last years at Cardross, on the eastern shores of the Clyde. Fishing and hawking were the daily employments of the Court. It was a strange, quiet life for the King. He entertained many friends, and most hospitably, to judge from the 'quantity of barley and malt purchased for the use of his brewhouse, and the abundance of animal food, especially beef, provided for the larder.'1 Our historians dwell on the immense physical powers, noble form, the cheerful face, and the dignified but winning manner of the beloved King. In March 1324, Queen Elizabeth gave birth to a son, and by the Treaty of Northampton, in confirmation of the peace, it was contracted that the heir of Scotland should marry Joanna, daughter of Edward II. of England, and sister of the present King Edward III. After certain negotiations about the Princess's dowry lands, she travelled to Berwick, accompanied by the Queen Dowager of England and a splendid retinue. She was met there by her bridegroom, a baby of five years, she being two years older, and on the 22d of July the marriage was solemnized at Berwick with every circumstance of joy and gratitude, and with every feeling of relief and rest that the struggle was over, and that peace was sealed in the union of these two little ones. 1 Kerr's Hist. of Robert I., vol. ii. p. 473. CHAPTER XIX. THE DEATH OF ROBERT I.-DAVID II. 'I am going a long way, Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, TENNYSON. MEANWHILE King Robert was 'reposing from the fever of the world,' and chastened by severe sickness, doubtless he was bringing forth the fruits of a good repentance. He was learning how uncertain a kingdom of this world was, and that the crown he had striven so hard for was about to be laid aside for ever. His biographers have dwelt on that heroic spirit which helped him through his years of penitence and affliction, on his mindfulness of others, on his chivalrous gentleness to women, for one of the fairest stories concerning him begins, ‘The King has heard a woman greet;' they have told of the confessions, and prayers, and communion that preceded Bannockburn, of the grand magnanimity that followed it, and they have not forgotten his last hours. There is a calm surrounding the warrior's deathbed at variance with his troubled life. Calling Lord James Douglas to his side, in the presence of the assembled nobles, he spoke of the vow which he had made that should he ever restore this kingdom to peace and freedom, he would assume the Cross against the enemies of his Lord and Saviour. 'To the fulfilment of this most solemn engagement my heart and soul have ever been most anxiously devoted,' he said, but as this had never been in his power, and never would be now, he had one last request to make to Douglas: 'I earnestly entreat that you, my most dear and faithful friend, through your longtried love, would undertake the expedition to the Holy Land in my stead, that my soul may be thereby acquitted before our Lord and Saviour from the vow which I am not able to fulfil; ... and my earnest desire is, when I am dead, that you take my heart along with you to Jerusalem, and deposit it in the Holy Sepulchre of our Blessed Lord and Redeemer, since my frail body is unable to go thence, according to my vow. . . . Douglas solemnly promised that he would perform the request of his friend and king. 'Blessed be my God and Saviour !' gasped Robert, ‘I shall now die in peace.' Soon after, on the 7th of June 1329, he breathed his last at the age of fifty-five, having reigned since the 27th of March 1306. In June of the following year Lord James Douglas set sail from Scotland, with the heart of his beloved master, to fulfil his promise. He stopped in Spain by the way to help Alonzo, the king of Leon and Castile, in a war with Osmyn, the Moorish governor of Granada. Surrounded by the enemy in a hot fight, he took from his neck the casket which contained the heart of Bruce, and the last words of the 'good Lord James,' as he was pierced to death by the Moors, were: 'Onward as thou wert wont, thou noble heart, and Douglas will follow thee or die !' On the next day the body and the casket were found by his friends, who carried them to Scotland. Douglas1 was buried in his hereditary mausoleum in 1 The story called 'The Douglas Larder' is a deep stain on the character of Lord James. See Tytler, vol. i. p. 255. the parish church of Douglas, and the heart of Bruce was deposited at Melrose. It is now time to look back on the history of the Church while war with its hurricane of sorrow was sweeping the nation. On the whole, there is little to chronicle. The pressure from without had been heavily felt; a restless and deceitful spirit had penetrated into wide regions of the kingdom of Christ; the clergy deteriorated with the times; and certain of the old Religious Orders were experiencing the first suggestions of the temptation to rest and be at ease in their grand endowments: to this many were eventually to succumb, for prosperity was to prove a more searching discipline to the spouses of Him who had not where to lay His head than all the assaults on patience and temper and the disheartening opposition which had seemed to drag them down in their earliest endeavours. To put on armour and plunge into the hottest of the fray was not unusual for an ecclesiastic, and the results were that he was respected by no one, for the worst of men discovered that even a bad bishop did not make a consummate general. When the Scots paid their visitation to the borders in 1319, the Archbishop of York, hearing of their march of havoc and devastation, hastily gathered together nearly 20,000 archers, yeomen, priests, monks, clerks, and friars, and with this heterogeneous undisciplined host, whose principal weapons. were probably pitchforks and sticks and stones, he went forth to meet the enemy at Mitton in Yorkshire. They were about two spears' length apart when the Archbishop's army became panic-stricken. They were therefore easily routed by the Scots; and owing to the multitude of ecclesiastics who were slaughtered, the affair was called, in ominous ridicule, the Chapter of Mitton. Another vast scandal was the readiness wherewith oaths taken under every circumstance of the most awful solemnity were broken. In this certain of the clergy set the example. William Fraser, Bishop of St. Andrews, died in France, in the year 1297, and was succeeded by William de Lamberton, Chancellor of Glasgow. This prelate's frequent vacillations from the Scottish to the English, and from the English to the Scottish parties, are notorious. He was eventually however faithful to Bruce, and when we read in Edward III.'s letter to Pope John XXII., in 1318, of the 'Bishop of St. Andrews in Scotland' as 'inflamed with Satanic fury,' we can discern what his politics then were. In 1305 we have seen him entering into a solemn association with the Earl of Carrick, and in 1306, assisted by the Bishop of Glasgow, he placed the crown upon his head. Soon after the two brave prelates were taken prisoners. In 1308, by the most emphatic oaths of allegiance to the King of England, Bishop Lamberton procured his freedom, and in 1310 he presided at the Synod in Dundee, in which the rights of Bruce to the throne are asserted in the strongest terms. Again, in 1311, Edward informs the Pope that the Bishop of St. Andrews was his best friend in Scotland. This is a specimen of his sinfully inconsistent behaviour. After the victory of Bannockburn, the Bishop set off on a tour to foreign parts, and on his return it appears that he turned over a new leaf, and began to devote himself to his diocese, 'which,' observes his biographer, 'could not be in a very flourishing state." He built ten new churches, and, besides many other useful works, 'he adorned the Chapter House of St. Andrews with curious seats and ceilings, and furnished the canons with precious vestments for the daily service, and stored their library with books.' His greatest performance, and, indeed, the chief ecclesiastical event of these times, was the completion of the Cathedral |