Edinburgh Bookshelf

Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time

Search

46 MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH. Quhare ever they go, it may be sene, How kirk and calsay they soup clene. Yet shortly after he adds :- I trow, Sanct Baruard, nor Sanct Blais, Gart never man beir up their claes, Peter, nor Paule, nor Sauct Androw, Gart never bear up their tailliq I trow. The whole poem evidently depicts the extravagance of an age, when the clown trod on the noble’s heel. Nuns, and milkmaids, and burghers’ wives, are alike charged with the fashionable excesses that neither satire nor sumptuary laws proved able to suppress. YIQNETTE-NOmXUI Capitd from Holyrood Abbey.
Volume 10 Page 50
  Enlarge Enlarge     Pictures Pictures
CHAPTER V. FROM THE DEATH OF JAMES V. TO THE ABDICATION OF QUEEN MARY. internal discord. The fatal events of Flodden had placed the Crown of Scotland on his infant brow, at the early age of eighteen months, and he again bequeathed its onerous dignities to the unfortunate May, then only an infant of a few daya old, the sole heir of his crown, and of more than all his misfortunes. With a sad presentiment of the future, the broken-hearted Monarch received on his death-bed the intelligence, that his Queen had given birth to a daughter in Linlithgow Palace, and exclaimed in the bitterness of his heart, " It came with a lass, and it will go with a lass I " (' Woe is me I " exclaimed Henry VIII., when the news of the King's death reached the English Court, '' for I will never have any King in Scotland so set to me again, nor one whom I favoured so well ! " Yet the advantages that such an occurrence afforded were not lost sight of by that wily Monarch. His recent success had placed a number of the Scottish nobility in his power, and these he now sought to secure to his interests, by granting them their freedom, and loading them with costly gifts. And from this t h e forward, until the final accession of James VI. to the crown of England, an English party continued to be maintained among the Scottish nobility, plotting the overthrow of every patriotic scheme, the ready tools of their country's enemies ; and if occasionally they are VIaaETTE-The Blwk Turnpike, where Qu-B Idary dept after her surrender at Carberry Hill.
Volume 10 Page 51
  Enlarge Enlarge     Pictures Pictures