the following day, accompanied by twelve armed
? men, disguised as seamen, with hoods over their
helmets, he appeared at the Castle gates, where they
contrived to overturn their casks and hampers, so
as to prevent the barriers being closed by the
guards and warders, who were instantly slain. At
a given signal-the shrill blast of a bugle-horn-
Douglas and his companions, with their war-cry,
rushed from a place of concealment close by. Sir
Richard de Limoisin, the governor, made a bitter
resistance, but was overpowered in the end, and
his garrison became the prisoners of David II.,
who returned from France in the following month,
accompanied by his queen Johanna; and by that
time not an Englishman was left in Scotland. But
miserable was the fate of Bullock. By order of a
Sir David Berkeley he was thrown into the castle
of Lochindorb, in Morayshire, and deliberately
starved to death. On this a Scottish historian
remarks, ? It is an ancient saying, that neither the
powekful, nor the valiant, nor the wise, long
flourish in Scotland, since envy obtaineth the
mastery of them all.?
When, a few years afterwards, the unfortunate
battle of Durham ended in the defeat of the Scots,
and left their king a prisoner of war, we find
in the treaty for his ransom, the merchants of
Edinburgh, together with those of Perth, Aberdeen,
atid Dundee, binding themselves to see it paid.
In 1357 a Parliament was held at Edinburgh for
its final adjustment, when the Regent Robert
(afterwards Robert 11.) presided ; in addition to
the clergy and nobles, there were present delegates
from seventeen burghs, and among these Edinburgh
In 1365 we find a four years? truce with England,
signed at London on the 20th May, and in
the Castle on the 12th of June; and another for
I appeared at the head for thejrst time.
fourteen years, dated at the Castle 28th October,
1371-
So often had the storm of war desolated its
towers, that the Castle of Edinburgh (which
became David?s favourite residence after his return
from England ?in 1357) was found to require
extensive repairs, and to these the king devoted
himself. On the cliff to the northward he built
?David?s Tower,? an edifice of great height and
strength, and therein he died on the zznd February,
1371, and was buried before the high altar
at Holyrood. The last of the direct line of Brucea
name inseparably connected with the military
glory and independence of Scotland-David was a
monarch who, in happier times, would have done
much to elevate his people. The years of his
captivity in England he beguiled with his pencil,
and in a vault of Nottingham Castle ?he left
behind hini,? says Abercrornbie, in his ? Martial
Achievements,? I? the whole story of our Saviour?s
Passion, curiously engraven on the rock with his
own hands. For this, says one, that castle became
as famous as formerly it had been for Mortimer?s
hole.?
It was during bis reign that, by the military
ingenuity of John Earl of Carrick and four other
knights of skill, the Castle was so well fortified, that,
with a proper garrison, the Duke of Rothesay was
able to resist the utmost efforts of Henry IV.,
when he besieged it for several weeks in 1400.
The Castle had been conferred as a free gift upon
Earl John by his father King Robert, and in consequence
of the sufferings endured by the inhabitants
when the city was burned by the English,
under Richard II., he by charter empowered the
citizens to build houses within the fortress, free of
fees to the constable, on the simple understanding
that they were persons of good fame.
?
.
-
CHAPTER IV.
CASTLE OF EDINBURGH-(continucd).
Progress of the Cuy-Ambassador of Charles VI.- Edinburgh burned-Henry IV. batAed-Albany?s Prophecy-Laws regarding the Building
of House-Sumptuary Laws, 1457-Murder of James I.-Coronation of James 11.-Court Intrigues-Lord Chancellor Crichton-Arrogance
of the Earl of Douglas-~-Faction Wars-The Castle Besieged-? The Black DinneF?-Edinburgh walled-Its Strength-Bale-fires.
THE chief characteristic of the infant city now was
that of a frontier town, ever on the watch to take
arms against an invader, and resolute to resist him.
Walsingham speaks of it as a village ; and in 1385
its population is supposed to have barely exceeded
2,oooj yet Froissart called it the Pans of Scotland,
though its central street presented but a
meagre line of thatched or stane-dated houses,
few of which were more than twenty feet in height.
Froissart numbers them at 4,000, which would
give a greater population than has been alleged.
