Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848
We now come to a subject on which really, jocularity apart, we stand upon firm and secure ground – the spot where Macbeth fell. All the chroniclers with one voice state that it was at a place called Lunfanan. Even Raphael Hollinshed, whose version, it is universally admitted, was the one perused by Shakspeare, – after he tells how the beleaguered fugitive beheld the miraculous forest with which his doom was involved approaching him, continues to say – "Nevertheless, he brought his men in order of battle, and exhorted them to do valiantly: howbeit, his enemies had scarcely cast from them their boughs, when Macbeth, perceiving their numbers, betook him straight to flight, whom Macduff pursued with great hatred, even till he came to Lunfannane." Perhaps Shakspeare, not knowing precisely where Lunfanan lay, supposed that it was some spot close to Dunsinane, and did not wish to burden his action with the particularity of an unimportant movement. Lunfanan is, however, north of the Dee, and distant full fifty miles in a straight line from Dunsinane, the rough mountains of the Braes of Angus lying between the two places; so that the two parties must have had a pretty long running fight, and Macbeth stood out even harder game than he has generally credit for. Our favourite poet describes the chase across the broad valley of Strathmore, through the rocky glens of Clova, over the Isla and the Esk, down through the hoary forest of Glentanner, across the raging Dee, and up again through mountain and forest, in this sententious and emphatic couplet,
"And our the Month they chaised him than
'Till the wood of Lunfanan."
When the victory was completed, we are told that they cut off his head, and bore it to King Malcolm at Kincardine – a pleasant village on the banks of the Dee, about ten miles from Lunfanan.
This same Lunfanan is a spot which it requires particular taste to love, and yet we have perambulated it not without interest. The Chroniclers speak of it as a forest, but the highest elevations are now generally bare of trees, save where in a few sheltered hollows the birches cling to the rocks. The hills are of considerable height, but round and bare, with few precipices, and little character of outline; but the glens between the hills are sheltered and well cultivated, each is enlivened by a small stream, and still more enlivened by the scanty population seeking the shelter of the recesses of the glen, and making it populous amid the waste. But we shall afford a better description than our own, in a few lines from "The Fortunate Shepherdess," by a poet who lived in a glen not far distant – Alexander Ross. It will be admitted, by the way, that our poetical quotations to-day are not of a hackneyed kind, whatever other censure they may incur.
"The water keely on a level sleed,
Wi' little din, but couthy what it made:
On ilka side the trees grew thick and strang,
And wi' the birds they a' were in a sang;
On ev'ry side, a full bow-shot and mair,
The green was even, gowany, and fair;
With easy sklent, on ev'ry hand, the braes,
To right well up, wi' scattered busses raise,
Wi' goats and sheep aboon, and ky below,
The bonny braes a' in a swarm did go."
Occasionally, when the new earth is turned up, strange uncouth warlike instruments are found in this district – remnants of ancient strife, so unlike any weapons recorded in the genuine history of the military art, that it were hard to say whether they belong to the age of Macbeth, or to unknown anterior centuries. Flint arrow-heads, stone hammers and axes, – such is their general character, though we have also seen among these mysterious discoveries, such a thing as a long flat mass of decomposed iron, which may have once been the blade of a dagger, or short sword. Here the knowing reader, who has been induced, on the field of Waterloo, to purchase a ball-perforated cuirass and helmet, which he afterwards discovers to have been made at a manufactory of Waterloo relics, will curl his lip in scorn; but he is wrong. Lunfanan is no relic-collecting district. We question if the inhabitants ever made a shilling of any one, the present company excepted, by the military stores discovered by them when ploughing their tough peat soil. We did not require there to practise the method of self-defence which we adopted on a visit to the field of Waterloo; and by the way – as we are inclined to recommend it strongly to our friends, as an effectual preservative from the main annoyance to which the hero-worshipper is subjected – we may here describe our method. On hiring our guide, we desired him to procure for us a fragment of an old kettle. Carrying this conspicuously in our hard, to each band of relic-sellers who came up, we stated that we were in the trade ourselves, that we had just acquired a very valuable article, and were willing to part with it at a moderate price. The cuirassiers did not look more ridiculous, when they attempted to storm the squares, than our assailants, when we fortified ourselves behind this piece of defensive armour. But to return to Lunfanan.
