The King staggered, recovered himself, stiffened, and turned towards his oratory.
“No more,” he said. “I take it kneeling.”
He moved away stupidly, stopped, turned again, and addressed himself, as if groping, towards the Jesuit:
“I take it kneeling, I say. The land of God—England—can it be—and I——?”
Some insect droned in the dead silence; the King was seen to start, to stoop, to block his ears with his hands.
“Tell them,” he said thickly, “to let the seaman go, in God’s name and the King’s. It is our will.”
George Buchanan
Two boys were quarrelling in the privy garden of Stirling Castle on the Forth. Their shrill little passions rose ludicrously inconsonant with the majestic gravity of the old historic pile. That had its roots deep-striking into the mighty rock from which it had sprung; and, above, every lusty tower, every folded roof, every soaring pinnacle of the massed congeries of hall and chapel and battlement which comprised the royal rookery was a living testimony to the fecundity of the source from which those roots had drunk. Stirling Castle, in common with other impregnable fortresses of its kind, had grown fat and strong, like a strapping vine, on the blood which soaked its bases—so strong that, in this year of stormy grace 1576, it was still the residence confidently appropriated to a regal minor.
The Castle, massive and somnolent, commanded imperturbably from its height the beautiful open champaign—with its meandering river like a silver uncoiled spring—in the midst of which it was set; the angry small voices vexed its serenity about as much as a buzzing fly might vex a mammoth. Yet they had this right in common with the great voices of the past; one of them came from the lungs of a nestling of the right eagle breed.
He, this nestling—the one destined to be our first Stuart monarch—was a stubby, commonplace boy of ten. His face was pale and somewhat meaty, his features were undistinguished in a pawky good-humoured way, his hair was longish and of a bright auburn, which was to deepen later on. Now, under the influence of anger, its roots were flushed red, which gave it an inflamed look, and the young gentleman’s close-buttoned doublet was sadly disordered, and its lace torn at the wrists.