The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon
associations. The very external aspect of the proud old pile is enough
to inspire high thought. It rears its irregular walls and massive
towers, like a mural crown around the brow of a lofty ridge, waves its
royal banner in the clouds, and looks down with a lordly air upon the
surrounding world.
On this morning, the weather was of that voluptuous vernal kind which
calls forth all the latent romance of a man’s temperament, filling his
mind with music, and disposing him to quote poetry and dream of beauty.
In wandering through the magnificent saloons and long echoing galleries
of the castle I passed with indifference by whole rows of portraits
of warriors and statesmen, but lingered in the chamber where hang the
likenesses of the beauties which graced the gay court of Charles
the Second; and as I gazed upon them, depicted with amorous,
half-dishevelled tresses, and the sleepy eye of love, I blessed the
pencil of Sir Peter Lely, which had thus enabled me to bask in the
reflected rays of beauty. In traversing also the “large green courts,”
with sunshine beaming on the gray walls and glancing along the velvet
turf, my mind was engrossed with the image of the tender, the gallant,
but hapless Surrey, and his account of his loiterings about them in his
stripling days, when enamoured of the Lady Geraldine--
“With eyes cast up unto the maiden’s tower,
With easie sighs, such as men draw in love.”
In this mood of mere poetical susceptibility, I visited the ancient keep
of the castle, where James the First of Scotland, the pride and theme of
Scottish poets and historians, was for many years of his youth detained
a prisoner of state. It is a large gray tower, that has stood the brunt
of ages, and is still in good preservation. It stands on a mound which
elevates it above the other parts of the castle, and a great flight of
steps leads to the interior. In the armory, a Gothic hall furnished with
weapons of various kinds and ages, I was shown a coat of armor hanging
against the wall, which had once belonged to James. Hence I
was conducted up a staircase to a suite of apartments, of faded
magnificence, hung with storied tapestry, which formed his prison, and
the scene of that passionate and fanciful amour, which has woven into
the web of his story the magical hues of poetry and fiction.
The whole history of this amiable but unfortunate prince is highly
romantic. At the tender age of eleven, he was sent from home by his
father, Robert III., and destined for the French court, to be reared
under the eye of the French monarch, secure from the treachery and
danger that surrounded the royal house of Scotland. It was his mishap,
in the course of his voyage, to fall into the hands of the English,
and he was detained prisoner by Henry IV., notwithstanding that a truce
existed between the two countries.
The intelligence of his capture, coming in the train of many sorrows and
disasters, proved fatal to his unhappy father. “The news,” we are told,
“was brought to him while at supper, and did so overwhelm him with grief
that he was almost ready to give up the ghost into the hands of the
servants that attended him. But being carried to his bedchamber, he
abstained from all food, and in three days died of hunger and grief at
Rothesay.” *
* Buchanan.
James was detained in captivity above eighteen years; but, though
deprived of personal liberty, he was treated with the respect due to
his rank. Care was taken to instruct him in all the branches of useful
knowledge cultivated at that period, and to give him those mental and
personal accomplishments deemed proper for a prince. Perhaps in this
respect his imprisonment was an advantage, as it enabled him to apply
himself the more exclusively to his improvement, and quietly to imbibe
that rich fund of knowledge and to cherish those elegant tastes which
have given such a lustre to his memory. The picture drawn of him in
early life by the Scottish historians is highly captivating, and seems
rather the description of a hero of romance than of a character in real
history. He was well learnt, we are told, “to fight with the sword,
to joust, to tourney, to wrestle, to sing and dance; he was an expert
mediciner, right crafty in playing both of lute and harp, and sundry
other instruments of music, and was expert in grammar, oratory, and
poetry.” *
* Ballenden’s translation of Hector Boyce.
With this combination of manly and delicate accomplishments, fitting him
to shine both in active and elegant life, and calculated to give him an
intense relish for joyous existence, it must have been a severe trial,
in an age of bustle and chivalry, to pass the spring-time of his years
in monotonous captivity. It was the good fortune of James, however, to
be gifted with a powerful poetic fancy, and to be visited in his prison
by the choicest inspirations of the muse. Some minds corrode, and grow
inactive, under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid
and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and
imaginative in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey
of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in
melody.
Have you not seen the nightingale,
A pilgrim coop’d into a cage,
How doth she chant her wonted tale,
In that her lonely hermitage!
Even there her charming melody doth prove
That all her boughs are trees, her cage a grove.+
+ Roger L’Estrange.
Indeed, it is the divine attribute of the imagination, that it is
irrepressible, unconfinable--that when the real world is shut out,
it can create a world for itself, and, with a necromantic power, can
conjure up glorious shapes and forms and brilliant visions, to make
solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of the dungeon. Such was the
world of pomp and pageant that lived round Tasso in his dismal cell at
Ferrara, when he conceived the splendid scenes of his Jerusalem; and we
may consider The King’s Quair,* composed by James during his captivity
at Windsor, as another of those beautiful breakings forth of the soul
from the restraint and gloom of the prison-house.
