Note Respecting the Personal Conformation of Sir William Wallace and King Robert Bruce.

The extraordinary bodily, as well as mental superiority which Wallace and Bruce possessed over their contemporaries, is thus recorded by Hector Boetius:

“About the latter end of the year 1430, King James I. (of Scotland), on returning to Perth from St. Andrews, found his curiosity excited to visit a very old lady of the house of Erskine, who resided in the Castle of Kinnoul. In consequence of her extreme old age she had lost her sight, but all her other senses were entire, and her body was yet firm and active. She had seen William Wallace and Robert Bruce in her earliest youth and frequently told particulars of them. The king, who entertained a love and veneration for great men, resolved to visit the old lady, that he might hear her describe the manners and strength of the two heroes. He therefore sent a message acquainting her that he would come to her the next day. When she was told that the king was approaching, she went down into the hall of her castle, attended by a train of matrons, many of whom were her own descendants. She advanced to meet his majesty so easily and gracefully that he doubted her being blind! At his desire she embraced and kissed him. He took her by the hand and made her sit down on the seat next to him, and then, in a long conference, he interrogated her on ancient matters. Among others he asked her to tell him what sort of a man William Wallace was; what was his personal figure; what his bearing, and with what degree of strength he was endowed. He put the same comparing question to her concerning Robert Bruce. ‘Robert,’ said she, ‘was a man beautiful, and of fine appearance. His strength was so great that he could easily have overcome any mortal man of his time, save one — Sir William Wallace! But in so far as he excelled other men, he was excelled by Wallace, both in stature and in bodily strength! For in wrestling, Wallace could have overthrown two such men as Robert. And he was comely as well as strong, and full of the beauty of wisdom.’”

I might have thought, had I known the above record in my young days, when I heard my old friend Luckie Forbes describe the Scottish heroes, that she must have been one of those matrons of honor to Lady Kinnoul, and had “seen baith the stalwarth chiefs” in her also venerable life. But the description of my humble historiographer was the work of her own heart, suggested there by tradition, and a holy reverence of even the name of William Wallace to help it out; and so my pen, moved by the same impulse, has attempted to copy the picture she presented.
Note Concerning Joanna of Mar and Strathearn.

This unhappy and wicked woman’s descendance, as daughter of a Princess of the Orkneys, and her husband, Mellis, Earl of Strathearn, is given in all the old Scottish genealogical words, and her marriage with Earl de Warenne, followed up by her most unnatural treasons against her native country, are not less faithfully recorded. But it is something curious that while revising this volume a few years ago, I met a paragraph in the Morning Post newspaper, relative to this very lady — now dead upward of five hundred years — and dated August 26th, 1831; almost the very anniversary-day of Sir William Wallace’s death! It was an extract from the Perth Courier, and runs thus:

“In preparing the foundation of the classical monument which Lady Baird is about to erect on Tom-a-Chastel, to the memory of Sir David, the workmen discovered the remains of an extensive edifice, intermixed with a blackish mold, in which human bones frequently occur, with stirrups, buckles, and other decayed fragments of ancient armor. In an excavation were found a quantity of black earth, the debris of animal matter, some human bones, a bracelet, and a considerable portion of charcoal, from which it may be concluded that the individuals whose remains were discovered, had perished during a conflagration of the castle. The tradition of the country is, that — Three ladies had been there burned to death. And as it is known that the Lady of Strathearn, a daughter of the Earl of Orkney, involved herself in the quarrels between Bruce and Baliol, and was, after the ascendency of the former, in a parliament held at Scone in 1329, doomed to perpetual imprisonment for the crime of laesoe majestatis, it is no violent stretch of conjecture to come to the conclusion that this very lady may have been one of the unhappy victims whose remains have been thus accidentally brought to light. The excavation undoubtedly (being the most probably supposition) was that usually found in the base of the dungeon-keep of the castle. Tom-a-Chastel, on the summit of which Sir David Baird’s monument is to be placed, overlooks the whole strath, and is even visible from Dundee.” So far the note from the Perth, newspaper (which was first appended to this “almost veritable romance-biography of Sir William Wallace,” in the edition of 1831); and on comparing the circumstances and dates of the period referred to, it does not seem improbable that such might have been the fearful end of that ambitious and cruelly impassioned woman. Earl de Warenne was not a man to burden himself with cares for such a partner, after her treasons had become abortive, in the secret continuance of which, most likely, she had been discovered in some of her territorial permitted visits to her inherited lands in Scotland. And the relics of the other two female forms found in the ashes, may reasonably be supposed to have been those of her personal attendants, sharing her captivity.

The above coincidence of recollections between the far past, and the present nearly but passing events, may be regarded as rather remarkable, for the hill of Tom-a-Chastel may now be looked upon as an object recalling to memory of two heroes. One Scotland’s noblest son, of full five hundred ages gone! The other, her boast on the plains of India, within our own remembrance. While the same summit brings two of her daughters likewise to eminent recollection. One that disgraced her sex in every relation of life; the other, who honors it, in all. The hand of the first would have destroyed her country’s greatest hero; the hand of the second raised a tumulus, to maintain the memory and the example of such true sons of her country in a perpetual existence.
The Scarf of James the Fifth of Scotland, in the possession of Dr. Jefferson, of West Lodge, Clapham.

This scarf belonged to, and............