In one of the narrow glens, near the old parish-church, there is an oblong solid turf bank, or mound, of considerable height, and regular construction, as clean and sharp in its outline as the glacis of a modern fortification. A neighbouring stream has been diverted round it, or rather the waters have been divided and distributed on either side, so as to surround it with a fosse. This curious antiquity is called "the Peel Bog," or Castle Bog. "The course," says the author of the statistical account of the parish, "by which the water was conveyed from the burn of Lunphanan may still be traced; the measure of the circumvallation by which the water was confined may still be made; the situation of the drawbridge is still discernible; the path leading from the fosse to the top of the mound may still be trodden; and the sluice by which the water issued from the moat, was laid bare by the flood of 1829."13 Even the sceptical Lord Hailes ventured to associate Macbeth's name with the spot; "as no remains of buildings," he says, "are to be seen, it is probable that the fortress was composed of timber and sod. In this solitary place, we may conjecture that Macbeth sought an asylum." At some distance from the Peel Bog, a low thin rampart of earth and stone encircles the summit of a conical hill; it is an inferior specimen of the old British hill-fort, well known both in Scotland and the north of England. But on the brow of one of the hills, there is a still more emphatic memorial of the monarch's fate. There a heap of gray stones, considerably larger than many others surrounding it, is still called, and is represented in the county maps as Cairn Beth. We must admit that, were it in a tourist's district, or were it the spot which popular literature, of any kind had marked as the grave of Macbeth, this would be suspicious. But no tourist's footstep seeks the quiet uninviting wilds of Lunfanan. There is no railway line, not even a stage-coach communication, between it and the world. You have but to see the rough, primitive, granitic air of the Lunfananers assembled at the parish church, to know that they are incapable of any imposition. Legends we always distrust, especially when they are connected with any spot sanctified by poetry. At Dunsinane, we believe, some vestiges are shown as marking the spot of the usurper's death, the "genuine" spot, "all others being spurious imitations;" but we suspect this legend is not even so old as Shakspeare's day, that it is no older than the revival of Shakspearean literature, and the rise of a general public interest in the spots illuminated by his genius.14 For more than one castle, Cawdor included, has the merit been claimed of being the identical edifice in which Duncan was slain, and undoubted four-posted bedsteads have been shown in actual existence to put scepticism to scorn. But any popular association of the actual events of Macbeth's career with quiet remote Lunfanan has been barred by the silence of Shakspeare, and the unwillingness of topographical critics to break the spell of the accepted localities. Though legends spring up like rumours, with a breath, the names of places which they have received from historical incidents are generally of long standing, and, indeed, a large proportion of the lowlands of Scotland is full of places which to this day bear Celtic names, given them by tribes who cannot have inhabited the districts for a thousand years at least. The old chroniclers, without exception, lay Macbeth's death in Lunfanan; the people of the spot, who never read these chronicles, and never, perhaps, heard of Macbeth, or if they did, heard the popular account of his death in Dunsinane, call a certain monumental tumulus Cairn Beth – this, we think, is very nearly conclusive.15 And yet, sitting on that Cairn, with the fresh breeze blowing round one, and the blue heavens above, and the blooming heather-bells around, or reclining on the smooth green turf of the Peel Bog, on a summer day, with the sun shining hot upon the hills, and the babbling brook singing its "quiet tune," it is not easy to associate the spot with that history of blood and horror, or to feel that its features are ancient, or that they ever were connected with warfare. In the gloomy, galleries of Glammis or Cawdor, with their grim old portraits, their armour, their secret staircases, their mysterious hidden chambers, and iron hooks in the wall – the idea of the haggard murderer, and all the associations of his deeds and his remorse creep more vividly on that imaginative conscience, which more or less makes cowards of us all in such places. Yet the history of the arts tells us that not one stone of these edifices, ancient though they be, can have stood upon another till the history of Macbeth was as old as that of Queen Mary is now. Why, then, should they retain their hold on us? They are contemporary with Shakspeare's Macbeth, though not with the historians', and are the style of edifice in which he cast his tragedy. It must be a feudal stronghold, heavily arched, buttressed, fortified, and gloomy, – where the lady in a vaulted half-lighted chamber may say:
"The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements."
