ploughshares, or over the seven times heated furnace of hell," he added, with terrible energy; "our time for vengeance has come!"
But the little monarch continued to sob and say: – "Lord regent, lord regent, I am a king."
At last he appealed to Sir Patrick Gray, commanding him to draw his dagger and cut the cords which bound the brothers and their two faithful friends; but the unfortunate captain, confounded by the suddenness of the catastrophe, impelled by his love for Murielle on one hand, his duty to the two highest officers of the crown on the other; his regard for the young king, and a remembrance of how insolently these Douglases had ever treated himself, leaned on his sword, and covered his face with his hand, to hide the emotion that warred in his breast.
Suddenly he approached Crichton, to unite his entreaties to those of his young monarch; but was roughly repelled.
"Oh, chancellor," he exclaimed, "is this my meed – this my reward for faithful service as the king's liege man?"
"If such you be, I command you, peace, Sir Patrick – guard the king, and leave the punishment of his rebels to us."
Now the voice of the regent was heard above the throng, as he shook his clenched right hand aloft.
"I arrest you, William, duke of Touraine, earl of Douglas, lord of Annandale, Longueville, and Galloway, on charges of foul treason; and you, Lord David Douglas; you, Sir Malcolm Fleming of Biggar and Cumbernauld; and you, Sir Alan Lauder of the Bass, captain of the castle of Thrave, on the same serious accusation."
"Treason?" reiterated the young earl, as he proudly raised his head; "in what have I been guilty of treason; and who dare accuse me?"
"I – the chancellor of Scotland," replied Crichton.
"Read the charges," said the regent, sternly.
"They are here," replied Crichton, unfolding a document, while all leaned on their unsheathed weapons, and listened breathlessly. "Treason, in the daily oppression of the king's subjects, at the head of two thousand horsemen, most of whom are outlawed moss-troopers and thieves of Annandale, who sorn on the king's lieges, and commit every outrage; and this ye do, though the parliament held at Perth, in 1424, ordained that no man should travel abroad with more followers than he could maintain. Treason in dubbing men as knights who are but sorners, limmers, and masterful rogues. Treason, in holding cours plénières after the fashion of parliament; and treason, in sending two gentlemen to France as your ambassadors to Charles VII."
"It is false, as all the rest!" exclaimed the earl. "I did but send them as my father desired me, when he lay dying at Restalrig, to renew his oath of fealty for the duchy of Touraine, the fief of Longueville, and other lands we hold in France; and to fix the yearly rental of the former at ten thousand crowns."
"He speaks most truly," exclaimed Sir Malcolm Fleming and Sir Alan Lauder in the same breath.
"Well, all this, though too little for a king, was too great for a subject," said the regent, haughtily.
"The extent of your power and the misuse thereof," resumed the chancellor, "with the lawless character of your followers, are pretexts enough, without others, on which to arraign you. No religion, no threats, no prayers or pretended reformation, no oaths or promises, can alter the inborn character we inherit with our blood; and what have you, Douglas, thus inherited? Pride, treason, contumacy, and the love of open rebellion against the crown; and these evil qualities will remain true to the fount from whence they spring; so, my lord regent, to the block, I say, with this viperous brood. If the boy is thus dangerous, what would the man be?"
"We demand to be tried by our peers," said the earl, firmly; "arraign us before the Estates."
"You have got nearly all the trial and shrift we mean to give you," said the regent, bluntly. "Romanno, away with them to the castle Butts."
The trial, if it can be called so, proceeded rapidly, for the judges had long ago resolved on the sentence, and, as one historian says, "were determined to make no allowance for the youth and inexperience of the parties – for the artifices by which they had been lured within the danger of the law, and for their being totally deprived of constitutional or legal defenders."
So, without counsel, jury, or written documents of any kind, these grim proceedings went on; but never once did the brave boys sue for pity, for mercy, or even for one hour of life.
From the hall, where the king, amid the débris of the banquet and combat, sank weeping on his canopied seat, the unfortunate earl and his brother were hurried down the back stair of David's Tower, and dragged to the greensward of the Butts, where the new barracks were built in 1796, and there, in the presence of the regent, the chancellor, Sir Walter Halyburton, the lord high treasurer, and other officers of state, after being barely permitted to embrace each other, they were thrown down on the block in succession, forcibly held there, and beheaded!
This terrible deed was scarcely done ere all the friends of the regent and chancellor, save their garrison, hastily quitted the castle; even as those who now witness an execution disperse rapidly as if it were a relief to get rid of emotions so deep as those which are excited by beholding a violent death, however judicially done.
For two days Sir Malcolm Fleming (ancestor of the earls of Wigton) was respited only because he had wedded Elizabeth Stewart, daughter of the old duke of Albany; but ultimately he too was beheaded on the same block that was yet crimsoned with the blood of those he loved so well.
Sir Alan Lauder, through the friendship of Romanno, effected his escape; while Fleming was interred in the coffin which bore the name of Murielle Douglas.
In a wild spot on the north-western slope of the castle rock, where the wall-flower and thistle flourished, and where at times the grass was spotted by the witch-gowans, those yellow flowers which are filled by pernicious sap, and are supposed to cause blindness, grew luxuriantly, they were all interred in one deep grave.
In 1753, when the foundations of an arsenal were being dug there, some human remains were exhumed, with several coffin-handles, and three inscription-plates of pure gold. With these relics were found the skull and horns of a bull, thereby identifying them with those victims of misrule who perished on the vigil of St. Catharine, in 1440.
CHAPTER XIV
THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF NOVEMBER
Playing at the tables, he
There was murder'd. At his shrine
Many a noble lady wept;
Many a knight of valiant line:
One mourn'd more than all the rest,
Daughter of the Genovine.
In the horror and bewilderment which were naturally excited by this terrible and unexpected catastrophe – this double execution which had taken place under his own eyes, and in which he felt himself thereby almost implicated, the unfortunate Captain of the King's Guard knew not what to do.
How would the powerful and hostile Douglases, and how might Murielle view him now?
He shrunk from the contemplation, and felt such an abhorrence of the regent and chancellor, that, although his bread and subsistence were derived from his post at court as Captain of the King's Guard, he was tempted to cast the office from him and leave the country. But to pass into exile was to lose all hope of Murielle, to relinquish her for ever; and he lived in an age when love was perhaps a more concentrated passion than it may be even in one of greater civilization.
To lure her with him into France, – in those old times the Scotsman's other home, – would be fraught with danger; for the Douglases would have interest enough with Charles VII. to procure their separation, and his commitment for life to some obscure bastille, where he would never be heard of again, – if their emissaries did not cut him off in the light of open day.
Then, on the other hand, his patron and friend, the late King James I., had made him promise to be a faithful subject and mentor to his son and heir; and, with one hand on that dead monarch's body as he lay murdered in the Black Friary at Perth, he had recorded the promise again