible degrees in the ears of the travelling stranger, as the language of each of the two countries now does. Unfortunately, this simple view brings us to the verge of a perilous controversy. There are some topics which the temper and reason of the human race seem not to have been made strong enough to encounter, so invari- ably do these break down when the topics in question are started. Of such is the question, To which of the great classes of European languages did that of the people called Picts belong? The contest, like a duel with revolvers over a table, has been rendered more awful by the narrowness of the field of battle, since some time ago the world possessed just one word, or piece of a word, said to be Pictish, and now one of the most accomplished antiquarians of our day has added another. 4 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. Keeping clear of this scene of peril, let us content our- selves with the obvious fact, that at an early age the eastern and northern parts of what now is Scotland were peopled by a race of very pure Teutonic blood and tongue. They formed a portion of that brotherhood of Saxon states, among which the amalgamations and split- tings, and the drifting-in of fresh swarms among old settlers, make so complex and confused a web of Anglo- Saxon history. It would happen, in these gains and losses of territory, that some ambitious Bretwalda of the south would extend his dominion or his influence far northward ; and from such incidents the pedants of the feudal law, who could not look beyond their own forms and nomenclature into the conditions of an age when there was neither feudality nor a Scotland to be feudal- ised, invented a feudal superiority in the Saxon kings over the kingdom of Scotland. The conquest of the south, of course, changed its position towards the north. England became Nor- manised, while Scotland not only retained her old Teu- tonic character, but became a place of refuge for the Saxon fugitives. The remnants of Harold's family the old royal race of England came among the other fugi- tives to Scotland, and took up their position there as an exiled court awaiting their restoration, and looking to their brethren of Scotland to aid them in effecting it. At the head of these princely exiles was Edward the ^Ethel- ing. His sister, the renowned St Margaret, married Malcolm the King of the Scots, who thus became more than ever the hope of the Saxon party. The names of their children have a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon sound: Edgar, the eldest, who succeeded to the throne; Edward, named after his maternal relation the Confessor; Edmond, and Ethelred. King Malcolm, in his marriage, is not to be altogether viewed as having, with chivalrous generosity, made a home for a persecuted princess in the only way in which such an arrangement could be decorously ac- complished. He had hopes of solid results from the brilliant connection, and made a bold effort to render them good by an invasion of England ; for there can be THE NORMANS IN SCOTLAND. 5 little doubt that Harding is right when he says of that fierce raid into Cumberland which ended in the battle of the Standard, that " King Malcolm of Scotland warred in England for his wife's right, pretending that she was right heir of England." During the interval of two hundred years between their invasion of England and their invasion of Scotland, the Normans had been gradually extending their social influence northward. As the flower of chivalry and the leaders of fashion they were personally popular in Scotland, where many of them became favourites at court, and formed rich matrimonial alliances. It is pos- sible that the wise men of the day may have deemed it a good policy to plant in the country offshoots of that mighty race who seemed destined to rule mankind wher- ever they went ; but if they thought that they would thus establish a Norman aristocracy, who in time would have a patriotic interest in the soil, and protect it from the designs of the aggrandising kings of England, their policy in the course of events turned out to be a failure. In the meantime the country saw chiefly the bright side of the Norman character ; for it is observable that the settlers had not so deeply rooted themselves as to cover the land with those castles which are everywhere the most remarkable and enduring memorials of their presence. Fortresses, no doubt, existed before their day, but these were generally mounds or ramparts, within which people inhabited open dwellings of wood, turf, or wattles. The Norman was the first to plant the feudal castle a building comprising within its four thick stone walls a rich man's dwelling, a fortress, and a prison, signi- fying that he who built it intended to consume the fruit of the soil, to make war upon his enemies, and to ad- minister his own justice among the people. The castles scattered over Europe not only show how far the Nor- mans have penetrated, as the shingle on the beach marks the height of the tide; but their various architectural types indicate, like those of fossils in geology, the histori- cal period of deposit. The annalists tell us how, after William's arrival, England was covered with Norman 6 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. strongholds ; and that country is rich in remains of the earliest type of castle the great square block, destitute of the later adjunct of flanking works, and the round arch, marking the lingering predominance of Roman forms. If there ever were castles of this sort in Scotland, they were at least so rare that no specimen now remains at least I can find none after diligent search. On the other hand, of the later and richer type of feudal architec- ture the pointed Gothic buildings with outworks, pecu- liar to the reigns of the Edwards there are many fine specimens. The same phenomena may be seen in Ire- land and Wales. Over all three countries the tide of Norman conquest had rolled; and though in Scotland the tide was driven back, it left these characteristic relics behind. Luckily for England, and for the liberties of the world, there were elements of national strength which in the end worked the tyranny of Norman rule out of the constitu- tion. Of the misery which the Saxon people had to endure under the earliest Plantagenet monarchs we have scanty traces, for such things are not with safety com- mitted to writing ; but what we have is sufficiently ex- pressive. Perhaps the following, taken from that sober unobtrusive narrative, the * Saxon Chronicle,' may suffice for this occasion : " They cruelly oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle-works. When the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. Then took they those men that they imagined had any property, both by night and by day, peasant men and women, and put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with unutterable torture, for never were martyrs so tortured as they were. They hanged them up by the feet, and smoked them with foul smoke; they hanged them by the thumbs, or by the head, and hung fires on their feet ; they put knotted strings about their heads, and writhed them so that it went to the brain. They put them in dungeons in which were adders and snakes and toads, and killed them so. Some they put in a ' crucet hus ' that is, in a chest that was short and narrow and THE NORMANS IN ENGLAND. 7 shallow and put sharp stones therein, and pressed the man therein, so that they brake all his limbs. In many of the castles were (instruments called) a ' loathly and grim ; ' these were neck-bonds, of which two or three men had enough to bear one. It was so made, that is (it was) fastened to a beam ; and they put a sharp iron about the man's throat and his neck, so that he could not in any direction sit, or lie, or sleep, but must bear all that iron. Many thousands they killed with hunger. I neither can nor may tell all the wounds or all the tortures which they inflicted on wretched men in this land ; and that lasted the nineteen winters while Stephen was king, and ever it was worse and worse. They laid imposts on the towns continually, and called it ' censerie.' When the wretched men had no more to give, they robbed and burned all the towns, so that thou mightest well go all a day's journey and thou shouldst never find a man sitting in a town, or the land tilled. Then was corn dear, and flesh, and cheese, and butter ; for there was none in the land. Wretched men died of hunger ; some went seeking alms who at one while were rich men ; some fled out of the land." l This is set down to the reign of Stephen, just about the time of the battle of the Standard, and about half-way between the conquest of England and the war of resistance in Scotland. Seeing this going on more or less for two hundred years, it is not wonderful that the Scots, contin- uing and flourishing under their old Saxon institutions, were grimly resolved to fight to the death against such a rule. The representative of this national feeling was the renowned William Wallace. Of him so much old romance and modern nonsense has been uttered, that cautious people are apt to shun his name in history, as, like Arthur, Merlin, Roland, and Odin, that of a mythical person not susceptible of articulate identification. But few historical figures come out so distinctly and grandly when stripped of the theatrical properties. He was a skilful and brave general, an accomplished politician, and a public man of unstained faith and undying zeal. ' 'Saxon Chronicle:' Record Edition, ii. 230, 231. 8 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. Nor is it at all necessary, in vindicating his fame, utterly to blacken those who would not co-operate with him. The Normans, who had acquired recent wealth and rank in Scotland, were not zealous in standing up for the independence of the people of the country and their protection from Norman tyranny how could they be expected to be so? One name among them has been consigned to eminent historical infamy, and for centuries has borne the burden of the ardent hatred of all true- hearted Scots the elder Baliol. I remember our being taught at school carefully to avoid confounding his name with another specially dedicated to infamy the Belial of Scripture. It is lucky for those who thus lie under historical ban that they are generally beyond the con- dition of suffering, either in body or spirit, from the execrations heaped upon their memory. And if we should say that even the fame of the departed has a right to be protected from injustice to receive due praise if its owner has done service to mankind, and at least quiet oblivion if he has done no harm a more easy consola- tion for the injustice done comes in the reflection that, under the same name, the demon of the historians is a different being from the harmless commonplace man who owned the name in the flesh. So this Baliol, while in history he stands forth as the foul betrayer of his country's independence as traitor to the vile allegiance he had sold himself to as guilty of every political crime which historical magniloquence can express was, in the flesh, a very ordinary sort of man, who, in agreeing to do homage for a territory to the monarch who had preferred him to it, acted on much the same principle as the holder of a snug office at the present day who sides with the statesman who has appointed him to it. And if he was at one time, under sore temptation, guilty of tampering with his allegiance, he did the best he could afterwards to put matters right. Looking to the social and political conditions of him and his class, it would be difficult to find a proposition that would have seemed more pre- posterous to them than that they should sacrifice the prospects of a good fief for the preservation either of a THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. 9 separate nationality or the liberties of a truculent, self- willed people. The Bruces themselves belonged to the same set ; but ere the grandson of the original claimant gained his great victory, the lapse of a quarter of a cen- tury of animosity may have nourished a sense of national- ity towards the people for whom he fought; and even if he was, after all, only the Norman adventurer, who saw a grand career of ambition as the leader of a people who would not be enslaved, he fairly won the crown he wore. The battle of Bannockburn, in being the conclusive act which relieved Scotland from the domination of the English King, became also the crisis at which France and Scotland became united in fast friendship. This friend- ship had been growing during the war of independence, but it could exist as a permanent European institution only after that was over. And at this point arises one of those occasions for rendering history distinct by unravel- ling minor confusions, which sometimes bring those who do the work of unravelling under suspicion as lovers of paradox. We shall all the more clearly understand the nature and tendency of the alliance by starting with the fact that, before a thorough external union with France, Scotland cast forth certain French characteristics which had found their way into the elements of her political and social condition. The rule of the Normans was the rule of a race who had made themselves French ; however rapidly, among a kindred Teutonic people, they were returning to their old Norse character. Of the Norman families which had established themselves in the country, Scotland retained but a small minority after the war of independence, for the obvious reason that the great majority had cast their lots with their natural leader, the King of England. The topographical antiquary, tracing the history of the early ownership of estates in Scotland, sees the change expressed with a distinctness plainer than any historical narrative. The early charters are rich in such a courtly Norman nomenclature as De Quincey, De Vere, De Vipont, D'Umfraville, Mortimer, and De Coucy. When order is restored, and the lands are again recorded as having lords, there are Johnstons, Bells, Armstrongs, 10 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. Scots, Kerrs, Browns, and suchlike, telling at once of their native Saxon origin. The loss of their estates, indeed, was a substantial grievance to the Norman holders, who would not relinquish them without a struggle j and in their effort to get them back again, under Edward Baliol, whom they had set up as King of Scotland for that purpose, they were very nearly suc- cessful in crushing the newly-bought independence of the land. Thus the extinction of the English rule had at first the effect of removing French elements out of Scotland. In England, the language of France, being the language of the Court, became that of the law, in which it has left to our own day some motley relics, remaining imbedded in it like grotesque organic remains. If, along with the influx of Normans, their language may have at one time been creeping into legal practice in Scotland, the efforts of the Edwards to enforce the English forms of law throughout the country made their technicalities especi- ally odious. All the way from the Border to the High- land line, the people, high and low, came to speak in very pure Teutonic ; for it is curious that the language of the Lowland Scots has not received the slightest tinge from close contact with the Celtic. Whatever it may have been among the common people, the literary lan- guage of England became afflicted with Gallicisms ; and so it came to pass that Barbour sang the liberation of his country from the English kings in purer English, accord- ing to the canon of the present day, than his contem- porary Chaucer, whose more finished verses are not so easily read by Englishmen as those of the Aberdonian. England in the end outgrew these French elements, but Scotland cast them forth at once. And we shall find that, however close became the intimacy of the two nations, and however powerful the influence of the greater on the destinies of the less, the symptoms of that influence were ever external and superficial it never penetrated to the national heart. After the expulsion of the English or, more properly, of the Normans from the north, it becomes a key-note in French history that England is to WALLACE. 1 1 be fought from Scotland ; while, on the English side of European history, the response is that everything must be right on the Border before it will be prudent to send an expedition to the Continent. When we have a clear hold on those great national conditions of which the League was an inevitable result, it is of less moment to know the minute particulars about the dates and tenor of the treaties, and the statesmen who negotiated them. But these too have their interest. The first name practically connected with them is Wallace's ; and there is some reason, besides his renown as a warrior, and an organiser and governor of his fellow-men, to award to him the reputation of a successful diplomatist. The legendary chroniclers, such as Blind Harry the minstrel, tell us that he frequented France ; that he became a respected friend and a favoured counsellor of the French monarch ; that he performed valorous feats on French soil, and that he chased pirates on French waters. These stories have been discredited by the grave, to whom it did not commend them that one of his feats was the hunting and slaying of a lion in Guienne. But there is an odd tenacity of life in the fundamentals of even the most flagrant legends about the Scottish hero. Few names have been so saturated with nonsense in prose and verse ; and the saturation seems to be ceaseless, having developed a formidable access in our own very times. Yet when we come to documents and other close quarters, we generally realise in some shape or other almost all the leading events of his wonderful legendary career. The statements of the graver of the old Scots historians are sufficient to convince the man who has worked hardest of all in clearing up the history of the League, that he was received at the French Court. 