Archaeological Journal/Volume 3/Notices of New Publications: The Antiquities of Gainford in the County of Durham
This work, of which only the first part is before us, will make Mr. Walbran creditably known as an accurate, and not inelegant, contributor to the stores of English topography; it is lo be hoped there is sufficient taste in the district which he has selected for illustration, and its neighbourhood, to encourage him to complete a publication so well begun. The village of Gainford, on the north bank of the river Tees, was given to the see of Durham in the ninth century, by Egred, bishop of Lindisfarne, and according to a passage in Simeon of Durham, it was the site of a monastery founded by Eda or Edwine, a Northumbrian chief, "who had exchanged his helmet for a cowl," and was buried in its church in 801. It did not remain long an appanage of the bishops of Durham; having been mortgaged in the time of bishop Aldune (998—1018) to the earl of Northumberland, whose successors, according to Simeon, would never restore it to the Church. We have no other account of it until it was granted by William Rufus about 1093 to Guy Baliol, and it remained with his descendents until the reign of Edward the First. The possession of Gainford by the Baliols naturally induced Mr. Walbran to investigate the history of that powerful family, and among other results of his labour is an eloquent defence of that historically ill-used individual, John Baliol, king of Scotland, which has especially attracted our notice. As we propose to defer any general examination of the work until its completion, which may be looked for at no distant time, we have great pleasure on the present occasion in extracting the author's estimate of the character of the so called fainéant king, of unfortunate memory; it is a favourable specimen of Mr. Walbran's earnest style of composition.
"The character of John Baliol, like that of most other unfortunate and unsuccessful princes, has been open to much unjust and ungenerous animadversion. He has been accused of betraying the liberties of his subjects, and personally of exhibiting a cowardly and unmagnanimous demeanour. Yet,—since with the majority, whether judging of the present or the past, success is hailed as virtue, while misfortune is branded as crime—it may be well to consider, if even here ineffectually and thus obscurely, how far interested were his accusers; and what justice in that chivalrous day would be meted by uncongenial minds, to one, who it seems was more meek and beneficent than impetuous and warlike; more inclined to the society of clerks than of knights; more conversant with the powers of reason, than of the sword. The accumulated obscurity of six centuries is but a dense medium wherein to view the stronger shades of character, moulded by circumstances and causes on which no actual light is thrown; and which can only be faintly illumined by records and documents, framed cautiously and systematically for legal or diplomatic purposes. Something of this character may, however, be inferred from those few but important recorded actions, which must have been dictated by something more than casual circumstances, or inconsiderate inclination. If anything of hereditary qualities was transmitted from his parents, and fostered and directed by them to the formation of his disposition, he had a father who was liberal-minded and brave, and a mother whose piety and benevolence were the admiration of her own, and the benefit of succeeding ages. Of the pursuits of his early days we have no particular record; but, since he was not then apparently destined to enjoy the great military inheritance to which he at length succeeded on the decease of his elder brothers, the rich and powerful Dervorguil might not inaptly extend to him her protection and her home; and to his mental and spiritual nurture she, who then contributed to the direction of so many, would, we may be assured, never be careless or indifferent. The foundation of a chapel at Piercebridge; the confirmation of his parents' Collegiate Institution at Oxford, that was disregarded by his brothers; his selection of an especial number of dignified clergy to act among his assessors, on his competition for the crown—even these incidents may indicate to many, and demonstrate to some, that he was influenced by the dictation, if not of purely religious, yet of serious and moral emotions: a tendency to which, the place of his education, and the doctrinal system of his tutors, might not ineffectually minister. A mild and christian-like spirit is discernible in those extant diplomatic compositions, which, if not written by his hand, or under his immediate dictation, must have proceeded in spirit from his suggestion, and in substance must have met his approval. In his eloquent renunciation of his homage he emphatically objects first to the outrages committed against morality and religion. His appeal to the French king breathes the same admirable spirit; and it may also be remarked that, at a time when justice dictated, and circumstances commanded the renunciation of his solemn fealty, he sought and awaited the dispensation of