There have been other kings here than David and the Abbot. The latter days of the Stewarts are especially connected with Kelso, so near the Border. Baby James was hurried hither and crowned in the cathedral as the III after Roxburgh. Mary Queen lodged here for two nights before she rode on to Berwick. Here in the ancient market-place, looking like the square of a continental town, the Old Chevalier was proclaimed King James VIII on an October Monday in 1715, and the day preceding the English chaplain had preached to the troops from the text--"The right of the first born is his." Quite differently minded from that Whig minister farther north, who later prayed "as for this young man who has come among us seeking an earthly crown, may it please Thee to bestow upon him a heavenly one." When this Rising of the Forty Five came, and he who should have been Charles III (according to those of us who are Scottish, and royalist, and have been exiled because of our allegiance) attempted to secure the throne for his father, he established his headquarters at Sunilaw just outside Kelso; the house is in ruins, but a white rose that he planted still bears flowers. To the citizens of Kelso who drank to him, the Prince, keeping his head, and having something of his royal great uncle's gift of direct speech, replied, "I believe you, gentlemen, I believe you. I have drinking friends, but few fighting ones in Kelso." Scott knew Kelso from having lived here, from going to school here, and it was in out of the Kelso library--where they will show you the very copy--that he first read Percy's Reliques. "I remember well the spot ... it was beneath a huge platanus, in the ruins of what had been intended for an old fashioned arbour in the garden.... The summer day had sped onward so fast that notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the dinner hour. The first time I could scrape together a few shillings I bought unto myself a copy of the beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently or with half the enthusiasm." Was it not a nearer contemporary to Percy, and a knight of romance, Sir Philip Sidney, who said, "I never read the old song of Percie and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet"? For myself I have resolutely refused to identify the word, Platanus, lest it should not be identical with the spot where I first read my Percy. Scott also knew Kelso as the place of his first law practice, and of his honeymoon. Here flowered into maturity that long lavish life, so enriched and so enriching of the Border. Horatio Bonar was minister here for thirty years--I wondered if he wrote here, "I was a wandering sheep." While James Thomson, who wrote "The Seasons," but also "Rule, Britannia"--if he was a Scotsman; perhaps this was an Act of Union-- "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves!"