IN these days of continental touring many, it is to be
feared, travel further and fare worse in search of storied country than
they might within an easy hour's ride of sober Glasgow. For the traveller
who cares to think as well as to see, nothing could be more suggestive
than a visit to the quiet, halfforgotten little town of Douglas among the
Lanark uplands. Here remains a tangible link with many of the greatest
events of Scottish history, and here a connected view is to be gathered of
the succeeding branches of a family, who were alternately the Guelphs and
the Medici of the North.
After the battle of Ancrum Moor, or Lillyard's Edge as it is oftenest
called, in Queen Mary's time, when Henry VIII. threatened the Earl of
Angus, head of the great Scottish House of Douglas, with reprisals for the
overthrow of the English forces and the death of their leaders, that earl
is said to have replied significantly, "Little does my royal brotherin-law
know the skirts of Cairntable. I can keep myself there against all his
English host." And here, in the remote fastnesses, where the narrow
valleys run up in wild solitude upon the mountain foot, there can be
little doubt that the earl would have kept his word. In this region for
centuries his race, the king-makers of Scotland, ruled with Princely
power. Here, beyond reach of the royal arm, and often in defiance of it,
they did their own desire throughout the long Middle Ages of chivalry and
terror. And here, under the shadow of the mountain mass of which the bold
earl spoke, many of them were born and the greatest of them lie buried.
Greatly changed, doubtless, from its ancient aspect is the scene to-day,
as the visitor drives westwards into Douglasdale, with smiling fields on
either side, and bosky woodlands here and there shading the smooth-rolled
road. The park wall of the Earl of Home, inheritor of the Douglas estates,
runs for miles by the roadside; and in the sunny strath, half a mile to
the right, where the battlements of the medieval keep, the "Castle
Dangerous" of Scott's romance, once frowned, stands a fair mansion of last
century, built by the first and last Duke of Douglas ; but the great
shoulder of Cairntable at the head of the valley still shuts out the
setting sun, the Douglas water still flows down under the quiet woodlands
to join the distant Clyde, and still the upland moors around, untamable by
plough and harrow, shut in with their ancient sky-line the Douglases'
cradle-land.
The irregular little town itself, clustering about the castle gateway
half-way up the valley, retains some vestiges of its ancient appearance.
On the ther side of Cairntable lies Airds Moss, where The Covenanters were
defeated in 1680; and here, in one of the narrow streets by the kirkyard,
the house, small-windowed and low-doored, still stands, in the basement of
which, after the battle, Hackston of Rathillet, one of the assassins of
Archbishop Sharpe, was secured, while in the low-roofed room overhead the
dragoons, with the head and hands of Richard Cameron in charge, kept watch
throughout the night. The town was the dwelling in early times of many a
stout Douglas vassal; and St. Bride's Kirk in its midst was the scene of
one of the most famous exploits of the illustrious companion of Bruce, the
Good Lord James. The incident was one of the first that happened after the
landing of Bruce in Carrick, and it illustrates at once the extremities to
which the king's party were driven, and the boldness to which they owed
theit final success.
The prowess of the Douglases appears to have been so well recognised even
then that the holding of their ancestral castle was considered by the
English a dangerous enterprise. The story is told by Barbour in "The
Bruce," and, three hundred years later, by Hume of Godscroft, the
historian of the family. It appears that a fair English damsel, the Lady
Augusta de Berkely, in the spirit of those times, had offered her hand to
the knight who should hold Douglas Castle against the Scots for a year and
a day, and that the gage was all but won by a gallant Englishman, Sir John
de Walton, when Bruce landed and took Turnberry. At Turnberry Douglas was
not far from his own country, and how he surprised the garrison in St.
Bride's Kirk here on Palm Sunday, and slaying the last of them among the
meal and wine on the floor of the castle cellar, gave the transaction the
name of " The Douglas Larder," is known to every reader of history. It was
then he set fire to his own castle, and betook himself to the fastnesses
of the open country, choosing, as he said, rather to hear the lark sing
than the mouse squeak.
