1. In the north of Scotland, where the cliffs bordering Moray Firth face the auroral heavens, are two ancient towns, Inverness and Forres, whose names are immortalized in Shakespeare's great tragedy of Macbeth, for it is in their vicinity that most of its scenes are laid.
2. It is a wild, lonely country, and must have been wilder and lonelier still eight hundred years ago, when from the neighboring Norway coast the black boats of the vikings, or North Sea rovers, used to come flocking into the quiet harbors of Moray and Cromarty Firths, like so many swift birds of prey swooping suddenly in from the gray horizon, snatching their plunder and flitting away on never-resting wings only to return in greater numbers and depart with richer booty.
3. In 1033–1039, when the sons of Canute the Dane were wearing the English crown, and not long after a few of the roving Norsemen had drifted away to plant a little history and a great mystery across the wide Atlantic, there reigned in Scotland a king by the name of Duncan MacCrinan. Among his nobles was a certain Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, about whom a great many stories are told, some of which would no doubt have made their subject open his eyes, for if we may credit the sober historians he was rather respectable than otherwise, and probably slept much better o' nights than Mr. Shakespeare would have us believe. It is even said that he made a pilgrimage to Rome and saw the Pope, which certainly ought to establish his virtue to anybody's satisfaction.
4. At all events he was a brave soldier and able general, and Duncan naturally thought that he had the right man in the right place when he gave him command of the royal army and sent him off to drive out Thorfinn and Thorkell, two Norse chiefs who had come over to conquer Scotland.
5. Macbeth had wedded a lady named Grnoch MacBœdhe, which made him cousin to the king, and very likely put strange notions into his head, even if they never were there before. He was what we call "a rising man," and so, having gloriously defeated Thorfinn and Thorkell, or, some say, making them allies, he gloriously turned around and made war upon Duncan MacCrinan. In this struggle Duncan was killed or mortally wounded near Elgin, on Moray Firth, and Macbeth usurped the throne.
6. Others claim that Thorfinn had conquered that part of Scotland, that Macbeth was his vassal and merely fulfilled his duty to his over-lord in repelling an invasion by Duncan, in which the latter deservedly met the common fate of war.
7. It is very difficult to learn the real truth about people who lived before history was anything more than oral tradition, because, as in the case of Macbeth, a great many legends gradually clustered about their names, which were not committed to writing until many, many years after the events actually occurred. The very earliest Scotch writing ever discovered is only a charter, and is dated 1095, more than fifty years after Duncan was "in his grave," and it was more than three hundred years later that a Scotch prior, named Androwe of Wyntonne, wrote a long historical poem which he called an Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland. In it he relates the story of Macbeth and the three witches, and the murder of Duncan, though he says that Macbeth afterward made a very wise and just king, whose reign of seventeen years was marked by great abundance, and by royal almsgiving and zeal for "holy kirk."
8. But a Latin history of Scotland, written about a hundred years before Shakespeare by an Aberdeen professor, and translated into English under the title of Holinshed's Chronicle, supplied the great dramatist with his plot, though it suited his purpose to combine the true story of Macbeth with the murder of an earlier king. Then, adding a great deal about ghosts and witches, and, above all, breathing into these dry, long dead mummies the quickening breath of genius, the immortal playwright recreated a Macbeth who seems a far more real and living character than many of our contemporaries.
9. By whatever means Macbeth secured the throne, history and fiction agree as to the manner of his losing it. Duncan's sons, in reality mere infants at their father's death, were hurried away by their friends, and Malcolm, the elder, was committed to his mother's brother, Siward, Earl of Northumbria, who in good time aided his young kinsman to recover his birthright.
10. Macbeth, notwithstanding his prosperous reign, was regarded as a usurper, and was consequently very unpopular with the loyal Scotch, who, though proud and quarrelsome, were always devotedly true where they recognized an obligation of fealty. So when Malcolm returned they flocked around the beloved young heir, and defeated his enemy at Dunsinane, though Macbeth was not killed at this place, as Shakespeare says, but fled across the Grampians to rally at Lumphanan. Here he was slain and the victorious Malcolm, called in history Malcolm Canmore, now went to Scone and was crowned upon a famous stone, believed by the Scotch to be the same that Jacob used for his pillow. It is certainly the one that Edward I of England afterward took away and made the seat of the coronation chair at Westminster Abbey, where it is still to be seen.
