LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE 0\ V MAITLAND OF LETHINGTON THE SCOTLAND OF MART STUART MAITLAND OF LETHINGTON AND THE SCOTLAND OF MAEY STUABT A HISTORY BY JOHN SKELTON * ADVOCATE J DOCTOR OF LAWS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH AUTHOR OF THE ESSAYS OF SHIRLEY VOL. I. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBUEGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXXXVII v/1 CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. PAGE Original authorities for a history of the period, . xi Spottiswoode and Calderwood, .... xiii The State Papers, . . . . . xv Use of the State Papers by the earlier historians, . xv Collections of State Papers, ..... xvi Sir William Cecil's Collections, .... xxiii Comparative value of original documents, . . xxiii Knox on Mary and her mother, .... xxv Statements that are primd facie incredible, . . xxvi Authorities not contemporary, .... xxxiv Plan of the work, ...... xxxvi Maitland's political and religious attitude to be ap- proved, ........ xxxviii BOOK I. FROM MAITLAND'S BIRTH TILL MARY STUART'S RETURN TO SCOTLAND. CHAPTER I. LE THING TON AND THE LAMMERMUIR. Birth of Maitland, . . The country of the Lammermuirs, . . . vi Contents. Tliirlstane and the Lauder valley, .... 5 The Castle of Lethington, 8 Thomas the Khymer, . . . . . 12 The " Auld Maitland " of Border Song, . . . 13 Sir Eichard Maitlaud, . . . . . . 15 His complaints of the time, . . . . . 22 His advice to his son, . . . . . . 26 Thomas Maitland, . . . . . . 27 John Maitland, the Chancellor, .... 32 The Duke of Lauderdale, 34 William Maitland's early life, . . . . 35 CHAPTER II. THE SCOTLAND OF MARY STUART. Edinburgh from the Blackford Hill, . . . 37 The Edinburgh of Maitland, 39 Scotland in the sixteenth century, . . . . 43 Xumbers of the people, . . . . 43 The Borderers, ....... 47 The Redshanks, . . . . . . 55 The Lowlanders, . . . . . . . 64 Destruction of the great woods, . . . . 65 The monastic life, . . . . . . 67 The burgh life, 71 Trade and commerce, . . . . . . 72 Mansions of the nobles, . . . . . 75 Agriculture, . 79 Love of sport, . . . * . -. . . 80 Wild animals, 81 Royal hunting-parties, . . . . . . 85 The Universities, . ' . . . . . 86 Melville at St Andrews, 90 The introduction of printing, . . . . 91 Scottish Literature, . . . . . . 93 The Romance Writers, . . . . . . 94 The Annalists, ....... 97 The Didactic Poets, . . . . .103 Sir David Lindsay and the Reformation, . . 112 Contents. vii CHAPTEE III. THE FEUDAL SOCIETY. Decline of Feudalism, . . . . . .118 The great feudal houses, . . . . .120 Comyn, . . . . . . . .121 Douglas, 133 Maitland's contemporaries, . . . . . 143 Arran Glencairn Argyll, . . . . .144 The Earl of Huntly, 146 The Earl of Morton, . . . . . .148 Parliament and the officials, . . . . .152 CHAPTEE IV. POLITICS AND RELIGION. The political position, . . . . . .155 The English claim to superiority, . . . . 156 The Scottish anarchy, . . . . . .158 The Stuarts, 160 The claim renewed by Henry VIII., . . .162 Sadler at Edinburgh, 163 Failure of the negotiations, . . . . .165 Vengeance of Henry, . . . . . .168 Eeligion, . . 173 Principles of the Eeformation, . . . . 174 St Andrews the ecclesiastical capital, . . . 176 The earliest reformers, . . . . . .182 Progress of dissent, . . . . - . 184 James V. and Sadler, . . . . . .185 Character of Cardinal Beaton, . . . . 187 Forces which shaped the Scottish Eeformation, . 189 The Martyrs, 190 The Gude and Godly Ballates, . . . .195 State of the Church, . . . . . . 198 lumbers of the clergy, . ... . . . 200 Immorality, idleness, ignorance, .... 202 viii Contents. CHAPTER V. THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION. Early notices of Maitland, 206 First controversy with Knox, .... 208 John Knox, Maitland as Secretary to the Regent, . . . 213 Marie of Lorraine, . . . . . .214 The Congregation of Jesus Christ, . . . 215 Religious animosity and political disaffection, . . 216 Knox's position, . . . . . .219 Maitland quits the Dowager, . . . . 221 Maitland 's position, . . . . . .223 Death of Marie of Lorraine, . . . . .225 CHAPTER VI. THE REVOLUTION. The glory of architecture, . . . . . 227 The medieval churches of Scotland, . . . 228 The " fiery besom," . . . . . . 230 Responsibility of Knox, . . . . .235 Deposition of Marie of Lorraine, . - . . 239 Failure of the Congregation, . . . .240 Knox and Elizabeth, . . . V . . 242 Maitland despatched for English aid, . . 245 Sadler at Berwick, . . . . . . 246 Anxiety about Maitland, . . . . .250 The Convention of Berwick, . . . . 254 The Siege of Leith and Treaty of Edinburgh, . . 254 Cecil in Scotland, . . . . . .' 256 Assistance rendered by Maitland, . - . . 256 The Parliament of 1560, 260 Maitland opens the Parliament, . . . 261 The Confession of Faith, . . . . .263 Religious divisions Knox and Maitland, . . 265 Contents. ix CHAPTEE VII. MAR Y STUART AND ELIZABETH TUDOR. Mary's claim to the English succession, . . . 269 Struggle between Mary and Elizabeth, . . . 270 English poets on Mary and Elizabeth, . . . 271 Character of Elizabeth, . . . .273 Character of Mary Contemporary evidence, . . 276 Sir Ealph Sadler, 277 Early letters from France, . . . . . 281 Thomas Eandolph, 284 John Knox, 286 Sir Francis Knollys, . . . . . .287 N. White, . 289 The scene at Jedburgh, 292 The true force and charm of Mary's character, . 294 CHAPTEE VIII. THE MINISTER OF MARY STUART. Mary returns to Scotland, . . . . .302 She allies herself with the moderate party, . . 304 She appeals to Maitland, . . . . .307 Difficulties of his position, ..... 308 Charges of inconsistency. . . . . .318 The Chamaeleon of George Buchanan, . . . 319 The Machiavelli of Eichard Bannatyne, . . 320 Modern Historians, . . . . . .321 Character of Maitland, 322 Speeches and letters, . . . . . .328 Devotion of his friends Mary Fleming, . . 330 The gift of ruling men, . . . . .333 Maitland's aims, . . . . . . .335 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. "VTO period of Scottish history has been pro- d.uctive of more difference of opinion among historical writers than the reign of Mary. There is hardly a single event, from the day of her birth to the day of her death, which has not been the occasion of keen and even vehement debate. I have sometimes felt that the con- clusions of competent students have varied so widely because certain preliminary questions have not been sufficiently considered. What are the original authorities for Mary's reign ? and what is their comparative value ? The latter question is, of course, the more import- ant of the two ; yet even the former is not entirely free from dubiety. Excluding one or two English and foreign writers, whose sources b Xll Introductory Chapter. of original information about Scottish affairs were obviously extremely meagre, the contemporary works which are really valuable appear to me to be these : ' The Chronicles of Scotland,' by Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie ; ' History of the Refor- mation in Scotland/ by John Knox (Laing's edition, 1846); ' Rerum Scoticarum Historia/ by George Buchanan ; ' The Complaynt of Scot- land ;' 1 ' Memoirs of Sir James Melvil of Halhill ' (London, 1683); 'Journal of the Transactions in Scotland, 1570-73,' by Richard Bannatyne (Edinburgh, 1806); 'The Autobiography and Diary of James MelvilT (Edinburgh, 1842); 'Historical Memoirs,' by Lord Herries (Abbots- ford Club, 1834); 'The Historic and Life of King James the Sext, 1566-1596' (Bannatyne Club, 1825); 'A Diurnal of Remarkable Occur- rents' (Maitland Club, 1833); "The Diarey of Robert Birrel" ('Fragments of Scottish History/ 1 An admirable analysis of The Complaynt of Scotland is given by the late Dr Ross, in his very suggestive volume on Scottish History and Literature (1884), pp. 247-292. The au- thor is unknown ; all that can be affirmed about him is that he was one of those representatives of the reforming Catholicism who stood by Marie of Lorraine while she pursued a moderate and pacific policy, an advocate of the French alliance, and a native of the Border counties. See Dr Murray's edition of The Complaynt (1872). Introductory Chapter. xiii by Sir J. G. Dalzell: Edinburgh, 1798 which contains also the contemporary narrative of the battle of Pinkie, " out of the Parsonage of St Mary's Hill in London, this xxviii of January 1548"); 'De origine, moribus, et rebus gestis Scotorum,' by John Leslie (Eome, 1578); 'The History of Mary Stewart,' by Claude Nau (Edin- burgh, 1883); 'History of the Church of Scot- land,' by the Eight Eev. John Spottiswoode (Edinburgh/ 1851); 'History of the Kirk of Scotland,' by Mr David Calderwood (Edinburgh, 1842); 'Ancient Scottish Poems,' from the MS. of George Bannatyne (Edinburgh, 1770); 'Ancient Scottish Poems,' from the MS. of Sir Eichard Maitland (Pinkerton, 1786) ; ' Scottish Poems of the Sixteenth Century' (Dalzell, 1801); and the official records of parochial, municipal, and eccle- siastical bodies, which have been published by the Spalding, Maitland, Bannatyne, and other Clubs. Some of these authorities can hardly perhaps in strictness be regarded as original or contem- porary. Spottiswoode's father, no doubt, was an office-bearer in the Eeformed Church from the first ; but Spottiswoode himself was not born till 1565. Yet whoever carefully examines XIV Introductory Chapter. his narrative will come to the conclusion that much of his information had been obtained at first hand from men who had been eye-wit- nesses of the events which he records. The same may be said of Calderwood, although Calderwood was not more than twelve years old when Mary was executed. Calderwood's temper was unhappy ; he was, in fact, so dour, so irresponsive, so obstinately opinionative, that he ultimately succeeded in alienating his warm- est friends ; l but he was a man of immense in- dustry ; he had collected, at one time or other, nearly all the pamphlets and broadsheets on ecclesiastical matters, which formed so large a portion of the current literature of the latter half of the sixteenth century ; and he has thus pre- served (though it is true that he borrowed largely from Knox, Bannatyne, and Melville) a valuable mass of historical documents which would other- wise have been lost. On these grounds it ap- pears to me that we are justified in regarding 1 "He was recommended to the first commodious room. Likely he shall not in haste be provided. The man is sixty- six years old ; his utterance is unpleasant ; his carriage, about the meetings of the Assembly and before, has made him less considerable to divers of his former benefactors." (Baillie's Letters, 1641.) Introductory Chapter. xv both Spottiswoode and Calderwood as original, if not strictly contemporary, authorities. 1 These are the principal contemporary authori- ties ; but there are other writings which are among the most valuable original contributions to the history of the time the State Papers. The State Papers, which are accessible to us, were for the most part a sealed book to the con- temporary historians. It is a mistake, however, to imagine that the more important of these inval- uable documents have only recently been made available for the purposes of historical research. For nearly two centuries the extraordinary inte- rest of the letters and other documents deposited in the great public libraries has been recognised by the Scottish antiquary. Mackenzie, in his ' Writers of the Scottish Nation,' the successive volumes of which were published between 1708 and 1722, acknowledges his obligations to " Mr 1 That the authors of A Diur- nal of Remarkable Occurrents, Historic of King James the Sext, and Birrel's Diarey were living during the reigns of Mary and her son does not, I think, admit of dispute ; but the pre- cise manner in which these con- temporary records were pre- pared, and by whom, is not known ; and the absence of any direct information on these points is calculated of course to impair their value. The " mem- oirs" attributed to Lord Herries are of doubtful authenticity ; they have admittedly been re- cast from an earlier manuscript. xvi Introductory CJiapter. Crawfurd's Collections from the Cotton Library in the Lawyers' Library at Edinburgh ; " and he prints in the article entitled " William Mait- land " three letters by the Secretary, taken from the Crawford transcripts. Bishop Keith, whose history appeared in 1734, refers to the same collection, "The Faculty of Advocates have in their fine library at Edinburgh a tolerably good collection of papers transcribed from the Cotton Library in England;" and he goes on to say that he proposes to place in the same library the copies of letters written in the French language which he had obtained from the Scottish College at Paris. (It does not appear that the intention was carried out ; the obliging keeper of the Advocates' Library assures me that, so far as he is aware, the papers to which the Bishop alludes have not been preserved.) Principal Eobert- son's ' History of Scotland ' was published in 1759, and in the preface to the first edition he refers to the Crawfurd Collection ("the library of the Faculty of Advocates at Edinburgh con- tains not only a large collection of original papers relating to Scotland, but copies of others no less curious, which have been preserved by Sir Robert Cotton, or are extant in the public Introductory Chapter. xvii offices in England") as well as to another col- lection, in the possession of Mr Goodall, the acute critic of the Casket Letters, who was one of the keepers of the Library. "Mr Goodall, though he knew my sentiments with regard to the conduct and character of Queen Mary to be extremely different from his own, communicated to me a volume of manuscripts in his possession, which contains a great number of valuable papers copied from the originals in the Cot- tonian Library and Paper Office, by the late Reverend Mr Crawfurd, Regius Professor of Church History in the University of Edinburgh." Both of these collections are now in the Ad- vocates' Library. The earlier was made for David Crawfurd of Drumsoy (mainly by Robert Robertson, A.M., about the year 1707), who presented it to the Faculty of Advocates. Mr David Crawfurd was the Historiographer-Royal, and the editor of the well-known ' Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland/ which was published in 1706. In the preface to the version of the ' Historic of King James the Sext,' printed for the Bannatyne Club, the editor (Thomas Thom- son?) gives an account of the circumstances attending the " downright forgery," of