On coming of age, Angus would be the head of a distinguished Scottish family, its roots going back to the 14th Century or earlier

The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day24

Angus burst into fits of laughter. First it was love, then it was talking to tables. He had heard of people talking to themselves, which was, they said, the first sign of madness but .... After mensa, mensae, mensam he learned dominus, domine, dominum. He understood that word. It meant a master and before his childhood was over, he would come across a variety of them, some good and others dismal.

Then his governess produced a better one. Bellum, meaning a war. He liked the sound of that and began to march around the schoolroom chanting bellum, bellum, bellum, belli, bello, bello, bella, bella, bella ....

On visiting Largie, Angus’s Aunt Violet extended his knowledge of Latin by lending him a book of stories about ancient Rome. Its author knew how to entertain uninterested boys. He asked them to lay aside their dictionaries and forget about Caesar and Livy and just listen.

In simple English, Arthur O Cooke, tells the story of how Rome began. Most young children would be enthralled by an opening chapter of a she-wolf suckling two baby boys.

In the accompanying illustration she looks like a shaggy German sheepdog as she gives twins Romulus and Remus a motherly lick on their cheeks.

Blueprint

For Cooke, clearly Rome is a blueprint for young, 20th Century British patricians. He doesn’t stint on heroes like Coriolanus, Cincinnatus and Spartacus, the slave but the man with the most resounding courage is Publius Horatius, who held Rome’s Sublician bridge over the river Tiber against the invading Etruscans.

Here was a real hero, a man who, against the odds, drove back the enemy hordes. Firing the imagination of innumerable children, it is about the struggle to keep a bridge at all costs (the Romans had already lost one of the city’s seven hills and if they let the others fall, all would be lost). Horatius realised that it would be better to destroy the Sublician bridge than let the enemy cross it.

While his soldiers hacked it down at one end, Horatius, helped by Spurius Latrius and Herminius, confronted the Etruscans at the other and stood firm until the bridge fell, whereupon Horatius plunged, fully armed, into the Tiber below and swam ashore to the Roman side.

I like to think that the Horatius story was Angus’s favourite and, when he went to bed and failed to fall asleep, he thought of him and dreamed he’d be as brave as that Roman one day.

In 1919 while Angus learned his Latin conjugations and declensions in the Largie schoolroom, a distant cousin, Sir Norman Lockhart from Lanarkshire, died. My grandparents attended his funeral and the reading of the will.

Wishing to heal the rift between the Macdonalds and Lockharts, the deceased decided to leave the estate of Lee and Carnwath to John and Daisy’s second son. On coming of age, therefore, Angus would be the head of a distinguished, Scottish family, its roots going back to the 14th Century or earlier.

Old records reveal that a William Loccard was granted the lands of Lee in 1272 but the name, Lockhart (originally Loccard) is mostly associated with King Robert the Bruce, Scotland’s greatest freedom fighter.

Civil war

During the late 13th and early 14th Centuries Scotland fought like a tiger to maintain its independence from England. On the death in 1290 of seven-year-old Margaret, granddaughter of Alexander III, there were 13 rivals for the Scottish throne.

Fearing a civil war, important members of the nation asked Edward I of England to arbitrate. Under his influence, John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, was crowned king of Scotland. Within two years, Edward had turned the country into a vassal state and demanded Scottish troops and funds for an invasion of France. Balliol refused and informed the French king of Edward’s plans.

After the English invaded Scotland in 1296, a succession of leaders including William Wallace won several victories over the English.

By 1306 there were two claimants for the Scottish crown: Robert the Bruce and John Comyn, who agreed that each, in renouncing his claim to the throne, would support the winner, who would grant his rival substantial land in return.

But Comyn broke the agreement by informing Edward of Bruce’s intention to be king. Comyn wished to gain both throne and land, in betraying his rival. In a fit of rage, Bruce murdered John Comyn at Greyfriars’ Kirk in Dumfries.

Within five weeks of the killing, Bruce was crowned king of Scotland at Scone. Thereafter, he won several battles against the English, the most famous at Bannockburn in 1314.

Bruce died in 1329. During the following year, Sir James Douglas, a noble from a prominent Scottish Lowland family commonly known as the Black Douglas’s, set off with a party of knights and squires for the Holy Land.

Their aim was to carry Bruce’s embalmed heart to Jerusalem and deposit it in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Christ’s putative tomb is located. For the medieval mindset, Jerusalem was the centre of the universe. According to the patriarch Abraham, Jerusalem was “the place where God was seen”.

It’s important to note that these medieval knights and squires had not set out for Paris, the city of lovers or Rome, famed for its power, both temporal and religious but Jerusalem, the city that all Jews, Christians and Moslems regarded as their spiritual centre.

This was the reason for Douglas’s pilgrimage, their purpose to expiate their late leader’s guilt. Ever since he had killed John Comyn, Bruce’s conscience had pricked him. Yes, the man had tricked him but that was no excuse for his murder.

Bruce was aware of another killing, also committed in a place of worship, this time in the south of England. In wishing rid of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry II had encouraged four of his knights to commit the terrible deed in a cathedral. The Becket story made Bruce catch his breath and his cheeks burn; no amount of priestly absolution could expunge his crime. Although Bruce’s victim was neither priest nor martyr, he was a man nonetheless, whose life he had destroyed.

Unlike Henry’s followers, Bruce’s Scottish knights, in undertaking this journey, were making amends for their leader’s wrongdoing.

More on Monday

© 2017 Mary C Gladstone, all rights reserved, courtesy of the author and Firefallmedia; available in hardcover and paperback online and from all booksellers.