With the accession of Robert 11.-the first of the
Stuart monarchs-a new era began in its history,
and it took a stahding as the chief burgh in
Scotland, the relations of which with England, for
generations after, partook rather of a vague prolonged
armistice in time of war than a settled
peace, and thus all rational progress was arrested
or paralysed, and was never likely to be otherwise
so long as the kings of England maintained the
insane pretensions of Edward I., deduced from
Brute the fabulous first king of Albion !
In 1383 Robert 11. was holding his court in
the Castle when he received there the ambassador
of Charles VI., on the 20th August, renewing the
ancient league with France. In the following year
a truce ended; the Earls of March and Douglas
began the war with spirit, and cut off a rich convoy
on its way to Roxburgh. This brought the Duke
of Lancaster and the Earl of Buckingham before
Edinburgh. Their army was almost innumerable
(according to Abercrombie, following Walsingham),
but the former spared the city in remembrance of
his hospitable treatment by the people when he was
among them, an exile from the English court-a
kindness for which the Scots cared so little that
they followed up his retreat so sharply, that he laid
the town and its great church in ashes when he returned
in the following year.
In 1390 Robert 111. ascended the throne, and ir.
that year we find the ambassadors of Charles VI.
again witnessing in the Castle the royal seal and signature
attached to the treaty for mutual aid and
defence against England in all time coming. This
brought Henry IV., as we have said, before the
Castle in 1400, with a well-appointed and numerous
army, in August.
From the fortress the young and gallant David
Duke of Rothesay sent a herald with a challenge
to meet him in mortal combat, where and when
he chose, with a hundred men of good blood on
each side, and determine the war in that way.
" But King Henry was in no humour to forego the
advantage he already possessed, at the head of a
more numerous army than Scotland could then
raise ; and so, contenting himself with a verbal
equivocation in reply to this knightly challenge, he
sat down with his numerous host before the Castle
till (with the usual consequences of the Scottish
reception of such'invaders) cold and rain, and -
twenty feet in length, with three or four large saws,
I for the common use, and six or more " cliekes of
castles, resorted to the simple expedient of driving
off all the cattle and sheep, provisions and goods,
even to the thatch of their houses, and leaving
nothing but bare walls for the enemy to wreak their
vengeance on; but they never put up their swords
till, by a terrible retaliating invasion into the more
fertile parts of England, they fully made up for
their losses. And this wretched state of affairs, for
nearly 500 years, lies at the door of the Plantagenet
and Tudor kings.
The aged King Robert 111. and his queen, the
once beautiful Annabella Drummond, resided in the
Castle and in the abbey of Holyrood alternately.
We are told that on one occasion, when the Duke
of Albany, with several of the courtiers, were conversing
one night on the ramparts of the former,
a singular light was seen afar off at the horizon, and
across the s t a q sky there flashea a bright meteor,
carrying behind it a long train of sparks.
'' Mark ye, sirs ! " said Albany, " yonder prodigy
portends either the ruin of a nation or the downfall
of some great prince ;a and an old chronicler omits
not to record that the Duke of Rothesay (who,
had he ascended the throne, would have been
David III.), perished soon after of famine, in the
hands of Ramornie, at Falkland.
Edinburgh was prosperous enough to be able to
contribute 50,000 merks towards the ransom of
James I., the gifted author of " The King's Quhair "
(or Book), who had been lawlessly captured at
sea in his boyhood by the English, and was left
in their hands for nineteen years a captive by his
designing uncle the Regent Albany ; and though
his plans for the pacification of the Highlands kept
him much in Perth, yet, in 1430, he was in
Edinburgh with Queen Jane and the Court, when
he received the surrender of Alexander Earl of
ROSS, who had been in rebellion but was defeated
by the royal troops in Lochaber.
As yet no Scottish noble had built a mansion in
Edinburgh, where a great number of the houses were
actually constructed of wood from the adjacent
forest, thatched with straw, and few were more than
two storeys in height ; but in the third Parliament
of James I., held at Perth in 1425, to avert the
conflagrations to which the Edinbiirghers were so
liable, laws were ordained requiring the magistrates
to have in readiness seven or eight ladders of
his progress or retreat."*
When unable to resist, the people of the entire
town and country, who were not secured in
* Wilson's ''Memorials." .
fired ;' and that no fire was to be conveyed from
one house to another within the town, unless in a
covered vessel or lantern. Another law forbade'
people on visits to live with their friends, but to