which xviii Introductory Chapter. Crawfurd was accused when he asserted that his volume of ' Memoirs ' was taken verbatim from an authentic manuscript of the period ; and he adds, " Had Mr Matthew Crawford, the contem- porary professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Edinburgh, lived to publish his projected work on the History of Queen Mary, his exposure of these ' Memoirs ' would have been in a very different tone from that of Bishop Keith," Keith having alluded to " the consid- erable variations between the manuscript and the print " with a mildness unusual (and ap- parently unappreciated) in antiquarian circles. Whatever his other merits may have been, Mr Matthew Crawford's handwriting is extremely illegible, and compares unfavourably with the admirable caligraphy of Mr Robert Robertson. The copies appear to have been made by the professor himself "from several repositories in England " during a visit he paid to London in 1728. The copies of Sir Nicolas Throckmorton's letters, however, were obtained as early as Jan- uary 1725 " from the originals which were lent me by Andrew Spreul, writer in Edinburgh ; " and several letters from Queen Elizabeth " in the Bishop of Ely's library at Cambridge," were Introductory Chapter. xix transcribed for him by " Mr Thomas Baker, fel- low of St John's College, a curious antiquary." I have gone carefully through these collections (the David Crawfurd Collection is in three vol- umes, the Matthew Crawford in two), and it appears to me that in either case the selection of documents was made with much skill and judgment ; comparatively few papers of first- rate importance have been omitted ; the letters of Eandolph, Throckmorton, and Knollys, which are of immense value to any historian of the reign of Mary, are given at great length, while there are many interesting letters from Mary, Elizabeth, Cecil, Sadler, Lethington, and others, as well as a selection from the contemporary pasquils, the invectives of George Buchanan and the ballads of " Tom Truth." When to these are added the original papers collected by James Anderson, Postmaster-General for Scotland, and published by him in 1728, it is obvious that no inconsiderable proportion of the most valuable documents in the great public libraries must have been well known to the Scotch antiquarian writers of the early part of the eighteenth century. The industry of these early adventurers is the more creditable when the difficulties they had to xx Introductory Chapter. contend with are recognised. The State Papers had not then been calendared, there was not even an inventory. A catalogue of the Cottonian Library had been printed at Oxford in 1696 ; but it was very imperfect ; and it was only in 1802 that the elaborate catalogue now in use was issued. 1 Until quite recently, indeed, little or nothing was done to facilitate the use of the invaluable treasures which were hidden away in public offices and private libraries. Anderson's Collections were not printed until 1728. A selection from the papers at Hatfield, made by Samuel Haynes, the rector, was published in 1740. Another volume, containing papers of a later date, selected by William Murdin, appeared in 1759. The State Papers and Letters of Sir Kalph Sadler, in three volumes, edited by Walter Scott, were published in 1807. Among several important collections, issued during the last fifty years, the selection made by Thomas 1 The Manuscripts in the Cot- tonian Library were deposited in fourteen presses, over which were placed the husts of the twelve Caesars, and of Cleopatra and Faustina. Hence the form of reference which is apt to puzzle a novice e.g., "Titus," " Vespasian," &c. Sir Robert Cotton, who was one of a band of well-known antiquaries Joscelin, Lambard, Camden, Noel was born 22d Jan. 1570. Introductory Chapter. xxi Wright in his ' Queen Elizabeth and her Times ' (1838) is perhaps the most useful to students of Scottish history. Of the official Calendars, pub- lished by authority of the Master of the Eolls, it is impossible to speak too highly ; and the Scottish Calendar, covering the period from 1509 to 1589, edited by Markham John Thorpe, is one of the very best of the series. The first part of the Calendar of the Hatfield manuscripts has been published quite recently (1883). It has been prepared with great care, and the abstracts of all the more important documents are unusually full and accurate. In the Fac- similes of the National MSS. of England, Scot- land, and Ireland (twelve volumes) to which I have elsewhere referred, many interesting docu- ments illustrating the Mary Stuart period have been excellently reproduced by the process known as photo-zincography. The two bulky volumes which contain selections from the Register of the Privy Council during the reign of Mary were prepared under the supervision of the late Mr Hill Burton; but most of the minutes of general historical interest had been previously published by Keith and others. It may be said with truth that nearly every document, throwing XXII Introductory Chapter. any light upon the most interesting events of the sixteenth century in Scotland, has now been made fairly accessible to the historical student. One or two may have been overlooked ; the treasures of the Vatican have not yet been exhausted ; x but, speaking generally, little re- mains to be done. The destruction of the muniments of the Scottish Colleges in France during the Eevolution was a real calamity ; it was in the Scottish Colleges at Douay and Paris that the letters and reports of Mary Stuart's envoys were stored ; and it was from their archives that any complete explanation of the Darnley and Bothwell episodes might have been looked for. But the Colleges were sacked during the Eevolution, and the libraries dispersed, " the most valuable MSS." we are told, " being sold by the quintal or burnt." 2 The Vandals of the Revolution cared for none of these things ; and it is highly improbable that any of the valuable manuscripts which were " sold by the quintal" are now in existence. 1 See the Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI. , edited by William Forbes Leslie, S.J. (1885). 2 Lord Herries's Memoirs. Preface, p. xxv (Abbotsford Club, 1836). Introductory Chapter. xxiii No writer on the age of Mary can overestimate his obligations to Sir William Cecil. Cecil was the most industrious of English statesmen of the first order. His activity, indeed, was almost incredible. The papers which he left behind him are widely distributed. They form no in- considerable portion of the national records, the State Papers connected with Mary and Eliza- beth in the Library at Hatfield, in the Public Record Office, in the Cottonian, Harleian, and Lansdowne Collections at the British Museum, drafted or endorsed by the great Lord Burleigh, being among the most valuable we possess. The comparative value of the letters of Ran- dolph, Drury, Sadler, Throckmorton, Knollys, and other correspondents of the English Secre- tary will be dealt with hereafter, in connection more particularly with the inquiry into the genuineness of the Casket Letters ; but I may say here that it has been too much the custom to regard " original authorities " with unreason- ing reverence, and to accept without question whatever is found in their pages. The narrative of a contemporary is not conclusive. It must be submitted to the ordinary critical tests before it can be allowed to pass muster. This rule is xxiv Introductory Chapter. of general application ; but it applies with special force for various reasons to the writers of the sixteenth century. Society was divided into two hostile camps ; and those in the one re- garded those in the other with a peculiar energy of dislike. In intestine strife the usages and courtesies of war are too often neglected ; when civil dissensions are intensified by theological animosities, the conflict attains the maximum of bitterness. There is barely one of the writers I have named on whose unverified testimony it is safe to rely. Lindsay of Pitscottie is re- garded by many (to some extent unjustly, I think) as the most credulous and unveracious of Scottish annalists ; but Knox, for one, was as credulous as Pitscottie. The Reformer's vigorous understanding was clouded by superstition, and warped by prejudice; and the dramatic force and intense vitality of his narrative must not blind us to the fact that he was a man of vio- lent and unreasoning antipathies, who listened greedily to idle rumour and the gossip of the market-place. The evidence of the writers of either faction must therefore be subjected to the closest scrutiny, and accepted with the utmost reserve. Introductory Chapter. xxv They must be compared one with another, and the conflicting evidence carefully weighed. A great German historian has demonstrated that it is possible by careful analysis to learn where a writer obtained the " facts " which he records ; and every statement made by Knox or Buchanan or Melville must, when necessary or practicable, be traced back to its source. A contemporary writer is truly valuable only for what he has garnered from his own experience ; and his authority 1 varies according to the nature of the subject. Knox, for instance, was intimately acquainted (no man more so) with the proceed- ings of the Congregation and of the General Assembly ; but he knew little, except from un- friendly rumour, of what was doing at Court. His relations with the Court were strained or hostile ; during many months, indeed, he was barely on speaking terms even with Moray ; and he regarded Mary and her mother with the most vindictive animosity. His eye was jaundiced ; he saw men " as trees, walking " ; and the most innocent natural phenomena were habitually translated by his morbidly vivid imagination into supernatural portents. Thus the unpleasant fog, the thick easterly "haar," which hung over xx vi Introductory Chapter. the Forth when Mary landed at Leith, and to which Edinburgh from its position is peculiarly exposed, was the expression of divine displeasure at her return. "The very face of heaven, the time of her arrival, did manifestly speak what comfort was brought unto this country with her to wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness, and all im- piety ; for in the memory of man, that day of the year, was never seen a more dolorous face of the heaven, than was at her arrival. The sun was not seen to shine two days before, nor two days after. That forewarning gave God unto us; but, alas ! the most part were blind." (Turning to Brantome, we find that the frivolous French- man saw nothing but a dense fog grand brouillard). Again (to take another instance), Knox asserts, or at least insinuates, that Marie of Lorraine was the mistress of Cardinal Beaton, and that her daughter was the mistress of Chastelard; and modern historians have not been averse to adopt these cruel calumnies on his unsupported testimony. But the slightest ex- amination shows that the Reformer was not in a position in either case to speak with authority; that he could have had no direct or personal knowledge ; and that he merely repeated the Introductory Chapter. xxvn malicious tittle-tattle of ignorant but industrions gossips. 1 To sift in such cases truth from fable, the chaff from the wheat, implies the exercise of what has been called the historical faculty. The historical faculty is an imposing name ; but the historical faculty in this connection is only common-sense applied to the past. And the common-sense which is severely critical, not to say sceptical, is the common-sense which must be brought to bear upon the records of Mary's reign. Many of the judicial depositions of the age, for in- stance, were obtained by fraud or torture ; the wholesome scepticism of common-sense teaches us 1 "At the first sight of the Cardinal, she said, 'Welcome, my lord ; is not the king dead 1 ' What moved her so to conjec- ture, diverse men are of divers judgments. Many whisper that of old his part was in the pot, and that the suspicion thereof caused him to be inhibited the Queen's company. However the tidings liked her, she mended with as great expedi- tion of that daughter as ever she did before of any son she bare." History of the Refor- mation, i. 92. The conversation between Mary and her brother as to Chastelard which Knox records is obviously apocryphal. (ii. 368.) Knox, of course, was not present at the inter- view, and he could not have obtained his information from Moray, for Moray was at that time so devoted to Mary that he incurred the resentment of the Reformer. " In all that time the Earl of Moray was so fremmit (strange) to Johne Knox, that neither by word nor write was there any com- munication betwixt them." (ii. 461.) xxviii Introductory Chapter. to regard them with acute suspicion. They are nearly, if not altogether, as valueless to the cautious historian as the confessions of midnight irregularities extorted by similar means from the witches. He dismisses without hesitation the hal- lucinations of the wretched creatures who figure so largely in the records of the criminal and spir- itual Courts of the Reformation ; but he has to deal (and these, of course, require more delicate handling) with moral as well as physical improb- abilities. A story is related upon what appears to be unimpeachable authority which is morally as incredible as a moonlight ride on a broomstick. Yet here again, neither timidly accepting nor rashly rejecting the evidence produced, he must allow his own judgment, his own sense of the fit- ness of things and the unities of character, free play. Hume has demonstrated with irrefutable logic that it is always more probable that the reporter was mistaken or misinformed than that a miracle was worked ; and a moral miracle must be nearly as incapable of proof as a physical. To both we may apply the Roman proverb, / would not believe it were it told me by Cato. 1 1 "When any one tells me | that he saw a dead man re- Introductory Chapter. xxix It is necessary to insist on this view ; for there are pitfalls on every side of the unwary traveller in this difficult country ; and the consistent ap- plication of the simple principle that it is more probable that the reporter was somehow mis- taken than that an event morally or intrin- sically incredible occurred, tends unquestionably to remove certain of the difficulties which beset his path. To take one or two examples. There is a report in Bannatyne's Transactions of a ser- mon, in which the ministers of the Church are exhorted to pray for the Queen, said to have been preached in St Giles', on Sunday, 17th June 1571, by Alexander Gordon, Bishop of stored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other ; and according to the superi- ority which I discover, I pro- nounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion." On Human Un- derstanding, section 10 Of Miracles. Whately's " Histo- ric Doubts concerning Napo- leon Buonaparte," which was meant as an answer to Hume, is essentially a more sceptical work than the essay on Mir- acles ; for if human testimony regarding the contemporary events of the nineteenth cen- tury may be so logically dis- credited, what credit can be at- tached to stories which belong to a remote past and an age of faith ? XXX Introductory CJiapter. Galloway. 