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Updated: June 5, 2025
It is but a conjecture, yet it is one that might seem justified by two isolated events so extraordinary, and by the state of discouragement and misery into which James seems soon to have fallen. Pitscottie relates that the King "took ane great suspition of his nobles, thinking that either one or other of them would deceive him;" and then there began to appear to him "visions in his bed."
Pitscottie thus saves the feelings of the lady of whom other historians say curtly that she did not please the King. But when the Scottish band reached the Court, though it was then in mourning for the Dauphin, recently dead, King James was received with open arms.
According to Pitscottie, James's private friends advised him first to take counsel with the Earl of Douglas, the long-forfeited and banished Earl, represented as being then imprisoned in Edinburgh, which is clearly apocryphal: and afterwards with the Duke of Albany, to whom Pitscottie is throughout very favourable, making no mention of his undoubted treachery.
Lindsay of Pitscottie. One reason why the prisoner is unnamed is no doubt that here, as in a hundred other places more explicitly, Knox would impress us with the feeling that no other or higher obedience in such matters is required of minister or prophet or apostle, than is required of the humblest man or the youngest child in God's people. 'Works, vi. 230. 'Works, iii. 245. 'Works, iii. 169.
When James heard soon after that his rebellious lords had disbanded their host, he collected a smaller army to revenge the ravages of Norfolk, issuing, according to Pitscottie, a proclamation bidding all who loved him be ready within twenty-four hours "to follow the King wherever he pleased to pass"; but even this new levy was little subordinate.
Notwithstanding," Ramsay says, "this simple wilfulness cannot be removed out of the King's mind for nae persuasion or mean. I trust verrilie," adds the traitor, "that, God will, he be punished by your mean for the cruel consent of the murder of his father." Curiously enough Pitscottie, the most graphic and circumstantial of historians, says nothing whatever of this most romantic episode.
One night, we are told, James himself in full armour took the command of the guard, more probably, however, from a boyish desire to feel himself at the head of his defenders than for any other reason; and even his bedchamber was shared, after an unpleasant fashion of the time, by the bastard of Arran, "James Hamilton, that bloody butcherer," as Pitscottie calls him, who had precipitated the fray of "Clear the Causeway" and was Angus's most inveterate enemy.
But Pitscottie must continue the tale in his own admirable way. He says: "We will lat him sleep in his bed, and return to George Douglas, who came home to Falkland at eleven hours at night, and required at the porters what the King was doing, who answered that he was in his own chamber sleeping, who was to rise tymous to the hunting, and right so said the watchmen.
Pitscottie narrates, with more evident truthfulness, how the Frenchmen on the Norman coast were alarmed by the ships, fearing it to be an enemy which hove in sight, "for there were many strangers in his companie, so that he appeared ane great army."
It is difficult to see why, accepting from Pitscottie all the rest of this affecting narrative, the modern historian should cut out this as unworthy of belief, "Who answered," continues the chronicler, "with tears falling from his eyes,"
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