1 For those of narrower faith there is one little scrap of what lawyers call real evidence, worth more than all the narra- tives of the chroniclers. When Wallace was apprehended and taken to London for trial, after the fashion of dealing 1 "II se refugia en France, ou il fut honorablement accueilli et traite par le Roi. "Michel, Les Ecossais en France, i. 46. 12 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. with other criminals he was searched, and the articles in his possession duly removed and inventoried. Among these were letters of safe-conduct from King Philip his French passport, in short ; a valuable piece of evidence, had any been needed, of practices hostile to the King of England. 1 That he should, at the Court of Philip, have forgotten the great cause to which he was devoted, is an inadmissible supposition ; and he is at least as likely as any one to have suggested that the common interest of France and Scotland lay in enmity towards England. But we find more distinct traces of Wallace having dealt with France through a diplomatic agent. When he held the office of Governor of Scotland, like every other man in power he required conformity in those who worked with him; and when they would not conform, displaced them. If he needed an excuse for strong measures, he had it in the urgency of the question at issue the preservation of the national independence. Accordingly, he drove out the primate who leaned to the Norman side, and got William Lamberton, a partisan of the national independence, elected Archbishop of St Andrews. Certain articles presented against this arch- bishop to his ecclesiastical superior, the Pope, by King Edward, bear that "Being thus made bishop, Lamberton continued at the Court of France with other the great men of Scotland, the King's enemies, labouring continually to do all the harm and injury in his power against his liege lord, until the peace was finally concluded between France and England. And after the conclusion of such treaty, he, Lamberton, by letters -patent under his seal, urged and excited the prelates, earls, barons, and all the common- alty of Scotland (these being the King's enemies), to carry on the war vigorously until the bishop and the other lords in France could return to Scotland. . . . Moreover, the bishop addressed his special letters, sealed 1 Palgrave, 'Documents and Records illustrating the History of Scotland, and the Transactions between the Crowns of Scotland and England, ' cxcv. NEGOTIATIONS WITH FRANCE. 13 with his seal, to the traitor Wallace, and prayed that, for the love of him the bishop, he, Wallace, would do all possible hurt and damage to the King of England. And Lamberton also wrote to his officers in Scotland to em- ploy a portion of his own provision for the sustenance of Wallace." 1 Soon afterwards Scotland was too effectually subdued to hold independent diplomatic relations abroad. In a curious way, however, the thread of the negotiations so begun may be traced through the intervening confusions, until the whole was resumed when France and Scotland could speak to each other both as separate indepen- dent kingdoms, and both having deep cause of enmity against England. 2 In the meantime, between Philip of France and Edward of England there was enacted a series of feudal pedantries which were the farce to the tragedy going on in Scotland, Edward reversing his posi- tion, and acting the truculent vassal. Both affairs arose out of those curious conditions of the feudal system which made monarchs do homage to each other for the sake of little additions to their available territories. Thus had the King of the Scots done homage at Windsor for the fief of Huntingdon and several other benefices held within the kingdom of England; and so, when the opportunity came, the King of England called this homage -doing king his vassal. In like manner, Ed- ward himself acknowledged the feudal superiority of the King of France in respect to his Continental possessions. So it came to pass that, as some English sailors com- mitted acts of piracy against French subjects, Philip of France called on Edward of England to come to Paris and do homage, and stand trial for misconduct as a disobedient vassal to his liege lord, just as Edward him- self had called on Baliol to come to Windsor. But the 1 Palgrave, clxv. a In one of the monkish chronicles (Lanercost, 182) it is narrated that, when Edward had penetrated, in 1296, as far as Aberdeen, he there found emissaries from Philip of France, with letters to Baliol and to many leading men of Scotland. 14 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. total disproportion between the demand and the power to enforce it made the summons of the French King ridiculous. It would have been a sight to behold the countenance of the fierce and determined long-legged Edward when he received it. The foolish bravado brought on the first English war in France, making way for those which followed it. The French were too glad to get out of the affair by the treaty of 1303 ; but, hard pressed as they then were, they tried to keep true faith with their friends of Scotland. Somewhat to the surprise of Edward, they introduced the Scots, their good allies, as a party to the negotiations ; and when Edward said that if there ever were an alliance of Scotland and France his vassal Baliol had freely resigned it, the French told him that Baliol, being then a prisoner of war, was no free agent, and could renounce nothing for the kingdom of Scotland. This time, however, the support of France availed nothing, for Scotland was speedily afterwards blotted for a time out of the list of independent nations. It is under the year 1326 twelve years after the battle of Bannockburn that in Rymer's great book of treaties we read the first articulate treaty between France and Scotland. There the French monarchs came under obligation to those of Scotland, " in good faith as loyal allies, whenever they shall have occasion for aid and advice, in time of peace or war, against the King of Eng- land and his subjects." On the part of the Scots kings it is stipulated that they shall be bound " to make war upon the kingdom of England with all their force, when- soever war is waged between us and the King of Eng- land." In 1371, when the alliance was solemnly re- newed, a hundred thousand gold nobles were advanced to Scotland on curious and shrewd conditions. The money was to be employed for the ransom of King David from custody in England. Should, however, the Pope be pleased to absolve the Scots Government of that debt, then the gold nobles were to be employed in making war against England. When proffers were made to France for a'separate truce, not including Scotland, they were gallantly rejected. On the other hand, when Scotland was sorely STATE OF FRANCE. 15 tempted by the Emperor Maximilian, and by other poten- tates from time to time, to desert her ally France, she refused. It endeared the alliance to both nations to sanctify it with the mellowness of extreme antiquity, and references to its existence since the days of Charlemagne find their way even at an early period into the formal diplomatic documents. There are two sides in the history of an alliance as in that of a war. Of the history of the ancient League, how- ever, the first chapter belongs almost entirely to France. Some Scotsmen went thither and influenced the political condition of the country long before France impressed the policy of Scotland. It will clear the way for what follows, to take a glance at the social condition of the land to which the Scots refugees flocked, after their country had established itself in hostile independence of the Plantagenet kings. In later times people have been accustomed to seek the politics of France in Paris, giv- ing little heed to the provinces ; but at the accession of the house of Valois, the contrast between the eminence of the one and the insignificance of the other was still greater. Paris was at that time, indeed, as much beyond any other European capital in extent, in noble buildings, and in luxurious living, as it is now beyond the second- ary towns of France. The fruitfulness of the reigning family provided it with a little mob of native royalties, who made it so attractive that not only did all the great feudatories of the Crown flock thither, but even indepen- dent monarchs preferred playing the courtier there to reigning in their own dingy capitals. One finds the kings of Navarre, of Sicily, and of Bohemia perpetually in the way, and turning up upon the surface of history when anything notable occurs in the French Court ; they could not tear themselves from the attractions of the place. The populousness and luxurious living of Paris are attested in a not pleasant or dignified fashion by the large number of butchers necessary to supply the city. They formed, when combined, a sort of small army; large enough, however, to be estimated by the thousand. 16 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. They were often used as a powerful but a dangerous political engine. By bullying bravado and violence they held a sort of corporate power when almost everything else of the kind had been annihilated. This power they used according to their nature. It was they who did the professional part of the business when the prisons were broken open by the Burgundian party, and the throats of the prisoners cut, making a scene in the year 1418 which was exactly repeated in the year 1792. The allusion to these brutes brings one naturally from the concentration of luxury, wealth, and rank in Paris, to the horrible abyss by which it was all surrounded. It is difficult to conceive the wretchedness and degradation of France at that time still more difficult, when it is fully realised, to understand by what steps the great nation of Henry IV. and Louis XIV. the still greater nation of later times arose to such a height of lustre and triumph. Whatever other elements were at work in the long event- ful regeneration, it may surely be permitted to our national pride to count that the infusion of Scottish blood into the veins, as it were, of the country, must have had some share in the change. There was at that time throughout the land neither sturdy independence nor affectionate, trusting dependence. Everything was thoroughly wrong. The great showed their superiority only in acts of injustice, insult, and cruelty ; the poor were servile and abject in subjection, and brutal, treacherous, and ungrateful when the iron rule was for a moment evaded. A sort of mortifying process was killing all the elements of independent constitutional action one by one, and approaching the heart. The ju- risdictions and privileges which the municipalities had inherited from the Roman Empire were crushed out. The lower feudatories were absorbed one by one, and the higher followed. By a curious fatality it fell to the family of Valois to unite the characteristic defects of a centralised despotism with those of an oligarchy. The great provinces came gradually one by one into the hands of the King ; but instead of being united to the Crown so as to make a compact and symmetrical empire, they STATE OF FRANCE. I/ were given to the princes of the blood and their de- scendants. Hence arose a class of nobles or territorial aristocracy, who formed a separate caste, looking down upon and bearing enmity to all owners of territory who were not of the blood - royal. Such were the lords of Burgundy, Orleans, Anjou, Bourbon, Berri, La Marche, and a crowd of others. The tendency of things was towards not only a divine right in the Crown to govern, but a divine right in the blood-royal to possess all things. The law was gradually withdrawing its protection from those who were not either themselves of the royal stock, or protected in a sort of clientage by one of the princes of the blood. Men in the highest places who did not belong to the sacred race might be pitched from their chairs of state to the dungeon or the scaffold, with that reckless celer- ity which characterises the loss of influence in Eastern despotisms. One of the few men in that disastrous period who was enabled to afford to France some of the services of a real statesman was the Sieur de Montagu. He had been raised to influence under Charles V., and became Comp- troller of Finances under his mad successor, Charles VI. He was a little, smooth-spoken, inoffensive man, who had the art of making friends ; and few positions would have appeared in any tolerably well-governed state more firm and unassailable than his. He had two brothers invested with rich bishoprics, one of them also holding civil office, and rising to be Chancellor of France \ while his daughters were married into the first families among the nobles of France below the rank of royalty. Of course he had not neglected the opportunity which a supervisance of the wretched and ruined finances of the nation afforded him for enlarging and consolidating his own fortunes. He had enormous wealth to fall back upon should he ever be driven from office. In too fatal a reliance on the security of his position, he made an im- prudent display of his worldly goods, on the occasion of the advancement of one of his brothers from the shabby- ish bishopric of Poitiers to the brilliant see of Paris. Mon- B 1 8 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. tagu resolved to give an entertainment, and to do the thing in style. The company who were invited and who attended proved at once his greatness and his popularity. The list of distinguished guests would dazzle the eyes of the most fashionable penny-a-liner of the ' Morning Post.' It included the King and Queen of France, the King of Navarre, and the royal dukes in a bundle. They were feasted from a service of gold and silver such as, it was significantly remarked, none of their own palaces could produce. The magnificence of an entertainment is not always so exceedingly satisfactory to the entertained as the confid- ing landlord expects it to be. On this occasion one of the guests John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy took offence at the profuse magnificence which surrounded him, and argued himself into the conclusion that it would more aptly become his own palace than the hotel of the parvenu. A few days afterwards, when Montagu was decorously walking to morning mass with one of his bishop brothers, Pierre des Essarts the Prevot of Paris crossed his path and laid a hand on his shoulder. The great statesman, highly indignant at such a familiarity, cried out, " Ribaud, es-tu si hardi que de me toucher ? " but Essarts had a warrant, and in fact the affair was serious. Montagu was arrested and thrown into a dungeon in the Petit Chat- elet The next step was to get up a feasible accusation against him. Doubtless his methods of amassing money, like those of every other statesman of the day, would not stand a very severe scrutiny ; but proceedings in this direction would be slow, petty, and inconclusive ; and as any chance might turn the tables in the victim's favour, it was necessary to get up something more astounding, odious, and conclusive. He was therefore charged with sorcery and magic ; and, to bring the accusation to a def- inite and practical conclusion, it was alleged that by these illegal arts he had produced the King's insanity. He was put to the torture, and after giving his tormentors hard work, he confessed whatever they pleased. The instru- ments being removed, he retracted, and appealed to his dislocated wrists and wrenches of the body, ending in STATE OF FRANCE. 19 hernia, as the real causes of his confession. But he was in hands where his wealth, not the punishment of a guilty man, was wanted. The affair had to be got over before the King should have a lucid interval ; so the tortured mangled body was relieved of its miseries by the headsman's axe. The King, when the lucid interval came, was indignant at the usage his faithful servant had received : but there was no remedy. John the Fearless was not the man to loose his grip on what he had touched, and, unless the head could also have been restored to its old owner, how was resto- ration to be made of the estates ? It is one of the most significant marks of a Providence overruling the affairs of man, that such acts are calculated, in some shape or other, to retaliate on their doers. When the princes of the blood established practices of cruelty and perfidy, they were unable absolutely to exempt them- selves, and establish as an unfailing rule that the con- sequent calamities should be restricted entirely to inferior persons. The Dukes of Burgundy and of Orleans, the King's nearest relations, were rivals for that supreme power which somebody or other must wield in the name of the madman. The former took a short way of settling the question. Orleans was murdered in the streets of Paris by the direction of Burgundy. The clergy and the savants of the day were called upon to applaud the deed as a wholesome act of tyrannicide. The opportunity was a good one for propitiating clerical influences. It was the time when rival popes were bidding for support, and stretching points with each other; so, what the one scrupled at, the other was delighted to oblige with. The sinuosities of the discussion on the slaughter of Orleans, influenced as they were by the duplex action of the Pope- dom and the oscillations of the two contending civil parties, would make an amusing history of ups and clowns. To-day a consistory applauds the act as a ser- vice to God and the King next a synod brings the con- sistory to task for maintaining a doctrine so revolting ; and, anon, a higher authority justifies the consistory and rebukes the synod. 