1 Gordon, who was a stanch sup- porter of Mary, having been indeed on more than one occasion her Commissioner to the Eng- lish Court, is reported to have said, " And, further, all sinners ought to be prayed for ; gif we should not pray for sinners, for whom should we pray, seeing that God came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Saint David was a sinner, and so was she ; Saint David was an adulterer, and so is she ; Saint David committed murder in slaying Urias for his wife, and so did she ; but what is this to the matter ; the more wicked that she be, her sub- jects should pray for her to bring her to the spirit of repentance." 2 This report of the Bish- op's discourse has been used to show that even her own partisans admitted that Mary was guilty of the crimes with which she was charged. But to impartial critics it seemed so incredible that one of the Queen's own party should have pub- licly accused his sovereign of murder and adul- tery, that they preferred to hold that the pre- 1 It appears, however, that the sermon could not have been delivered on that day. 1 Journal of the Transac- tions in Scotland, by Richard Bannatyne. Edinburgh, 1806 : p. 181. Introductory Chapter. xxxi tended discourse was an invention of the enemy, it bore, they maintained, " evident marks of forgery." 1 The theory of forgery, however, is not necessary, it is easy to see how a perfectly honest misunderstanding might have arisen. The sermon was probably published as a broad- sheet, a condensed and imperfect report having been supplied to the printer by one of the audi- ence. The Bishop's argument was obviously to the effect that even on the assumption that Mary was guilty of the crimes imputed to her, she was, as a sinner as well as their sovereign, entitled to the prayers of her ministers. He was putting, for the sake of argument, a hypothetical case. 2 This, I think, is an easy and natural solution ; but the report of another admission to the same effect, said to have been made by John Leslie, Bishop of Eoss, presents greater difficulties. 1 Senators of the College of Justice, by Brunton and Haig (1832), p. 131. 2 Or was it &jeu ffesprit, a sa- tirical effusion directed against the Bishop as much as against Mary? This view is rather supported by a later passage, in which the preacher confesses "this vile carcass of mine to be the most vile carrion, and altogether given to the lusts of the flesh, yea, and I am not ashamed to say the greatest trumper in all Europe, until sic time as it pleasit God to call upon me and mak me one of his chosen vessels, in whom he has poured the spirit of his evangel." xxxii Introductory Chapter. The well-known historian of Scotland was the indefatigable servant of Mary. He was for years her constant adviser; after he was sepa- rated from her, he went from Court to Court, proclaiming her innocence and denouncing her wrongs. Yet, in a letter from Thomas Wilson to Lord Burleigh (November 8, 1571), Leslie is represented as bringing the most grotesque and monstrous charges against the mistress whom he served with loyal fidelity to the end, charges far more sweeping, indeed, than the Confederate Lords had ventured to offer. " He saith, further, that the Queen is not fit for any husband. For, first, she poisoned her husband, the French King ; again, she hath consented to the murder of her late husband, Lord Darnley ; thirdly, she matched with the murderer, and brought him to the field to be murdered ; and, last of all, she pretended marriage with the Duke, with whom (as. he thinketh) she would not long have kept faith, and the Duke should not have had the best days with her." l It appears to me that this narrative is intrinsically incredible. I do not undertake to offer any explanation ; but and 1 Calendar of Hatfield Manuscripts, p. 564. Introductory Chapter. xxxiii this is a question which every reader must de- cide for himself is it possible to believe that, in conversation with a comparative stranger, who was moreover an agent of the English Govern- ment, Leslie, that " most pious, able, and devoted servant " (as Mary called him in a letter to Philip, shortly before her death), did connect, or could have connected, his mistress's name with such vile and indeed irrational criminality? Here again we fall back upon Hume ; we may, or may not, be able to explain the misunderstanding ; but the fact being in itself incredible / would not believe it were it told me by Cato. The period to which my examination of the State Papers has been specially directed com- prises the thirty years between the death of James V. and the death of Maitland (1542-1573). It has been necessary for me to treat incidentally of statesmen, soldiers, and poets who belonged to an earlier time ; but, except in the case of the Comyns, I have made no special studies for the purpose, and even in the case of the Comyns, I have constantly felt that the materials which I have endeavoured to arrange required systematic revision. In the meantime, and until some more exhaustive inquiry has been completed, XXXIV Introductory Chapter. my provisional sketch may be accepted for what it is worth. Among writings not contemporary, which are more or less instructive for this period, the fol- lowing may be noted : Mackenzie's ' Lives of Scottish Writers;' 1 Bishop Keith's 'Affairs of Church and State in Scotland' (Spottiswoode Society, 1844-45); Robertson's 'History of Scot- land ; Douglas's ' Peerage of Scotland ' (2 vols., 1813) ; Scott's ' Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border ; ' Chalmers's ' Life of Queen Mary ; ' Riddell's 'Peerage and Consistorial Law;' Nichol's ' History of the Scottish Poor Law ; ' M'Crie's ' Life of John Knox ; ' ' Historical Account of the Senators of the College of Justice ; ' Robert Chambers's writings on Scottish Antiquities ; Hallam's ' Constitutional History of England ; ' Skene's ' Celtic Scotland ; ' 2 Froude's ' History of 1 Dr Mackenzie was a care- less, credulous, and uncritical writer ; but, born in 1669, he belonged to an age when au- thentic traditions of the pre- vious century were still current, and some of these he, and he alone, has recorded. 2 The extraordinary accuracy and keen critical acumen of Dr Skene's Celtic Scotland can- not be lauded too highly ; and though it deals mainly with the Scot before his institutions had been feudalised, it forms the groundwork on which all later history must be based. It is altogether a monument of solid and enduring work which has barely been appreciated as yet except by a few laborious scholars. Introductory Chapter. xxxv England ; ' l Burton's ' History of Scotland ; ' Tytler's ' History of Scotland ; ' Schiern's ' Life of Bothwell ; ' Sir John Graham Dalzell's an- tiquarian reprints (Sir John was a member of the Scottish bar, who devoted himself between 1798 and 1848 to the republication in a conveni- ent form of many rare and remarkable tracts illustrative of Scottish history) ; Cosmo Innes's ' Scotland in the Middle Ages,' and ' Sketches of Early Scottish History ; ' Walcot's ' The Ancient Church of Scotland ; ' Hartings's ' Extinct British Animals ; ' and the voluminous Mary Stuart 1 Only the man or woman who has had to work upon the mass of Scottish material in the Eecord Office can properly ap- preciate Mr Fronde's inexhaus- tible industry and substantial accuracy. His point of view is very different from mine ; but I am bound to say that his acquaintance with the intrica- cies of Scottish politics during the reign of Mary appears to me to be almost, if not quite, unrivalled. I am afraid, from what I have heard, that Mr Froude's proposed History of the Empire under Charles V. has been definitely put aside. One may be permitted to doubt whether even the duties im- posed upon him by Mr Carlyle's testament, and which he has discharged with such eminent (if unappreciated) sincerity and candour, should have been al- lowed to stand in the way. The nearest approach to a com- prehensive European view of the Revolutionary movement of the 15th and 16th centuries is, of course, to be found in the successive works of the great German historian, whose death is announced while these pages are going through the press Leopold von Ranke ; but Mr Symonds and the author of Euphorion have presented us with isolated " studies ;; of great interest. Introductory Chapter. literature, from Goodall, Tytler, and Whittaker to Hosack, Bell, and Swinburne. I have considered it inadvisable to burden the text of this preliminary volume l with copious footnotes. Such a practice, by interrupting the How of the narrative, tends to weaken the in- terest and distract the attention of the reader. The leading authorities are specified in this in- troduction ; and an Appendix of Notes and Il- lustrations, containing numerous extracts from, and references to, original writers and records, is in preparation. If I am not mistaken, the Appendix will be found by no means dry, the direct and naive comments of contemporary observers having generally a natural freshness which the more laboured narrative of the his- torian fails to retain. I am not conscious in any case of missing the exact sense of the passages which I have taken from State papers and other contemporary documents; but I have ventured 1 I propose to divide my narrative into three Books. The first Book is contained in the volume now published, and in- cludes the period from Lething- ton's birth to Mary's return to Scotland in 1561. The second Book will cover the period be- tween 1561, when Mary re- turned, and 1567, when she abdicated ; the Third, the period between the abdication and Maitland's death in 1573. Introductory Chapter. xxxvn not unfrequently to substitute a modern for an obsolete word ; and, as a rule, I do not adhere to the spelling. I have made one exception only certain of Lethington's letters, printed now for the first time, are given exactly as they were written. 1 The purist of a Text Society may pro- perly enough resent any tampering with an original text ; but the business of a writer of history is to make himself intelligible to his contemporaries, and it is a mistake to use language (except perhaps when specially char- acteristic and graphic as John Knox's often is) which has become obsolete, and which, without a glossary, cannot be understood by a fairly intelligent reader of modern English. A history written during the evenings of busy days, devoted to other work, is produced under obvious disadvantages. Yet it may possibly be argued on the other hand that " The sense that handles daily life, That keeps us all in order more or less," and that is as valuable to the man of letters as 1 The letters referred to will be found in the second volume, in the chapter devoted to the Maitland - Sussex correspond- ence. About two hundred of Maitland's letters are in exist- ence. xxxviii Introductory Chapter. to the man of action, is braced and invigorated by the habitual intercourse with all sorts and conditions of men which the secluded scholar does not enjoy. I cannot expect that the conclusions which I have ventured to formulate in this book will be accepted by the zealots on either side. The Calvinistic or Puritan view of the Scottish Reformation has had brilliant apologists ; so has the Catholic ; but the policy, moderately conservative, rationally progressive, of the party that Maitland led, has been treated with con- sistent unfairness. Yet Maitland, according to the view I hold, was in complete intellectual accord with the prudent compromise which Elizabeth and Cecil, which the English Church and the English Commonwealth, represent. Somewhat behind the iconoclastic Radicalism, somewhat in advance of the reforming Catho- licism, he followed in politics and religion the via media. The moral and material prosperity of Scotland is traced by many eloquent writers to the revolutionary movement of which Knox was the soul. It may be reasonably doubted how far this view is consistent with a sound Introductory Chapter. xxxix construction of the facts of history. The Church of Knox, after a stormy struggle of a hundred years, during which it had failed to conciliate the aristocracy on the one hand, or the sober in- telligence of the middle and lower classes on the other, burnt itself out in Covenanter and Cameronian. The Church that survived, the Church that is identified with the true social development of Scotland, is the Church of Mait- land and Spottiswoode, of Forbes and Leigh- ton, of Carstares and Robertson, of Robert Lee and Norman Macleod and John Tulloch. 1 The theocratic government which the extreme party in Church and State desired to establish was inconsistent with the genius of a free people ; the Revolution of 1689, in spite of obvious limitations, was the beginning of a better order of things ; and to the Union, far more than to the Reformation, the amazing progress which Scotland has made since the early years of the eighteenth century is to be ascribed. 