Jane Seton; or, The King's Advocate: A Scottish Historical Romance
have mended matters with thee and Angus, I think. But what does
royal blood signify? Art thou not at this moment covered with the
blood of my subjects? Just now, earl, I tell thee, thou hast all the
aspect of a gory murderer."
"Then, behold the head of my victim!" said the noble, as from his
mantle he rolled at the king's feet the enormous and grisly head of
the wolf. "Behold that _other_ head, on which, as on mine, your
majesty has placed a golden price."
Admiration flashed in the eyes of James V.; he threw away his sword,
and took the earl's hand in his.
"Oh, Ashkirk, Ashkirk! thou triest me sorely; oh, why art thou nob my
friend?--but it cannot be; for thy wrongs against thy country, its
parliament and crown, are too deep to be easily forgiven. For the
gallant deeds of this night, I feel that I could forgive them all;
but what would my people say, and what my peers, Cathcart and Lennox,
Darnley, Hailes, Lyle, and Lorn,--all of whom are hostile to thy
house? Besides, I have sworn--solemnly and irrevocably sworn--never
to forgive the crime of man or of woman in whose veins there is one
drop of the Douglas blood; and too surely, at this hour, at my own
hearth and home, I feel that thy mother and thy sister are Douglases.
My poor Magdalene!--Lord earl, thy crimes I might afford to forgive
freely, for they are only those of a rash and headstrong Scot; but
the other crimes of thy family never--never!"
And here, stung deeply by the thought of that supposed sorcery which
was bringing his queen to the grave, James paused, and pressed his
hands upon his brow; and the earl, who was ignorant of what he
referred to, remained silent and perplexed.
"Still I could forgive thee, for the memory of my father's friend,
Earl John,--that arm of steel and heart of fire--but my vow!--it
cannot be. Here let us part; go on, pursue thy wandering way,
unfriended and unhappy lord, and may Heaven keep thee! Here, take
these thirty crowns from me,--not as the price of this wolf's head,
which I will bear with me to Falkland, with the story of thy prowess,
to shame my carpet knights, but as that gift, such as one friend, one
gentleman, may freely bestow or freely accept from another. There
are proclamations for thine apprehension posted on every city cross,
on every burgh-barrier and tolbooth-gate, throughout the length and
breadth of the land; if thou escapest, I will rejoice; and if thou
art taken, I will sorrow; for, by my father's soul, I must then
behead thee before the gates of Stirling. So away! to France, to
Flanders, to Italy--anywhere but England, the land of our enemies;
and may the blessed God grant that we shall never meet
again.--Farewell!"
And leading forth his horse, for the storm had now died away, and the
early sun of June had risen, the king put his foot in the stirrup,
saying,--
"My adventures are wild and strange; and assuredly, if ever old
Scotland hath a Plutarch, James V. will live in his pages. Adieu!"
and with these words, placing the wolf's head at his saddle-bow, the
king put spurs to his grey horse, and galloping along the sandy
beach, rode over the adjacent hill in the direction of Falkland,
which lay on his road to the Cistercian abbey of Balmerino.
The earl stood near the mouth of the cavern on the desolate beach,
and gazed after the king's retiring figure, with mingled feelings of
sadness, hostility, and admiration. Then, after long musing and much
hesitation, he took up the purse of crowns which lay at his feet, and
kissing his hand towards the castle of the Inch--the prison of Sybil
Douglas and his mother--walked slowly and thoughtfully along the
beach.
The storm had completely lulled. The sea was mirrored around the
rocks and isles; the sky was blue and cloudless. The chafing waves
broke with a dreamy ripple on the yellow sands. The green headlands
and bold promontories, the rustic villages and quaint old fisher-town
that nestled between them, were all shining in the silvery haze of
that beautiful summer morning; but the soul of the young earl was sad.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE DEATH OF MAGDALENE.
"Envy and calumny will destroy innocence and pleasure; the oppressed
will be sacrificed to the oppressor; and, in proportion as tyranny
makes kings distrustful, judicial murders will depopulate the
state."--_Telemachus_, Book XX.
During these passages the young queen, Magdalene, had daily become
worse, and the "catarrh, which descended into her stomach," as Madame
de Montreuil says in one of her letters, had brought her to the verge
of the grave.
The sorrow and alarm of James were great; and remorsefully he now
remembered the warnings of Francis I., contrary to whose most urgent
advice he had espoused her, instead of the blooming Mary of Lorraine.
Foreign physicians were sent by their kings from distant courts and
cities, even from Syria and the remote countries of the east, and
daily they crowded the antechamber with their long beards and longer
garments, their grave visages and solemn quackeries; but their
presence had no other effect than to bring lower and lower the health
of poor Magdalene, and to excite the wrath and jealousy of John of
the Silvermills, who (as the king's apothecary, and deacon of the
barber-chirurgeons of Edinburgh), by the presence of these strangers,
felt his dignity encroached upon, and his reputation impugned.
The love of the amiable French girl for her gallant young husband was
excessive; it strengthened as her strength decayed; and finding that
matters of state separated them long and frequently, contrary to all
advice, she left Balmerino, with its shady woods and mellow air, and,
to be near her beloved James V., returned to the grey and solemn
courts of Holyrood on the eighth day of June.