There was an old saying in the country that, however
often Douglas Castle should be destroyed, it should always be rebuilt with
greater magnificence than before ; and the saying seems to have held good
throughout. The burning of one of these strongholds in old times appears,
indeed, to have been of but small account, the place consisting of little
else than stone walls. Readers of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel " will
remember how Wat Tinlinn, fleeing before the southern raiders, as he leads
his wife on her nag through Branksome gate, complains that his foes have
burned his keep:
The fiend receive their souls therefore !
It had not been burnt this year and more.
It is not likely, therefore, that Douglas Castle lay
long in ruins after the country's enemies had been expelled. Here,
probably, in 1329, when Bruce lay dying at Cardross, came the messengers
to summon Douglas for that last behest of carrying his master's heart to
the Holy Land which was to cost him his life. And here, a little later, it
may be supposed, the brother and heir of the Good Lord James brought his
wife Dornagilla, sister of the Red Comyn and niece of Baliol, by right of
whom the Douglases afterwards made a double claim to the throne of
Scotland. In 1357 the tenth lord, son of this lady, and nephew of Bruce's
companion-in-arms, was made Earl of Douglas by David II., and the power of
the family increased by leaps and bounds. Alternately the bulwark and the
menace of the throne at home, the House of Douglas was equally renowned
and feared on the battlefields of the Continent. The third earl, James,
married the sister of King Robert III.; and it was he who, on a moonlit
night in 1388, won the famous fight against Lord Percy on the field of
Otterburne, the fight celebrated in one of the most famous Border ballads.
The fourth earl, Archibald, who was popularly named "Tine-man" or
"Lose-man," was equally famous for his valour and ill-fortune in war. He
it was who married his daughter to the ill-fated Duke of Rothesay, and it
is his portrait, as noble as it is haughty and terrible, which has been so
admirably drawn by Scott in "The Fair Maid of Perth." For services
rendered to Charles VII. he was made Duke of Touraine and Marshal of
France, before he fell, with so many of the Scottish nobility, on the
battlefield of Verneuil.
To the exploits of the Douglases and their comrades at that period on the
Continent was owed the beginning of the romantic esteem in which Scotland
and the Scots are held in France to the present day. The later wanderings
of Scottish scholars like George Buchanan and the Admirable Crichton added
further to the romantic repute of the northern nation, and more recently
the heroic exile and adventurous risings of the Jacobites confirmed the
impression.
Presently, however, the Douglas power became too perilously great for the
estate of a subject. While members of the family held the earldoms of
Angus, Ormond, and Moray, the main branch were Dukes of Touraine, Lords of
Longueville, and Marshals of France, and in Scotland Earls of Douglas and
of Wigtown, and Lords of Bothwell, Galloway, and Annandale. When they rode
abroad it was with a bodyguard of two thousand men; at their feudal court
they even created knights; and their possessions covered no less than
two-thirds of the land of Scotland south of Edinburgh. They felt
themselves strong enough, in fact, to contest the throne. Through
Dornagilla they represented the lines both of Comyn and Baliol, and they
began to talk of their claim. At the same time the mischievous whisper
went about that, owing to the irregular marriage of King Robert II., the
reigning House of Stewart was illegitimate. Clearly the Douglases had
become a menace to the crown.
The first blow to their power fell during the boyhood of James II.
William, the sixth earl, a stripling of fifteen, was tempted away from his
stronghold here in Douglasdale by the wiles of the Chancellor Crichton,
and, seated with his brother David at the royal table in Edinburgh, saw
the black bull's head, the sign of death, suddenly set upon the board. A
popular rhyme, probably the last stanza of a contemporary ballad referring
to the tragedy, has been handed down to the present day:
Edinburgh Castle, town and tour,
God grant ye sink for sinne;
And that even for the black dinnour
Earl Douglas gat therein.
It was William, the eighth earl, the most active and
turbulent of his race, who first openly rebelled against the king. He it
was who, deprived by James of his post of Lieutenant-General of Scotland,
retired to his Castle of Douglas, meditating revenge; himself, against the
king's authority, ordered the destruction of Lord Colville and Sir John
Herries; delivered up at the royal mandate the person of his prisoner,
Maclellan, the tutor of Bomby, "wanting the head"; and finally entered
into a band of man-rent with the great Earls of Ross and Crawford to
support each other in every quarrel, even against the royal authority. And
he it was who, in the little supper cabinet in Stirling Castle, replying
with refusal and taunts to James's request that he should break the
disloyal compact, heard the sudden oath, "By Heaven, my lord, if you will
not break the league, this shall!" and fell, stabbed by the dagger of the
king.
