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His administration commenced with more external pomp than had been usual, or would seem to be congenial either with his own professions, or with the plain and simple manners of the people whom he governed. When going to court or church, he was always preceded by two sergeants who walked with their halberts.
The troopers got under arms in the market-place at this unexpected summons, while, with faces of anxiety and earnestness, Cornet Grahame, a kinsman of Claverhouse, and the Provost of the borough, followed by half-a-dozen soldiers, and town-officers with halberts, entered the apartment of Niel Blane. "Guard the doors!" were the first words which the Cornet spoke; "let no man leave the house.
In front of the great gates were stationed four warders with the royal badge woven in gold on the front and back of their crimson doublets, with roses in their velvet hats, roses in their buskins, and halberts over their shoulders. Just within the gates stood a gigantic porter, a full head and shoulders taller than the burly warders themselves.
"Well, men, you have all done your duty to your lady right well this night, and there is not one of us here who would not gladly have such brave fellows in his service. I see that you are all four wounded." "They are scarce to be called wounds, Sir Count, seeing that they are but flesh cuts from their halberts which we got in the fray below.
I stood composedly at the dining-room window, and was very thankful that I wasna provost in such a hurricane, when I saw poor Mr Keg, as pale as a dish clout, running to and fro bareheaded, with the town-officers and their halberts at his heels, exhorting and crying till he was as hoarse as a crow, to the angry multitude, that was raging and tossing like a sea in the market-place.
The men sprang up from the fire, seized their long-barrelled muskets and their halberts; and a few who had laid aside their steel corselets hastily fastened them on again, and threw their bandoliers, filled with charges, over their shoulders. The merry, careless party was now quickly converted into a troop of cautious soldiers.
There were more arms in this hall-pikes and halberts of ancient date, pistols and jack-boots of more than a century old, that had done service in Cromwell's wars, a tattered French guidon which had been borne by a French gendarme at Malplaquet, and a pair of cumbrous Highland broadswords, which, having been carried as far as Derby, had been flung away on the fatal field of Culloden.
They ordered halberts to be brought into the hall where they assembled, and thus armed themselves against those conspiracies with which, they pretended, they were hourly threatened. As stories of plots, however ridiculous, were willingly attended to, and were dispersed among the multitude, to whose capacity they were well adapted.
"He says that his horse has only gone ten leagues, and will ride over you all." And drawing his sword and swinging it furiously round, he cut off in his passage the blades of the nearest halberts, and in less than ten minutes fifteen or twenty of them were changed into broom-handles.
Thereafter the halberts finished him off, and he was buried there and then, in lime, under the floor of the Hall of Knights, under the very spot where he had fallen, which was long to remain imbrued with his blood. Thus miserably perished the glittering Königsmark, a martyr to his own irrepressible romanticism. As for Sophia, better might it have been for her had she shared his fate that night.
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