There, to the joy of her husband, she seemed to revive a little; and
the preparations for her coronation (which was to be on a scale of
magnificence hitherto unknown in Scotland) had been resumed with
renewed vigour; but alas! on the tenth of July, three days after the
arrest of Lady Jane Seton, she suddenly threw up her hands to heaven
and expired, at a moment when, stooping over her couch, the king, her
husband, was playfully caressing and conversing with her; and the
great solemn bells of St. Giles's, and those of the abbey church, the
Dominicans, the Cistercians, and other friaries, as slowly and sadly
they tolled a knell, warning all good people to pray for the passing
soul, announced that direful event which plunged the whole land in
sorrow; for James V., "the king of the poor," was really a monarch
who reigned in the hearts of a people who were then loyal and
generous as they were brave.
She was solemnly interred by torchlight in the royal vault at
Holyrood; and, in her strong prison, Jane Seton heard the deep hoarse
boom of the minute guns, as they broke upon the still midnight sky
from the towers of King David, St. Margaret, and the ramparts of that
stately fortress which enclosed her.
So great was the grief of the nation, that this was the first
occasion of a general mourning in Scotland; and in the accounts of
the lord high treasurer there are still preserved numerous entries of
the Scottish and Holland cloths, French blacks, white crosses upon
sable velvets, and many other articles for the court, together with
the expenses of Magdalene's magnificent obsequies, the dirges sung
and solemn masses said on that melancholy event, which became the
all-absorbing topic of the time.
The whole nation mourned with the king; and everywhere, at kirk or
market, on highway or in burgh-town, black cloaks and sable feathers
had replaced the gaudier colours and fashions of the age. A great
funeral escutcheon hung in each of the eight cathedrals, and over the
gates of all the royal palaces. Like those used in France and
Germany, they were lozenge-formed, bearing the royal arms of Scotland
on a black ground, surrounded by those of the sixteen families from
whom the queen was descended. At the four corners were placed (as
usual among us at the present day) mort-heads, and the black
interstices were _semée_ with powdered tears.
After the funeral, King James, with a small retinue, retired to the
solitude of his beautiful country palace at Falkland.
If the hidden cause of the queen's illness had puzzled the learned
physicians and astrologers who had gathered around her couch, as it
were, from the four winds of heaven, it occasioned greater
speculation among the superstitious people of Scotland, and a
universal whisper of _sorcery_, followed by a cry for vengeance on
the cause of an effect so dire, went throughout the land, from the
Caledonian to the German Sea.
Fettered to a sick bed, suffering under the extremes of mental and
bodily agony--the double wounds, received first from Roland Vipont,
and secondly from the earl, all combined, and acting upon a frame
weakened by a previous illness, had brought Sir Adam Otterburn to the
brink of the grave.
His hours of delirium were full of visions either of love and
delight--of Jane Seton and a successful suit, or of sanguinary
horror--of conflicts, tortures, and executions; while the hours of
comparative calm that succeeded--the mere result of utter
exhaustion--were occupied by deep-laid schemes of avenging himself
upon the authors of so many miseries.
His mind had now but two thoughts--a delirium of love and a delirium
of hate; and they corroded his heart between them.
He had cast off Jane Seton; for so he strove to think, and so, unto
himself, he said a thousand times; he had rent her from his heart,
and abandoned her to the terrors in store for her. Then love would
come again, and he strove wildly to stifle it like a rising flame;
for he had given the first impulse to the ball of fate, and he
resolved to let it roll on its course to destruction.
In his moments of calm agony, when every voice in his heart was still
but those which whispered of jealousy and revenge, he deliberately
dictated, and drew up with bitter care, certain articles of
accusation, implicating Jane Seton wholly and solely in the death of
the queen, by sorcery of the most malignant character; and, armed by
a warrant, the town mansion of the Ashkirk family, which had not been
opened since the Albany herald, John Hamilton of Darnagaber, had
placed his seal on every door and lockfast place thereof, was opened
and searched by that unwilling functionary and the witch-finder,
Nichol Birrel.
After the dose he had been compelled to swallow at Cairntable, the
latter, it may be supposed, had reached Edinburgh with considerable
difficulty; and, like his master, animated by personal and implacable
vengeance against Sir Roland Vipont, he entered with heart and soul
into the public prosecution. Thus, when by order of his lord and
patron, Redhall, he was searching the house of the Setons, he
contrived most opportunely to discover in the boudoir of Lady Jane a
little wooden image bearing a crown, and marked with the initials
M.B. It was stuck full of pins, and was partly scorched by fire; but
after being duly sprinkled with holy water, and exorcised by the late
queen's French confessor, was deposited in the hands of the lord
advocate, who sealed it up in a box marked with the cross, as being
the most tremendous and damning proof of guilt that had ever come
under the notice of the newly-constituted College of Justice.
With one voice the whole city now accused, and without a moment's
hesitation condemned, Jane Seton. The preparations for her trial
went on rapidly; and the king, who was absorbed in his own grief, and
remained secluded among the woods of Falkland, abandoned her to her
fate; but the wretched Redhall suffered more than either the hapless