TWO ROADS TO "UNION."

Otago Witness, Issue 3265, 11 October 1916, Page 60

TWO ROADS TO "UNION."

By Jessie Mackay

(Continued.)

Leaving Ireland in the gathering darkness of ner long, disorganised struggle against the Plantagenet kings, we return to Scotland in the time of David I, the able and progressive son of Malcolm Canmore and the saintly Margaret. We have already noted how this prince modelled his court and Tealm on the Norman, or rather Anglo-Norman, style current in England—the stronger lines laid down by Henry I, and restored, once the firm hand of Henry II had put down the supreme disorders of Stephen's reign. The institutions of Scotland took the feudal stamp of Royal authority ; courts of justice were established under settled appointment, and the Saxon jury was added to the system of Roman law on which Scotland's domestic judiciary is based to this day. Education, largely in the hands of the Church, was supplemented by burgh schools. If literature and song were still behind the Celtic art of Ireland on certain lines, it was shared in a degree by the now predominant school of French minstrelsy which gave us the Arthur cycle of Walter Map and Malory. Chivalry, the bloom of feudalism, came with the .Norman knights who flocked to the Court, to found many a noble house of a later day—one of them, De Brus, being the ancestor of Robert Bruce. The makings of a future Parliament had come into being. Few of these newer fashions reached the Highlands; but their great chiefs carried on their unquiet tribal polity under acknowledged fealty to the monarchy, which imposed its own ideas of justice when it could best enforce them. For South Scotland, at least, the time between David I and the death of good Alexander 111 in 1286 was a time of growth, progress, and comparative peace. The great towns had their special rights, duties, and privileges allotted by custom or decree, thus providing that civic make-weight for peace, law, and honest trade which stood England so well in the wars of the Roses, and later in the Civil war. All through this period, however, the see-saw for Northumberland and the Scottish Border went on between the kings, and promises of fealty had been made at tiraes of stress by the Scottish monarchs. Neither they nor their people had the slightest idea of keeping these extorted nromises, any more than they were disturbed by excommunications from the Pope ; Queen Margaret's Church kept a stiff backbone as years went on; neither in Church nor State was there the pliability that invites foreign interference. Let it be remembered, then, that, while from 1172 Ireland was bleeding "slowly but continuously from the side fronting the Norman Pale, where sat the English envoys, whose business it was then and after to divide Ireland against herself, Scotland in the same 100 years and over that lay between the Norman invasion and Alexander Ill's death. _ was growing stronger as a nation, unifying herself in independence, while absorbing what foreign culture she found conducive to unity. " The sood stars met in her horoscope " were strengthening her for centimes of national peril and disorder- falling on her in an hour she knew not. It was a sunny day on which the sudden might of the Great Aggression descended. Alexander 111, the good and wise great-grandson of David I, had married the daughter of Henry 111, paying a vague

personal homage to his English father-in-law, not committing his country at large. The Royal pair had one daughter, Margaret, who married the King cf Norway, and was the mother cf another Margaret, the '-.Maid of Norway." Bright seemed the promise of dominion for this baby princess. Her grandfather, whose heiress the great Scottish barons consented to hold her, had added the sovereignty of the Celtic Isle of Man and the Norse Hebrides to the Scottish Crown in peace. But Scotland's brightest mediaeval day was over when Alexander suddenly died. The little Maid of Norway was sent for. Edward I, her warlike grand-uncle, was watching her inheritance with a hawk-like eye from the Border, marking with jov the commencing of strife between the claimants, Bruce and Bali oh The marriage project, ever beloved of the English kings who coveted Scotland, came first to hand; he won the anxious Kingdom's consent to a union between the baby queen and his own little son, afterwards Edward 11. But the tiny queen died at Orkney on the way to her kingdom, and the woes of Scotland began.

