Willie, in irons in the castle. He was taken prisoner during a time of truce, and imprisoned contrary to the express agreement of the truce, and William Scott, the Lord of Buccleuch, whose follower he was, demanded his instant release. This demand was not complied with, and his angry chief, after the fashion of those times, came here at once with two hundred horsemen, provided with ladders for scaling the walls, and instruments of iron for forcing the gates; and before the garrison could prepare for resistance, in the brightening dawn of an April morning, forced the castle, and carried off the renowned Willie, his irons still on, which Sir Walter Scott says a smith knocked off at a cottage by the road side between Longtown and Langholm. Summary proceedings these. These men had not yet acquired our modern notion of debating the question. They did not palter whatever they did, nor cheat their consciences with the questionable virtue of votes.
Another of our English monarchs, James the First, visited Carlisle in 1617, and very probably lodged in the castle, perhaps in the very apartments his mother once occupied. The object of his journey to Scotland–the establishment of Episcopacy in the place of Presbyterianism–was a very unwise one, and together with his intolerance of the English Puritans and his universal despotism, the source of all the long train of evils that troubled all, or nearly all, his descendants. But the pedant king appears to have found favour with the pleasant people of Carlisle, for they, with all due speechifying and kissing of hands, presented him with a "cup of golde" valued at thirty pounds, and "a