20 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. This affair caused great uneasiness throughout the whole privileged class of royal scions. Attacking and killing one of their own number in the open street was treating him no better than a common seigneur, or even a roturier. The Duke of Burgundy should not have acted so by one of themselves it was an ungentlemanly thing. Upon the other hand, were he to be subjected to legal responsibility for what he had done, this would in- volve the admission that the royal class could be liable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals an alter- native too horrible and preposterous to be indulged in for a moment. Altogether the question was indeed in a fix. The end illustrated the spirit expressed in the Psalms, " Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days." The death of their leader did not immediately ruin the Orleanists, who continued the struggle under his relation the Count of Armagnac. Year after year went on the ceaseless contest, each up and down alternately, while their wild struggle crushed and ruined every sur- rounding object they came in contact with. Nor when Henry V. was thundering at the gate could they hear the warning voice of conquest over the horrid din of their own quarrels, or relax their hold of each other to turn an arm against the invader. To be sure, they met and tried to come to an under- standing. One meeting was held on an island in a small lake with a barrier across it, so that but few could be assembled on either side, and these few could not touch each other. The results of this meeting were not very satisfactory, but the next was more conclusive. It was held on the long bridge of Montereau, where the Yonne meets the Seine. A complex barrier was erected to obviate treachery. The Orleanists, however, had the last handling of it, and the Duke of Burgundy, with the small body of attendants admitted on the bridge, found themselves somehow face to face with the Orleanists, while a bar clicked behind them and cut off their com- munication. John the Fearless made the best of things, clapped his greatest enemy, Tanguy du Chatel, on the STATE OF FRANCE. 21 shoulder, and called him a good guarantee for his safety. As he knelt to the young Dauphin, the hilt of his sword incommoded him, and he touched it to move it aside. Those who surrounded him, waiting the first good oppor- tunity for their work, pretended that they believed he was drawing his sword, and immediately hacked him to pieces. Comines drew from this incident the moral that rival kings and great heads of parties should not attempt to hold personal interviews. The temptation on such occasions to settle all old scores by a single coup, he counted too great for ordinary flesh and blood. While such was the nature of things at the top of the social tree, to convey an impression of the wretchedness and degradation at its other extremity is beyond the power of general terms. The details themselves make the reader at last callous with their weary monotony of torture, starvation, and slaughter. The stories told to inflame the sans-culottes of the Revolution how that a feudal lord coming home from the chase would rip up the venires of a couple of serfs, and warm his feet in their reeking vitals such things were no exaggeration of the reality, and, indeed, no imagination could exaggerate it. From the frequency with which whole districts are ren- dered pestilential by the thousands of dead, starved, or slaughtered, one wonders how the land kept up its popu- lation, and how the scanty remnant of inhabitants had heart to renew the race, and bring into the world fresh victims of such horrors. When Henry V. came over to make his conquest, his captains excited curiosity at first, until they knew better the habits of the country, by ab- staining from an established practice both of Orleanists and Burgundians, which required that when any peasant had been caught, and compelled to act as guide, to bury the dead, or perform any enforced services, he should, when no longer of use, be stripped of any clothing worth removing, and then be hung up by the heels before a fire, where, whether with the refinement of basting or not, he was roasted until he gave the clue to any hoard of silver pieces he might have saved, or until he died, if he could or would give no such clue. 22 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. The English victories in the Hundred Years' War, which seem so astounding, are but natural results to those who are in the habit of contemplating, through contemporary documents, the abjectness of the French peasantry or villeinage of the period. The great masses brought into the field were so far from being trained to war, either as soldiers of the crown or followers of their seigneurs, that they were denied the use of arms, unless when marshalled in an army. The English bow and bill men were, on the other hand, sturdy knaves, well fed, free within cer- tain limits, and expert at handling their weapons. In fact, between them and their Norman masters, after the lapse of centuries, a sort of surly compact had been formed as between those who knew each other to be sterling stuff, for they were kindred in character, and had both sprung from the same hardy Scandinavian stock. The English bow and bill men were nearly as good as mailed men-at-arms ; and one of these fully equipped and mounted was among a crowd of serfs like a ship of war in a fleet of fishing-boats he could go about unharmed, slaughtering all he could come at, until he became tired. So little of common cause was there between them, that the French men-at-arms on some provocation would set to slaughtering among their starving crowd of followers, or would let the enemy do so without taking umbrage. The Captal of Buch gained great honour by a bloody attack on a large body of the Jacques, who were doing no creditable work, certainly, yet it was on his own side. In their great battles with the English invaders, the French men-at-arms were nearly as much occupied in chastising their own serfs as in fighting with the enemy ; and at Agincourt the leaders would not condescend to act at the head of their men, but formed themselves into a separate battel, apart from the great mass, who became consequently a chaotic crowd, not only useless but detri- mental. According to a very offensive practice of those chivalrous times, the chances of safety to a vanquished foe depended on what he was likely to fetch in ransom : in some instances a rich or royal captive was in danger from a contest among his captors for the monopoly of his THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 23 capture and the corresponding ransom-money. Alas for the poor French serf ! there was little chance of making anything of him; nor, in the distracted state of the country, was he worth preserving as a slave. He was put to the most valuable use when his carcass manured the ground on which he fell. So much for the social condition of the French people during the early part of the Hundred Years' War with the English kings. To the political condition of France as a nation, and one of the European community, perhaps the best key may be found in the remark of Sismondi, that the contest was not in its origin a national one between France and England. It was a question of disputed succession, in which the competitors for the crown were the only persons ostensibly interested. The nobles took their side according to their calculations, founded on interest or connection, as the smaller European princes have done in the great wars of later times. As to the serfage, if they thought at all, the tendency of their thoughts would probably be that they could not be more miserable than they were, whoever was their king ; and we may be pretty sure that they did not attempt to solve the question about the prevalence of the old Salic code within the soil of France. In fact, the invaders, accustomed to treat their neighbours at home as fellow-beings, were, as we have seen, kinder to the poor peasantry than their armed countrymen. But a conquering class or race will ever become insolent and exasperating ; and, after a time, the oppression and insolence of the invaders sent the healthy blood of patriotism to the heart of the people, where it aroused that cohesive natural energy which swept the enemy from the land, and made France the great empire it became. With the Scots, on the other hand, the war, though waged on French soil, was national from the beginning. It was thus the fortune of their allies to secure a body of men-at-arms who were not only brave men and thoroughly trained soldiers, but who brought with them still higher qualities in that steadfast faith which had been hardened on the anvil of a war for national freedom. Nominally 24 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. entering the French service as mercenary troops, there never were soldiers less amenable to the reproachful application of that term. Of all the various elements which a French army then contained among the Italian and German hirelings among native men-at-arms who had been fighting but the other day against their existing leader and cause, and might in a few days do so again among the wretched serfage who were driven into the field and did not even know what side they were on, among all these, the Scots alone had a cause at heart. France was the field on which they could meet and strike the Norman invaders who had dealt so much oppression on their paternal soil, and had run up so long an account of injuries and cruelties ere they were driven forth. The feeling, no doubt, was an unamiable one, according to modern ethics. It came to nothing that can be expressed in gentler language than the Scot's undying hatred of his neighbour to the south of the Tweed. The many terrible incidents in the long war of Scottish independence testify the sincerity of this hatred. But as motives went in those days, it was among the most sterling and honest going, and served to provide the French kings with a body of men hardy and resolute, steady and true ; and possessing so specially these qualities, that even Louis XI. perhaps of all monarchs whose character is well known to the world the most unconfiding and most sceptical of any- thing like simple faith and honesty was content, amid all his shifting slippery policy and his suspicions and pre- cautions, to rely implicitly on the faith of his Scots Guard. The English army had been twelve years in occupation. Agincourt had been fought, the infant heir of the house of Lancaster had been proclaimed at Paris with the quiet decorum that attends the doings of a strong government, when Scotland resolved to act. In 1424, John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, arrived in France with a small army of his fellow-countrymen. Accounts of the numbers under his command vary from 5000 to 7000. This seems but a small affair in the history of invasions, but, looking at the conditions under which it was accomplished, it will turn out to be a rather marvellous achievement. It is THE SCOTS AUXILIARIES. 25 only necessary to look at the map of Europe to see that from whichever side of our island the Scots attempted to approach France, they must pass through the narrow seas in which England even then professed to have a naval superiority. A steamer now plies from Leith to Dunkirk for the benefit of those who prefer economy and a sea voyage to a railway journey ; but from the union of the crowns down to the establishment of that vessel a year or two ago, the idea of going from Scotland to France other- wise than through England would have been scouted. The method of transferring troops, too, in that period, was by galleys, rowed by galley-slaves, little better than mere rafts for sea-going purposes, and ever requiring in foul weather to hug the shore. Scotland could not have afforded vessels to transport this force ; it was taken in hand by France, Castile and Aragon offering, as we are told, to assist with forty vessels. Henry V. of England, then ruling in France, naturally felt the seriousness of an infusion of such fresh blood into the distracted and ruined country ; and he instructed his brother, the Duke of Bedford, acting as viceroy, to put on the screw at all the English seaports, and do whatever the old traditional prerogatives of the Crown, in purveying vessels and seamen, was capable of doing, in order that a force might be raised to intercept the Scots expedition. Bedford lost the opportunity, however. The Scots troops debarked at La Rochelle, and, passing towards the valley of the Loire, encamped at Chatillon. These rough northern foreigners were not received by the natives without invidious criticism. Two or three instances occur in which the simple parsimony of the commissariat of the Scots camp has astonished the people of more luxurious countries. But it became a second nature with the wandering man-at-arms to bear enforced starvation at one time, and compensate it by superfluous indulgence at another. The Scots probably took their opportunity in a country which, desolated though it was by warfare, was a Garden of Eden after their own desolate bogs, and they earned for themselves the designation of sacs a vin et mangeurs de moutons. 26 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. But an opportunity occurred for wiping off such a reproach. The Scots and some French, all under the command of Buchan, approached the old town of Bauge. in Anjou, on one side of the stream of the Cauanon, while Clarence and the great English host were encamped on the other. The Scots, just in time to save themselves, discovered their danger. The English were crossing the river by a narrow bridge when Buchan came up and fought the portion of the army which had crossed over. As M. Michel remarks, it was the same tactic that enabled Wallace to defeat Surrey and Cressingham at Stirling it might also be described as a seizing of the opportunity that was afterwards so signally missed at Flodden. Then took place one of those hand-to-hand conflicts, in which the highest-spirited and best-mounted knights of the age encountered in a mingled turmoil of general battle and single combat. The great host meanwhile struggled over, and was attacked in detail. It was a victory attended, from its peculiar conditions, with more than the average slaughter of the conquered. In the words of Monstrelet, " The Duke of Clarence, the Earl of Kyme (?), the Lord Roos, Marshal of England, and, in general, the flower of the chivalry and esquiredom, were left dead on the field, with two or three thousand fighting men." Henry V. was naturally provoked by a defeat that so strongly resembled those he had been accustomed to inflict ; and his anger, sharpened by grief for the death of his brother, tempted him into one of those unworthy acts which great conquerors sometimes commit when thwarted by defeat. He had then in his possession the young King of the Scots, James I. With his consent, or in his name, an instruction was issued to the Scots army no longer to fight in the cause of France against England. Buchan protested that the orders of a monarch not at freedom were of no avail. Henry then thought fit to treat the Scots as rebels, not entitled to the courtesies of war. To make the case more clear, he took his captive to France. James was in the English camp when Melun was taken, and therefore Henry hanged twenty Scotsmen found among the garrison. On the surrendering of Meaux, too, THE SCOTS AUXILIARIES. 2/ there were especially excluded from the conditions of the capitulation all the Welsh, Irish, and Scotch as if all these were alike rebels. It is generally said that Buchan got the baton of High Constable of France as a reward for the victory of Bauge', though Monstrelet speaks of him as Constable when he fought it. At all events, he held this high office an office so very high that his poor countrymen at home cannot have easily seen to the top of it. We are told that, in Court precedence, it ranked next after the blood- royal ; that an insult to the holder of it, being equivalent to one on royalty itself, was similarly punished ; and that he was the highest military authority in the kingdom, having at his disposal all its warlike resources the commander-in-chief, in short. Moreri, who tells us this, also, to be sure, tells us that when a king of England dies, the lord mayor of London acts as interim king until another is fairly settled on the throne; but it is to be presumed that Moreri had a better knowledge of the practices on the banks of the Seine than of those on the banks of the Thames. In this country we are familiar with the title chiefly through the great names coupled with it the Constable de Luxemburg, the Constable Montmorenci, Du Guesclin, and the terrible Bourbon. Among such names, to stumble on the Constable Buchan sounds quite homely, as we say in Scotland. The con- stabulary was considered too formidable an office to be always full, and seems to have been reserved for emer- gencies, like the Roman dictatorship ; and that hour of emergency and of destitution of native spirit must have been dark indeed, when its highest dignity, and also the custody of the honour of the nation, were together con- ferred upon a stranger. The dignity was balanced by princely domains and castles stretching over the territory between Avranches and Chartres. These the new-comer seems to have almost taken into his own hand, for the French authorities speak of his putting himself in pos- session of the castle at Chartres after the battle of Baugd After that battle Buchan was joined by his father-in- law, Archibald Earl of Douglas, who brought with him a 28 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. reinforcement of four or five thousand Scots. Douglas, among other honours and substantial rewards, was in- vested with the great dukedom of Touraine. There was almost a rivalry in the royal munificence to the two leaders, and their followers were not forgotten, as we shall afterwards see ; but they left on bloody battle-fields a record that their honours and emoluments were well paid for, and but briefly enjoyed. Though Bauge had taught the wholesome doctrine to the French that their enemies were not unconquerable, and had put the house of Valois in sufficient heart to renew the struggle, it was yet uphill work. In the battle of Crevant in 1424 the Scots were the chief sufferers. In one brief sentence Monstrelet testifies to their devotedness, and narrates their fate : " The English and Burgundians won the day and the field ; the greater part of the Scots, amounting to three thousand, who were in the front ranks, were either killed or taken." 