at once plain and hard, with all the towering pride of her family. Rothsay not only neglected but ridiculed her amongst his dissolute companions. The injury sunk deep in the minds of the younger Douglases, and was not to be forgiven. All this was so much gain to the plans of the base Albany, who had long determined at any cost to clear Rothsay out of his own path to the throne. For some time the impediments to this murderous career were too great. The queen had for her advisers the old Earl of Douglas, Archibald the Grim, and Trail, the Archbishop of St. Andrews. By their united authority and counsels they restrained both the wildness of Rothsay and the ambitious schemes of Albany. But after the death of these three beneficent guardians, with whom, says Pordun, it was commonly said through the land, that the glory and honesty of Scotland were buried, the Duke of Rothsay plunged once more into his excesses, and it was advised by Albany that he should be put under some degree of restraint. In an evil hour the old king listened to this, and the fate of Rothsay was sealed.
Amongst the duke's companions was a Sir John Ramorgny, the most accomplished villain of his time. His education was of the most complete character for the age, for it seems he had been originally intended for the Church, but the profligacy and reckless spirit of his youth had disqualified him, and he had become first a soldier and then a diplomatist. His handsome person, his fascinating manners, the insinuating address and grace of his demeanour, which covered no single spark of conscience or principle, peculiarly fitted him to be the supple tool of princes. He was accordingly employed by Albany in state negotiations, both at home and abroad.
This man was just the person to attract the attention of the young Rothsay. He could inform him of all the life and follies of foreign courts, and introduce him to the most criminal pleasures of his own capital. Rothsay, with his openness of character, did not for a moment conceal his hatred of Albany, and Ramorgny, with the utmost coolness, advised him to have him assassinated. From this diabolical counsel Rothsay, who, however misguided, was honourable by nature, revolted in horror, and heaped such terms of abhorrence on his advisor, that Ramorgny, stung with all the resentment of a fiend, and incapable of the remorse of a man, conceived the moat deadly hatred to the young duke, betrayed his conversations to Albany, and lent himself to assist in his destruction.
In league with this villanous uncle and his villanous confidant Ramorgny were now, unfortunately, the Earl of Douglas, whose sister Rothsay had married but neglected, and Sir William Lindsay of Rossy, whoso sister he had loved and forsaken. These noblemen now waited in a plot which at this time of day appears not more revolting than astonishing—the murder of the heir apparent to the throne.
To effect this, it was represented by them to the aged king, who lived in close retirement, and knew nothing of what passed without but through the medium of Albany, that such were the excesses of the prince that it was absolutely necessary to put him under some closer restraint. Ramorgny and Lindsay, as the most apparently disinterested, wore made to introduce this to the king, and with such effect that the afflicted old monarch gave an order under the royal signet to arrest the prince and place him in temporary confinement. The victim was now in their power. Ramorgny and Lindsay seized him as he was on his way to St. Andrews with only a few followers, and shut him up in the castle of St. Andrews. Having sent off to Albany the tidings of their success, they were instructed by him to convey him to the solitary castle of Falkland. One tempestuous day, therefore, they threw a cloak over his rich dress, mounted him on a sorry horse, and, in this disguise, attended by a strong body of soldiers, they hurried him to Falkland and thrust him into a dungeon.
For fifteen days the unhappy prince was kept there under the charge of two ruffians of the names of Wright and Selkirk, whose business it was to starve him to death, When groaning in the agonies of hunger, his voice became known to a poor woman, who contrived to steal to his grated window, which was level with the ground, and convey him food, by dropping small barley cakes through the bars, and nourishing him with her own milk, conveyed to him through a pipe.
But the protracted life of their victim roused the suspicion of the assassins; they watched, and drove away the kind woman, and Rothsay soon perished in such terrible agonies that it was found, after his death, that he had gnawed the flesh from his own shoulder. His body was buried privately in the monastery of Lindores, and it was proclaimed that he had died of dysentery. But the fatal truth was not long in becoming known, and the public, forgetting the follies of the prince, now joined in universal execration against Albany as his murderer. Yet what availed it? The monarch, who bitterly bewailed the death of his son, and is supposed to have been well aware of his murderers, was himself in Albany's hands, and that daring and unscrupulous man not only demanded examination before Parliament of his conduct, but obtained for himself and Douglas an acquittal from all charge of guilt, which none dared to advance against them, and still more, an attestation from the powerless king, under his own seal, of their innocence, which, however, nobody believed.
While these horrors had been maturing and transacting, the Earl of March, resenting the treatment of himself and his daughter by the court and Douglas, had retreated to his impregnable castle of Danbar, renounced his allegiance to the King of Scotland, done homage to Henry of England, and joined energetically the Percies of Northumberland in their attacks on his native country. What stimulated him to more bitterness was to see his vast estates conferred on Douglas, the hereditary enemy of his house. He made frequent inroads, either to recover his lands, or, by laying them waste, to render them useless to the intruder. These devastating visits obliged the border barons, the Haliburtons, the Oockburns, Hepburns, and Landers, to make common cause with the Douglas. They agreed to give the command by turns to the different chiefs, and each was ambitious to excel his associates by some feat of arms, called in the language of the times chevanche. On one of these occasions, the command being in the hands of Sir Patrick Hepburn of Hailes, the Scots broke into England and laid waste the