1 In associating these names, I assume of course that there is in religious societies a moral and spiritual continuity (the apos- tolical succession of Christian life and conviction), a contin- uity which may be held perhaps to be even more essential than that which is ecclesiastical only. xl Introductory Chapter. The famous minister of Queen Elizabeth was, during many anxious years, the constant corres- pondent of William Maitland ; long after Mait- land's tragic end, Lord Burleigh, as we know, looked back with pathetic regret to the interrup- tion of " the old familiar friendship and strict amity " : Were the pretty frivolities of the Age of Dedications still in vogue, a record of the life and times of " Lethington " would have been most fitly inscribed to the illustrious minister of Queen Victoria, who maintains undimmed the civic renown of the Cecils, and who values, as Maitland valued, sobriety in religion and sanity in politics. J. S. THE HERMITAGE OF BRAID, 15th Oct. 1886. BOOK I. FROM MAITLAND'S BIETH TO MARY STUART'S RETURN MAITLAND OF LETHINGTON. CHAPTER ONE. LETHINGTON AND THE LAMMERMUIR. WILLIAM MAITLAND of Lethington, one of the most remarkable Scotsmen of the sixteenth century, was born about the year 1528. The accurate and industrious David Laing says generally that he was born some time between 1525 and 1530 ; and we may therefore conclude that the date can be only approximately de- termined. If he was born in 1525, he was forty-eight years old when he died ; if he was born in 1530, he was not more than forty-three. A brief life, according to either reckoning ; but one into which much was crowded. The country of the Lammermuirs is the coun- VOL. I. A 2 Lethington and the Lammermuir. try of the Maitlands. They owned the lands that lie between the upper waters of the Leader and the Tyne, their old keep of Thirlstane being built upon an affluent of the Leader the more modern Tower of Lethington rising from a conspicuous plateau on the Tyne near Haddington. Some fifteen or twenty miles of a rough moorland track lead from the vale of the Leader to the vale of the Tyne. It is a country with a character of its own ; and the pedestrian who traverses these bare high-lying valleys, while the mists of an autumnal morning are driving round the Lammerlaw, will not read- ily forget the impression they make. Even now it is a place where the characteristics of the solitary sheep-walks of the Border dales are appreciated with exceptional vividness. There is nothing Alpine about the scenery, it would be absurd to associate the mountain glory and the mountain gloom with these unromantic up- lands. The rocks which dip into the sea at Fast Castle and St Abb's Head are very grand ; but of course, regarded simply as scenery, they have nothing in common with the inland range to which they truly belong. Yet the pastoral solitude of the region is not unimpressive. From Tollishill to Tester ten miles as the crow flies there is not a shepherd's hut. The tramp who misses the track in winter or early spring Lethington and the Lammermuir. 3 may be lost for days. The snow lies deep, and the mists the easterly "haar," to which a range that skirts the shore of the German Ocean is pecularily exposed, as well as the true moun- tain mists are blinding. From the summit of the Lammerlaw one-third of Scotland lies at our feet ; but there are comparatively few points of vantage from which a distant view can be ob- tained. To the eye of a stranger, indeed, no- thing can be more confusing than this intricate network of valleys, this convolution of glens, this vast billowy plain, where the waves rise and fall in soft and tender lines, and one rounded summit succeeds another with almost wearisome iteration. The only token of human life on their bracken-covered sides is the occasional sheep-pen which, however, when empty and deserted, seems somehow to add to the loneliness of the surroundings. What sounds there are serve only to deepen the impression of absolute quiet- ude, the croak of a raven, the whir of the moorfowl, the wail of whaup and plover, the bleating of the sheep. The hill-country of Lauderdale even to-day is seldom explored. There are probably a hun- dred glens which are not visited once a-year, except by the shepherds. Others where grouse are sufficiently abundant may be shot over about the Twelfth of August for a week. The birds, 4 Lethington and the Lammermuir. however, on these low-lying moors (the Lammer- law itself is only seventeen hundred feet above the sea) are shy and wild, and after the first day or two quite unapproachable. Such a district as I am describing must have been three hundred years ago wellnigh impenetrable. From Soutra to Penshiel there was one track only across the hills which a horseman could ride. The slopes of the Lammermuir were at an early period dense with forest and populous with game. In a manuscript history of one of its moorland parishes, the author observes that the names of the properties were mostly taken from those of the wild animals that used to haunt them. It was "a place which of old had great woods, with wild beasts, from which the dwellings and hills were de- signed, as Wolfstruther, Eoecleugh, Hindside, Hartlaw, and Harelaw." The wolf and the forest had possibly disappeared before Lething- ton was born ; but, even apart from savage ani- mals and primeval thickets, it is obvious that during an unquiet and turbulent reign, his native valleys must have been well suited for concealment and defence. Within a day's ride of the capital, the sanctuaries of the Lammer- muirs, sparsely peopled by clansmen whose fidelity was absolute, were specially convenient to a statesman who had many enemies. We hear, indeed, on more than one occasion, that Lethington and the Lammermuir. 5 the Secretary is " in hiding among the hills." Thirlstane the modern Thirlstane of the Earls of Lauderdale stands within a mile of the curious old burgh of Lauder, where a system of land-tenure virtually amounting to peasant- proprietorship has existed for many hundred years. It seems to have worked fairly well, than the burgesses of this secluded community, a more thriving, thrifty, well-to-do set of Scots- men are hardly to be met with this side the Atlantic. The Maitlands, quitting the cradle of the family in a neighbouring strath, appear to have latterly appropriated the burgh fortalice of Lauder. The central tower of the original fort- ress still remains ; but first the Chancellor William Maitland's brother and then the Duke, adapted it to the more refined requirements of modern life. The park, through which the Leader winds, is finely wooded ; one or two of the trees a noble sycamore, a still nobler ash are of immense age ; but the famous bridge, over which "Bell -the -Cat" and his brother nobles hanged the unlucky favourites of James III., has been removed. There are many pictures of the Duke, pictures in which the story of swift deterioration may be plainly read ; a lovely Countess by Gainsborough or Romney ; another delicate and winning face by a French artist ; 6 Lethinyton and the Lammermuir. all the Earls for two hundred years ; and three or four portraits of undoubted antiquity, which are said to be those of William Maitland and his brother. A strong family likeness runs through them all ; the character of a politic and powerful race has impressed itself upon their faces. It may be doubted, however, whether any entirely authentic portrait of William Maitland is in existence ; that in ' Pinkerton,' which is said to be taken from the Lauder portrait, is a manifest caricature of the original ; on the other hand, an engraving in the ' Iconographia Scotica ' repro- duces with tolerable fidelity one of the portraits in the Great Hall. The black velvet robe is trimmed with fur ; the broad white collar is richly laced. The hair is of a delicate auburn, so are the eyes, which are almond-shaped. The nose is long and peaked ; the lines of the mouth, partly covered by the pointed mous- tache, are strong and masterful. There is nothing severe or sinister about the face ; one feels, indeed, that it might become on occasion keenly sarcastic ; but for the moment the air of absolute composure, of an almost sluggish mas- terfulness, is complete. The curiously arched eyebrows remind one of the Mephistopheles in Retsch's outlines ; and the expression of repose, the accentuation of languor, is perhaps only a trick of the diplomatist, who, while seemingly Lethington and the Lammermuir. 7 inert and incurious, follows with instinctive vigi- lance every feint of his adversary. So the matter stands. We cannot positively affirm that any portrait of William Maitland has been preserved ; but even if it could be demonstrated that the Secretary did not " sit " to the artist, it is quite possible (the family traits, as I have said, being so persistent and indelible) that we have a good deal of " Lethington " in this really admirable bit of work by an earlier Jamesone. The surroundings of the old keep of Thirl - stane, in the adjoining dale, will appear familiar to those who know the Border landscape of the late George Harvey. There is the long shoulder of the pastoral hill, patched with heather and flecked with sunshine ; the brawling mountain torrent hurrying down to meet the Leader and the Tweed ; the strong square tower, with its immemorial ashes and knotted and twisted thorns, perched on the high table-land which rises steeply from the water-edge ; the rounded backs of the Lammermuirs along the northern sky. Of a summer evening, when, though the sun has set behind " Eildon's triple height," day- light still lingers in the west, and flushes the zenith, it is difficult to imagine a scene more peaceful, or in some aspects more pathetic. Save for complaint of curlew and plover, the silence is unbroken, and the haunting fascina- 8 Lethington and the Lammermuir. tion of the Borderland may then be felt at its best ; " The grace of forest charms decayed, And pastoral melancholy." When I stood the other day within its crumbling walls the cuckoo and the corn-crake were calling. The corn-crake and the cuckoo are not exactly modern inventions. They must have been vocal in the valleys when robber-chiefs dwelt here among armed retainers, and vigilantly watched the rough and dangerous track that led across the hills from the Scottish capital to the North- umbrian moors. We associate these sounds with utter peacefulness and the sweet amenities of the spring; what associations did they stir, what feelings did they rouse, in the breasts of the freebooters of the Border ? The whole environ- ment of our life has so completely changed, that it is wellnigh impossible to realise to ourselves, even imaginatively, the conditions, moral, in- tellectual, and physical, of that fierce and tur- bulent society. But Lethington is the ancestral seat that is most closely associated with William Maitland. It is probable that he was born within the old tower; there his boyhood and early manhood were passed ; the " Politician's Walk " is still pointed out by the local antiquary ; his friends in Haddington and elsewhere knew him as " the Lethington and the Lammermuir. 9 young Laird " ; in all the diplomatic correspond- ence of the age "the Lord of Lethington" is a famous and familiar name. To Cecil, to Eliza- beth, to Norfolk, to Mary Stuart, "Lethington" was the synonym for the gayest wit and the keenest intellect in Scotland. The hill-country is close at hand ; but the castle stands on the plain, the fertile Lothian plain that lies be- tween the Lammermuir and the sea. The great central tower of the "Lamp of Lothian" the Abbey Church of Haddington and the great square keep of Lethington, are the two historical monuments of the district where John Knox and William Maitland were born. They have stood the wear and tear of centuries ; many centuries will pass before they cease to be landmarks. The castle of Lethington is perhaps the finest existing example of a kind of building which united enormous strength with entire simplicity. There is some little attempt at ornamentation about the roof; the rain is carried off through the grinning mouth of griffin or goblin ; half-a- dozen narrow windows and narrower loopholes pierce the walls at irregular intervals ; but other- wise the precipice is sheer no shelf or ledge breaks the fall. From the flat plain, this pro- digious piece of simple, massive, monumental masonry rises like a natural rock. The walk round the battlements is as the path along a 10 Lethington and the Lammermuir. sea-cliff. The fine park is thickly wooded ; but a broad, straight, grassy avenue, twice the breadth of the castle, has been cut across the forest, somewhat formal, like the approach to a French chateau, through which a delightful glimpse of green fields and winding rivulet and purple moorland is gained. The interior for three centuries or more can have undergone little, if any, change ; the kitchen, the great hall, the bedrooms, the vaulted roof, the wind- ing staircase in the wall, the arms of the Mait- lands above the doorway, are in perfect pre- servation. Before the introduction of artillery, such a fortress was virtually impregnable. When the owner had closed and barricaded the one massive oaken door on the ground -floor, the waves of war beat around it in vain. 1 Life inside the walls, to be sure, must have been somewhat flat and monotonous ; but the roof protected by its stone balustrade was always open to air and sky, and formed probably the favourite lounge of the imprisoned inmates. Built midway of a gentle slope facing the 1 The author of 'A Diurnal of Occurrents' says that the castle was burnt by the Eng- lish on 15th September 1549. "Upon the 15th day thereof the Englishmen past out of Haddington, and brunt it and Leidington, and past away without any battell, for the pest and hunger was richt evil amangst them." The damage, however, could not have been great. Lethington and the Lammermuir. 1 1 Lammermuir, the view from the highest turret is extremely fine. The towers of the Abbey Church, indeed (the Abbey lying to the north in the shallow basin of the Tyne), are not in sight ; but from east to west the billowy sweep of wooded knoll and yellow strath appears well- nigh illimitable. Coalston and Salton, Tester and Whittinghame places renowned in history and legend are near at hand. So are Soutra and the Lammerlaw. The capital itself (or the heights in its neighbourhood) may once have been visible on a clear day; but on that side the spreading branches of a circle of venerable limes now rise above the roof. Lethington has passed away from the Mait- lands, and the name of the great historical mansion is not to be found on the map. The Duke sold it to the cousin of a famous hoyden, the saucy and frivolous Frances Stewart of De Grammont's scandalous chronicle. It is said, indeed, to have been virtually given to him by the spoilt beauty after she became Duchess of Lennox, Lord Blantyre being a poor man, the purchase-money was advanced to him by his cousin. Hence the fantastic modern name Lennoxlove. Thus also it comes about that the heirlooms of the Maitlands are to be found, not at Lethington, but at Thirlstane ; and the only picture of much interest on the walls is that of 12 Lethington and the Lammermuir. Frances Stewart herself, painted by Sir Peter for the Duke. "Fife and the Lothians" was then the politi- cal heart of Scotland ; and Maitland was lucky in being born within twenty miles of the capital. No fitter birthplace, indeed, for a Scottish states- man could have been selected. The Lauderdale Maitlands, it is true, did not rank with the great governing houses of Hepburn or Hamilton or Hume ; but, though commoners themselves, they were allied by marriage with the nobility of Lothian; the family was now prosperous and powerful; and their lineage was not undis- tinguished. Before the Leader joins the Tweed, it passes the hamlet of Earlston, Earlston being the modern corruption of Ercildoun. Thomas the Ehymer is a somewhat shadowy and unsubstan- tial figure, and modern scepticism treats his pro- phetic utterances with scant respect. But even the historical iconoclast does not venture to im- peach the authority of the feudal conveyance which has been duly recorded, and charters granted by or to the Laird of Ercildoun are still in evidence. That the poet was married is another fact which has been fully established ; and his wife, if the unbroken tradition of Lauderdale may be accepted, was a daughter of the then knight of Thirlstane the ancestor of William Maitland. Lethington and the Lammermuir. 