1 The remnant of the Scots auxiliaries, though thus thinned and weakened, bore the chief weight of the bloody battle of Verneuil a year afterwards. 2 This is one of the many battles in which defeat has been attributed to misunderstandings and mistakes among allies, for there were there men of three nations on one side French Lombards, and Scots. Wherever the blame lay, the penalty was paid by the Scots, of whom all but a few lay dead where they fought. It has been said that their fate was of their own seeking, for, on meeting face to face with their mortal enemies of England, they sent Bedford a message that they would neither spare nor be spared neither give nor take quarter. 8 Buchan, the High 1 ' Monstrelet, ' by Johns, vi. 48. 2 Sismondi says of the marshalling of the French army, "Les Ecossais, qui faisoient le nerf de leur armee." xiii. 34. 8 " Un ecrivain contemporain, se faisant 1'echo d'un bruit repandu a 1'epoque, signale la fierte ecossaise comme la principale cause du desastre de Verneuil, qu'il considere comme un evenement heureux pour la France: 'Les Ecossais,' dit-il, ' sont d'habitude ardents et solides au combat, mais temeraires et fiers a 1'exces. ' Puis, apres un recit sommaire de cette journee, il continue ainsi ' C'etait un spec- THE POLITICAL SITUATION. 29 Constable, and Douglas, the Duke of Touraine, were found among the dead. They had not given their lives an utterly vain sacrifice to the cause of their adoption. Though Verneuil is counted among the English victories, it had no resemblance to the sweeping triumphs of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. It was so tough an affair, and was so near to the defeat of Bedford and Salisbury, that they became really alarmed about the stability of the su- premacy of the house of Lancaster in France. We cannot rightly estimate the influence over the des- tinies of Europe of the events which severed Scotland from England and allied her to France, without remembering that it was long the aim of every powerful European mon- arch to follow the example of Charlemagne, and restore the Roman Empire. People have been so much occupied in discussing the religious hierarchy bequeathed to the world by the old Empire, that they seem to have for- gotten how much of its political organisation remained to influence mankind. Roman institutions, in fact, live and influence our everyday habits and customs, and many of our greatest political organisations have their root in the established practice of the Empire. It is there, for instance, that we shall find how, in European diplomacy and international law, there are rules obeyed by nations, obligations performed by them, and rights exacted by them, without any paramount authority to enforce obedi- ence. The paramount authority existed once in the person of the Emperor of the world ; and though it has departed, the practices and traditions which kept the various states of Europe together have remained in force, tacle affreux a contempler que celui des monceaux de cadavres entasses et presses sur ce champ de bataille, la surtout oil la lutte avail eu lieu avec les Ecossais ; car pas un d'eux ne fut epargne a litre de caplif. .... La cause de cet acharnemenl et de ce carnage sans merci fut la fierte des Ecossais : avant 1'engagement, le Due de Bedford leur ayant envoye demander quelles seraient les conditions du combat, ils repondirent qu'ils ne voulaient pas, ce jour-la, faire de prisonniers aux Anglais, ni que les Anglais leur en fissent ; reponse qui, en allumant centre eux la fureur de 1'ennemi, les fit exterminer.'" Michel, i. 148, quoting from Meyer, 'Annales Rerum Belgicarum.' 3O THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. and have been worked by " the great powers," who may be said to hold the functions of the old Empire in a sort of commission. It is observable that at the present day the established rules of diplomacy have scarcely extended beyond the bounds of the old Empire, except by includ- ing Russia; but though the greater part of the Russian territory was beyond the pale, there is no Court in Europe where the traditions of the Empire are so religiously maintained as in that of Russia where, indeed, the ambition which made the monarchs of the middle ages aim at the restoration of the empire of the world is be- lieved still to guide the policy of the house of Romanoff. We cannot get the oriental nations to accept of our system of diplomacy, except by sheer force. An am- bassador they count an intruder and a spy, and they preserve no treaty which they can break. Even in the American States, where diplomacy and international law are studied more than anywhere else, it seems impracti- cable to apply those old traditional rules called the laws of war and peace, which have kept Europe together. The municipalities which have so deeply influenced the history of Europe are a section of the institutions of the Empire. There are towns whose existing governments were given to them by the Caesars ; and it was a signal testimony to the vitality of these institutions, that in the late reconsolidation of Italy they formed the means of dovetailing together the fragments which had been so long separated. In some countries the Justinian collections are the only absolute authorities in the law in all they have more or less a place. In England even, for all the abuse it has met with from the common-lawyers, the civil law has an acknowledged place in Equity, the Ecclesias- tical courts, and the Admiralty jurisdiction; and large masses of it have, surreptitiously and under false names, been brought into the sacred precinct of the common law itself. It would be difficult to say of the laws which adjust rights and obligations between man and man in England, whether one would find a greater quantity in the Statutes at large than in the Pandects. The political machinery of the imperial system, though THE POLITICAL SITUATION. 3 1 broken into fragments, remained in its several parts so compact and serviceable for centuries as to be available for consolidating the power of Napoleon. It may easily be understood, then, how readily it would serve any monarch of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, who felt strong enough to use it. Hence these monarchs were not merely excited by vague notions of influence and con- quest with indefinite results, but saw a distinct, recognised office, supreme among worldly monarchies in dignity and power, which had been held of old, and might be aspired to again, as a legitimate object of ambition. The double- eagle in the achievement, figurative of the conjoined em- pires of the East and of the West, indicates powers which -have some time or other aspired at the empire of the world at renewing the conditions under which Cassar could decree "that all the world should be taxed." It is curious to see how the newly-grown feudal system, with its fictions and pedantries its rights of property and possession, for instance, as separated from its rights of superiority aided the influence of the imperial organ- isation in the hands of clever and vigilant princes. A troublesome territory would be handed over by a great king to some smaller neighbour, who, nearer the spot, was better able to govern it, and who, if it were not handed over to him, might take it. He came under obligation to do homage for it to the giver, but the practical result of this obligation would depend on subsequent events. If generation after generation of his house were gradually acquiring such fiefs, they might soon possess a power .sufficient to defy the feudal superior. On the other hand, the practice of doing homage for a part of their posses- sions might taint a decaying house with the sense of in- feriority, and bring them in at last for homage for the whole. When Edward I. summoned Baliol to come to Windsor and give account of his conduct, and when that same Edward was himself cited by Philip of France to kneel before him and answer for certain piracies com- mitted by Englishmen, the feudal formalities were the same, but behind them were certain realities which made the two affairs very different. Thus Europe presented to 32 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. the able and ambitious among her monarchs two kinds of apparatus of aggrandisement. In the one, a vassal house, gaining fief after fief, would work its way to the vitals of a monarchy, and extinguish its life ; in the other, a great power would crush one by one its smaller neighbours, by gradually enlarging the prerogative of the lord paramount. Whoever would wish to see this sort of game played with the most exquisite skill and the most curious turns of luck, should study closely the history of the absorption of Burgundy into France. In our own country the play was more abrupt and rough. It was handled with a brute force, which succeeded in Ireland and Wales, but drove Scotland to effective resistance. The significance of this resistance was not limited to this island. The Normans were then bearing it with a high hand over all the nations of Europe. If the Empire was to be restored, he who should be chief among the Norman rulers would be the man to restore it. Had Henry V. been King of all Britain, it would have been the most natural of effects to such a cause that he should also have been undisputed King of France ; and with such a combination of powers in his hand, what was to prevent him from being the successor of Charlemagne? The battle of Bannockburn was the ostensible blow which broke this chain of events. It was not the only interruption which Norman aggrandisement had then to encounter. Only twelve years earlier than Bannockburn, the Flemings had gained a popular victory over the chivalry of France at Courtrai ; within a year after the defeat of Edward, the Swiss bought their independ- ence in the terrible battle of Morgarten. The coincidence is not purely incidental. The three battles were types of a general revulsion against Norman aggrandisement arising in the hearts of the oppressed in various parts of Europe. As part of an empire which included France and Scot- land, with whatever else so much power might enable its owner to take, it is hard to say how it would have fared with the liberties of England, governed perhaps from Paris rather than London; and some have thought that the enjoyers of these liberties owe a debt to the victors at Bannockburn. THE SCOTS GUARD. 33 Everybody has heard of the famous Scots Guard of France. The same authorities that carry back the League to the days of Charlemagne, make him the founder of this force. It is a pity that we have no distinct account of its origin, and can only infer from historical probabilities that Claude Fauchet is right in saying that it was formed out of that remnant of the Scots who survived the slaughter at Verneuil, and did not desire to return home. 1 If Charles VII. was not the founder of the Guard, it is pretty certain that he adjusted its organisation as a permanent institu- tion of the French Court. This easy, lucky monarch was so thoroughly the parent of the Scots Guard, that they wept for him in a demonstrative manner, which induced an old chronicler to say " Et les Escossoys hault crioient Par forme de gemissement. " The Scots Guard consisted of one hundred gens cTarmes and two hundred archers. They had a captain who was a high officer of state. The first captain of the Guard who appears in history and probably the first person who held the office was John Stewart, lord of Aubignd, the founder of a great Scots house in France, of which more hereafter. By a chivalrous courtesy the appointment to this high office was confided to the King of Scots. This was an arrangement, however, that could not last. As the two nations changed their relative position, and the Guard began to become Scots only in name, it be- came not only out of the question that the captain should be appointed by a foreign government, but impolitic that he should be a foreigner. It is curious to notice a small ingenious policy to avoid offence to the haughty foreigners in the removal of the command from the Scots. The first captain of the Guard who was a native Frenchman, was the Count of Montgomery, who, for his patrimonial name, which corresponded with that of an old Scots family, passed for a man of Scots descent. It was thought prudent that his son should succeed him ; but the selection was 1 ' Origines des Dignitez et Magistrats de France, ' p. 39. C 34 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. not fortunate, for he was the same Montgomery who hit King Henry II. at the jousts in honour of his daughter Elizabeth's marriage to Philip II., and so made Mary Stewart Queen of France. According to the old courtly creed of France, the privileges of the Scots Guard had an eminence that par- took of sacredness. Twenty-four of them were told off as the special protectors of the royal person. They took charge of the keys of the chamber where the King slept, and the oratory where he paid his devotions. When, on a solemn progress, he entered a walled town, the keys were committed to the custody of the captain of the Guard. They guarded his boat as he crossed a ferry, and were essential to the support of his litter when he was carried. On ordinary occasions two of them stood behind him ; but in affairs of great ceremony the recep- tion of embassies, the conferring high honours, the touch- ing for the king's evil, and the like six of them stood near the throne, three on either side. It was deemed a marked honour to them that the silk fringe with which their halberts were decorated was white the royal colour of France. There is something melancholy beyond description in contemplating the condition of a country, the vital treas- ures of which had to be confided to the fidelity and bra- very of hireling strangers. If there was a fault in the affair, however, it was not with the Scots : they were true to their trust, and paid faith with faith. On their side of the bargain, too, there is something touching in the picture of a hardy high-spirited race robbed of their proper field of exertion at home, and driven to a foreign land, there to bestow the enterprising energy that might have made their own illustrious ; and serving a foreign master with the single-minded fidelity that had been nourished within them by the love of their own land and kindred. But it must be admitted that their hospitable patrons made their exile mighty comfortable. When the lank youth left behind him the house of his ancestors, standing up grey, cold, and bare, on the bleak moorland, it was not to pass into hard sordid exile, but THE SCOTS GUARD. 35 rather to exult in the prospect of a land of promise or El Dorado : and faithfully was the promise kept ; for the profuse hospitality and lavish generosity of France to her guests is a thing hardly to be elsewhere paralleled in his- tory. It was but just that it should all be requited with sound fidelity and ardent devotion. The trust which Louis XI. reposed in the Guard has been already referred to. It was not their blame that he took their assistance in grubbing up the roots of all the political institutions which checked or modified the supreme authority of the Crown. If we were to suppose, indeed, that they passed beyond the routine of duty to think of the political results of the affairs in which they were engaged, they would find a good many partisans in the present day, had they adopted the designs of their crafty master as their own, and backed them as the soundest policy for the future of France and of Europe at large ; for Louis XI. is by no means championless. In one of the most amusing of all the chronicles ever written that of Comines the Scots Guard figure fre- quently, and always creditably. Louis, who was reputed to trust no other creatures of human make, appears to have placed entire reliance on them. They saved him at a crisis of great peril in his renowned attack, along with the Duke of Burgundy, on the city of Liege. Both poten- tates were deeply plotting the one to bring, the Burgun- dian territories directly under the crown of France, the other to change his dukedom for a kingdom, which might in the end comprise France itself. Both were of one mind, for the time, in deadly malice and murderous pro- jects against the industrious burghers of the city. By a concurrence of events which broke through the fine tex- ture of his subtle policy, Louis found himself in the hands of his fierce rival ; for he was within the lines of Bur- gundy's army, with no other resource or protection appa- rently but his Scots Guard. There was to be a storming of Liege, which was anticipated by the citizens breaking out and attacking the camp of the Duke. In the con- fusion of such an affair at such a juncture, it is easy to suppose that Louis could not know friends from enemies, 36 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. and had reason to believe the enemies to be far the more prevalent of the two. Comines gives this distinct and homely narrative of what he saw of the affair, for he was present : " I, and two gentlemen more of his bedchamber, lay that night in the Duke of Burgundy's chamber (which was very small), and above us there were twelve archers upon the guard, all of 'em in their clothes, and playing at dice. His main guard was at a good distance, and towards the gate of the town ; in short, the master of the house where the Duke was quartered, having drawn out a good party of the Ltigeois, came so suddenly upon the Duke, we had scarce time to put on his back and breast plate and clap a steel cap upon his head. As soon as we had done it, we ran down the stairs into the street ; but we found our archers engaged with the enemy, and much ado they had to defend the doors and the windows against 'em. In the street there was a terrible noise and uproar, some crying out, ' God bless the King ! ' others, ' God bless the Duke of Burgundy ! ' and others, ' God bless the King, and kill, kill ! ' It was some time before our archers and we could beat the enemy from the doors and get out of the house. We knew not in what condition the King was, nor whether he was for or against us, which put us into a great con- sternation. As soon as we were got into the street, by the help of two or three torches we discovered some few of our men, and could perceive people fighting round about us ; but the action there lasted not long, for the soldiers from all parts came in thronging to the Duke's quarter. The Duke's landlord was the first man of the enemy's side that was killed (who died not presently, for I heard him speak), and with him his whole party (at least the greatest part of them) were cut in pieces. " The King was also assaulted after the same manner by his landlord, who entered his house, but was slain by the Scotch Guard. These Scotch troops behaved them- selves valiantly, maintained their ground, would not stir one step from the King, and were very nimble with their bows and arrows, with which, it is said, they wounded and killed more of the Burgundians than of the enemy. Those THE SCOTS GUARD. 