"Down with the bloody house of Guise! A Hamilton—a Hamilton!"
The poor queen-mother grew deadly pale on hearing these hostile and unexpected shouts from the populace, whose favour has ever been in all ages variable as the wind; but Florence felt his blood boil! He had been reared in a land where gallantry was a science; he had heard Francis I.—the most splendid of European monarchs—declare that a court without ladies was like a spring without flowers; he had stood by his side, bearing the train of Anne of Albany, when Laura's tomb at Avignon was opened, and when flowers and verses were cast upon her bones, as a tribute to her past beauty and to Petrarch's love and muse. The fourth and fifth Jameses were in their graves, and Scotland no longer understood the sentiment of chivalry; but, filled with indignation by the reiterated insults of a lank-haired fellow who followed the queen's train, in a suit of sad-coloured clothes, Florence drew his sword and would have smote him down, when she quickly arrested his hand, and said, with one of her most alluring smiles,—
"I pray you to spare the poor man, and I shall tell you a story. One day some drunken archers of Paris, in my hearing, insulted Catherine de Médicis, and said a hundred bitter and abusive things to her, as she was proceeding on foot under her canopy through the Rue de l'Arbre Sec towards the Louvre. Perceiving my kinsman, the Cardinal de Lorraine, start angrily from her side, she grasped his scarlet cope, saying,—
"'Whither goes your eminence?'
"'To see those poltroons hanged without delay!'
"'Nay, nay,' said she, 'not so; let them alone. I will this day show to after-ages that, in the same person, a woman, a queen, and an Italian, controlled both pride and passion.' If the terrible Catherine could do this, why not may I, who have ever been deemed so tender and gentle?"
"Most true, madam," replied Florence, bowing low as he sheathed his sword; "your wish is law to me."
Her train left Edinburgh by the Lower Bow Porte, on the parapet of which was a bare white skull, that seemed to grin mockingly at the turmoil and terror of those who crowded the steep and winding street below. Mary shuddered as she saw it, for this poor relic of mortality was the head of the terrible "Bastard of Arran," Sir James Hamilton of Finnard, whilom captain of Linlithgow, royal cup-bearer, and grand inquisitor of Scotland, executed for treason against James V.; and all who passed the old arch beneath were wont to sign the cross, for it was alleged that this head, after it was cut off, had thrice cried "Jesus Christus" as it rolled about the scaffold, and that no blood came from it; moreover, on the day it was first spiked, a certain honest farmer, the gudeman of St. Giles's Grange, when passing under the gate with a cartload of turnips to market, beheld them all turn into human heads, which winked and grinned at him for the full space of three minutes.
As the royal train issued forth upon the western road that led to Stirling, the sun arose in his ruddy splendour and shed a blaze of yellow light across the eastern quarter of the sky; and against this glow Edinburgh uprose, with its castles, towers, and spires, its hills and mass of roofs, its strange piles of gables and chimneys, in outline, strongly and darkly defined. Then the blue flag, with the white cross of St. Andrew, was seen to wave upon the summit of King David's keep; and the flash and boom of a culverin from the rampart below it, as the light smoke floated away on the soft breeze of the early morning, announced that the governor of the castle, Hamilton of Stainhouse, had fired the first gun at the approaching foe.
A wail arose from the city beneath; for that hostile sound also announced that the English, with sword and torch, flushed by victory and fired by the spirits of rancour and devastation, were at hand; but the queen and her train, warned by it of coming danger, added spurs to their speed, as they galloped past the long shallow loch, the ancient church, the rocky hills, and reedy marshes of Corstorphine.