13 I do not know if this knight of Thirlstane can be identified with the " auld Maitland " who is the hero of a well-known ballad recovered by Sir Walter Scott from the recitation of Mrs Hogg the venerable mother of the Ettrick Shepherd. This Sir Eichard was the owner of Thirlstane during the war of independence, and his obsti- nate defence of the old castle, judging from the fragments that remain, must have furnished a popular theme to many a Border minstrel. Among the romantic figures dear to the com- mon people commemorated by the Bishop of Dunkeld, " Maitland with his auld beard grey " occupies a prominent place. According to the ballad, the English army under Edward, after harrying the Merse and Teviotdale, " all in an evening late," came to a " darksome house " upon the Leader. The darksome house was Thirlstane, where a grey-haired knight, in an- swer to Edward's summons, " set up his head, and crackit richt crousely." He had got, he said, his "gude auld hoose," from the Scottish king, and he would keep it as long as it would keep him, against English king or earl. The siege lasted for more than a fortnight ; but each assault was repulsed ; and at last auld Maitland was left "hail and feir" "within his strength of stane." The king was bitterly mortified; and when at a later period he met 14 Lethington and the Lammermuir. young Maitland abroad, the face of the stern old father " Sic a gloom on ae browhead ! " still haunted his memory. "For every drap o' Maitland blude, I'll gie a rig o' land." The young Scottish soldier was nowise loath to ac- cept the invitation ; and when he had got the representative of " the auld enemy " fairly under foot, he gave him characteristically short shrift. " It's ne'er be said in France, nor e'er In Scotland when I'm hame, That Englishman lay under me And e'er gat up again." Between this Sir Eichard, whose exploits were " sung in many a far countrie, albeit in rural rhyme," and the Sir Richard of Mary Stuart's Court, the figures of the successive owners of Thirlstane are somewhat dim and undistinguish- able. A "William de Mautlant of Thirlstane joined the Bruce, and died about 1315. His son, Sir Robert Maitland, who, on 17th October 1345, had a charter of the lands of Lethington, fell next year at the battle of Durham. John, the son of another William, married Lady Agnes Dunbar, daughter of Patrick, Earl of March March was one of the greatest of the great earldoms and died about 1395. Then Robert Maitland of Thirlstane was in 1424 one of the hostages for James I. William Maitland, the father of the later Sir Richard, and the grand- Lethington and the Lammermuir. 15 father of Queen Mary's Secretary, married a daughter of George, second Lord Seton, and fell at Flodden. It is plain from this brief retro- spect that for several hundred years the ances- tors of " Lethington " had held a considerable and distinguished place among the great county families of the Merse. The name, moreover, had been intimately associated with some of the most stirring events in the national annals. We need not wonder, therefore, that the second Sir Richard should have prided himself as he did upon his descent. He was "dochter's son" of the noble house of Seton ; and he " collectit, gaderit, and set furth" with keen enjoyment the records of that gallant race. But he was probably thinking of the untitled gentlemen who had lived at Thirlstane on the Leader son succeeding father in an unbroken line for many generations when he wrote, with pardonable complacency, in the prologue to his history, " For we see some men, barons' and small gentlemen's houses, which began before some of the said great houses (now decayed), and con- tinued all their time, and yet stands lang after them in honour and sufficient living." Of this Sir Richard the famous father of the more famous son, whose life I have undertaken to write a good deal of information through various channels has come down to us, and may 16 Lethington and the Lammermuir. here be pieced together. He was ninety years old when he died in 1585 ; so that he must have been born four or five years before the close of the fifteenth century. He succeeded to the family estates in 1513 ; and about 1521 married Mariot Cranstoun, the daughter of the Laird of Crosbie. They had seven children three sons and four daughters. Both Sir Richard and Lady Maitland attained extreme old age the wife dying on the day her husband was buried. During his long life he held high office in the State, Keeper of the Privy Seal, Commissioner to England, Senator of the College of Justice. He was, according to the poet who wrote his epitaph (Thomas Hudson, " the unremembered name of him"), " ane worthy knight, baith valiant, grave, and wise ; " and the eulogy was not undeserved. His " steadfast truth and un- corrupted faith" had never been impugned either by friend or foe. 1 Enemies indeed he had none ; 1 Knox indeed asserts in his reckless fashion that Maitland was bribed to allow Cardinal Beaton to escape from prison in 1543. "But at length by buddis given to the said Lord Seaton and to the old Lord of Lethingtoun, he was restored to St Andrews, from whence he wrought all mischief." Sadler and Arran must have known who were implicated ; but, though they talked the matter over, Lethington's name does not occur. " Then he told me," Sadler writes, reporting his conversation with the Regent, " then he told me swearing a great oath that the Cardi- nal's money had corrupted Lord Seton." Lethington and the Lammermuir. 17 both factions respected and trusted him ; the counsel of the " unspotted and blameless " judge was always in request. James VI. observed, on his retirement from the active duties of the bench, that he had served with unswerving fidelity, " our grandsire, gudsire, grandame, mother, and ourself ; " so that Sir Eichard must have been in the public service in one capacity or other for upwards of sixty years. It was a wild and stormy time ; and the man who, in high office during sixty of these troubled years, was permitted to lead a simple, studious, tranquil, and, for the most part, uneventful life, must have been exceptionally fortunate, as well as constitutionally prudent. Several months of each year were of course spent in the capital ; but Lethington was his favourite residence. He loved the quiet of the country. There he col- lected his poems ; there he planted ; there he gardened. The apple still prized as "the Leth- ington," was, it is said, introduced by him from abroad. A contemporary poet has painted with cordial sympathy, and no inconsiderable skill, the characteristic attractions of the old keep. Let Virgil praise Mantua, Lucan Corduba ; but the excellence of Lethington its massive tower, its walls exceeding strong will be his theme. He can keep silence no longer; he must "put furth his mind," as he says, with natural quaint- VOL. I. B 18 Lethington and the Lammermuir. ness. How delightful it is to gaze from the wide roof over fair fields and woods ; to see Phoebus rise from the Lammermuir, or at nightfall "to hear the bumming of the air and pleasant even's sound!" The arbours, the flower-beds, the orchard green, the " alleys fair, baith braid and lang," which he praises, are still preserved ; but the lands have passed away from men of "Maitland blude"; even the historic name has been stupidly and foolishly discarded ; and one fears that the bard's inquiry " Who does not know the Maitland blude, The best in all the land ; In whilk some time the honor stude, And worship of Scotland ? " would not now receive, even from the dwellers on the soil which Sir Eichard owned, any clear or articulate response. It is only a hundred years ago since Pinkerton was able to assure his readers that Barbour's ' Bruce,' Blind Harry's 'Wallace,' and Sir David Lindsay's poems "might be found in modern spelling in almost every cottage in Scotland." I imagine that, out of the libraries of the learned and curious, not half-a-dozen copies could now be produced. The new democracy appear to have absolutely no interest in the story or ballad which was the delight of their fathers and grandfathers. We Letliington and the Lammermuir. 19 have wisely or unwisely made a clean sweep of the Past. A great calamity overtook Sir Richard at a period of his life which cannot now be precisely fixed. We know, however, that before Mary returned to Scotland he was blind. The loss of sight to a man of his tastes must have been a severe privation; but he bore the affliction with characteristic calmness and cheerfulness. Fortunately it did not incapacitate him for active life, he continued to occupy his seat on the bench, which he did not definitely resign, as we have seen, till within a year or two of his death. In the country he must now, how- ever, have been comparatively helpless. Field- sports were out of the question, and even his trees and flowers had possibly ceased to inter- est him. " I am visited with such infirmity," he says, in the preface to the ' History of the Setons/ "that I am unable to occupy myself as in times past. But to avoid idleness of mind, and because in these days I think it perilous to ' mell ' with matters of great importance, I have among other labours gathered and collected the things set forth in this little volume." By "other labours" he probably alludes to what ultimately became his engrossing occupation the cultivation and collection of verse. The Maitland Manuscripts preserved at Cambridge 20 Lethington and the Lammermuir. are worth far more than their weight in gold are in fact invaluable ; for had they not been preserved, much of the early poetry of Scotland would have been irretrievably lost. Mary Mait- land was his favourite amanuensis (she wrote with admirable distinctness and legibility, be- sides being a bit of a poet herself) ; and thus father and daughter seated at the window of the Great Hall which looks out on the Lammer- law months, and possibly years, were pleasantly and profitably spent. 1 Sir Richard's own verses not as poetry in- deed, but as records of the time are interesting o and valuable. They confirm the agreeable im- pression of his character which we otherwise obtain. The writer was not a man of any excep- tional insight or brilliancy ; but his sincerity, his shrewdness, his fine sense, his good feeling, his homely honesty and rectitude, are disclosed on every page. The passion 2 of the Reformation 1 The Scottish Text Society are about to republish the Cam- bridge MSS. A facsimile of a page from the folio Maitland MS. in the Pepys Collection in Magdalen College will be found in the third volume of the 'Facsimiles of the National Manuscripts of Scotland' (No. XXVI.), which also contains two pages from the quarto MS. in the beautiful handwriting of Mary Maitland (No. LXXII.) 2 The hysterica passio, we might say, when such an in- cident as this was possible : " There chanced a duel, a single combat, betwixt James Hep- burn of Moreham and one Birnie a skinner in Edinburgh. They were both slain and buried the morning after. Hepburn LetTiington and the Lammermuir. 21 does not appear to have touched him. In a fanatical age he was fair; he was tolerant at a time when toleration was held to be a mark of the beast. A good deal of the liberal spirit which distinguished the son is found in the father. Though latterly a stanch Protestant, he had no patience with the "fleshly gospellaris," as he calls them, who though most godly in words were loose livers, and who, though in all other things they acted " maist wicketlie," yet held themselves to be the true servants of God, because they called the Pope Antichrist, and the Mass idolatry, and ate flesh on Fridays. There is a fine passage in the ' History of the Setons,' where, after recording the benefactions of Jane Hepburn to the church of Seton, he continues : " Peradventure some in these days will think that building of kirks, giving of ornaments thereto, and founding of priests, are superstitious things and maintenance of idolatry, and there- fore not worthy to be put in memory. But who will please to read the histories and chronicles of all countries will find the conquest of lands, the moving of wars, and the striking of fields and alleged and maintained that there was seven sacraments ; Birnie would have but two or else he would fight. The other was content with great pro- testations that he would defend his belief with his sword ; and so, with great earnestness they yoked, and thus the question was decided." 22 Lethington and the Lammennuir. battles most written and treated of, howbeit the said conquests and doings proceeded of most insatiable greediness, and most cruel tyranny, against all law both of God and man. And since things unleesom as these are written to the com- mendation of the doers thereof, may I not set forth such works as, through all Christendom, and with all the estates thereof, were held of greatest commendation and most godly ? How they pleased God, I refer to Himself who sees the hearts and intentions of all creatures. At the least it shows the liberal and honourable heart of the doers thereof, who would rather spend their geir and goods upon such visible and commendable acts than hoard and poke up the same in coffers, or waste it upon unlawful sensuality or prodigality." We are constantly told that the principles of civil and religious liberty were unfamiliar to the men of the sixteenth century, and that tolera- tion, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech and thought, were plants of later growth. But such a passage as this (and there are many similar passages, for instance, in the contem- porary letters of William the Silent) seems to show that the idea was not so unfamiliar as it is said to have been, and that the reformers who attached civil and ecclesiastical penalties to "un- licensed thinking" sinned wilfully, and against Leihington and the Lammermuir. 