37 who were appointed made their sally at the gate, but they found a strong guard to oppose them, which gave 'em a warm reception and presently repulsed 'em, they not being so good soldiers as the others. As soon as these people were repulsed, the King and Duke met, and had a confer- ence together. Seeing several lie dead about them, they were afraid their loss had been greater than really it proved to be ; for upon examination they found they had not lost many men, though several were wounded ; and without dispute, if they had not stopped at those two places, and especially at the barn (where they met with some small opposition), but had followed their guides, they had killed both the King and the Duke of Burgundy, and in prob- ability would have defeated the rest of the army. Each of these princes retired to his quarters greatly astonished at the boldness of the attempt ; and immediately a council of war was called to consult what measures were to be taken the next morning in relation to the assault, which had been resolved upon before. The King was in great perplexity, as fearing that if the Duke took not the town by storm, the inconvenience would fall upon him, and he should either be kept still in restraint, or made an abso- lute prisoner, for the Duke could not think himself secure against a war with France if he should suffer him to de- part. By this mutual distrust of each other one may clearly observe the miserable condition of these two princes, who could not by any means confide in one another, though they had made a firm peace not a fort- night before, and had sworn solemnly to preserve it." J French historians are tolerably unanimous in their tes- timony that the Guard were faithful fellows. As a small select body of men. highly endowed with rank and remun- eration, they were naturally the prize-holders of a consider- able body of their countrymen, who in the army of France strove to prove themselves worthy of reception into the chosen band. Thus the Scots in the French army carried the spirit of the service beyond the mere number selected as the Guard; and there was among them a fellow-feeling, 1 'Memohs of Philip de Comines,' book ii. chap. 12. 38 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. mixed with a devotion to the Crown of France, of a kind which there is no good term for in English, while it is but faintly expressed by the French esprit de corps. A few of the facts in the history of the Scots troops employed by France bring it closer home than any generalisation can ; for instance, after other incidents of a like character, M. Michel quotes from D'Auton's Chronicle, how, in a con- test with the Spaniards in Calabria, in 1503, the banner- bearer, William Turnbull, was found dead with the staff in his arms and the flag gripped in his teeth, with a little cluster of his countrymen round him, killed at their posts, " et si un Ecossais etait mort d'un cote, un Espagnol ou deux Tetaient de 1'autre." The moral drawn from this incident by the old chronicler is, that the expression long proverbial in France, " Fier comme un Ecossais," was because the Scots "aimaient mieux 'mourir pour hon- neur garder, que vivre en honte, reprochez de tache de lascheteV" When the two British kingdoms merged towards each other in the sixteenth century, the native element was gradually thinned out of the Scots Guard. When Scotland became part of an empire which called France the natu- ral enemy, it seemed unreasonable that her sons should expect to retain a sort of supremacy in the French army. But there are no bounds to human unreasonableness when profitable offices are coming and going, and many of our countrymen during the seventeenth century were loud in their wrath and lamentation about the abstraction of their national privileges in France. Some Scotsmen, still in the Guard in the year 1611, had a quarrel with the French captain, De Montespan, and brought their com- plaint before King James. As French soldiers appealing to a foreign monarch, they were very naturally dismissed. Of course they now complained at home still more loudly, and their cause was taken up by some great men. The French behaved in the matter with much courtesy. The men dismissed for a breach of discipline could not be replaced at the instigation of a foreign Court, but the Government would fill their places with other Scotsmen duly recommended. So lately as the year 1642, demands THE SCOTS GUARD. 39 were made on the French Government to renew the ancient League and restore the " privileges " of the Scots in France, including the monopoly of the appointments in the Guard. But though made in the name of King Charles I. by the Scots Privy Council, these demands were, like many of the other transactions of the day, rather made in hostility to the King than in obedience to his commands. Louis XIV. gave a brief and effective answer to them. He said that he would renew the League only on the condition that the Scots should cease to act as the ally of England, either by giving obedience to the King of that country, " or under pretext of religion, without express permission from the King, their master " a pretty accurate diplomatic description of the position of the Covenanting force. 1 Down to the time when all the pomps and vanities of the French Crown were swept away along with its sub- stantial power, the Scots Guard existed as pageant of the Court of France. In that immense conglomerate of all kinds of useful and useless knowledge, the ' Dictionnaire de Trevoux,' it is set forth that "la premiere compagnie des gardes du corps de nos rois " is still called " La Garde Ecossaise," though there was not then (1730) a single Scotsman in it. Still there were preserved among the young Court lackeys, who kept up the part of the sur- vivors of the Hundred Years' War, some of the old formalities. Among these, when the Clerc du Guet challenged the guard who had seen the palace gate closed, " il repond en Ecossois, I am hire c'est a dire, me voila ; " and the lexicographer informs us that, in the mouths of the Frenchmen, totally unacquainted with the barbarous tongue in which the regimental orders had been originally devised, the answer always sounded, " Ai am hire." In some luxurious libraries may be found a gorgeous volume in old morocco, heavily decorated with symbols of royalty, bearing on its engraved title-page that it is 1 See ' Papers relative to the Royal Guard of Scottish Archers in France : ' Maitland Club, 1835. 40 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. " Le Sacre de Louis XV., Roy de France et de Navarre, dans 1'Eglise de Reims, le Dimanche, xxv. Octobre, MDCCXXII." After a poetical inauguration, giving assur- ance of the piety, the justice, the firmness, the devotion to his people, of the new King, and the orthodoxy, loyalty, and continued peace that were to be the lot of France, with many other predictions, wide of the truth that came to pass, there come a series of large pictures, representing the various stages of the coronation, and these are followed by full-dress and full-length portraits of the various high officers who figured on the solemn occasion. Among these we have the Capitain des Gardes Ecossois in full state uniform. This has anything but a military aspect; it is the single-breasted broad-flapped coat of the time, heavily embroidered, a short mantle, and a black cap, with a double white plume. The six guards are also represented in a draped portrait. It is far more picturesque than that of their captain, yet in its white satin, gold embroidery, and fictitious mail, it con- veys much less of the character of the soldier than of the Court attendant, as will be seen by the inventorial description given below. 1 In the original engraving, by the way, the artist has thrown an air of absorbed devoted- ness into the very handsome countenance drawn by him, which is at variance, in some measure, with the tone of the attitude and costume, as pertaining to a mere figure in a state pageant. 1 " Un habit de satin blanc ; par dessus une cotte d'armes en broderie d'or. Sur le corselet, les armes de France, surmontees d'un soleil, avec le devise : le tout brode en cartisanne d'or sur un fond de trait d'argent, formant des mailles ; les manches et basques de la cotte d'armes brodees en or, sur un fond blanc ; un chapeau blanc, garni d'un bouquet de plumes blanches a deux rangs ; la par- tuisannea la main." CHAPTER II. PERSONAL ANECDOTES OF THE SCOTS IMMIGRANTS THE WOLF OF BADENOCH'S SON THE ALBANY AND DARNLEY STEWARTS THE HAMILTONS AND DOUGLASES INVESTMENT OF THE SCOTCH DUKE OF TOURAINE NOTICES OF SCOTSMEN SETTLED IN FRANCE, AND THE FAMILIES FOUNDED BY THEM THE SETTLEMENT OF THE SCOTS COMPARED WITH THAT OF THE NORMANS. THE arrival of the Scots auxiliaries, the battles in which they were engaged, and the formation of the Scots Guard from the remnant, make an episode in history which I have thought it best to keep by itself. There were constant migrations, however, of Scotsmen to France, from the commencement of the Hundred Years' War downwards, and I now propose to give a few character- istics of the men who went thither, of the reception they met with, and of the destinies of their descendants. King Robert III. had a younger brother Alexander, who was made lieutenant of the northern part of the kingdom. His royal birth and breeding were insufficient to control the temptation of using his opportunities to collect a Highland following, and setting them to their natural work, which was mischief. He became, of course, the terror of all the well-disposed within the district he was set to rule over, and they complimented him with the title of "The" Wolf of Badenoch." He set his eye on some lands on the Spey belonging to the Bishop of Moray, and sent a few hundreds of his gallow-glasses to take possession. The bishop had recourse to his own peculiar artillery, and excommunicated the Wolf. One would have thought this mattered little ; but besides being the wolf beyond the Grampians, Alexander Stewart was prince and courtier at Holyrood, where the condi- 42 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. tion of excommunication carried with it many social inconveniences, not to speak of the insolence of the prelate, who dared to cast such a slur on a man of his condition. He therefore, to give the bishop a foretaste of what might follow, sent down a few handy lads to the plains of Moray, where they burnt the choir of the church of Forres and the house of the archdeacon. As this had not the desired effect, he collected a larger force of ruffians, and, descending on the Lowland like an ava- lanche, fell on the episcopal city of Elgin and burned its noble cathedral. This was going rather too far. The Wolf had not only to disgorge, but to propitiate the Church with gifts, and do penance until the Pope set him right by absolution. His ashes repose in the Cathe- dral of Dunkeld, where may be seen his recumbent effigy, with arms folded, in serene peace looking to another world, while, in a Gothic inscription, the forgiv- ing Church records that here lies Alexander Stewart, Lord of Buchan and Badenoch, of good memory. This worthy had a favourite illegitimate son, also called Alexander. He, as was natural, followed his father's footsteps, and collected a troop of bare-legged ruffians, who reived and ravaged far and near. The Lindsays, Ogilvies, and other gentlemen of Angus, resolved to put a stop to this, and collected a body of men-at-arms and Lowland bowmen, a sort of force which held the High- land caterans in utter scorn as a set of rabble to be swept before them. The Wolf cub, however, alighted on the tactic which, in later times, made a Highland force terrible a concentrated rush on the enemy. This the small body of Lowlanders caught on the rugged banks of the Isla, and they were at once swept away, mail-clad horsemen and all, before the horde of savages they had despised. A little incident in this battle is thus described by a bard who might have been present, and probably had it from an eyewitness. Sir David Lyndsay, trying to make head against the torrent as a mounted man-at-arms, had trodden several of the Highlanders down, and had one of them pinned to the earth with his long lance. Thereupon, in the words of old Wyntoun THE WOLF CUB. 43 " That man held fast his own sword Into his nieve, and up thrawing He pressed him, not again standing That he was pressed to the earth ; And with a swake there of his sword, Through the stirrup-leather and the boot Three ply or four, above the foot, He struck the Lyndsay to the bone. That man no stroke gave but that one, For there he died. " i Nestling in a valley close to the mountain-range where the father and son held rather a roving commission than a right either of property or government, stood the castle of Kildrummy. As its ruins still attest, it was not one of those grim, gaunt, starved-looking square towers which the impoverished nobility of Scotland were fain to hide themselves in, but a vast and beautiful Gothic fortress erected in the time of the great war of independence, probably by the English. This desirable residence the youth set his eye on ; so with his Highland host he stormed and took it. It belonged to the widowed Countess of Mar. The country was not so absolutely without any nominal law that territory could be acquired in this way; at all events, it was prudent to have the military title of conquest fortified by some civil formal- ities to prevent future cavilling. The victor, therefore, married the widow, obtaining from her a conveyance of her property to himself and his heirs. Some formalist having probably put him up to the notion that the transaction, as it stood, was still open to question, a second deed bears record how that the hus- band resigned the whole property back to the wife, and in token thereof approached the castle, and humbly placed the key in her hand, telling her to take possession 1 Scott could not but see the value of such an incident in heroic narrative, and accordingly, in the ' Lord of the Isles, ' he brings it in at the death of Colonsay's fierce lord : " Nailed to the earth, the mountaineer Yet wreathed him up against the spear, And swr:jg his broadsword round ; Stirrup, steel boot, and cuish gave way Beneath that blow's tremendous sway." 44 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. of the castle, the furniture therein, and the title-deeds of the domain ; whereupon she gave the whole back to be enjoyed by her husband and the heirs of the marriage. Still again the dread of the red-tapism of the day haunted the prudent marauder, and a scene occurred which must have been exceedingly amusing to all concerned. In presence of the Bishop of Ross and of the feudatories of the domain, assembled in general council in the fields beyond the walls of the castle of Kildrummy, the Count- ess again executed an investiture of her husband in all her estates and properties, especially including those of which she was unjustly deprived, a gift which opened up indefinite fields of enterprise to so active a husband. The deed is so profuse in its attestations of the perfect freedom and absence of all restraint and intimidation wherewith the Countess acted, that one's suspicion would naturally be raised even without a knowledge of the antecedents. Such was the career of one who afterwards made a brilliant figure at the Court of France. His reception there, or rather the position he took up, is recorded in his homely rhymes by the contemporary Wyntoun ; and as M. Michel adopts his account, so may we. Here it is, with the spelling a little modernised, as in the preced- ing passage from the same rather wordy chronicle : " The Earl of Mar passed in France, In his delight and his pleasance, With a noble company Well arrayed and daintily, Knights and squires great gentlemen, Sixty or more full numbered there, Men of council and of virtue, Of his court and retinue. In Paris he held a royal state At the Syngne, knowen the Tynny Plate, 1 All the time that he was there Biding, twelve weeks full and mare, Door and gate both gart he Aye stand open, that men might se (so) Enter all time at their pleasance Til eat or drink, or sing or dance." 