The timber edifice on such an eminence as the Peel Bog – probably, as the sagacious Lord Hailes imagines, the true character of the edifices possessed by Macbeth – would no more fill up the true architectural wants of the drama, than a marble Grecian temple, or a Canadian settler's log-house.
Crimes briefly told without details have no interest, unless they can be put in the shape of statistics – some people will be inclined to deny that the exception is the reverse of the rule. We are not writing history, and if we were, the historical details which go no further than that A stabbed B, and C poisoned D, and E mutilated F, are not such as we are inclined to believe our readers would thank us for. It is very clear that the death of Duncan, if we had no more than authentic annals to deal with – if it had been a question merely of history, and not in some measure incidentally connected with the highest rank of human intellectual effort – would have formed a very meagre object of comment. The society of antiquaries might have endured a paper on it – for such endurance is the martyrdom they have chosen – but no other person would. In looking, then, down through Scottish history from the accession of Macbeth's successor, we find little that can be noticed with any applicability to our particular purpose, until we reach the time when the records provide us with some of the details.
Yet there is one very early tragic incident, which appears to us to have considerable interest, as one of the first striking instances where the fierce spirit of clan animosity – the burning desire to avenge the wrongs of the chief – was exhibited by the Highlanders. It occurred about the year 1242. A tournament was held on the English Border, at which two young knights, Patrick Earl of Athole, and Walter de Bysset, a cadet of the family who were lords of the great northern districts, subsequently the patrimony of Lord Lovat, encountered each other. Bysset was unhorsed. Not long afterwards, the building in which the Earl of Athole lived, in Haddington, was burned to the ground, and he, with several of his followers, died in the flames. By some accounts the Earl was previously murdered, and the house was burned to conceal the deed. Let us here have recourse to the distinct and considerate account of the incident in our favourite poet: —
"Whether it was of recklessness,
Or it of forethought felony was,
Into the Inns, lang ere day,
Quhare that the Earl of Athole lay
A fell fire him to coals brynt,
Thus suddenly was that Earl tynt.
And with him mony ma
There houses and men were brunt alswa."
Some Highland gillies from Bysset's country had been seen in the neighbourhood, and suspicion immediately fell upon the head of that house. He tried to prove an alibi – that he was, at the time of the tragedy, in Forfar, some eighty miles distant from Haddington, doing the honours of hospitality to the Queen. As our historical poet says:
"But this Sir William at Forfar
That night was late at the supper
With the Queen, and her to chamber led,
And in his own chamber yhed till his bed,"
like a good old country gentleman. But an alibi went for little in a Highland feud.
"To purge him for this the Queen
Profered her to swear bodily,
But that assythed not the party,
That was stout and of great might,
They said – Wherever he was that night
Bathe his armouries and his men
Intil Haddington were seen then,
When this earl was brynt with fire:
They said the Byssets in their ire
Of auld feud and great discord
That was between them and that lord,
Did that in forethought felony."
It was still the age of ordeals. The hot ploughshares were, perhaps, obsolete, but single combat was in full practice; and even jury trial was considered a species of ordeal rather than a deliberate judgment upon evidence. The accused party in the one case appealed to the chances of war – or, taking the reference in its more solemn aspect, he left his cause to be vindicated by the God of battles: in the other, he threw himself upon the suffrages of his peers. Both ordeals were considered about equally reasonable and fair; and if the man who preferred the ordeal of battle were a gigantic warrior, unconquered, and terrible in the lists, he was, to the true believer in ordeals, not more formidable than the feeblest of his contemporaries, for a just Deity might wither his uplifted arm; and if he retained the physical superiority he had previously indicated, it was because the All-seeing Eye knew of the justice of his cause. Now Bysset, who seems to have been somewhat of a sceptic in ordeals, had no objection to trust the issue to single combat, and challenged whomsoever would dare to stand forth against him. But he would not submit to an assize or jury, for he said the whole country had prejudged him. His opponents had, somehow or other, greater faith in the ordeal of an assize than that of battle, and would not accept his challenge. In the meantime, to show his sincerity, he requested the northern clergy to curse and excommunicate the perpetrators of the deed.
