Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen — Volume 1Tytler, Sarah
History
Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen — Volume 1
Tytler, Sarah
Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 1819-1901
There was a story told at the time of the Prince and Campbell of Moonzie.
Prince Albert had arranged to return at a particular hour to drive with
the Queen. Moonzie, who was the most ardent and agile deer-stalker in the
neighbourhood, had got into the swing of the sport, till then
unsuccessful, when, as the men lay crouching among the heather, waiting
intently for the herd expected to come that way, the Prince said it was,
time to return.
"But the deer, your Royal Highness," faltered the Highlander, looking
aghast, and speaking in the whisper which the exigencies of the case
required.
The Prince explained that the Queen expected him.
It is to be feared the Highlander, in the excitement of the moment, and
the marvel that any man--not to say any prince--could give up the sport at
such a crisis, suggested that the Queen might wait, while the deer
certainly would not.
"The Queen commands," said her true knight, with a quiet smile and a
gentle rebuke.
In the evening there was company, as at Taymouth, some in kilts. Campbell
of Moonzie showed himself as great in reels as in deer-stalking. (Ah! the
wild glee and nimble grace of a Highland reel well danced.) The Queen
danced one country dance with Lord Willoughby, while Prince Albert had the
eldest daughter of the house, Lady Carington, for his partner.
The next day the royal party, starting as early as nine on a hazy morning,
reached Stirling and visited the castle, which figures so largely in the
lives of the old Stewart kings. The Queen saw the room in which James II.
slew Douglas, John Knox's pulpit, the field of Bannockburn, which saved
Scotland from a conquest, and the Knoll or "Knowe" where the Scotch Queens
and the Court ladies sat to look down on their knights "Riding the Ring"
or playing at the boisterously boyish game of "Hurleyhacket." But the
autumn mists shut out the "Highland hills," already receding in the
background, and the Links of Forth, where the river winds like the meshes
of a chain through the fertile lowlands to the sea. Soon Drummond Castle
and Taymouth, with their lochs and mountains and "plaided array," would be
like a wonderful dream, to be often recalled and recounted at Windsor and
Buckingham Palace.
From Stirling the Queen travelled back to Dalkeith, where she arrived the
same night. During her Majesty's last day in Scotland, which she expressed
herself as "very sorry to leave," she drove to Roslin Chapel, where twenty
"barons bold" of the house of St. Clair wear shirts of mail for shrouds,
then went on to storied Hawthornden--a wooded nest hung high over the
water, where the poet Drummond entertained his English brother-of-the-pen,
Ben Jonson.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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