1 M. Michel calls it Plat d'Etain. SCOTS MEN-AT-ARMS. 45 The Earl of Mar for he was now firmly established in that dignified position took part with some companions- at-arms of the best blood in Scotland, at the battle of Liege, fought on the i4th of September 1407 : it was one of the contests in which the Duke of Burgundy had to back the Prince-Bishop against the powerful corporation of that almost sovereign city. M. Michel cites an old French chronicler, a good pendant to Wyntoun, who, after Messieurs Guillaume Hay, and Jacques Scringour, and Helis de Guenemont, expands concerning the feats of other heroes, whose names, slightly disguised, will readily be recognised by their countrymen. " Sire Alexandra en son droit nom De Commech, qui ot cuer entier, Ce jour y fut fait chevalier, Et Messire Andrieu Stievart Fu chevalier de belle part. De Hay sire Guillebert Fut ce jour en armes appert, Com bon et hardi combattant. Sire Jehan de Sidrelant Doy bien en honneur mettre en compte* Car il est fiz d'un noble conte. Sire Alexandre d'lervin, Qui le cuer ot humble et benin, En ce jour monstra hardie chiere; Et cil qui porta la baniere Du conte qui est tant prisiez Ce fu sire Jehan de Miniez. " Here are many familiar Scots names, some of them, it is true, a little disguised. Guenemont is Kinninmond, the name of a good old stock sometime decayed, and now, it is believed, unrepresented in Scotland, though it is sup- posed to be alive both in Sweden and France. Sidrelant is Sutherland, and Miniez Menzies, the laird of that terri- tory which bears the queer-sounding name of Pitfoddles. De Commech is puzzling, but M. Michel boldly trans- poses it into Keith. Alexandre d'lervin, who represents the true knight of chivalry a lamb at home, a lion in the field is the same who gets like praise in the rude Scots ballad which details so accurately the great battle of Harlaw: 46 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. " Gude Sir Alexander Irvine, The much-renowned Laird of Drum, Nane in his days was better seen, When they were sembled all and some, To praise him we should not be dumb, For valour, wit, and worthyness, To end his days he there did come, Whose ransome is remeediless. " The same companions-at-arms, indeed, who fought with him in Flanders, followed Mar to victory in the great battle of Harlaw. The Continental campaign had there- fore a great influence on British history. There, doubt- less, the Scots knights obtained that consciousness of the prowess of trained, mail-clad men-at-arms, which prompt- ed them with confidence and success to fight a host many times as large as their own. That critical day brought to an end what our common historians call the Rebellion of Donald of the Isles. The question it really decided was, whether the representative of the Norse race, which had founded an empire in the islands and western Highlands, should continue to be an indepen- dent monarch, ruling Scotland as far as the Forth, and perhaps as far as the English border. Here the roistering leader of ragamuffins, coming home with his foreign experience, became a mighty general and sage statesman ; and like many others who pass from disreputable into creditable and profitable courses, he achieved the suppression of those who, while he was sowing his wild oats, were his companions and tools. 1 Most conspicuous and illustrious among the emigrants to France were those who belonged to the royal race of Stewart : and here let me offer an explanatory protest for 1 It is curious to find the demure Fordun from his quiet cell, in dog Latin gently referring to the indiscretions of this hero's youth, as in contrast with the honoured decorum of his other years, thus In juventute erat multum indomitus et diictor catervanorum that is to say, of caterans or Highland thieves. But afterwards in virum alterum mutatus placenter trans monies quasi totum aquilonem guber- nabat. THE CONSTABLE BUCHAN. 47 spelling the name in this unfashionable manner. It is the old Scots spelling, the other namely, Stuart hav- ing been gradually adopted in deference to the infir- mity of the French language, which is deficient in that sinewy letter a half-breed between vowel and conso- nant which we call W. This innovation stands in the personal nomenclature of our day, a trivial but distinct relic of the influence of French manners and habits over our ancestors. For all their illustrious birth, these Stewarts went forth like the others, wandering unfortunates, with no hold upon the world but that which their heads and hands, and perhaps the lustre of their descent, gave them, and in the end they rooted themselves as landed Lords and Princes. John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, the High Con- stable, whose deeds and fate have been already recorded, was a son of the Regent Albany, and grandson of King Robert II. Alexander Stewart, Duke of Albany, a brother of James III., cuts a rather ugly figure in the history of his own country. He set up as king, calling himself Alex- ander IV., and agreed to do homage and acknowledge the old supremacy of England if Edward IV. would assist him, and make his nominal title a reality. After a rather adventurous life he went over to France. His antece- dents did not in the least prejudice the tolerant heart of Louis XL against him ; on the contrary, he was a man very much after that monarch's own heart. He acquired great lordships in France, and thoroughly assimilated himself to the Continental system. He married Anne de la Tour, daughter of the Count of Auvergne and Bou- logne, of a half-princely family, which became afterwards conspicuous by producing Marshal Turenne, and at a later period the eccentric grenadier, Latour d' Auvergne, who, in homage to republican principles, would not leave the subaltern ranks in Napoleon's army, and became more conspicuous by remaining there than many who escaped from that level to acquire wealth and power. The sister of Anne de la Tour married Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino. From this connection Albany was the uncle of Catherine de Medici, the renowned 48 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. Queen of France, and, in fact, was that nearest relation, who, as folks used to say in this country, "gave her away " to Henry II. On this occasion he got a cardinal's hat for Philip de la Chambre, his mother's son by a second marriage. He lived thoroughly in the midst of the Continental royalties of the day, and had the sort of repute among them that may be acquired by a man of great influence and connection, whose capacity has never been tried by any piece of critical business a repute that comes to persons in a certain position by a sort of process of gravitation. Brave he seems to have been, like all his race, and he sometimes held even important commands. He accompanied his friend, Francis I., in his unfortunate raid into Italy in 1525, and was fortunately and honour- ably clear of that bad business, the battle of Pavia, by being then in command of a detachment sent against Naples. His son, a thorough Frenchman, became after- wards regent of Scotland ; but though he acted in the way of legitimate business, he was not, as we shall find, a much better friend to his country than his father had been. Well scolded as they have been through all legitimate history, it has been the fortune of M. Michel to show that to the Albanys Scotland owes a boon which would have gone far to retrieve their character a century ago the use of and taste for French wines. This specialty as a national taste is not even yet dead ; for every Englishman who gets at good tables in Scotland, remarks on the pref- erence for the French wines over those of Spain and Por- tugal, although, until the other day, the duties, which in old Scotland had been greatly in their favour, were rather against the French. The following details about the commerce of the Scots in France seem interesting. " During his residence in France, the Duke of Albany occupied himself actively, as it would appear, in favour of the Scotch merchants trading in our country, all the more that they were undoubtedly commissioned by the nobility. His efforts were crowned with success; and Francis I. gave at Amboise, in the month of May 1518, an order to free these foreigners from the dues to which foreign merchandise was subjected at Dieppe, the usual WINE TRADE. 49 place of their disembarkation ; which, however, did not prevent fresh demands on the part of Scotland some years after. "What commodities could the Scotch bring to our country ? " Probably the same which they sent to Flanders, and of which we have a list in the great book of Andrew Halyburton, one of the first merchants of his time, who filled the high office of Conservator of the Privileges of the Scottish Nation in the Low Countries or, as we should now say, Scottish Consul at Middleburg. There was, in the first place, salmon, which came even to the inland towns, such as Reims, where a municipal order of 1380 regulated the sale of it; then herrings, cod, and other fish, for the common people ; lastly, wool, leather, and skins. "Afterwards this catalogue increased so much that a rhymer of the seventeenth century could say to a courtier ' Tury, vous quittez done la cour, Pour vous jeter dans le negoce : Ce n'est plus celui de 1' amour, Mais celui d'Espagne ou d'Escosse.' Spain and Scotland, it seems, were the countries in which commerce was most lucrative, as there also seems reason to believe that the Spaniards and the Scotch were the foreigners best known in France, when we find another poet make an actor say 'Je passe quand je veux, bien que je sois Fran9ais, Tantot pour Espagnol, tantot pour Escossois. ' " In exchange for the goods which they brought us, the Scotch received from us the products of a more advanced civilisation, not only by regular commerce, but by dip- lomacy, the agents of which, as it seems, had the privi- lege of bringing in goods free of tax. On the 8th May 1586, Henry III. wrote to M. de Chateauneuf, his am- bassador at the Court of Elizabeth : ' I beg of you also to mention to her the depredation which some of her sub- jects have committed near Dieppe on a Scotch vessel, D 50 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. which was returning to Scotland, in which there were, to the value of sixteen hundred crowns, wines, silken cloths, sugar, spices, and other things which the said Sire Esneval had caused to be purchased, and was having carried for his use into Scotland, by one of his people named Captain James. They had the cruelty to remove the sails of the said vessel, and to leave it and also another Scotch vessel at the mercy of the wind and sea ; but God helped them so much that they were thrown upon the coast by the reflux of the tide there, where they were known and suc- coured.' " The place occupied by wines in this enumeration of goods destined for Scotland shows the importance of the consumption of them by our allies in the sixteenth cen- tury. Even in the thirteenth, Henri d'Andeli describes the Scotch and some other Northern nations as drinking abundantly of the wines of La Rochelle ; and in the following century Froissart shows us their ships coming into the port of Bordeaux to load with wine, at the risk of being captured in going out of the river, as happened under rather singular circumstances related by Cleirac, who supposes the master of a Scotch vessel, laden with wine for Calais, in connivance with Turkish pirates. A letter of James IV. to the first president of the parliament of Bordeaux recommending to him the affair of his sub- ject George Wallace, master of the ship Volant, seized for theft imputed to Robert Gardiner and Duncan Campbell tells us that in 1518 the Scotch continued to come in quest of our wines, and did not always behave themselves in an exemplary manner. "We know by President de Thou, that in his time, towards the end of the sixteenth century, Scotch wine- merchants came annually to Bordeaux; and we have a decree of the Council of State of the $d June 1604, granting indemnification of 18,000 livres to John Anderson and John Williamson, Scotch merchants, from whom they had confiscated two hundred tuns of wine at Havre." * The Darnley branch of the Stewarts had a destiny in 1 Michel, i. 357'36i. THE DARNLEY STEWARTS. 51 France which belongs to European history. Sir John Stewart of Darnley was one of Buchan's heroes, and fought at Baugd and Crevant, where he was wounded and taken. He was exchanged for the Earl of Suffolk's brother, Lord Pole. He was rewarded with the lands and lordships of Aubigny, Concressault, and Evereux, with the privilege of quartering the arms of France on his achievement. In 1427 he visited his own poor country in great state, with no less a function than that of ambassador from the Court of France. His mission was to negotiate a marriage between Louis the Dauphin and Margaret of Scotland. A year afterwards he and his brother were both killed in battle before Orleans, and were laid together in the cathedral of that memorable city. John Stewart's representatives merged all their other titles in that of Lennox, which his marriage brought to the family. The fifth in descent from him, Matthew Earl of Lennox, who succeeded to the title in 1526, served under the French banner in the Italian wars, and though he hardly reached historic fame, is recorded in the books of genealogy as that respectable personage " a distinguished officer." Coming to Scotland in all his foreign finery, he made love to Mary of Guise, the widow of James V., a pursuit in which, by the oddest of all coincidents, he was the rival of the father of that Bothwell who settled all questions of small family differences by blowing his son into the air. This Lennox achieved, as every one knows, a more fruitful alliance with royalty through a daughter of Margaret, the sister of Henry VIII. Returning to Sir Alexander Stewart, we find that his second son, John, founded a great house in France. The titles of John's son and representative, Bernard, were, " Viceroy of Naples, Constable of Sicily and Jerusalem, Duke of Terra Nova, Marquis of Girace and Squillazo, Count of Beaumont, D'Arcy, and Venassac, Lord of Aubigny, and Governor of Melun." 1 He commanded the army of Charles VIII. which invaded Naples, and 1 Douglas's 'Peerage,' ii. 93. 52 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. gained the victory of Seminara, an achievement which Sismondi thus describes : " D'Aubigny, who commanded in Calabria, resolved to arrest the progress which King Ferdinand was making in his territories, seconded by Gonzalvo of Cordova ; and although he could not collect more than 400 mounted men-at-arms, twice the number of light cavalry, and a small body of Swiss infantry, he crossed the river between Terra Nova and Seminara before the enemy, and attacked them on the opposite bank, although their number was at least three times as great as his. The Calabrians, who had forced Ferdinand and Gonzalvo to accept the battle, did not wait for the first attack, but fled as soon as they saw the French advance. Ferdinand would have been taken had not John of Altavilla given him his horse, at the sacrifice of his own life : he was killed shortly after. Gonzalvo, Hugh of Cordova, Emmanuel Benavides, Peter de la Paz, Spanish captains who all, at a later period, became famous at the expense of the French, would have been taken prisoners the following night in Seminara, if D'Aubigny, who was enfeebled by the Calabrian fevers, and sick all the time during which he was fighting, had been able to attack that town immediately. The gates were opened to him the next day." * Seven years later he was overpowered by numbers, and had to capitulate on the same spot; so that there is occasional confusion in history about the battle of Semin- ara, which is sometimes spoken of as a victory by, and sometimes as a defeat of, the French. Between these two conflicts there were many gallant feats of which he was the hero ; and he was as renowned for gentleness as for bravery. He was the companion of Bayard, and his rival in fame as a chivalrous soldier. 2 He died at Cor- storphine, near Edinburgh. One of the recumbent stone figures in the picturesque little Gothic church of that village is reputed by tradition to represent the great Lord 1 Sismondi, ' Hist, des Frar^ois, ' ch. xxvi. f " Le Sire d'Aubigny dont la loyaute etoit celebree dans tout le royaume de Naples." Sismondi, ch. xxix. DUCHY OF TOURAINE GIVEN TO DOUGLAS. 