Stone of Destiny Read Free Page B

such talk to crossing the Border on my own account. Clearly I needed a leader. I had not yet learned the lesson that there are no leaders worth following; that leaders are egocentric humbugs, who casually use others for their own ends. The way of a man with a maid is easily explained, but the way of a leader with those who follow him and think he is great is one of the mysteries of life. Born leaders should be locked up. Leadership should be made a crime.
    Yet the crime I contemplated needed a leader, and the crime itself fascinated me. Thoughts of it would not go away. It was, as I hear kids say in the slang of today, ‘neat’. The Stone had been taken from Scotland to show that we had lost our liberty. Recovering it could be a pointer to our regaining it. A promise had been made by the Treaty of Northampton of 1328 that it would be returned, and that promise had never been kept. Why should fulfilment of that promise not be wrung from them by spiriting the Stone away at dead of night? It only weighed 4 or 5 hundredweight, which was not an impossible load for several men to carry. An empty chair speaks louder than a full house. Much louder than a full house if that house is a House of the Westminster Parliament. It might just speak loud enough to awaken the people of Scotland.
    For more than 2,000 years the Stone had been the talisman of the Scottish people, and, for all I knew, they might still venerate it. My childhood memories came back to me and I remembered my mother’s stories. I could almost see the thin smile on the long, lean, sallow face of my great hero, that slit-throat, the Good Lord James, the great guerilla leader of the Wars of Independence. Here was a guerilla operation in modern times, to be carried out not by ambush, but by careful stealth in the enemy camp. The very audacity of the idea would have made him chuckle. It might have the same effect on the Scots of today. It was difficult; it could be spectacular; it was symbolic; it struck at the very heart of Englishry; it righted an ancient wrong; yet it hurt no one. Spiriting away four or five hundredweight of sacred Stone from the very heart of the Empire might fire the imagination of the world if it were carefully carried out. If we bungled it, we would be the only sufferers. But we must not bungle it. Who was to be the Good Lord James?
    I found him on John MacCormick’s Rectorial Committee. Among all the others he stood out as being the born leader of such an expedition. He was Bill Craig, who was President of theUnion that year, and a big man in the corporate life of the university. He had already graduated with one degree, and was studying for a further one. He had charm and ability, and above all he was able to lead. Indeed in the fun and frolic of a rectorial election he led me into much temptation to which I readily succumbed, and together we got into all sorts of trouble, which was not real trouble because he had the useful facility of knowing how not to be caught. I learned much from him.
    He was 26, a year older than me, as I was just newly 25. Like me he was small in stature, but he had a commanding presence. By sheer force of argument and personality he could persuade the most reluctant audience whether in public or private, because he was as able a speaker in debate as he was in committee. He was a ready-witted politician in the Liberal cause, which, then as now, permitted its adherents to formulate their own policy, and I don’t mean that as a jibe.
    For the job we contemplated, qualities were needed other than those of a politician, and he possessed these par excellence. Calm and unruffled in the most adverse of circumstances, he had that type of temperament which can never admit defeat, and will turn disaster into glorious victory. Add to this that he is small and Pictish, like so many Scots, because we are all as much Picts as Scots, and imagine a Puckish smile concealing a wicked sense of humour, and you have a picture of Bill.
    Yet