In the three years' struggle, known in history as the Douglas wars, which
succeeded this tragedy, it was more than once uncertain whether James
Stewart or James Douglas, brother of the murdered earl, was to wear the
crown of Scotland; and during that period Douglas Castle must have been a
place of many transactions. Finally, however, at the river Carron, a
Douglas army, 40,000 strong, melted without a battle before the king's
forces. At the combat of Arkinholme two of Douglas's brothers, the Earls
of Moray and Ormond, were slain; and after an exile of thirty years
Douglas himself was taken in a Border raid, and sent to end his days in
the Fifeshire Abbey of Lindores.
So ended the great race whose history for three hundred years had been the
history of Scotland, and of whom it may truly be said, in the ancient
popular rhyme:
So many, so good, as of the Douglases have been,
Of one sirname in Scotland never yet were seen.
In this struggle the House of Angus, a younger branch
of the same family, sided with the king, giving rise to the popular
saying, based on the complexion of the two houses, that "the Red Douglas
had put down the Black." To the Earl of Angus accordingly passed a large
part of the Douglas estates, and also, it would appear, a large part of
the Douglas spirit.
Archibald, fifth in descent from the first Earl of Angus and the youngest
daughter of Robert Ill., got his soubriquet of "Bell-the-Cat" from the
transaction at Lauder Bridge, in which lie bearded Cochrane, the unworthy
but all-powerful favourite of James III. His two eldest sons, with two
hundred others of the Douglas name, fell with James IV. at Flodden. His
third son was the famous Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, whose
translation of the "AEneid " - not only the earliest, but one of the
finest metrical versions of a classic in the English or Scottish
language-deserves to be better known than it is in modern days. Whether or
not the poet was born at Douglas Castle is unknown, but he must certainly
have been familiar with its surroundings, and the fact lends a lettered
interest to the place.
Archibald, the grandson and successor of "Bellthe-Cat," apart from the
fact of his long and renewed ascendency in the government of Scotland
during the minorities of James V. and -Mary, possesses a peculiar interest
for students of history. By his marriage with Margaret, daughter of Henry
VII. of England and widow of James IV., he became the father of Lady
Margaret Douglas. She married Matthew, fourth Earl of Lennox, and her son,
Lord Darnley, becoming the father of James VI., was the ancestor of the
present royal family of Great Britain. When Henry VIII. granted the
counties of Merse and Teviotdale to Sir Ralph Evers and Sir Brian Laitoun,
and these leaders came northward ravaging the Border, it was this Earl of
Angus who declared that lie would write the instrument of possession upon
their bodies with sharp pens and in bloodred ink, and who, threatened
afterwards by the English monarch, replied in the significant phrase
regarding the skirts of Cairntable. It was he also who, rebuked for coming
to Parliament contrary to proclamation with a guard of a thousand horse,
answered jestingly that "the knaves would not leave him, and that he would
be obliged to the Queen if she could put him in the way of being rid of
them, for they consumed his beef and ale." And it was he who, when further
urged by Mary of Guise, in pursuance of her policy of reducing the power
of the Scottish nobles, to give up to her his stronghold of Tantallon,
replied with ominous vehemence, "The castle, madam, is yours at command,
but by St. Bride of Douglas I must be the captain, and I will keep it for
you as well as any one you will put into it."
The notorious Earl of Morton, himself a Douglas, Regent of Scotland in the
minority of James VI., owed his original influence to the fact that he was
uncle and tutor, or guardian, to the Earl of Angus, then also a minor, and
that he thus held control of all the Douglas estates and power. Morton's
career remains the blackest blot on the Douglas roll of fame. After taking
part in the murders of Rizzio and Darnley, ordering the execution of the
bravest soldier of the time, his old friend Kirkaldy of Grange, and
delivering up to the vengeance of Queen Elizabeth the unfortunate Earl of
Northumberland, a refugee who might have expected nobler treatment on
account of the ancient chivalry between the Houses of Percy and Douglas,
he finished his career under the knife of the "maiden," a form of
guillotine which he had himself introduced from Halifax in Yorkshire.