I need not dwell upon the well-known tale of Edward's installation of himself as umpire in the distracted realm, where no fewer than eight claimants were on the verge of civil war. Of the two who counted, Edward chose the weakest man, and, in Scottish eyes, the one with least claim, John Baliol, as King of Scotland and vassal of England. Then Edward commenced treading on the royal worm, 'till John Baliol was goaded to revolt, and Edward seized ruthlessly on his chance of making tlie kingdom in all but name an English province. Let no one think that Edward I meant special ill to Scotland. He was far-seeing, just according to feudal ideas of justice, an enthusiastic lover of the new Parliament idea in England, and willing to extend that and other benefits to a docile northern kingdom. But docility was the one quality Scottish nationality had ever lacked, specially where outsiders were concerned. The rise of Wallace was the beginning of Scotland's salvation from a union which at that tune and under those circumstances would have destroyed that stubborn Scoto-Saxon-Norman nationality which never would have any but its native kings. The last decade of that momentous thirteenth century saw Scotland broken, but not bowed, beneath the conquering might of Edward. In 1305 Wallace was betrayed and savagely put to death; but the torch of Scottish nationalism was caught up by the repentant Robert Bruce, who in the heat of faction had stooped to become Edward I's man. Castle after castle, town after town, fell to Bruce, on whose gallant person and undisputed lineage from the ancient kings the heart of Scotland was set. The old lion broke his heart in the struggle, vindictively ordering that his unburied bones would be carried before the army to victory over the Scots. Seven years later the generals of his weakling son, Edward IT, were crushingly and finally defeated at Bannockburn, and Scotland was free after nine-and-twenty years of devastating strife. It was a people's victory as well as a Royal victory. Scotland no* had a Parliament of her own, and 12 years after Banncckbum this body adjusted Royal dues and limited the Royal power to levy taxes. But the wounds of Scotland were not left to heal before she had to take the field anew. Good King Robert Bruce died 16 years after Bannockburn, and the English peril loomed again through the storm clouds of a new claimants' war, headed by the son of the dethroned Baliol, while the little heir, David Bruce, went, to France for safe keeping. His sister Marjory had long been married to Walter the Steward of Scotland. On the children of this pair during Brace's lifetime had been settled the succession, failing David and his heirs, and again a Baliol, allied with an English Edward (now third of the name), forced civil war on Scotland. We need not follow the battles and sieges* of that distracted time. Suffice it to say that David 11, the weak and foolish son of Bruce, died childless after a strong effort to settle the Crown of Scotland on an English prince, and away from his detested brother-in-law, the Steward. Scotland was harassed with war taxation, distracted with faction and bloodshed, her commerce interrupted, her law courts and her schools disorganised, her domestic quiet destroyed. It would have seemed a time for the fair (and not ill-meant) proffers of the politic Edward II to find acceptance by the harried country. Scotland was to be forgiven the ransom of David when captured at Ncvil's Cross; she was to join the Scottish Crown to that of England! retaining her standing as an independent kingdom, her laws, and her Parliament; she was to have the Lia Fail, the treasured Coronation Stone looted by Edward I, restored to her, and also to have full freedom of trade—all the things which England was crushing out of Ireland with the' left hand, she was, in brief, offering in her open right hand to Scotland. And vet, such was the essential unity and independence of this proud, impoverished people after generations of wasting strife, that they would have none of England, and her promises, and -elung to the line of Bruce and the House of Malcolm Canmore. Nothing would shake their allegiance to the children of Marjory Bruce. Thus did the dynasty of the Stuarts begin with the ill-strain brought in by the shifty and turbulent Steward, Marjory's husband. David's weakness, though it plunged Scotland into deeper factious trouble, strengthened the constitutional position of the Administration. Scotland would have none of Edward Ill's promises, though it might seem that two centuries of Stuart domination and incessant Border warfare was a high price to pay for independence. Not all the Stuart kings were weak or vicious; valiantly did the learned and gallant James I strive to enforce justice in a distracted kingdom, and he paid for the effort with his life. Wars with the unwieldlj House of Douglas and lesser, but no less turbulent, barons filled up the reigns of James II a-nd James 111. So low had Scotland sunk in the arts of peace that the very

iove of culture and learning in these princes was held a crime by their fierce vassals, who had no welcome for the wellnigh spent light of the Renaissance when it reached Scotland. Till James IV's time each of the five Stuarts before him began his reign as a minor, which meant that, however zealous, each could do little more, at the best, than correct the anarchies of the first part of his reign. Learning, as we have said, was more than out of fashion; the state of the pre-Refoimation Church of (Scotland for the better part of two centuries had been indescribable. Scarcely a trace of the Culdee enthusiasm of Margaret's co-ordinating reforms now remained, and the land was ripe for change. The Church of Ireland, despite the ravages of Dane, Norseman, Norman, and Saxon, and maligned by envoy and annalist, was still something better than the Cimmerian darkness of Scottish ecclesiasticisni in the fifteenth century. Yet the Scottish Parliament was striving to push on secular education ; the burgesses had lost none of their power, and shipbuilding and commerce were reviving under James IV. And at the head of this dog-gedly-determined people was the saucy " Goodman of Ballangeich " himself, strong enough to put by the proffer of Henry Vll's daughter's hand till he made himself leisurely sure that he wanted her. Who would have thought that of all the addled schemes of union by marriage this was to bo the one that succeeded, when the beautiful young shrew, Margaret Tudor, wedded in '1503 at 14, was to bring the iate-bud-dihg olive-branch with her to Scotland anl pave the way for that actual union of the two crowns which took place exactly 100 years later at the death of her niece. Elizabeth? Who, indeed, when Flodden was fought 11 years after the bridal? '

This was the Scotland that Wishart woke to spiritual life, and Knox bound in a stern, unifying theocratic polity a religions democracy that wore down almost the worst, wildest, and most venal baronage in Europe at the time —the baronage that seethed and intrigued round Mary Queen of Scots and round her son's long minority.

Was it well that Scotland had chosen to hold the stony upland track of national independence for three desolating centuries? That question is partially and most suggestively answered by Goldwin Smith on the last page of his 'lrish History and Irish Character" : " Nothing seems more lamentable to ordinary readers of history than the death of that heiress of Scotland who was destined to unite her 'country peacefully with England bv marrying the heir of Edward I. It would have spared the two countries several centuries of bloody and devastating war. Yet nothing contributed more than the distinct national character and distinct national religion of Scotland to save Britain from being entirely subjugated by the Absolutism of Strafford and the Anglicanism of Land. The first check to these came from Edinburgh, not London." - (To be continued.)