23 the light. And if we are to accept Sir Richard's deliberate judgment the impressions of a singu- larly sober and judicial observer we are tempted to question how far the new order of things, as a reformation of morals, was a real advance upon the old. Much of the literature of the age, at least, seems to support the contention that there was little immediate amendment of life, and that, in some respects indeed, the ultra-Calvinistic revolution did more harm than good. It was natural, of course, that the liberation of the fresh and ardent activities which were every- where at work should be attended by occasional outbursts of anarchy and licence ; and too much validity must not be ascribed to complaints which were perhaps unconsciously exaggerated. The preachers ultimately succeeded in stemming the tide. Open sin as well as innocent gaiety were proscribed ; but the Puritan was not vic- torious for nearly a century ; and if Scotland had been content with such " reasonable reforma- tion" as Sir David Lindsay and Sir Richard Maitland advocated, it is possible that his aid might have been entirely dispensed with. The religious debauch has been followed once, and perhaps more than once, in our history by the inevitable reaction. Sir Richard's complaints are very specific, and are so far borne out by much contemporary evi- 24 Lethington and the Lammermuir. dence. Where is the blitheness that hath been ? he inquires. The popular festivals and merry- makings are forbidden ; the old familiar and kindly relations between the laird and his dependants have ceased to exist. Justice cannot be administered ; the great men come to the bar with "jak of steel," and overawe the judges. The thieves of Liddesdale are more truculent than ever. Both the temporal and spiritual estates are " soupit in sensualitie"; and, in spite of the pretended reformation, at no former time were vice and crime more prevalent, pride, envy, dissimulation, on the one hand; theft, slaughter, and oppression of the commons on the other. Euth and pity are banished. The peas- antry had been well treated by the kirkmen ; but since the teinds and kirk-lands have been appropriated by lay lords they are utterly wrecked having been either evicted from their holdings, or ruined by monstrous rents and oppressive services. The commons were profit- able to the common- weal ; what is to come of the land, he asks, when none are left to defend it ? But though the honest hind is ruined, the money which has been wrung from him is reck- lessly thrown away on unprofitable luxuries. New-fangled fashions are spreading among the wealthy traders. The furred cloaks of the wives and daughters of the citizens are made of the Leihington and the Lammermuir. 25 finest silk their hats are " cordit " with gold, and " broidered " with golden thread their shoes and slippers are of velvet. It may be said that these are the complaints of an aristocratic grumbler, who had no very warm attachment to the new order and the new men ; but the language used by the preachers of the Reformed Church themselves was just as vehement. The General Assembly which met at Leith in January 1572 twelve years after the Reformation had been completed was opened by an address from the Reverend David Ferguson ; and it is tolerably obvious, from the unqualified terms in which he denounced the prevailing ungodliness and immorality, that up to that time no amendment had been observed by those most closely interested. " For this day Christ is spoiled among us, while that which ought to maintain the ministry of the Kirk and the poor is given to profane men, flatterers in Court, ruffians and hirelings; the poor in the meantime oppressed with hunger, the kirks and temples decaying for the lack of ministers and upholding, and the schools utterly neglected." If he had been brought up in Germany, he con- tinues, " where Christ is truly preached, and all things done decently and in order," and then should have seen "the foul deformity of your kirks and temples, which are more like sheep- 26 Lethington and the Lammermuir. cots than the house of God," he could not have believed that there was " any fear of God or right religion in the most part of this realm." " And as for the ministers of the Word, they are utterly neglected, and come in manifest contempt among you ; whom ye mock in your mirth and threaten in your anger." This spirited discourse was printed at St Andrews in 1573, and was approved by Knox, who "with my dead hand but glad heart " praised God that " in this desola- tion " such light was still left in His Church. It is clear, indeed, that Knox himself, in his latter years, was profoundly dissatisfied with the fruits of the Eeformation. His influence had declined ; he was very lonely : " Jezebel " had been cast out, and the preachers were victorious ; yet some- how the Church did not thrive. One of the most interesting of Sir Richard's poems is addressed to his eldest son " Counsel to my son being in the Court." It was written about 1555, soon after William Maitland had entered the service of the Queen-Regent. He entreats his son to be neither a flatterer nor a scorner ; but to treat all men with equal courtesy and gentleness. He warns him against " playing at the carts," unless, indeed, for pastime or in- considerable stakes. Though he should rise to the highest place in the government, he is to remember the instability of fortune, and walk Lethington and the Lammermuir. 27 warily. He is not to seek prematurely for ad- vancement ; experience steadies the judgment ; and it is well not to be over-confident in a world which is as changeable as the moon or the sea. He is to follow a consistent course, be not blown about, he says emphatically, by "winds of all airts." And above all he is to be true in thought and deed to the Queen, caring at the same time for the poor man, and maintaining justice and right. One is not quite sure, when reading this poem, how far the old laird understood or appre- ciated his brilliant son. After the Secretary's death, Sir Richard wrote to Elizabeth to assure her that he did not approve of all that William Maitland had done. But upon the whole, the relations between father and son, from first to last, appear to have been entirely cordial. There was a good deal, indeed, of the incalculable about the younger man, and Sir Richard may occasion- ally have felt as the mother hen feels when her duckling takes to the water. This liking for an unfamiliar element is, we may fancy, a constant source of surprise and disquietude to the mater- nal mind ; and Lethington's brilliant audacities may sometimes have been misinterpreted by his father as they were by others. All Sir Richard's sons were men of extraordi- nary force of character ; even Thomas, who died young and who is remembered mainly as one of 28 Leihington and the Lammermuir. the learned controversialists in Buchanan's cele- brated symposium ' De Jure Eegni apud Scotos ' must have been a remarkable man. He is the reputed author of a jeu desprit printed in Cal- derwood, which for its ironical force and grave simplicity is not unworthy of Swift or Defoe. It professes to report the speeches which were delivered at an informal meeting by the leaders of the extreme party in Church and State on the proposal that Moray should accept the crown. The peculiarities of each of the speakers Knox, Lindsay, John Wood, James Macgill, and the rest are hit off with entire fidelity ; and the grave tone of an impartial reporter is preserved with whimsical decorum. The preachers were very angry; they denounced the anonymous author and his " forgery," as they called it, with the utmost bitterness ; and anxiously assured their people that no such meeting had been held. Irony is the flower (the flower or weed ?) of a later season. The delicate incisiveness and subtle reserve of a weapon that wounds with the stealthy stroke of the stiletto were indifferently appre- ciated at a time when heads were harder and thicker than they are now, and when good down- right abuse a blow straight from the shoulder such as Knox could deliver was required to impress an argument on the understanding. The bubbles that float on the surface of a refined and Lethington and the Lammermuir. 29 polished society are common enough among us ; Canning, Praed, Disraeli, Thackeray, Aytoun, Martin, have brought the art of blowing them to perfection ; but Maitland's political squib was perhaps the first of its kind in Scotland, and deserves recognition accordingly. Here are a few words from the speech assigned to Knox : " ' I praise my God greatumlie that hath heard my prayer, which often times I poured forth before the throne of His Majesty, in anguish of my heart ; and that hath made His Evangell to be preached with so notable a success under so weak instruments ; which in- deed could never have been done, except your Grace had been constituted ruler over the Church, especially indued with such a singular and ar- dent affection to obey the will of God and voice of His ministers. Therefore it seemeth to me necessar, both for the honour of God, the comfort of the poor brethren, and the utility of this com- monweal, that first your Grace, next your estate, be preserved in equality of time, and not to prescribe any diet of fifteen or seventeen years, leaning more to the observation of politic laws than the approbation of the eternal God. As I could never away with their jolly wits and politic brains, which my Lord Lindsay calleth Matchiavel's disciples, so should I wish they were out of the way if it were possible. Better 30 Lethington and the Lammermuir. it is to content ourselves with him of whose modesty we have had good experience, both in wealth and trouble, than to change from the gravity of an aged ruler to the intemperancy of an unbridled child. Your Grace hath perceived how the blast of my trumpet against the Kegi- ment of Women is approved of all the godly. I have written in like manner, and have it ready for the printing, a book wherein I prove by suffi- cient reasons that all kings, princes, and rulers go not by succession ; and that birth hath no power to promote, nor bastardy to seclude, men from the government. This will waken others to think more deeply. Besides this, we shall set furth an act in the General Assembly ; and both I and the rest of the brethren shall ratify the same in our daily sermons, till that it be more than sufficiently persuaded to the people. This being solemnly done, the book of God opened and laid before the nobility, who will say the contrair, except he that will not fear the weighty hand of the magistrate striking with the sword, and the censure of the Kirk rejecting him, as the scabbed sheep from the rest of the flock, by excommunication ? ' Then my Lord Eegent said : ' Ye know I was never ambitious : yet I will not oppose myself to the will of God, revealed by you who are His true ministers. But, John, hear ye tell your opinion in the pulpit.' Lethington and the Lammermuir. 31 Which when he had promised to do, the Laird of Pittarow was desired to speak." The finale as related by Calderwood, is highly characteristic of the manners and customs of a theocratic society : " David Forrest, called the General, gave a copy of it to Alice Sandelands, Lady Ormeston, and affirmed it to be true. She brought it to Mr Knox, and asked if it was true. He answered, 'Ye sail know my answer after- ward.' So the next preaching day he rehearsed the contents of it, and declared that the devill, the father of lees, was the chief inventor of that letter, whosoever was the penman, and threat- ened that the contriver should die in a strange land, where he should not have a friend near him to hold up his head. And as the servant of God denounced, it came to pass ; for he departed out of this life in Italy while he was going to Kome." 1 1 Satirical effusions do not appear to have been in favour with the Presbyterian clergy. Thus we find in the Chronicle of Perth : " Henry Balnaves and William Jack made their repentance in their own seats on Sabbath afternoon, for mak- ing libel against Mr William Couper, minister, and Henry Elder, clerk As King David was ane sair sanct to the crown, So is Mr William Couper and the clerk to this poor town." Not content with ecclesiastical censure, an Act of Council was afterwards passed, which de- clared that neither of them " should bear office or get hon- orable place in the town there- after." Considering the strength of their own language, the min- isters must have been extraor- dinarily sensitive. 32 Lethington and the Lammermuir. John Maitland, the second son, was born in 1545, so that he was a mere lad when "Leth- ington " was in the prime of life. He was a fine scholar some of his Latin epigrams are still preserved ; an eminent lawyer, who had acquired wide repute as a jurist before he was raised to the bench ; and he was made a judge at three -and -twenty. He lacked the supreme gifts of his elder brother the flash of genius, the play of wit, the brilliant gaiety; but for sheer force of character he was not a whit his inferior. When he emerged from the long eclipse that followed the fall of Mary's faction in Scotland, he rose with extraordinary rapidity to the highest place in the State. He was the favourite minister of James. The great nobles, the old earls, regarded him with distrust ; but, confident in the support of the middle classes and of the Kirk, he successfully defied their hostility. The conflict with Bothwell, the con- flict with Mar, were prolonged and obstinate ; but, though he met with occasional misadven- tures, his intrepidity, his political sagacity, his indefatigable industry, made him indispensable to the king, and when he died in his fiftieth year he was still one of the foremost men, if not the foremost man, in Scotland. He was building the great house at Thirlstane when he was suddenly seized with mortal illness ; and . Lethington and the Lammermuir. 