him, who, he was taught to believe, could effectually blot out on earth what was registered in heaven. Between his temperament and his talent there might be, and probably was some disparity; but the greater part, if not the whole of the obloquy that has been cast upon him, seems to have been propagated by ascribing to his personal cowardice those humiliating submissions, which the estates of the realm had, by their indiscriminate and unconditional acknowledgment of Edward's paramount authority, attached to the tenure of his crown. A principle was thus represented in, and necessarily carried out by, his person, that has ever since been humiliating to the people of Scotland;—a section of whom, in his own day, clamoured against him from interested and treasonable partizanship; and others, since, because they found it more convenient to make their humiliation a personal rather than a national act; and to cast the blame on the one man, who, with a pardonable and natural deference of patriotism, received a splendid and undoubted, but otherwise unattainable inheritance, with diminished lustre, rather than on the regent representatives of the realm, who, unpatriotically, and with no defensible motive at all, consented to its surrender under no definite condition. It was not virtually from his election and consequent submission that the kingdom was involved in centuries of commotion and aggression. Every other competitor, even the "immortal" Bruce, made the same submission, swore the same fealty, and declared they would, if they might, receive the crown on the same condition as he. Edward's end was to be gained, and would have been gained, with each. He seemed to threaten like the furies of Æschylus,
ἐλὼ δὲ μὴ τυχοῦσα τῆς δίκης
Βαρεῖα χώρᾳ τῃδʼ ὁμιλήσω πάλιν.
"The means might have been more protracted; the end more certain and severe. The relinquishment of the treaty of Northampton, founded on an alliance invalid and unconsummated, could not diminish tin; liberty or security of Scotland, which had then acknowledged itself a fief of England; nor did the memorable appearance of its king before the English parliament produce any national or unreasonable concession. We may be both just and generous in ascribing that appearance, wherein he deferred his royal dignity to what appeared a religious obligation, from a desire to conciliate and temporise, when he too well knew that treason would be in his camp, as interest was in his council. He might indeed lack that brutal spirit that impelled Bruce to imbrue his hands in his kinsman's blood before the altar of his God; and that regal magnanimity that condemned Wallace to his doom: yet, courage was never wanting when its presence would have been successful; nor ceased he to resist until all resistance was unavailing. The appellation, too, from whence his cowardice has been imputed, or more probably, suspected, was, with an unamiable feeling easy to understand, applied to him only after the adornments of royalty were removed from him; and at best can be deemed but of doubtful interpretation. But, whatever was his capability or his disposition, it will tax our credulity but little to believe that, in an age when the effusion of human blood was but lightly regarded, he was guiltless of the foul crimes that stain so many of his contemporaries. That, from malice to his king, and by treason to his country, he never sought, like Bruce, to wade through slaughter to a throne, nor like Edward, in the exercise of his sovereign authority, to shut the gates of mercy on mankind.
"When the imagination would invest with its airy forms the heroic characters of the past, it may not inaptly linger long on the last days of this 'dim, discrowned king.' Divested of the emblems of the sovereignty he had enjoyed; defeated in his expectation of transferring his sceptre to a posterity that should maintain his name among the potentates of the earth; separated by distance and by death from the associates of his youth, and the partners of his expectations; oppressed by bodily suffering, and unsoothed by domestic attention—how often, in that solitary and benighted gloom, as the old man sat in the chateau of his humbler, but happier forefathers, how often must
"Memories of power and pride, which long ago,
Like dim processions of a dream, had sunk
In twilight depths away'—
memories of ingratitude, or contumely, or treachery, have compassed him round about; and mingled emotions of discontent, and disappointment, and despair, have bounded painfully and bitterly through his heart—a heart, that gladdened only by the light of day, might have found—in the mighty magnificence of nature—in the lone path of the hoary forest—in the impetuosity of the mountain torrent—in the declining sun, that lingered like itself o'er his far-off realm—a dignifying solace and a joy. which neither the worm within, nor the foe without, could alike diminish or destroy. It was the last scene of a sad drama, that needed but the pen of Drayton, or Marlowe, or Shakespeare; and now lacks but the pencil of one master hand, to excite that immortal interest and sympathy they have won for more trifling scenes, and more unworthy men."