"Sir William Bysset gert for thi,
His chaplain in his chapel,
Denounce cursed with book and bell,
All they that had part
Of that brynnin, or any art.
The Bishop of Aberdeen alswa,
He gart cursed denounce all tha
That either by art or part, or swike,
Gart burn this time that Earl Patricke,
In all the kirks halely
Of Aberdeen's diocesy.
Sir William Bysset this process
Gart be done."
Wild justice began to be enforced in the country of the Byssets, which was overrun by their enemies: in the pathetic language of our poet —
"His landis quite,
Was for that burning all herryet,
Bathe of nowt, and sheap, and kye,
And all other goods halely."
At length, the Byssets agreed "to come into the king's will," or abide by his arbitration. They came under an obligation to depart to the Holy Land, and there for the remainder of their days pray for the soul of the murdered man. Their broad estates were forfeited, and a portion of them coming into the hands of a family named Frezelier or Frazer, they planted the roof-tree of the great chiefship of that name in the northern Highlands.
There is little doubt that the murder of Athole was a piece of clannish vengeance over which the chief had no control. His wild Highland followers saw him unhorsed: it was enough. Into such puerile refinements as the law of chivalry, which bound him to take the unhorsing with the meekness of those who turn the left cheek when the right is smitten, they could not enter. The more they believed in the high spirit of their chief, the more they would be confident, that he would exult in a signal vengeance for the insult. Of course, when the vengeance was accomplished, it would rouse an unquenchable desire of retaliation in the men of Athole; and indeed it may be conjectured from the circumstances of the whole proceeding, that the king believed the Byssets personally innocent, but dared not, for the peace of the country, allow them to remain in Scotland. And yet, what is on the whole the most remarkable feature of the Highland feuds of the day, – neither the Athole nor the Bysset family were old hereditary patriarchs of the people. They were foreign adventurers, but recently rooted in the country. The Celtic races seem to have at once rallied round such intruders, in the strongest and fiercest spirit of devotion. When a chief had descendants, his race held, of course, generally a position which a stranger could not shake. But if the people had quarrelled with their chief, or if from other circumstances the headship were vacant, they clung with instantaneous tenacity to the first Norman adventurer to whom the monarch assigned their territory; and the descendants of these refined sons of chivalry by degrees assimilated themselves to the people among whom they were cast; becoming ostensibly of the same race as that over which they held rule.
The banishment of Bysset was connected with important historical results. Instead of going to Palestine, per agreement, to pray for the soul of the slaughtered Earl of Athole, he went, according to Matthew Paris, to a nearer and more agreeable place, the court of England. There he fostered in Henry III., those notions of the feudal vassalage of the Scottish kings to England, which produced the invasion of his successor, Edward I. Bysset had a considerable personal interest in this question; for, if the king of England had a paramount superiority over Scotland, his banishment and forfeiture might be reversed. Such conduct shocks all historical notions of patriotism; but what better claim had Scottish nationality on the Norman adventurer, than the respectability of Juggernaut has on a member of the supreme council of Calcutta? The ancestors of the house probably came over with William, a century and a half earlier; the banished lord was perhaps brought over from England with his father or grandfather, to accept the chiefship of a portion of the Highland wastes, over which the King of Scots professed to hold sovereignty. Aggrandisement was the sole object among the barbarians of the north; and when they ceased to derive a territorial revenue within Scotland, their connexion with the country where they lived was as completely closed, as that of the governor of a colony when he is recalled.
The subsequent history of this race was as strange and eventful as their first appearance in the Scottish annals. They became great lords in Ulster; and early in the fifteenth century they were again represented by a Scotsman, Donald Balloch, the hero of the battle of Inverlochy, whose mother was the heiress of the Byssets. For some time after this, we might trace their descent, like the track of a wild beast, by the marks of rapine and disorder; and at a later period we finally lose sight of the pedigree of the Byssets, in Montrose's celebrated ally, Kilkittoch.