33 his grandson, the famous or infamous Duke, years afterwards, completed the princely house, which a too sanguine architect had left unfin- ished. He had so far, indeed, outlived his pop- ularity. He had established the Presbyterian form of worship and government in the Church ; the Act of 1592, "the charter of the liberties of the Kirk," as it is called, was his work ; but he had been concerned in the death of "the bonnie Earl of Moray," a crime which, taking hold of the popular imagination, like the death of Darnley, Scotsmen have never ceased to de- test. Lord Burleigh said that the Scottish Chancellor was " the wisest man in Scotland ; " and the intimate relations "the old familial- acquaintance and strict amity " which Sir William Cecil had maintained with Lethington, were renewed with the younger Maitland ; but there was a large alloy of baser stuff in his " wisdom " ; the ardent Churchman was careless of religion, and the sagacious and patriotic statesman was restrained by no vulgar and in- convenient scruples. Lord Thirlstane John Maitland was made a peer before he died was buried in the Abbey Church of Haddington, where many of the Mait- lands lie. On a florid monument of yellow marble in the aisle his virtues were duly com- memorated by his august master in even more VOL. i. c 34 Lethington and the Lammermuir. florid verse. The monument has been carefully preserved ; it is within a few yards of the simple slab which marks the last resting-place of Jane Welsh Carlyle. On the later fortunes of the Maitlands, as peers of Scotland, it is not here necessary to enlarge. Only once in the years that suc- ceeded did they rise again into distinct his- torical and national importance. The portly figure of Lauderdale a grotesque and uncouth, but terribly impressive figure occupies a large part of the canvas which the painters of the next century devoted to its beauties and to its wits. The apostate Covenanter became the boon companion of Charles, and the contrast between the austere discipline of the conventicle and the gaieties of a voluptuous Court was no doubt keenly relished. The coarse and sensual tastes of the man were not perhaps inbred ; the evil grew upon him as we can partly trace in the portraits that remain ; under happier stars, and a better master, the most highly gifted Scotsman of the time might have been worthily and pro- fitably employed. But the infamy which, in the judgment of his countrymen, attaches to that sinister career, is not now likely to be relieved by any touch of brightness which the closest scrutiny (and five - and - twenty vol- umes of unexplored Lauderdale manuscripts Lethington and the Lammermuir. 35 repose in the British Museum) can throw upon it. 1 Of the earlier life of William Maitland, little, indeed nothing, with certainty is known. I am, for various reasons, inclined to believe that he was born about the year 1528, it is probable that his brother John, the Chancellor of James VI., was not born before 1545 ; and John was one of the younger members of a family which, as I have said, consisted of three sons and four daughters. 2 William was little more than a boy when, following the fashion of the time, he went to St Andrews, and he probably completed his education abroad. The close connection between Scotland and France was still maintained, and the sons of the Scottish gentry were well re- ceived by the polished society of a capital where Marie of Lorraine had been a familiar figure, and where her daughter, the little Queen of Scots, with her band of maiden " Maries," and the fair scholars of the cloister, now held a mimic Court. It is obvious from his correspondence that Maitland had been highly educated ; the incidental allusions, the classical innuendoes, the 1 Selections from these papers are being published by the Camden Society. 2 Pinkerton says John was born about 1537; but he was only fifty when he died in 1595. The date commonly as- signed is 1545, and this agrees with the inscription on his monument. 36 Lethington and the Lammermuir. bright byplay in his letters, are characteristic of a man of graceful and scholarly accomplishment. He was not, perhaps, a profound or laborious student ; but for a man of action, for a man of the world, his store of poetry and philosophy was by no means contemptible, and he could use it on occasion with characteristic prompti- tude and adroitness. The erudite Elizabeth declared that Lethington was " the flower of the wits of Scotland ; " in many a sharp debate, in many a Biblical controversy, Knox found him no mean antagonist. Yet it is certain that he was an even better judge of men than of books. Than the young Scotsman, who in his thirtieth year became a Minister of State, no keener critic of the follies and foibles of the world, of human nature in its strength and in its weakness, was then living. CHAPTER TWO. THE SCOTLAND OF MARY STUART. rPHE stranger who from the summit of Black- ford Hill gazes across green strath and winding river and autumn-tinted woods to the distant Ben Lomond and Ben Ledi, is astonished by the wonderful variety and beauty of the landscape. No fairer scene had Marmion sur- veyed ; (the magic light of an incomparable imagination falls here as elsewhere !) and many who have gone further afield than Marmion are ready to admit that it is not easily rivalled. The capital itself and its immediate surroundings can be studied to better advantage from this than from any other coign of vantage in the neighbourhood. Arthur's Seat, with the long buttress of Salisbury Crag, stands directly before us. A mile or so to the west the Castle crowns the rocky ridge which rises from Holyrood to St Giles', and on which Old Edinburgh was built. Beyond the spires of church and citadel stretch 38 The Scotland of Mary Stuart. the blue waters of the Forth and the low shores of Fife. In the mid distance lies the rocky island of Inchkeith ; and with a field-glass the masts of the merchant navy riding in the roads of Leith (where Winter's fleet lay during the famous siege) may be singled out one by one. The level plain between us and the city the arena, as it were, of a spacious amphitheatre is surrounded on every side by eminences more or less commanding, the Castle Kock, the Calton Hill, Arthur's Seat, the heights of Black- ford, Craiglockhart, and Corstorphine. Directly behind us lies the deep glen of the Hermitage, with its rich sweep of autumnal woods ; while still further to the south the graceful line of the Pentlands rises sharply and picturesquely above the pastoral hills of Braid. It is not less than three miles from Blackford to the Castle Hill ; but the whole intervening space has now been built over, much of it within the memory of middle-aged men. The squalid and densely populated " closes " that surround the Grassmarket and the Greyfriars are succeeded by stately crescents and spacious squares, and these again by the sumptuous villas of the lawyers and merchants of the prosperous capital of the north. The Edinburgh that Lethington knew as a lad The Scotland of Mary Stuart. 39 the Edinburgh of 1545 or of 1550 was con- tracted within narrow limits. It occupied the back of the ridge between the Castle and Holy- rood, or to speak more correctly, between the Castle and the Netherbow ; for at that time the Canongate, which continued the High Street to the palace of Mary Stuart, formed a separate burgh. On the north no fortified line of wall was needed the deep dip into the Nor' Loch being sufficient protection for the lofty buildings which were there crowded along the brink of a wellnigh impassable ravine. Outside the city wall to the south, there was little building of any kind. The district was sparsely peopled. There were one or two chapels or religious houses ; some sort of pro- visional shelter on the Boroughmuir for those smitten by leprosy or the plague ; a hamlet of rustics beside St Eoque ; the strong castle of the Napiers of Merchiston, and the mansion of the Lairds of Braid. A dense forest of oak had at one time clothed the gentle slopes that lie be- tween Merchiston and the Pentlands ; "a field spacious and delightful by the shade of many stately and aged oaks ; " but the forest had been gradually thinned out ; much of the timber had been used for the construction of booths and galleries in the city ; and the wild creatures 40 The Scotland of Mary Stuart. who had haunted the sylvan glades of Blackford and Braid had been driven back upon the valley of the Tweed and the moors and marshes of the Upper Ward. The French called the city Lislebourg a name which now seems hardly appropriate. In the sixteenth century, however, Edinburgh was nearly surrounded by water. The Nor' Loch and the marshes of the Boroughmuir have been drained; but the picturesque slopes of Arthur's Seat still rise from the reedy margin of lakes where the ousel and the moor-hen breed. The edge of the ridge on which the buildings of Old Edinburgh were piled is nowhere more than a few yards wide. The main thoroughfare occupied this narrow arete. The steep and often precipitous " closes " which join the High Street and Canongate at right angles, and constitute the most notable feature of the old town, take their character from the lie of the ground which they occupy. They form a series of stairs or ladders, on either side of the ridge, leading straight from the level and open country below to the central thoroughfare. In this main thoroughfare the whole public life of the city was concentrated. Here was the great Collegiate Church of St Giles' here the market-places (the Tron and the butter Tron), the Cross, the Parliament House, the Courts of Justice, the The Scotland of Mary Stuart. 41 dwellings of the great nobles and lawyers and merchants and ecclesiastics. 1 The population of the capital at this time did not amount to more than forty thousand souls ; but it was crowded into a space where at the present day it would be difficult to accommodate one-half the number. The whole length of the High Street from the Castle to the Tron is only eight hundred yards ; from the Castle to Holyrood not more than fourteen hundred. The capital was thus as populous as an ant-hill; and from morning to night the main street at least must have pre- sented a busy- and stirring scene a scene which no doubt reminded the Flemish trader of the turbulent burgher life of the great cities of his native land of Ghent and Antwerp and Bruges. Much of the business was transacted in the open air; the "closes," each shut off by its gate from the High Street, were so narrow that neighbours sitting at door or window could converse across the footpath. The ferment of this excited and animated life, favourable as it was to the growth of a somewhat turbulent democratic sentiment, must have been highly contagious. Priests and nobles and tradesmen and caddies jostled one 1 The High Street, however, even at this time, had been mainly appropriated by the trading community the great nobles and ecclesiastics having already retreated to the aris- tocratic " closes." 42 The Scotland of Mary Stuart. another on the " causey." They met in the great cathedral at the solemn functions of the Church ; they bartered and trafficked in the road- way ; the women sat and gossiped on the outside stairs of the houses, or along the open galleries ; no criminal was taken to the Tolbooth or hanged at the Cross, no troop of retainers wearing the livery of Douglas or Hamilton entered the gates, no sermon was preached in St Giles' or speech made to the Parliament, without the whole com- munity being forthwith apprised of what had taken place. The "rascal multitude" of the capital was alternately abused by courtly Church- man and uncourtly Reformer; and the impul- siveness which led them to side now with the one faction and now with the other, was no doubt due to the feverish conditions of the life they led. Brought daily together into intimate con- tact, each craftsman was known by headmark to every other. All public acts, all political and municipal duties, were transacted under a fierce blaze of light, which excited and stimulated the entire society. Thus it came about that at not unfrequent intervals, when heated by zeal or blinded by panic, they sallied out, master and man, like a swarm of angry bees. 1 1 Taylor, the Water Poet, I am writing, gives a graphic who was in Scotland some fifty picture of the capital as it was years after the period of which in the beginning of the next The Scotland of Mai*y Stuart. 43 Of this stirring and crowded life, and of the influence it exercised on the nation at large, I shall have occasion to speak hereafter ; in the meantime we must try to realise with some dis- tinctness the condition of provincial Scotland, the Scotland that lay outside the walls of the capital, about the time when William Maitland left the family nest to try his fortune at Court. The country everywhere was thinly peopled ; the whole population in the middle of the six- teenth century did not probably exceed six hundred thousand souls. The estimate is ap- proximate only; there are no statistics which can be implicitly trusted. For a nation which was forced to play a great part in the Euro- century : " Leaving the castle, I descended lower to the city, wherein I observed the fairest and goodliest street one-half an English mile from the Castle to a faire port which they called the Netherbow, and from that port the street which they call the Kenny-gate is one quarter of a mile more, down to the King's Palace, called Holy -rood- house ; the buildings on each side of the way being all of squared stone, five, six, and seven stories high, and many by -lanes and closes on each side of the way, wherein are gentle- men's houses, much fairer than the buildings in the high street, for in the high street the mar- chants and tradesmen do dwell, but the gentlemen's mansions and goodliest houses are ob- scurely founded in the afore- said lanes ; the walls are eight or ten foote thick, exceeding strong, not built for a day or a week or a month or a year ; but from antiquity to posterity for many ages." [Since this chapter was in type, some in- teresting information on the topography of Old Edinburgh, by Professor David Masson, has appeared in the ' Scotsman' newspaper.] The Scotland of Mary Stuart. pean politics of the age, the number seems to us insignificant ; but, with our " teeming mil- lions," we are apt to forget that the influ- ence of a nation does not necessarily depend on its numerical superiority. Athens, in her prime, had only three hundred and fifty thou- sand citizens ; the population of Judea did not exceed a million and a quarter. Before the war of the Succession, which placed Robert Bruce on the throne, the population of Scotland had probably been as great as it was in the be- ginning of Mary's reign ; but three centuries of bloody wars and disastrous feuds had effectually arrested the natural growth. During the forty years of comparative tranquillity which followed there was a rapid rise. Because of the long truce, as Buchanan observes of an earlier pause in the slaughter, " there were more young men in the country." When James VI. ascended the English throne in 1603, his Scottish sub- jects numbered about a million. It is difficult to believe that the ruler of this handful of people could on occasion bring twenty or thirty or forty thousand men into the field. The number of Scotsmen who fought at Flodden has been possibly overstated by our earlier writers ; yet there seems no good reason to doubt that at least thirty thousand men-at- arms were gathered upon the Boroughmuir. The Scotland of Mary Stuart. 