53 of Aubigny, Marischal of France ; but heraldry does not confirm this. Next to the royal family of Scotland in France were the houses of Hamilton and of Douglas, who at times almost rivalled them at home. The French dukedom of Chatel- herault is a name almost as familiar in history as the home title of the Hamiltons. By the side of the Scottish Constable of France rode a countryman scarcely less powerful the lord of the vast province of Touraine, which had been conferred on the gallant Douglas. It may interest some people to read an official contempor- ary account of the pomps and ceremonies, as also of the state of public feeling, which accompanied the investiture of the territory in its new lord. It is clear from this document that the people of Touraine took with signal equanimity the appointment of a foreigner from a distant land to rule over them. " Four days after the date of the letters -patent, the news of the change which they celebrated reached Tours. Several ecclesiastics, burghers, and inhabitants assembled in alarm in the presence of Jehan Simon, lieutenant of the Bailli of Touraine, William d'Avaugour, and charged Jehan Sain tier, one of their representatives, and Jehan Gamier, King's Sergeant, to go to Bourges, to William de Luce, Bishop of Maillezais, and to the Bailli, to learn whether the King intended to give and had actually given the Duchy of Touraine to the Earl of Douglas, of the country of Scotland ; and, if it was true, to beg of them to advise the said churchmen, burgesses, and inhabitants, what course they ought to pursue, and what was to be done in the circumstances, for the honour and advantage of this town of Tours and country of Touraine. " The which Jehan Saintier and Gamier brought back for answer, that the said nobles above mentioned said to them that it was true that the King has given the said Duchy of Touraine to the said Earl of Douglas, and that they should not be at all alarmed at it, and that the people of the said Tours and country of Touraine will be very gently and peaceably governed; and that before the said Earl of Douglas shall have, or shall go to take possession 54 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. of, the said Duchy, the King will send letters to the said churchmen, burgesses, and inhabitants, and each of his officers commissioned to make over to him the said pos- session, and that my Lord Chancellor and the said Bailli would in a short time be in the said town, the which would tell them at greater length what they had to do in the circumstances, and the causes by which the King had been moved to give him the said Duchy ; and also the said Saintier and Gamier brought the copy of the letter of gift of the said Duchy to the said Earl. "As soon as they knew at Tours that the King had given the Earl of Douglas the Duchy of Touraine, and that the new Duke was preparing to set out to take pos- session of it, they assembled at the Hotel de Ville to consider whether they would go to meet this stranger, and whether they would make him the customary pres- ents, which consisted of six pipes, that is twelve barrels, of wine, six measures of oats, fifty sheep, four fat oxen, and a hundred pounds of wax in torches. " They deputed two churchmen and four of the most considerable citizens to go to Loches to compliment the Duke in name of the town, ad they formed a company of mounted burghers to go to meet him. Having found him at a certain distance from the town, it accom- panied him till his arrival at Tours, into which he made his entry on the 7th of May, by the gate of Notre Dame la Riche. There he was received by the four represen- tatives of the town, and by all the burgesses, in arms. Martin d'Argouges, principal representative, spoke on presenting him the keys, and begged of him to maintain the inhabitants in their privileges, franchises, and liber- ties. The Duke promised, and the representatives took note of his consent, by three notaries, whom they had brought for the purpose. The Duke having then taken the keys, restored them immediately to the first represen- tative. Then he entered the town, where he was received by the people with acclamation. The streets were hung with tapestry and strewed with flowers. He went straight to the cathedral, at the great door of which he found the archbishop and all the canons in canonicals. The dean SCOTS FAMILIES IN FRANCE. 55 presented to him a surplice, an amice, and a breviary. The Duke, having taken the oaths at his hands, was received as a canon, and installed in the choir in pres- ence of Louis of Bourbon, Count of Vendome, grand chamberlain of France ; of John of Bourbon, his brother, Prince of Carency; of Francis of Grigneux; and of several other noblemen. Next day he went to the church of St Martin, where he was similarly received as honorary canon. After these ceremonies he established his cousin, Adam Douglas, governor of the town and castle of Tours, according to his letters of the 27th May. The inhabitants, after deliberation by their representa- tives, made a present to the new governor of two pipes of wine and a measure of oats." l So ends the history of the public inauguration of Douglas in his Duchy of Touraine, the extent of which one may see by looking at any old map of France in Provinces. Another ceremony, however, awaited him ere long. He paid for his honours with his gallant blood. He and the Constable Buchan were laid down together in one grave in the chancel of the cathedral church of Tours, the capital of his domain. Passing from the great houses which were royal, or nearly so, the researches of M. Michel have brought out a vast number of Scotsmen of the more obscure families, whose condition was materially improved, to say the least of it, by migration to La Belle France. Conspicuous for his good fortune among those who had reason to lament the kindly King Charles VII., was Nicholas Chambers, e'cuyer d'ecurie du roi, who, in 1444, obtained the seig- neury of Guerche, in Touraine, the district of the Douglases. Then follow certain Coninglants, Coigans, Coningans, Cogingands, and Conyghans, clustered to- gether as variations on Cunningham ; to these are set down certain gallant achievements, escapes, and fatalities, but nothing very specific for the genealogist, until one of them is run to earth in acquiring the lands of Arcenay, in 1 Extrait des Deliberations Municipals de la Ville de Tours- Michel, i. 139. 56 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. Burgundy, by union with the heiress, Martha of Louvois. After this the family is traced through many distinguished members to the first Revolution, when it disappears ; but it reappeared, it seems, in 1814, and is supposed still to exist. In tracing the alliances of the Lords of Arcenay, another Scots family of like origin turns up in the marriage of one of them to Marguerite de Humes, daughter of Jean de Humes, Seigneur de Cherisy. This Jean's mother was the daughter of a Guillaume Stuart, supposed to be of Scots origin ; and his grandmother, before her marriage to his grandfather Humes, had been the widow of a George de Ramsay, " probablement Ecossais lui-meme," as M. Michel says. Next come the Quinemonts or Kinninmonds, also established in Burgundy and Touraine. Their estate in Touraine alone may stand as a sample of the lists, long to tediousness, of the domains attached to the names of Scots families by the French heralds. They were Seigneurs "de Saint-Senoch, de la Roche-Aymer, de Varennes, des Cantelleries, de Bauge, de la Guenerie, de la Houssiere, de Vauguerin, de Paviers," &c. Next in order comes La Famille Gohory. To them L'Hermite-Souliers dedicates a chapter of his * History of the Nobility of Touraine,' wherein he derives them from the Gori of Florence ; but M. Michel triumphantly restores them to their true distinction as Scots Gorrys or Gowries. 1 Among the noble houses of Touraine, follows that of Helye Preston de la Roche Preston, married to Dame Eleanor Desquartes, eminent in its 1 Perhaps Goreeus may be a variation of the same name, but this is merely a guess. Johannes Gorseus, a celebrated physician in Paris, left a posthumous work, published at Frankfort in 1578, called ' Definitionum Medicarum Libri xxiiii.' It is in the form of a dictionary, the heads under which each matter is treated having the peculiarity of being in Greek. It professes to deal with all knowledge connected with medicine, but medicine at that time was discursive over all nature ; and, in fact, the book which is a bulky folio may be considered one of the earliest scientific cyclopaedias. SCOTS FAMILIES IN FRANCE. $? own province from its nobility, and illustrious as the stock of the great Descartes. It is questioned whether the husband was a son of Edward Preston, who took to wife Pregente d'Erian, or of Laurent Preston, married to another daughter of the same house. These Erians seem to have had a decided partiality for the bonny Scots, since the widow of Edward Preston married the Seigneur of Ponceau and La Menegauderie, who, having been an archer of the Scots Guard under the name of De Glais, is with reasonable probability supposed to have been a Douglas from Scotland ; while another daughter is allied to the Seigneur de la Guenaudiere, named Maurigon, supposed to be a form of Morrison. There are still among other branches of the D'Erian race "plusieurs alliances avec des gentilshommes Ecossais de la garde du roi." One falls to Guillaume Dromont or Drummond, another to Guillaume le Vincton the nearest approach which French spelling and pronunciation can make to Swinton, though one might think it more akin to Living- ston. Another is destined to Henri de Crafort or Crau- furd, Sieur de Longchamp et de la Voyerie. Passing from the husbands of the D'Erians, the next Scot endowed by marriage is Andre* Gray, a name that speaks for itself. There are two noble archers of the Guard called Bourtic probably they were Bourties, the difference being a clerical error rather than a corruption ; and these are followed by a group of distinguished Livingstons converted into Levistons. Passing into Champagne, we have the coats armorial and some genealogical particulars of the houses of Berey, D'Handresson, Locart, Tournebulle, and Montcrif the origin of these is obvious. The last was probably an ancestor of that Moncriif who shines so brilliantly among the wits of the Grimm and Diderot school one of the forty immortals of the Academy, and a popular dramatist. The next name does not so obviously belong to us Val- Dampierre and one can only take M. Michel's word for it. It may perhaps be resolved into its familiar original by a process such as that applied to its owner's neighbour as a great territorial lord in the land of vineyards namely, 58 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. the Sieur Devillengon. When we go back a step to Vullengon, and then to Villamson, something not un- familiar dawns upon us, and at last we are landed in the homely surname of Williamson very respectable in many instances, but distinguished among ourselves by no greater celebrity than that of poor Peter Williamson, who was kidnapped and sold as a slave in the plantations, whence he escaped to tell his adventures to the world. It is quite delightful to see how this ordinary plant flourishes and blooms in Champagne. According to tra- ditions of the family, collected by La Chenaye-Desbois, Thomas Williamson, second of the name, archer of the Guard in the reign of Charles VIII., was allied to the royal house of Stewart. This may be true, but it was a current mot among the French of old that every Scotsman was cousin to the king. Whatever they may have been, however, the Williamsons or D'Oillengons, with many ter- ritorial branches, clustered round "les terres de Saint- German-Langot, de Lonlai-le-Tesson, et de la Nocherie." They preserved their highly characteristic native motto, "Venture and win," which had, no doubt, been their guiding principle from generation to generation. Their blazon, too, is ambitious, and strange to behold: a double-headed eagle, like the Austrian, grasping in its claws something like a small beer -barrel ; in scientific language a spread eagle argent, membered and beaked, poised on a casquet of the same, hooped argent It would be easy to cull similar particulars about the house of Maxuel; Herisson or Henryson, metamorphosing itself into D' Arson ; Doddes or Dods ; Estud from Stud, a name now scarcely known among us; the De Lisles, viscounts of Fussy, who are identified with our northern Leslies; Vaucoys, which is identified with Vauxe or Vans ; Lawson, which turns itself into De Lauzun ; D'Espences or Spences, who further decorate their simple native surnames with the territorial titles, De Nettancourt, de Bettancourt, de Vroil and de Villiers-le-Sec, de Launoy-Renault, de Pomblain, de Ville Franche, de St Sever, and many others. Surely the Spences, left behind in cloudy, sterile Scotland, ploughing sour moorlands, or SCOTS FAMILIES IN FRANCE. 59 drawing meagre profits from the retail counter behind the half-door of the burgh town, would have found it hard to recognise their foreign cousins fluttering thus among the brilliant noblesse of sunny France. The changes, indeed, which our harsh, angular sur- names undergo to suit them to the lazy liquid flow of the French utterance, are such as to give tough and tantalising work to the genealogical investigator ; and it is difficult to appreciate the industry which M. Michel has bestowed in the excavation of separate families and names from the great mass of French genealogical history. We all know the lubricity of the French language at this day in the matter of names, and how difficult it is to recognise the syllables of one's own name even where it is read off from one's own visiting-card, if the reader be a Frenchman. Such a name as Halliday is easily reclaimable, even though its owner may flame in the territorial patronymic of Vicomte de Pontaudemer. Folcart and Le Clerk are resolvable into Flockhart and Clerk. In deriving D'Ang- lars from Inglis, however, as others have done, M. Michel acknowledges that the circuit is considerable, if not im- practicable : " La distance nous parait trop grande pour qu'un rapprochement soit possible." The name of Wil- liam Stuyers, too, puts him at defiance, although in an old writ he is mentioned as an officer of the Guard, and designed a "natif du royaume d'Escosse." Sinson is, without much stretching, traced to Simpson. The name Blair appears in its native simplicity, only attaching itself to the titles Fayolles and L'Estrange, in preference to the territorial titles of Pittendriech or Balthayock enjoyed by the most eminent members of the house in Scotland. Wauchop transposes itself into Vaucop and Vulcob. Per- haps, however, the respectable but not dignified name of Monypenny owes the greatest obligation to change of climate. Even in its own original shape, when trans- ferred to a country where it does not signify a large store of copper coinage, it floats down the mellifluous flood of the noblesse quite naturally in company with the territo- rial titles of Varennes and Concressant ; but when altered into Menypeny, it might return home, as indeed it did, 6O THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. in the possession of a French ambassador, without risk of detection. The change is but slight, and shows how much may be accomplished by the mere alteration of a letter in removing vulgar and sordid associations. Another remarkable type of the Scots emigrant families is that of Blackwood. It suffers little more by transfer- ence than the necessary remedy for the want of the w, in which it partakes with the royal house of Stewart. The French Blackwoods were of the later Scots emigrants fleeing from the Reformation, and their rewards in the country of their adoption were rather from offices than from lands. It would be difficult to find the distinction between the territorial aristocracy and the noblesse of the Robe better exemplified than in comparing the fortunes of the Blackwoods with those of the other families just spoken of. Adam Blackwood, the head of the house, held a judicial office which gave him the title of Conseiller au siege de Poitiers. His grandfather fell at Flodden. His father had been killed in the wars of Henry VIII., probably at Pinkie, when he was ten years old, and his mother died soon after, a widow broken hearted. The boy, tended by relations whose religion gave them more influence in other countries than at home, was sent early abroad. He became a thorough Frenchman, studying at Paris, and spending his days at Poitiers. He was a champion of the old Church and the divine right of kings, and wrote with the controversial vehemence of the age against the opinions promulgated by Buchanan in his ' De Jure Regni apud Scotos.' But that for which he chiefly claims remembrance is his ' Martyre de la Royne d'Escosse, Douairiere de France,' &c., with an account of the "mensonges, calomnies, et faulses accusations dressees centre ceste tresvertueuse, trescatholique et tresillustre princesse." It is most easily to be found in the reprint of tracts on Queen Mary, by Jebb. Blackwood hit the key-note of that kind of chivalrous rejection of sublunary testimony, and deification of the accused, which have characterised the subsequent vindicators of Queen Mary's innocence ; and there is in his resolute singleness of pur- pose, and energy of championship, the charm which, SCOTS FAMILIES IN FRANCE. 