But, with the death of Alexander III., the last of the Celtic dynasty, troubled times began for Scotland. First came the patriotic struggle of Sir William Wallace against the English oppression. Then came days of civil wars of the Bruce and that splendid hero the Black Douglas, and all the selfish tyranny of Edward I. of England, ending in the legacy he left to Scotland--a century and a half of incessant war. Those were days when no man had time to lay his hand to the plough, and no woman bore a son but he was reared a fighter and a hater; when English armies or rude bands of raiders would trample down the growing grain; when, the sound of the axes scarcely still, the little thatched homes of the wooden city would be wantonly kindled and left in smoking ashes and desolation. During all this time, neither was the Abbey of Holyrood spared by the “auld enemy.” In 1322 Edward II. laid it in ashes; and when David II., son of the Bruce, was buried before the High Altar, the silver shrine above it no longer held the miraculous Cross, for it had fallen into the hands of the English at Durham, and had there remained, a venerated exile in their Cathedral. With the Stuart dynasty, in Holyrood as everywhere else, the age of romance began. It was in 1429, five years after King James I. had come to Scotland, that a very dramatic scene took place in the Abbey. The King and Queen and Court were present at Mass in Holyrood Church on the Feast of St. Augustine. Suddenly the chanting of the priests broke off as the solemn ceremony was interrupted by the apparition of a half-clad man before the High Altar, who, holding a naked sword by the blade, knelt and presented it to the amazed King. This was the Lord of the Isles, one of the most powerful of the wild Highland chieftains whom James had been trying to subdue, and who had lately taken arms against the King, and burnt Inverness to the ground. In this savage and poetic way did the great ruined Chieftain give in his desperate submission, and tradition continues the poetry by insisting that it was at the intercession of Queen Jane that his life was spared. In the same year the twin infant sons of James I. were born in Holyrood Abbey; and, seven years later, when Queen Jane had fled to Edinburgh Castle with her eldest son after the murder of the King at Perth, it was at Holyrood Abbey that the little James II. was hastily crowned. It was at Holyrood Abbey that James II. was married to Mary of Gueldres. Their son, James III., was also married at Holyrood Abbey, to that Margaret of Denmark who sailed into Leith with her Danish fleet, and made Scotland the richer by the Orkneys and Shetlands as her marriage portion.