Few of the incidental notices connected with those minor offences which mark the general character of the people, can be found anterior to the commencement of the criminal records. Hector Boece and our friend the poet occasionally tell wondrous incidents; but they are not to be depended on, and few of them have enough of dramatic spirit to be interesting as fables. We are inclined, however, to mention, in passing, the judicial feats of stout old Regent Randolph, whom the poet maintains to have been the greatest of law reformers; in testimony whereof, he adduces a case in point, far beyond the nicety of modern juridical philosophy. The regent hanged a man for stealing his own property. There was a law, that the community should make good every theft, the perpetrator of which could not be discovered. Founding on this law, a husbandman secreted his plough-irons, and received compensation.
"A gready earl soon after was,
Burnin' in sik greediness,
That his plough irons himself stall,
And hid them in a peet pot all.
He playned to the sheriff sare,
That stolen his plough irons were;
The sheriff than paid him shillings twa,
And after that he done had sa,
Soon a great court he gart set,
Wytting of that stelth to get."
The fraud was discovered, and the perpetrator of it hanged.
The murder of James I. is one of the few crimes anterior to the commencement of the records, of which a contemporary account, circumstantial and truthlike, has been preserved.16 Few historical tragedies bear comparison with this, either in the audacity with which the assassination was planned, or the relentless atrocity with which it was perpetrated. Nothing can afford so lively an illustration of the perilous tenure of the Scottish crown in the fifteenth century. We would fain have had the telling of this story, and of that part, especially, where, after the household traitor had removed the great iron bolt, a young damsel, a daughter of the house of Douglas, thrust her arm in the socket. "She was but young," says Hector Boece, "and her bones not solid, and therefore her arm was soon broken in sunder, and the door dung open by force." Poor child! few have been the acts of loyal devotion so heroic as hers; but the whole narrative has been so fully and minutely incorporated with history, as to afford us no excuse for here repeating it.17
There are, on the other hand, among the early criminal records, two instances of conspiracy against the life of the monarch, of which the particulars are not sufficiently ample to give them the interest of mystery. To excite curiosity, we must see a certain way, while we are unable to see so far as we desire: but in these cases we have little more than the accusation and the condemnation. One of the sufferers was Janet Lady Glammis, condemned to be burned on the 17th of July 1537; we find her name in the criminal record five years earlier, charged with "art and part of the intoxication of John Lord Glammis her husband." The charge has not a very formidable sound, but it doubtless meant either poisoning or sorcery or both; for they were then held to be one concern, as the Romans showed that they deemed them by the title they conferred on the witch, "venefica." This trial is remarkable from the circumstance of a number of gentlemen having preferred paying a penalty to acting on the jury. Perhaps they were inclined, as a later bulwark of our constitution is said to have done, to find a verdict of 'sarved him right.' It was through the instrumentality of poison that the unfortunate lady was charged with intending to effect her design against the life of the king; but of her motive, or ultimate object there is no indication, beyond her relationship to the Douglas family, and probable connexion with their intrigues. The other charge of treason occurred so closely at the same juncture, that for this reason alone historians have supposed that they had both some untraced connexion with a common plot. The culprit in this instance was John Master of Forbes, who was charged with a design to shoot the king as he passed through the town of Aberdeen. It was a service which he was likely to have performed as successfully as Bothwellhaugh, for he had already shown his abilities in the murder of his neighbour, Seton of Meldrum. In those days, the people who took upon them to fire at kings – very different from the maudlin wretches whose diseased brains conceive such horrid projects in a civilised age – knew what they were about, and were generally successful. They were well accustomed to "break into the bloody house of life;" and the attempt on a crowned monarch was merely a higher range of practice, tasking their best abilities. The simple truth is this: that in the present age we are not accustomed to shooting people, and therefore, when any wretch takes into his frenzied brain a design to fire at a Louis Philippe, he gets confused and makes a bungle of it. It is not a practice suited to the age, and no man of any sense would adopt it.