6 1 when one can forget the facts, pervades the writings of this class. Blackwood married Catherine Courtinier, daughter of the Procureur du Roi of Poitiers. She bore to him four sons and seven daughters a progeny so ab- normal in France, that it induces M. Michel to express admiration at his continuing the pursuit of letters, " malgre' ses devoirs de magistral, d'e'poux, et de pere." He pub- lished a collection of pious meditations in prose and verse, of which M. Michel tells us that, paying a visit to London, where he was presented at Court, King James showed him a copy of his ' Meditations ' in the royal library. One of Blackwood's sons became a judge at Poitiers. His son-in-law, George Crichton, was professor of Greek "au colle'ge de France." His brother Henry taught philosophy in the University of Paris ; another brother, George, "fit un chemin assez brillant dans 1'eglise de France." This was a method of enrichment which could not give a territorial hold to a family ; and whether it was from a distaste towards acquisitions which could not be made hereditary, or to difficulties in the way of a foreigner rising in the Church, it is observable that the ecclesiastical is the department in which the Scots took the least portion of the good things going in France. Yet some of them drew considerable temporal prizes in the profession which deals with our eternal destiny. A certain priest named John Kirkmichael, or Carmichael, seems to have had an eventful history, of which but the outline remains. As he is said to have escaped from the carnage of Verneuil, it is to be presumed that he fought there, and was not in orders. But he afterwards became Bishop of Orleans, and is known in French ecclesiastical history as Jean de St Michel. It is a question whether it is he who estab- lished in his cathedral church the messe bcossaise for his countrymen slain at Verneuil. The great Cardinal Beaton, Bishop of Mirepaux, was an ecclesiastical prince in France, whence great portion of his lustre was reflected on his own poor country. His nephew James, a far worthier man, had a different career, spending his old age in peace among his French endowments, instead of coming home 62 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. to fall in the wild contests of his native land. He was employed as Queen Mary's ambassador in France, and continued ever faithful to her cause. He saw, as the shadow of the change of rule and religion in his own country, a like change come over the fortunes of the Scot in France. His countrymen were now no longer adven- turers seeking the region best fitted for pushing their for- tunes, but poor refugees seeking bread or a place of hiding and refuge. Yet a gleam of patriotic feeling came over the old man when he heard from his retirement that the son of his old mistress heretic though he was had succeeded to the broad empire of Britain ; and he caused fire on the occasion certain feux de joie at St Jean de Lateran. Several of the Kennedys, predominant among the hard-fighting clans near the Border, obtained distinctions in France, where the sharp contour of their name was smoothened into Cenedy. Thomas de Houston is pleased to accept from Louis XI. the seigneury of Torcy in Brie, in place of the ch&tellenie of Gournay, which he resigns. Robert Pittilloch, a Dundee man, seems to have first entered the service in the humblest rank, and to have worked his way up to be captain of the Guard, and to enjoy the nickname of Petit Roi de Gascogne, along with a more substantial reward in the lordships of Sauveterre. One could go on at great length with such an enumera- tion, but it is apt to be tiresome. This is not intended as a work of reference or a compendium of useful know- ledge, and I must refer the reader who, either for histori- cal or genealogical purposes, wishes to find all that is known about the settlements of the Scots families in France, to go to M. Michel's book. The names and titles thus casually brought together, will serve to show how thoroughly reviving France was impregnated with good Scots blood. The thorough French aristocratic ton characterising the numerous ter- ritorial titles enjoyed by the adventurers, may strike one who meets the whole affair for the first time as mightily resembling the flimsy titles by which men of pretension SCOTS FAMILIES IN FRANCE. 63 beyond their caste try to pass themselves off for some- bodies. But everything about these Scots was real and substantial, in as far as the fortunes they achieved were the fruit of their courage and counsel, their energy and learning. The terrible slaughter among the French aris- tocracy in the English battles made vacancies which came aptly to hand for the benefit of the enterprising strangers, and of course they could not do otherwise than adopt the custom of the country, with its complex system of territorial titles, in which men's proper names got swamped and buried, in so far that half-a-dozen Frenchmen, all brothers born of the same father and mother, will be commemorated under names totally distinct. It was during the Hundred Years' War that this colony, as it might almost be termed, of Scots settled in France. The affair bears a striking resemblance to the influx of Northmen, or Normans, five hundred years earlier, with this grand distinction, that these came as enemies and depredators, seizing upon their prey, while the Scots came as friends and champions, to be thankfully re- warded. The great similarity of the two migrations is in the readiness with which both sets of men settled down, assimilating themselves with the people. The assimilation, however, was not that of slave or follower in the land of adoption not even that of equal, but partook of leadership and guidance. Both were received as a sort of aristocracy by race and caste ; and hence it came to be a common practice for those who were at a loss for a pedigree to find their way to some adventurous Scot, and stop there, just as both in France and England it was sufficient to say that one's ancestors came in with the Normans. Colbert, who has left his mark on history as the most powerful of financiers, when he became great, got the genealogists to trace his family back to the Scots, as many a man in England, on rising to distinction, has spanned over intervening obscurities and attached his pedigree to a follower of the Norman. The inscription, 64 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. indeed, on his Scottish ancestor's tomb will be found in Moreri " En Escosse j'eus le berceau, Et Rheims m'a donne le tombeau." Moliere professed Scots descent, to cover, as the in- vidious maintained, the vulgarity of the sound of his paternal name of Poquelin. A mystery worth clearing up surrounds a suggestion sometimes made about the great Sully, that he professed relationship with the Beatons of Scotland to bring him rank. What makes such hints appear rather invidious is, that he claimed for his own family of Bethune a lustre which could get no aid from Scotland. He arrogated descent for it from the house of Austria, and specifically warned the public against the supposition that he meant the existing im- perial house of Hapsburg, whose ancestors were but private gentlemen a century or two ago his ancestors were of the old reigning house. There seems, however, to have been some hitch in his pedigree ; for, in the notes to the common editions of his memoirs, allusion is made to a process "unjustly" disputing his right to bear the name of Bethune, in which a writer on his side mentions his connection with the Beatons of Scotland ; l and M. Michel cites from a standard genealogical and heraldic authority the dictum that the Bethunes were of Scottish origin. 2 So little, by the way, did Sully know 1 Memoirs, book vi. 2 "Bethun, originaire d'Ecosse, mais etabli en France: ecartele, au I et 4 d'argent, a la fasce de gueules, accompagnee de trois macles de meme ; au 2 et 3 d'or, au chevron de sable, charge en chef d'une hure de sanglier d'argent. " From Saint Allais, ' Armorial General des Families Nobles de France' (Michel, ii. 136). To the accom- plished herald there will be much suggestive both in the identities and the marks of difference between this blazon and that of the head of the Scots family of Beaton : " Quarterly, I and 4 azure, a fesse between three mascles or ; 2 and 3 argent, on a chevron sable an otter's head erased of the first." Nisbet's 'Heraldry,' i. 210. The mascle, by the way, is supposed to be a peculiarly French symbol, being taken from a kind of flint found in Bretagne. Nisbet remarks that it had been sometimes mistaken for the lozenge. SCOTS FAMILIES IN FRANCE. 65 of the geographical relations of the archbishop, that he speaks of his diocese of Glasgow as a place in Ireland. To return to the comparison with the Normans. Sir Francis Palgrave set all his learning to work with sedu- lous diligence to find out some of the antecedents, in their own northern land, of the illustrious houses of Normandy and England, but without success ; all was utter darkness, as if one had passed from the unsetting sun into the arctic winter. The failure was more in- structive than many a success. It showed emphatically how those brilliant adventurers, the Frenchest of the French, had cast their chrysalis when they spread their wings in the new land of their adoption. And some- what similar it seems to have been with our Scots, who at once take their place with all proper national charac- teristics in the fastidious aristocracy of the most polished people in the world, preserving no traces of the influence of their native bogs and heaths and hard upbringing, and equally hard uncouth phraseology. On one point, however, the Scots must have differed from their Scandinavian prototypes they must have owned to pedigrees, whether fairly obtained or not. The specialty of the Northmen, on the other hand, at the com- mencement of their career, appears to have been to abjure pedigree with all its vanities, and start as a new race in competition with the old worn-out aristocratic Roman world. The old world professed to despise the rough barbarians of the new; but these gave scorn for scorn, and stood absolutely on their strength, their daring, and their marvellous capacity to govern men. It is among the most singular of social and historical caprices, that the highest source to which, in common estimation, a family can be traced, is that which is sure to come to a stop at no very distant date. Of families not Norman it may be difficult to trace any pedigree beyond the era of the Norman migrations; but of all Norman houses we know that the pedigree stops there absolutely and on principle. The illimitable superiority assumed over the rugged adventurers by the great families of the old world seems not to have rested so much on the specific pedigree 66 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. of each, as on the fact that they were of the old world that their roots were in the Roman empire that they belonged to civilisation. But so utterly had the historical conditions here referred to been inverted in popular opin- ion, that it was usual to speak of the house of Hanover as in some way inferior to the Stewarts, who, in reality, were mere mushrooms beside the descendants of the Guelphs. It would be too heavy a responsibility for the most patriotic among us to guarantee the unexceptionable re- spectability and good conduct of all those countrymen of ours who built up their fortunes under the auspices of our munificent ally. It would be especially perilous to guar- antee that they all held that social position at home which they asserted and maintained abroad. All the world knows how difficult it is to adjust the equivalents of rank between nations, and to transfer any person from one social hierarchy into his exact place in another. There are specialties social, hereditary, and official, to be dealt with, some of them having nothing equivalent in the other hierarchy, some with the same name, but a totally dif- ferent meaning, others fictitious or casual in the one, while they have a fixed, distinctive, even legal meaning in the other. To interpret, but far oftener to confuse, these difficult and distracting elements of identification, there are the variations in etiquette, in domestic usage, in cos- tume, in physical condition and appearance, which would all teach towards a certain conclusion were men omnis- cient and infallible, but lead rather to distraction and blunder in the present state of our faculties. It was one of Hajji Baba's sage observations, that in England the great personages were stuck on the backs of the carriages, while their slaves or followers were shut inside to prevent their escape. How many people, supposing that, in a solemn, bearded, turbaned, and robed Oriental, they have had the honour of an interview with some one of princely rank, have been disgusted with the discovery that they have been doing the honours of society to a barber or a cook ! There are some Eastern titles of mysterious grandeur which are yet far from impressing the auditor with any sense of dignity in their mere sound as, for instance, SCOTS FAMILIES IN FRANCE. 6? Baboo, Fudky, Maulvee, and the like. There is the great Sakibobo, too, of tropical Africa ; how would his title sound at a presentation ? and how can we translate it into English? To come to Europe, what notion of feudal greatness do we imbibe by hearing of the Captal of Buch, the Vidam of Amiens, the Ban of Croatia, and the Stavost of Olxstern? To come nearer home still, what can Garter or Lyon make of the Captain of Clanranald, the Knight of Kerry, The O'Grady, and The O'Donoghue? Is it not on record that a great Highland potentate, hav- ing in Paris presented a card bearing that he was Le Chef de Clandonochie, was put in communication with the chief of the culinary department of the hotel where he visited ? Even some of the best established and most respectable titles have difficulty in franking themselves through all parts of the country. Has not an Archbishop of York been suspected of imposture on presenting his cheque on a Scotch bank with the signature of Eborac ? and have not his countrymen had their revenge on the Scots Judges and their wives, when Mrs Home travelled in charge of Lord Kames, and Lord Auchinleck retired with Mrs Boswell? We may see, in the totally different uses of the same term, how subtle a thing titles are. The Sheriff of Mecca, the Sheriff of London, and the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, are three totally different sorts of personage, and would be troubled how to act if they were to change places with each other for a while. It is said to depend on niceties in its use whether the Persian Mirza expresses a Prince or a mere Mister. But, after all, where can we go for a greater social puzzle within the compass of three letters than in our own Sir, which is at once the distinctive form of addressing royalty, the exclusive title of knight- ship, the common term which every man gives another in distant polite communication, and an especial form of ex- pressing haughty contempt, when communications are not intended to be polite ? There being thus, in fact, in titles of all sorts, consider- able room to come and go upon, it is probable that the Scots adventurers made* the best of the very considerable number of rather empty titles scattered over their barren 68 THE ANCIENT LEAGUE. acres. An instance of their assumption has been recorded as a flagrancy. A certain Monteith of obscure origin having got access to Richelieu, the Cardinal asked him which family of Monteiths he belonged to. As the story goes, remembering that his father was a fisherman on the Forth, he said he was " Monteith de Salmonnet ; " and the anecdote is verified by the existence of a solid folio volume, first printed in French and afterwards translated into English, being a history of the civil wars of Britain in the seventeenth century, by Robert Monteith de Salmonet a title as emphatic and distinct as that of the proudest De Chateau Rouge or De la Tremouille. But even this audacious case is not entirely beyond vindication. The right to a cast of a net was a feudal privilege or servitude inheritable by the head of the family, like any seignorial right ; and, in a country where people spoke of the suc- cession to the hereditary gardenership of the lordship of Monteith, it was not necessarily an act of flagrant im- position to make something dignified out of the piscatory privilege. The history of almost every man's rise in the world con- sists of a succession of graspings and holdings of posi- tions taken up timidly and uncertainly, and made by degrees secure and durable. In the development of this tendency, it will be the policy of the immigrant to find, for any social title of a dubious or fugitive character which he may enjoy in his own country, some seeming equivalent, but of fixed character and established value, in the land of his adoption. Scotland, with its mixed and indefinite nomenclature of ranks, would thus afford good opportunities for the ingenuous youth transferring himself from his dubious home-rank into something more specific in the symmetrical and scientifically adjusted Court precedency of France. The practice of the Lairds and Goodmen of presenting themselves by the territorial names of their estates, with or without their family pat- ronymics, gave an opportunity for rendering the posses- sion something equivalent to the French De and the German Von. The families that had lost their estates adhered to the old title with the mournful pride of de- SCOTS FAMILIES IN FRANCE. 69 posed monarchs. If these had often the sympathy of their peculiar world with them, yet no one could, with a shadow of justice, blame the actual possessors of the solid acres for also claiming the honours attached to them. John Law of Lauriston, who ruled France for a few months with the capricious haughtiness of an Eastern despot, among the many strange chances which led to his giddy elevation, owed much to that which gave uniform- ity and consistency to the others namely, that, although he was an Edinburgh tradesman, his possession of a small estate, happily named, in the neighbourhood of his busi- ness, enabled him to take rank in the noblesse. History affords one very flagrant case of the potent uses of the territorial Of. In Galloway there long existed a worshipful family called the Murrays of Broughton. They were not ennobled by a peerage, but belonged to the opulent and proud class of territorial aristocracy who often do not con- sider the peerage any distinction, and so they were thor- oughly entitled to consider themselves within the category of noble in France and Germany. There happened also to be a small croft or paddock on the wayside between Noble- house and Dumfries called Broughton, and its owner, some say its tenant only, being named Murray, took on himself very naturally and fairly the style and title of Murray of Broughton. Having found his uses in this title, he left it dedicated to perpetual infamy ; for he it was who, having incited poor Prince Charles Edward to the Scottish ex- pedition, and by his zeal obtained the office of " Secretary to his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales," afterwards used the information he had thus obtained to buy his own personal safety, by bringing his companions in re- bellion to the block. So thoroughly had his notoriety impressed on the contemporary mind the notion of his representing the old Galwegian house of Murray of Broughton, that it is believed even by local antiquaries. It will not do too rigidly to sift the pretensions by which men, young, poor, obscure, and struggling, have sought notice in early life, and found their way to honours and pos- sessions which they have worthily and honourably enjoyed. Imagination is strong and criticism weak in matters of 7