The subject of the poem is his love for the lady Jane Beaufort, daughter
of the Earl of Somerset, and a princess of the blood-royal of England,
of whom he became enamoured in the course of his captivity. What gives
it a peculiar value, is, that it may be considered a transcript of
the royal bard’s true feelings, and the story of his real loves and
fortunes. It is not often that sovereigns write poetry or that poets
deal in fact. It is gratifying to the pride of a common man, to find
a monarch thus suing, as it were, for admission into his closet, and
seeking to win his favor by administering to his pleasures. It is a
proof of the honest equality of intellectual competition, which strips
off all the trappings of factitious dignity, brings the candidate down
to a level with his fellow-men, and obliges him to depend on his own
native powers for distinction. It is curious, too, to get at the history
of a monarch’s heart, and to find the simple affections of human nature
throbbing under the ermine. But James had learnt to be a poet before he
was a king; he was schooled in adversity, and reared in the company of
his own thoughts. Monarchs have seldom time to parley with their hearts
or to meditate their minds into poetry; and had James been brought up
amidst the adulation and gayety of a court, we should never, in all
probability, have had such a poem as the Quair.
* Quair, an old term for book.
I have been particularly interested by those parts of the poem which
breathe his immediate thoughts concerning his situation, or which are
connected with the apartment in the Tower. They have thus a personal and
local charm, and are given with such circumstantial truth as to make the
reader present with the captive in his prison and the companion of his
meditations.
Such is the account which he gives of his weariness of spirit, and of
the incident which first suggested the idea of writing the poem. It was
the still mid-watch of a clear moonlight night; the stars, he says, were
twinkling as fire in the high vault of heaven, and “Cynthia rinsing her
golden locks in Aquarius.” He lay in bed wakeful and restless, and took
a book to beguile the tedious hours. The book he chose was Boetius’
Consolations of Philosophy, a work popular among the writers of that
day, and which had been translated by his great prototype, Chaucer. From
the high eulogium in which he indulges, it is evident this was one of
his favorite volumes while in prison; and indeed it is an admirable
text-book for meditation under adversity. It is the legacy of a noble
and enduring spirit, purified by sorrow and suffering, bequeathing to
its successors in calamity the maxims of sweet morality, and the trains
of eloquent but simple reasoning, by which it was enabled to bear
up against the various ills of life. It is a talisman, which the
unfortunate may treasure up in his bosom, or, like the good King James,
lay upon his nightly pillow.
After closing the volume he turns its contents over in his mind, and
gradually falls into a fit of musing on the fickleness of fortune, the
vicissitudes of his own life, and the evils that had overtaken him even
in his tender youth. Suddenly he hears the bell ringing to matins, but
its sound, chiming in with his melancholy fancies, seems to him like a
voice exhorting him to write his story. In the spirit of poetic errantry
he determines to comply with this intimation; he therefore takes pen in
hand, makes with it a sign of the cross to implore a benediction,
and sallies forth into the fairy-land of poetry. There is something
extremely fanciful in all this, and it is interesting as furnishing
a striking and beautiful instance of the simple manner in which
whole trains of poetical thought are sometimes awakened and literary
enterprises suggested to the mind.
In the course of his poem, he more than once bewails the peculiar
hardness of his fate, thus doomed to lonely and inactive life, and
shut up from the freedom and pleasure of the world in which the meanest
animal indulges unrestrained. There is a sweetness, however, in his very
complaints; they are the lamentations of an amiable and social spirit at
being denied the indulgence of its kind and generous propensities; there
is nothing in them harsh nor exaggerated; they flow with a natural and
touching pathos, and are perhaps rendered more touching by their
simple brevity. They contrast finely with those elaborate and iterated
repinings which we sometimes meet with in poetry, the effusions of
morbid minds sickening under miseries of their own creating, and
venting their bitterness upon an unoffending world. James speaks of his
privations with acute sensibility, but having mentioned them passes on,
as if his manly mind disdained to brood over unavoidable calamities.
When such a spirit breaks forth into complaint, however brief, we
are aware how great must be the suffering that extorts the murmur. We
sympathize with James, a romantic, active, and accomplished prince, cut
off in the lustihood of youth from all the enterprise, the noble uses,
and vigorous delights of life, as we do with Milton, alive to all the
beauties of nature and glories of art, when he breathes forth brief but
deep-toned lamentations over his perpetual blindness.
Had not James evinced a deficiency of poetic artifice, we might almost
have suspected that these lowerings of gloomy reflection were meant as
preparative to the brightest scene of his story, and to contrast with
that refulgence of light and loveliness, that exhilarating accompaniment
of bird and song, and foliage and flower, and all the revel of, the