n at any other part of its history. Fine
foreign ambassadors, grave English diplomates trained in the school of
the great Cecil, and bound to the subtle and tortuous policy of the
powerful Elizabeth; besides a new unusual crowd of lighter import but
not less difficult governance, the foreign artists, musicians, courtiers
of all kinds, who hung about the palace, had come in to add a hundred
complicating interests and pursuits to the simpler if fiercer
contentions of feudal lords and protesting citizens: not to speak of the
greatest change of all, the substitution for the ambitious Churchman of
old, with a coat of mail under his rochet, of the absolute and
impracticable preacher who gave no dispensations or indulgences, and
permitted no compromise. All these new elements, complicated by the
tremendous question of the English succession, and the introduction of
many problems of foreign politics into a crisis bristling with
difficulties of its own, made the epoch extraordinary; while the very
streets were continually filled by exciting spectacles, by processions,
by sudden fights and deadly struggles, by pageants and splendours, one
succeeding another, in which the whole population had their share. The
decree of the town council that "lang weapons," spears, lances, and
Jedburgh axes, should be provided in every shop--so that when the town
bell rang every man might be ready to throw down his tools or his
merchandise and grip the ready weapon--affords the most striking
suggestion of those sudden tumults which might rise in a moment, and
which were too common to demand any special record, but kept the town in
perpetual agitation and excitement--an agitation, it is true, by no
means peculiar to Edinburgh. No painter has ever done justice to the
scene which must have been common as the day, when the beautiful young
Queen, so little accustomed to the restraints and comparative poverty of
her northern kingdom, and able to surround herself with the splendour
she loved out of her French dowry, rode out in all her bravery up the
Canongate, where every outside stair and high window would be crowded
with spectators, and through the turreted and battlemented gate to the
grim fortress on the crown of the hill, making everything splendid with
the glitter of her cortege and her own smiles and unrivalled charm.
Sadder spectacles that same beautiful Queen provided too--miserable
journeys up and down from the unhappy palace, sometimes through a