Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and PoetsOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
History
Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Edinburgh (Scotland) -- History
The narrative goes on with an account of the declining health of the
Queen. For more than six months she had been unable to mount a horse, or
sometimes to rise from her bed, and in the midst of this illness the
King set forth upon one of his raids into England, on what provocation
or with what motive it is difficult to tell, except that the provocation
was perpetual and the motive persistent the leading rule of life. His
two elder sons accompanied him on this expedition, which for some reason
Margaret had opposed, "much dissuading" him from going; but this time,
unfortunately, had not been hearkened to. Probably she set out along
with him, on her way to Edinburgh to pass the time of his absence there,
which was a place where news could be had more readily than beyond the
sea in Fife. The solitary castle, high perched upon its hill, whence
messengers could be seen approaching, or, better still, the King's
banners coming back, was a fitter home for an anxious wife than the
palace over the Firth among its woods. How long she remained there we
are not told, and there are now unhappily no articulate remains at all
of the old stronghold which must have risen upon that height, with its
low massive walls and rude buildings. The oldest relic in Edinburgh is
that little sanctuary, plain and bare as a shed, deprived of all
external appearance of sanctity, and employed for vulgar uses for many
centuries, which has been at length discovered by its construction, the
small dark chancel arch and rude ornament, to have been a chapel, and
which there seems no doubt is at least built upon the site consecrated
for Margaret's oratory, if not the very building itself. It is small
enough and primitive enough, with its little line of toothed ornament,
and its minute windows sending in a subdued light even in the very flush
of day, to be of any antiquity. I believe that even the fortunate
antiquary who had the happiness of discovering it does not claim for
this little chapel the distinction of being the very building itself
which Margaret erected. Yet it must have been one very similar,
identical in form and ornament, so that the interested spectator may
well permit himself to picture the sick and anxious Queen, worn out with
illness and weighed down by sore forebodings, kneeling there in the
faint light before the shadowed altar, trying to derive such comfort as
was possible from the ministrations of the priests, and following with
her prayers her husband and her boys, so young still and not hardened to
war, who might be falling by the hands perhaps of her own kindred, in
the country which was hers, yet which she scarcely knew. In the
intervals of these anxious prayers, when her failing strength permitted,
how wistfully the Queen and her ladies must have gazed from the walls
far around on every side to watch for the first appearance of any
messenger or herald of return. From the woods of Dunfermline and its
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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