The earliest of the Scottish criminal records that have been preserved begin in the reign of James IV., about the year 1488. Mr Pitcairn, who has generously laid these early records before the public, not at the expense of the record commission but at his own, says of them, – "The books of adjournal and minute books of the supreme criminal tribunal of Scotland, as well as the records of the Justice Aires, &c. at these remote periods, were kept in an obscure forensic Latin. This circumstance, added to the well-known difficulty of deciphering the ordinary MSS. of these centuries, and the fact of the books now preserved being generally mere scrolls and memoranda, written with many contractions and evidently during the hurry of the court proceedings, have hitherto rendered the task of examining them, and presenting the public with the more important cases, a labour of a peculiarly irksome and repulsive kind." We do not doubt it, and hence our gratitude to Mr Pitcairn, for not only deciphering these discouraging manuscripts, but translating the Latin into English. Those indeed who, like ourselves, have perused his volumes – if any other person has perused them – owe a double debt of gratitude to Mr Pitcairn; for he has enabled us to read, in excellent type, what we would otherwise have had to decipher in distressing MS., and he has given us the means of pursuing the task of research by our own fireside, instead of in the interior of the Register House; while we have the satisfaction to feel, in perusing his quartos, that the number of people to whom, in common with ourselves, they have laid the field open, is a very limited one indeed – so limited, that we shall consider every quotation we make from his volumes as select and valuable as if we were able to subjoin MS. penes auct. to it.
The earliest of these translations from the old Latin records contain the minutes of circuit courts on the Borders. The entries are as like each other as those of a police charge book. Plunder of cattle is the perpetual theme, and the quantity of business done by individuals is sometimes startling. Here is an ordinary specimen: —
"Walter Scott of Howpaslot, allowed to compound for treasonably bringing in William Scott, called Gyde, John his brother, and other traitors of Levyn, to the Hereship of Harehede. Item, for theftuously and treasonably resetting of Henry Scott and other traitors of Levyn: item, for the treasonable stouthrief of forty oxen and cows, and two hundred sheep, from the tenants of Harehede, at the same time. Robert Scott of Quhitchester became surety for his entry at the next Justice Aire."
Such were the gentry who, in the words of the namesake of Howpaslot,
"Drove the beeves that made their broth,
From England and from Scotland both."
Another entry like the former, containing more names that will sound not unfamiliar, may be given as a further specimen. The two, from their similarity, will satisfy the reader that it would tend little to edification to make a more extensive selection.
"John Scott of Dalloraine, allowed to compound for art and part of the resetting of John Rede and John Scott in Tushielaw in his theftuous deeds; and especially the time that the said John Scott stole a 'drift' of sheep from Thomas Johnson forth of Quhithop. Item, for treasonably resetting Hector Armstrong, a traitor of Levyn, in his theftuous deeds and treasons, &c., &c. Item, for common oppression of the lieges, in taking and plundering them of their horses and goods by his own authority. Item, for intercommuning with the English in treasonable manner. Item, for common reset of the thieves of Liddesdaile, Eskdale, and Ewesdale. Item, for slaughter of one called Colthride, &c., &c. Robert Scott of Quhitchester became surety to satisfy the parties."
The reader of Scottish history knows that, in the year 1530, James V., finding that by Circuit Courts of Justiciary he produced little more effect upon these Border depredators than if he had made a gratuitous distribution of Cicero de Officiis among them, made war on them, by leading an army through their country, and destroyed their strong-holds, as the German free cities destroyed the castles of their professional brethren on the Rhine. It was on this occasion that Johnny Armstrong visited him with twenty-four armed "gentlemen," according to Pitscottie, "very richly apparelled," and that the king, turning haughtily round from the freebooter's proffered courtesy said, "What wants yon knave that a king should have?" There is something sad in Armstrong's fate. He appears almost to have considered the king one of his own class, – a leader of men, but a greater leader. Somewhat pompous and conceited he appears to have been; – somewhat too trustful in the effect of his hearty hail-fellow-well-met way of approaching the royal presence. In fact, Johnny Armstrong "did not know his place," and treated the king too much like a brother freebooter, of a higher standing than himself. But, in his apprehension and execution, there is something that makes the nearest possible approach to treachery; and we can imagine a blush rising in the royal cheek, when the robber captain turned haughtily round and said, "I am but a fool to seek grace at a graceless face." The entry regarding the redoubted leader, in these records, is as brief as it is humiliating, for the lion had not the telling of the tale; – "John Armstrong, alias BlakJok, and Thomas his brother, convicted of common theft, and reset of theft, &c., hanged."