In the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Castle of Kirkintulloch was the principal residence of John Comyn Lord of Badenoch, who, as nephew of King John Baliol, was a competitor with Bruce for the crown of Scotland, and he was called the Red Comyn to distinguish him from his father, the Black Comyn, who was so named from his swarthy complexion.
In those days the country around this castle was covered by forests of oak and pine, through the secluded hollows of which the Kelvin and the Logie crept with that slow and sluggish current which gives them more the aspect of Flemish canals than streams that roll from Scottish mountains. The rising burgh was then roofed with stone, or thatched; the Roman fort on the Barhill was nearly entire, as when a thousand years before the soldiers of the Cæsars had relinquished it before the furious Scots; and the now ruined tower of Sir Robert Boyd, Baron of Kilmarnock, Hartshaw, Ardneil and Dalry, was still the stronghold of his family, who were the sworn enemies of the Baliols and all their adherents. So deep, indeed, was their hatred, that they would not bury their dead in the same church; thus, while the Boyds were laid in the Chapel of St. Mary (which is now the parish kirk), the Comyns were interred in the Church of St. Ninian.
The Red Comyn was powerful, cunning, and dissembling; being ambitious, and though he fought under Wallace at Falkirk, intensely selfish, he feared to lose his estates after that disastrous battle was lost; and as usual with Scottish nobles, considering his own interest before the common weal or the national honour, he joined the English ranks, and fought against his own country in the army of the traitor-king, John Baliol.
He was a woful tyrant to the burgh of Kirkintulloch; for, in defiance of the old laws of the land, he enforced the bludewit, the stingisdynt, the marchet, the herezeld, and other exactions now unknown within the ports of a Scottish town; and as all pleas between burgesses and travelling merchants must be settled before the third flowing and ebbing of the tide, he usually decided them by whipping the burgess and confiscating the goods of the stranger. Moreover, although it had been ordained by the kings of old, that on any burgess departing on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land or other sacred place, his goods and family should be protected "vntill God brought him name againe," the wives of the absent were often seized by Comyn, and their goods by his lady.
At his mills he exacted exorbitant mulctures, and he hung all who dared to complain; if any ventured to grind wheat, mashloch, or rye with hand querns, they were also hanged; and though it was statute and ordained that he who stole a halfpenny-worth of bread should be scourged, that he who stole a pair of shoes should be pilloried, or eightpence worth should have one leg cut off, the tyrant hanged them all. Thus his Dule-tree was never without a man hanging from it, with the black gleds flying round him; for Comyn ground alike to the dust the burgesses within the walls and the gudemen of the Newland Mailings without; so that it was generally said in Dumbartonshire, that the devil himself would be a gentler overlord than he; and he was so hated that men remembered the dreadful fate of his father in Badenoch, and it came to be whispered about that there was a prophecy made by a weird woman, that he too should die a violent death!
His wife, Lady Gwendoleyne, was esteemed one of the most beautiful women in Scotland, and none had outshone her at the Court of Queen Yolande, the consort of Alexander III. Lovely beyond all comparison, tall, stately and magnificent in form, with pale commanding features and dark eyes, indicative rather of pride of birth and loftiness of mind than of gentleness, she made the people—even those whom her beauty dazzled, and her slightest smile would have won for ever—shrink and quail before her, as beneath the eye of some mysterious spirit; for the keen black eye of that imperious lady is said to have been as dangerous in its beauty as it was terrible in its expression.
She had been wedded early to the Red Lord of Badenoch; they had three daughters, the youngest of whom (according to Andrew Wyntoun) was married to the traitorous MacDougal of Lorn. They had also one son, who at the time this history opens, A.D. 1306, was in his eighteenth year, and was said to be a handsome, gallant, and high-spirited youth; but, unfortunately, devoted to the false Baliol, at whose mock Court in the Castle of Perth he resided, and there he had been educated.
Notwithstanding her own unparalleled beauty, her husband's rank, power, and overweening authority, Lady Gwendoleyne was far from being happy! A thorn sharper than a poisoned arrow rankled in her heart, in the form of a restless jealousy of her husband, to whom she was passionately devoted, and whom she loved with all the ardour of her impulsive nature. And though he seemed to be, in manner, all that befitted a faithful and attached spouse, he was yet an object of suspicion to Gwendoleyne; for some artful minion had skilfully sown the seeds of mistrust between them, and several of Comyn's unguarded actions and interferences with the wives of pilgrim-burgesses had given her every reason to deem her fears were just and true; hence her fiery heart became a prey to furious passions and to bitter thoughts, and she looked about her, longing for some fitting object on which to vent her wrath.
Her husband's kinsman and her own dear friend, old Sir Alexander Baliol of Cavers, Great Chamberlain of Scotland, to whom she often hinted her complaints against Comyn and her suspicions of his infidelity, endeavoured to laugh away her fears.
"Madam," said he, on one occasion, "jealousy is the soul of a love which will brook no rival even for a moment. I mean not to hint that you love Red Comyn too much, but without this jealousy your love for him perhaps would die."