45 But when we remember that every man and boy between sixteen and sixty years of age was "liable to serve, the difficulty is to some extent removed. The population of Scotland according to the census of 1881, slightly exceeded three millions and a half. Of this number nearly one million males were between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Assuming that the population is now six times greater than it was in the reign of James IV., and that the proportion of avail- able males to the whole population remains about the same, there must have been in 1513 considerably upwards of one hundred thousand men capable of bearing arms. On a grave national emergency, and when the great nobles were cordially united, it is quite possible that at least a third of this number thirty or forty thousand more or less disciplined retainers may have followed the king to the field. From the point of view of the social and political observer, the people of Scotland during the sixteenth century might have beeen roughly classified as Borderers, Lowlanders, and Celts, the inhabitants of the Border dales, of the Low- land counties along the eastern seaboard, and of the wild and mountainous districts, Highland and Island, lying behind the chain of the Gram- pians. In constructing a picture of the Scotland of Mary Stuart these broad lines of demarca- 46 The Scotland of Mary Stuart. tion must be habitually recognised. Impassable marshes where the bittern and bustard lodged ; broad meres haunted by water-fowl ; masses of primeval forest from which the wild creatures of the chase the wolf, the boar, the red-deer had not yet been driven ; a scanty strip of arable land round the unfrequent hamlet, and a considerable breadth of pastoral country, rising through meadow-grass and bent and heather, to the stony infertility of the surrounding moun- tains ; the splendid and imposing houses of the religious orders, the fortified castles of the nobles, the wretched cabins of the peasantry; these were common to each. But while among the wilds of Liddesdale and Badenoch the people were in a very rudimentary stage of civilisation, were not yet weaned from the savage ways of their an- cestors, Fife and the Lothians were compara- tively settled. " Fife and the Lothians " is a convenient colloquial expression much in use at the time; but "Fife and the Lothians" really represented a much wider territorial area an area extending on the one hand to Glasgow, and on the other to Elgin or Aberdeen. Trade, agriculture, commerce historical, ecclesiastical, and legal culture the amenities of social and domestic life the political forces which deter- mine the form of government, were to be found there, and there only. The capital, the univer- The Scotland of Mary Stuart, 47 sity towns, the rising burghs, the thriving sea- ports, were included in the "inland counties," from which the outlaws of Athol and Badenoch and the broken men of the Border "stark mosstroopers, and arrant thieves " were ex- cluded by Act of Parliament. 1 Of the outlying districts, the Border country was most intimately associated with the general history of the time, and exercised the most direct influence upon the course of events. The rain-cloud that sweeps the sides of Ettrick Pen helps to fill the Tweed, the Annan, and the Esk ; and the configuration of the Border dales will be best understood if we take our stand on one or other of the peaks of the range of which Ettrick Pen is probably the true summit. To 1 Marie of Lorraine, the Queen of James V., landing at Fife Ness, rode to St Andrews, where she was met by the bridegroom. "When the Queen came to her palace, and met with the King, she confessed unto him, she never saw in France, nor no other country, so many goodly faces in so little room, as she saw that day in Scotland : For she said it was shown unto her in France, that Scotland was but a barbarous country, destitute and void of all good commodities that used to be in other countries ; but now she confessed she saw the contrary: For she never saw so many fair personages of men, women, young babes, and children, as she saw that day." There may have been a touch of flattery in this speech ; but other travellers were struck in the same way ; and the " East Neuk of Fife" was probably in the reign of James V. the most settled and progressive district in Scotland. 48 The Scotland of Mary Stuart. the north and north-east we have the valley of the Tweed, to the south and south-west the valleys of the Esk and the Annan. The Tweed falls into the German Ocean ; the Esk and Annan into the Solway. The tributary valleys of the Tweed are those through which the Ettrick, the Yarrow, the Leader, and the Teviot flow. All these, except the Leader, descend from the hill-country which lies to the south ; the Leader alone, issuing from the Lammer- muirs, belongs to the north. Speaking gener- ally, it may be said that the basin of the Tweed comprehends the whole of the fertile strath that lies between the Lammermuir and the Cheviots. Melrose, Dryburgh, Roxburgh, Kelso are built on the banks of the main stream ; Branxholm stands on the Teviot ; Ferniehurst on the Jed. This is the Scott and Ker country, the Lords of Buccleuch and the Kers of Ferniehurst and Cessford. Crossing the hillside above Branx- holm we reach the system of valleys whose combined waters ultimately form the Esk Eskdale, Ewesdale, Wauchopdale, and Liddes- dale. Dwelling close to the Border among wellnigh inaccessible marshes (the Debateable Land of Canonbie, Morton, and Kirkandrews, the cause of constant strife), the men of these dales Armstrongs, Elliots, Grahams, and Littles were exceptionally turbulent and troublesome. The Scotland of Mary Stuart. 49 The " thieves of Liddesdale " had an ill repute, and defied with impunity the Scottish and English Wardens. " The Armstrongs of Liddes- dale," Magnus wrote in 1526, "had reported presumptuously that they would not be ordered, neither by the King of Scots, their sovereign lord, nor by the King of England, but after such manner as their fathers had used before them." Hermitage Castle was the only con- siderable place in these remote and lawless valleys. Built by Nicolas de Soulis, it had afterwards come to be a stronghold of the Douglas. On the overthrow of the great house, the Hepburns of Hailes appear to have assumed, by a rather loose kind of hereditary title, the Wardenship of the Middle Marches, and Hermit- age passed into their hands. Annandale is the last of the true Border dales ; for Nithsdale, which is sometimes classed along with them, is separated from England by the broad waters of the Solway. The " great names " in these western valleys were Jardine, Johnstone, and Maxwell. The dales must at that time have been populous, on a week's notice seven thou- sand men could be raised in Nithsdale, Annan- dale, and Liddesdale alone. The fighting men of the Border were all mounted. As light irregular cavalry, as scouts in a difficult country, their services to a more VOL. I. D 50 The Scotland of Mary Stuart. organised force were often invaluable. The Border nags were slight, but wiry and inde- fatigable, and perfectly suited for Border travel and Border warfare. They could pick their way with admirable sagacity along the narrow and slippery tracks that crossed the quaking mosses of Tynedale or Tarras ; they could clamber like goats across a mountain -pass or up the bed of a torrent ; in the darkest night, through the wildest storm, the natural w T ariness which they shared with the fox and the foumart could be implicitly trusted. The man who had lost his arm was not more helpless than the Borderer who had lost his horse. On the other hand, when man and horse were well mated, the mosstrooper was a formidable foe. In his steel bonnet and leather jacket, " dagg " or " hackbut " at his saddle-bow, and a Jedburgh stave or jack-spear ready to his hand, he could ride forty miles between dusk and dawn, and then swoop like a hawk upon a hostile clan or the " auld enemy " of England. They were not gipsies ; they clung with persistent fidelity each man to the dale where he was born ; but the life, if not nomadic, had no element of stability or permanence. The beacon-fires which sent the news of a raid from peel to peel were constantly blazing. By the time the slogan of the free- booters was heard, the cabins had been unroofed The Scotland of Mary Stuart. 5 1 and dismantled, the women and children, the sheep and cattle, had been huddled within the thick walls of the neighbouring castle, and the men had ridden off through moor and moss to rally the outlying retainers of their chief. Re- parabit cornua Phoebe was the motto of the Scotts of Harden. It might have been adopted by the Border men in general. They were, in FalstafFs phrase, "Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon." Passion- ately fond of the chase, the "mysteries of woods and forests " appealed to the imagination of the Borderer with peculiar force. But the moon- light ride across the hills, with the prospect of a sharp skirmish and a rich haul of " nolt " and nags on the other side of the water, was a still finer joy. It was a cruel, lawless, and anarchic society ; yet it had at the same time some of the virtues which a more polished community is apt to lose. The Eed Indian is a Eed Indian to the end ; but the Border blood was good. Though entirely illiterate, the Dalesmen were not devoid of imagination. The plaintive wail of the Border ballad, the echo of an earlier minstrelsy, has still to a Scottish ear a charm of its own. They were brave and fearless ; devout after a fashion ; bribe or menace could not shake their fidelity. The unwritten laws of Border honour were inflexibly maintained by thieves and outlaws. A traitor 52 The Scotland of Mary Stuart. coming among them fared badly. He was a marked man, and had short shrift. The Judas who betrayed the fugitive Northumberland was never forgiven. "To take Hector's cloak" be- came a proverbial term of reproach. About the time of Hector's treachery one of Cecil's emissaries made his way into Teviotdale, where the Earl of Westmorland was in hiding amongst the Kers. Constable was an abom- inable scoundrel ; but his narrative is bright and animated. The devil quotes Scripture, we are told; and the familiar letters of Elizabeth's ministers, in which, while invoking the coun- tenance of the Almighty in language borrowed from the Psalms and the Prophets, the basest intrigues are unblushingly disclosed and dis- cussed, simply amazes us. The obliquity of the puritanic conscience, the deadness of the moral sense in profoundly moral men, is an almost unaccountable phenomenon; we can have no doubt of the sincerity of their religious zeal, and yet they lied like troopers. What is the explan- ation ? Constable had a keen perception of the infamy of his mission ; yet Cecil himself could not have applied the salve of the public well- being to his conscience with more unctuous adroitness. He sincerely trusts that Elizabeth will be merciful ; for he could never forgive himself if his victims were brought to the block. The Scotland of Mary Stuart. 53 " If it should turn to the effusion of their blood, my conscience would be troubled all the days of my life." His guides, though thieves and out- laws, were quite incorruptible ; his own mission, he admits, was intrinsically base. " This be a traitorous kind of service that I am w T ayded in, to trap them that trusted me, as Judas did Christ." The men he was bribed to betray were his own kith and kin, old friends and neigh- bours ; and he praises Lady Westmorland against whose husband's life he was plotting with affectionate if discriminating enthusiasm, "a faithful servant of God; a dutiful subject to the Queen's Majesty ; an obedient, careful, lov- ing wife to her husband ; and of a ripeness of wit, readiness of memory, and plain and pithy utter- ance of her words. I have talked with many, but never with her like." 1 One is glad to know that the fugitives escaped, and that his own experiences were not altogether pleasant. "I came furth of Scotland on Sunday, the extremest day for wind and snow that ever I rode in ; " "I dare not ride over the fells without more company, for I was in great peril meeting a company of Scots thieves on Thursday at night last." But, as I have said, the fellow wrote 1 Lady Westmorland was Anne Howard, daughter of the Earl of Surrey, and sister of the Duke of Norfolk. 54 Tlie Scotland of Mary Stuart. admirably, and no livelier picture of the interior of a Border peel has been preserved. " So I left Ferniehurst and went to my host's house, where I found many guests of divers factions, some outlaws of England, some of Scot- land, some neighbours thereabouts, at cards ; some for placks and hardheads ; and after that I had diligently learned and inquired that there was none of my surname that had me in deadly feud, nor none that knew me, I sat down and played for hardheads amongst them, where I heard vox populi that the Lord Eegent would not for his own honour, nor for honour of his country, deliver the Earls, if he had them both, unless it were to have their Queen delivered to him ; and if he would agree to make that ex- change, the Borderers would start up in his con- trary, and reive both the Queen and the Lords from him, for the like shame was never before done in Scotland, and that he durst better eat his own ' lugs ' than come again to seek Fernie- hurst ; if he did, he should be fought with ere he came over Soutra Edge. Hector of Harlow's head was wished to have been eaten amongst us at supper." 1 1 .