it is of Britain; but battled round about, and battled for as it has been since ambitious time began, it is of neither England nor Scotland. "Our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed," as the phrase still runs in the acts of Parliament, and in the royal proclamations; not England's, not Scotland's. Our town, the King's town.
For it is an independent borough (1551) since the men who fared before us could not determine which should possess it, and so our very own time records that history in an actual fact. I do not suppose the present serious-looking, trades-minded people of the city, with their dash of fair Danish, remember their singular situation day by day. The tumult and the shouting have died which made "the Border" the most embattled place in the empire, and Berwick-upon-Tweed the shuttlecock in this international game of badminton.
It is a dual town at the best. But what has it not witnessed, what refuge, what pawn, has it not been, this capital of the Debatable Land, this Key of the Border.
The Tweed is here spanned by the Royal Border Bridge, opened in 1850, and called "the last Act of Union." But there is another bridge, a Roman bridge of many spans, antique looking as the Roman-Moorish-Spanish bridge at Cordova, and as antique as 1609, an Act of Union following swiftly on the footsteps of King James VI—who joyously paused here to fire a salute to himself, on his way to the imperial throne.
The walls of Berwick, dismantled in 1820 and become a promenade for peaceful townsfolk and curious sightseers, date no farther back than Elizabeth's time. But she had sore need of them; for this "our town," was the refuge for her harriers on retaliatory Border raids, particularly that most terrible Monday-to-Saturday foray of 1570, that answer to an attempt to reassert the rights of Mary, when fifty castles and peels and three hundred villages were laid waste in order that Scotland might know that Elizabeth was king.
It was her kingly father, the Eighth Henry, who ordered Hertford into Scotland—"There to put all to fire and sword, to burn Edinburgh town, and to raze and deface it, when you have sacked it and gotten what you can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God lighted upon it for their falsehood and disloyalty. Sack Holyrood House and as many towns and villages about Edinburgh as ye conveniently can. Sack Leith and burn it and subvert it, and all the rest, putting man, woman and child to fire and sword without exception, when any resistance is made against you. And this done, pass over to the Fife land, and extend like extremities and destructions in all towns and villages whereunto ye may reach conveniently, not forgetting among the rest, so to spoil and turn upside down the Cardinal's town of St. Andrews, as the upper stone may be the nether, and not one stick stand by another, sparing no creature alive within the same, especially such as either in friendship or blood be allied to the Cardinal. The accomplishment of all this shall be most acceptable to the Majesty and Honour of the King."
Berwick has known gentler moments, even marrying and giving in marriage. It was at this Border town that David, son of the Bruce, and Joanna, sister of Edward III, were united in marriage. Even then did the kingdoms seek an Act of Union. And Prince David was four, and Princess Joanna was six. There was much feasting by day and much revelry by night, among the nobles of the two realms, while, no doubt, the babies nodded drowsily.
At Berwick John Knox united himself in marriage with Margaret Stewart, member of the royal house of Stewart, cousin, if at some remove, from that Stewart queen who belonged to "the monstrous regiment of women," and to whose charms even the Calvinist John was sensitive. One remembers that at Berwick John was fifty, and Margaret was sixteen.
There is not much in Berwick to hold the attention, unless one would dine direct on salmon trout just drawn frae the Tweed. There are memories, and modern content with what is modern.
Perhaps the saddest eyes that ever looked on the old town were those of Queen Mary, as she left Jedburgh, after her almost fatal illness, and after her hurried ride to the Hermitage to see Bothwell, and just before the fatal affair in Kirk o' Field. Even then, and even with her spirit still unbroken, she felt the coming of the end. "I am tired of my life," she said more than once to Le Croc, French ambassador, on this journey as she circled about the coast and back to Edinburgh.
She rode toward Berwick with an escort of a thousand men, and looked down on the town from Halidon Hill, on the west, where two hundred years before (1333) the Scots under the regent Douglass had suffered defeat by the English.
It was an old town then, and belonged to Elizabeth. But it looked much as it does to-day; the gray walls, so recently built; the red roofs, many of them sheltering Berwickians to-day; the church spires, for men worshiped God in those days in churches, and according to the creeds that warred as bitterly as crowns; masts in the offing, whence this last time one might take ship to France, that pleasant smiling land so different from this dour realm. At all these Mary must have looked wistfully and weariedly, as the royal salute was fired for this errant queen. She looked also, over the Border, then becoming a hard-and-fast boundary, and down the long, long road to Fotheringay, and to peace at last and honour, in the Abbey.
It is well to stand upon this hill, before you go on to the West and the Border, or on to the North and the gray metropolis, that you may appreciate both the tragedy and the triumph that is Scotland's and was Mary's. The North Sea is turning purple far out on the horizon, and white sea birds are flying across beyond sound. The long level light of the late afternoon is coming up over England. In the backward of the Border a plaintive curlew is crying in the West, as he has cried since the days of Mary, and æons before.
Flodden
You may go westward from here, by train and coach, and carriage and on foot, to visit this country where every field has been a battlefield, where ruined peel towers finally keep the peace, where castles are in ruins, and a few stately modern homes proclaim the permanence of Scottish nobility; and where there is no bird and no flower unsung by Scottish minstrelsy, or by Scott. Scott is, of course, the poet and prose laureate of the Border. "Marmion" is the lay, almost the guide-book. It should be carried with you, either in memory or in pocket.
If the day is not too far spent, the afternoon sun too low, you can make Norham Castle before twilight, even as Marmion made it when he opened the first canon of Scott's poem—
"Day set on Norham's castle steep
And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot's mountains lone;
The battled towers, the donjon keep,
The loophole grates, where captives weep,
The flanking walls that round it sweep,
In yellow luster shone."
There is but a fragment of that castle remaining, and this, familiar to those who study Turner in the National Gallery. A little village with one broad street and curiously receding houses attempts to live in the shadow of this memory. The very red-stone tower has stood there at the top of the steep bank since the middle Eleven Hundreds. Henry II held it as a royal castle, while his craven son John—not so craven in battle—regarded it as the first of his fortresses. Edward I made it his headquarters while he pretended to arbitrate the rival claims of the Scottish succession, and to establish himself as the Lord Superior. On the green hill of Holywell nearby he received the submission of Scotland in 1291—the submission of Scotland!
Ford castle is a little higher up the river, where lodged the dubious lady with whom the king had dalliance in those slack days preceding Flodden—the lady who had sung to him in Holyrood the challenging ballad of "Young Lochinvar!" James was ever a Stewart, and regardful
