Stuart monarchs-a new era began in its history,
and it took a stahding as the chief burgh in
Scotland, the relations of which with England, for
generations after, partook rather of a vague prolonged
armistice in time of war than a settled
peace, and thus all rational progress was arrested
or paralysed, and was never likely to be otherwise
so long as the kings of England maintained the
insane pretensions of Edward I., deduced from
Brute the fabulous first king of Albion !
In 1383 Robert 11. was holding his court in
the Castle when he received there the ambassador
of Charles VI., on the 20th August, renewing the
ancient league with France. In the following year
a truce ended; the Earls of March and Douglas
began the war with spirit, and cut off a rich convoy
on its way to Roxburgh. This brought the Duke
of Lancaster and the Earl of Buckingham before
Edinburgh. Their army was almost innumerable
(according to Abercrombie, following Walsingham),
but the former spared the city in remembrance of
his hospitable treatment by the people when he was
among them, an exile from the English court-a
kindness for which the Scots cared so little that
they followed up his retreat so sharply, that he laid
the town and its great church in ashes when he returned
in the following year.
In 1390 Robert 111. ascended the throne, and ir.
that year we find the ambassadors of Charles VI.
again witnessing in the Castle the royal seal and signature
attached to the treaty for mutual aid and
defence against England in all time coming. This
brought Henry IV., as we have said, before the
Castle in 1400, with a well-appointed and numerous
army, in August.
From the fortress the young and gallant David
Duke of Rothesay sent a herald with a challenge
to meet him in mortal combat, where and when
he chose, with a hundred men of good blood on
each side, and determine the war in that way.
" But King Henry was in no humour to forego the
advantage he already possessed, at the head of a
more numerous army than Scotland could then
raise ; and so, contenting himself with a verbal
equivocation in reply to this knightly challenge, he
sat down with his numerous host before the Castle
till (with the usual consequences of the Scottish
reception of such'invaders) cold and rain, and -
twenty feet in length, with three or four large saws,
I for the common use, and six or more " cliekes of
castles, resorted to the simple expedient of driving
off all the cattle and sheep, provisions and goods,
even to the thatch of their houses, and leaving
nothing but bare walls for the enemy to wreak their
vengeance on; but they never put up their swords
till, by a terrible retaliating invasion into the more
fertile parts of England, they fully made up for
their losses. And this wretched state of affairs, for
nearly 500 years, lies at the door of the Plantagenet
and Tudor kings.
The aged King Robert 111. and his queen, the
once beautiful Annabella Drummond, resided in the
Castle and in the abbey of Holyrood alternately.
We are told that on one occasion, when the Duke
of Albany, with several of the courtiers, were conversing
one night on the ramparts of the former,
a singular light was seen afar off at the horizon, and
across the s t a q sky there flashea a bright meteor,
carrying behind it a long train of sparks.
'' Mark ye, sirs ! " said Albany, " yonder prodigy
portends either the ruin of a nation or the downfall
of some great prince ;a and an old chronicler omits
not to record that the Duke of Rothesay (who,
had he ascended the throne, would have been
David III.), perished soon after of famine, in the
hands of Ramornie, at Falkland.
Edinburgh was prosperous enough to be able to
contribute 50,000 merks towards the ransom of
James I., the gifted author of " The King's Quhair "
(or Book), who had been lawlessly captured at
sea in his boyhood by the English, and was left
in their hands for nineteen years a captive by his
designing uncle the Regent Albany ; and though
his plans for the pacification of the Highlands kept
him much in Perth, yet, in 1430, he was in
Edinburgh with Queen Jane and the Court, when
he received the surrender of Alexander Earl of
ROSS, who had been in rebellion but was defeated
by the royal troops in Lochaber.
As yet no Scottish noble had built a mansion in
Edinburgh, where a great number of the houses were
actually constructed of wood from the adjacent
forest, thatched with straw, and few were more than
two storeys in height ; but in the third Parliament
of James I., held at Perth in 1425, to avert the
conflagrations to which the Edinbiirghers were so
liable, laws were ordained requiring the magistrates
to have in readiness seven or eight ladders of
his progress or retreat."*
When unable to resist, the people of the entire
town and country, who were not secured in
* Wilson's ''Memorials." .
fired ;' and that no fire was to be conveyed from
one house to another within the town, unless in a
covered vessel or lantern. Another law forbade'
people on visits to live with their friends, but to