11. But, like many another evil that has been wrought before now, Macbeth's treason resulted in the ultimate good of his country; for Malcolm, during his long exile, had become accustomed to the superior civilization of the English, and now introduced many improvements among his subjects. Having known, too, the sorrows of a fugitive, he welcomed to his court the Saxon princes fleeing from Norman William, among whom was Margaret Atheling, the gentle granddaughter of Edmund Ironsides, who became his bride, and whose winning graces went far toward refining the rude manners of the warlike Scots. One of their sons was the saintly King David, who founded Melrose Abbey, and who is said to have been to Scotland "all that Alfred was to England, and more than Louis was to France."
12. Another noble, called Banquo, seems to have had some part in Duncan's overthrow, but as the play of Macbeth was written in the reign of James I, who was a Scot and traced his descent back to Banquo, it was not deemed prudent or polite to represent the character in an unflattering light; so he was pictured as noble and incorruptible, and was so unfortunate, poor man, as to have to be murdered to make the story end well.
13. Sir Walter Scott, in his "Tales of a Grandfather," gives us a story differing little from the outline of Shakespeare's drama, but then, who that has spent enraptured hours over Rob Roy and the Black Dwarf could wish the charming wizard to spoil a good story for the sake of mere historical exactness? not I, surely! And the Macbeth of history, no matter how zealously we may try to discover him, or how faithfully we may attempt, at this late day, to reconstruct his damaged reputation, he can never be to us anything better than a very misty tradition. Whatever he may have been eight hundred years ago, the Macbeth we know, the only real Macbeth there is or ever can be, is after all the one that met the witches in the thunder-storm on Forres Heath and then went home and murdered the gentle old king who "had so much blood in him," and a moment later, startled by the knocking at the gate, exclaimed in bitterest remorse: "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st!"
14. If you read this scene in the silent hours when every one else in the house is sleeping, you will almost believe that you murdered Duncan yourself, and that you hear Lady Macbeth's hoarse whisper in your ear: "To bed, to bed, there's knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done can not be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed."
15. Then you will shut the book in sudden terror of the lonely midnight, and scramble into bed with the blood curdling in your veins, and presently, aided by the darkness, your imagination will bridge the gulf of centuries, and you will seem to see a long vaulted hall in a mediæval palace, and in the hall a banquet spread, around which gather lords of high degree, while on the canopied dais at the upper end sit King Macbeth and his white haired, pitiless, guilty queen. And from the rainy outer darkness you may catch the faint echo of a mortal cry: "Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!" And then as you picture the king stepping down from his royal seat to meet a blood-stained murderer at the door, you will have a momentary glimpse of Banquo lying in the roadside ditch "with twenty trenchéd gashes in his head," and of Fleance speeding away alone through the stormy night.
James Johonnot (1823–1888) was a New York State educator.
Born in Bethel, Vermont, he attended school at the New England Seminary in Windsor. In 1845, he became principal of Jefferson School in Syracuse. In 1848 he graduated from the State Normal School in Albany. Starting in 1850, he was employed as an agent for publishers D. Appleton & Company, and in 1853 he was elected state agent of the New York State Teachers' Association. From 1861 to 1866, he was principal of the high school at Joliet, Illinois. In 1872, he was elected principal of the State Normal School at Warrensburg, Missouri, where he remained until 1875. He then served as superintendent of schools for one year in Deposit, New York, and then lived from 1876 to 1880 in Ithaca, New York. After 1880 he lived in Princeton, NJ with his son-in-law, a professor at Princeton College.[1]
He was the author of Principles and Practice of Teaching, Country School-Houses: Containing Elevations, Plans, and Specifications, and many other works, was joint author of Kruesi's Drawing Books, and assisted in the preparation of Appleton's Geographies.
His Ten Great Events in History (1887) starts as follows:
The great events in history are those where, upon special occasions, a man or a people have made a stand against tyranny, and have preserved or advanced freedom for the people. Sometimes tyranny has taken the form of the oppression of the many by the few in the same nation, and sometimes it has been the oppression of a weak nation by a stronger one....