Morton was the last of the Douglases to figure largely in the history of
the country. Since their first appearance in the national annals nothing
had permanently humbled the race, and doubtless they would have continued
longer in the ascendant; but the years of Morton's rule as practical
monarch of Scotland were among the last of the old regime. So long as
physical bravery and strength remained the titles to power, the influence
of this great family had dominated the State. At the union of the crowns
of England and Scotland, however, the old order of things began to pass
away, and with it the House of Douglas passed from its place as the chief
force to be reckoned with by rulers of the country. Twice again, when
physical might became the arbiter of State affairs, the Douglas name
emerged from retirement. William, the eleventh Earl of Angus, was made
Marquis of Douglas by Charles I. in 1633, and during the troubles of the
time shared to some extent the misfortunes of his royal master. At Douglas
Castle, with princely lavishness, he kept alive the traditions of medieval
hospitality ; and as a resort of persons devoted to the royal cause the
stronghold was seized and held for a time by the Covenanting troops. The
Marquis himself joined Montrose after the battle of Kilsyth, and, sharing
in the defeat of the great Royalist general at Philiphaugh, was for some
time afterwards a fugitive. The last appearance of a Douglas in the field
was in 1715, when Archibald, the third marquis, who had been created a
duke in 1703, took arms and fought against the Jacobites at the battle of
Sheriffmuir. But the days of the fierce Douglas mastery were over, and the
race which had twice, in the times of James II. and of the Regent Morton,
been great enough to embroil the country from Berwick to Inverness in the
flames of war, became no more than a memory, a succession of formidable
names on the page of history.
Strangely enough, as if the destiny of the house had been accomplished,
the line ended with the last of its members who appeared on a Scottish
battlefield. The first Duke of Douglas was also the last, and he died
childless. Upon that event the dukedom became extinct, the marquisate
passed to the House of Hamilton, itself a younger branch of the House of
Douglas, lineally descended from the first marquis; and presently over the
vast estates was waged the great law battle of the Douglas Case, one of
the most celebrated legitimacy trials in the history of the Courts. The
estates passed first, by the judgment of the House of Lords, to the duke's
nephew, Archibald Stewart, created Baron Douglas in 1790, and afterwards,
through Stewart's grand-daughter, to the eleventh Earl of Home.
Little now remains of the ancient Castle of Douglas in Douglasdale, though
part of the ruin still stands near the modern mansion. More remains to
suggest the associations of the past about the ruined Kirk of St. Bride,
close by the park gate, in the town of Douglas. Its quaint and unique
little tower, half Moorish in character, with oriels in its octagon top,
contains a clock presented by Queen Mary; and in the ruined aisle below,
the Inglises still exercise the right of burial granted by the Good Lord
James to one of their name for valour on the battlefield. But the interest
centres in the choir of the church. There, under the high altar, the
members of the great race of Douglas themselves were buried. For many
years the place lay open and neglected, and the boys of the neighbouring
school used to sport about the tombs of the mighty dead. The eleventh Earl
of Home, however, who succeeded to the estates, had the choir repaired and
restored with reverence and taste, and a beautiful recumbent figure in
alabaster and marble commemorates his countess, through whom the
succession passed to his house. There also reclines the figure of the Good
Lord James himself, much defaced, it is said, by Cromwell's soldiers, who,
as was their habit, quartered their horses in the kirk. His legs are
crossed, the sign of the Crusader, and though when the wall was opened a
few years ago nothing was found in the space below, doubtless his remains
were among the others in the vault under the altar, for it is expressly
stated in Barbour's "Bruce" that his bones were brought from Spain and
buried here. Two silver cases containing hearts were found among these
remains, the first believed to be that of the. Good Lord James, the second
supposed to belong to Archibald, "Bell-the-Cat," whose recumbent figure
lies opposite to that of his great ancestor. Among the figures of his
children carved on the side of his tomb appears one in priestly robes, who
may be taken to be the famous Gavin, Bishop of Dunkeld. The hearts now lie
under glass, within a stone combing on the floor of the choir, and these
grey, corroded cases, with their contents, remain for the visitor of
to-day the suggestive centre for the associations of Douglasdale, as they
abide the mortal relics of members of the race who, moving high in the
dark and terrible drama of ages past, were respectively the makers and
unmakers of kings.
