They then opened the window, and flung the yet warm and sorely mangled corpse of that mighty earl, who was the rival of his king, into the nether baillerie of the castle; and from the terrible deed of that night of Shrove Tuesday, the 20th of February, the apartment in which it took place is still named the "Douglas Room."
As a sequel to it, the Edinburgh newspapers of the 14th of October, 1797, have the following paragraph:—
"On Thursday se'nnight, as some masons were digging a foundation in Stirling Castle, in a garden adjacent to the magazine, they found a human skeleton, about eight yards from the window over which the earl of Douglas was thrown, after he was stabbed by King James II. There is no doubt that they were his remains, as it is certain that he was buried in that garden, and but a little distance from the closet window."
CHAPTER LIII.
THE SIEGE OF THRAVE.
Well, then, to work; our cannon shall be bent
Against the brows of this resisting town;
Call for our chiefest men of discipline
To cull the plots of best advantages:
We'll lay before this town our royal bones,
Wade to the market-place in Frenchmen's blood
But we will make it subject to this boy.—King John.
The unfortunate Sir Patrick Gray knew the atrocities of which the castle of Thrave had been the scene during the late earl's lifetime; and he also knew the cruelty of which Achanna, his tool and minion, was capable; thus the dying words of Douglas made his soul tremble with terror for the safety of Murielle, in such butcherly and unscrupulous hands. But how was she to be saved?
All the vassals of the crown were not numerous enough to penetrate into Galloway and storm Thrave, amid a land of pastoral wilds and pathless forests, swarming with freebooting lairds, fierce moss-troopers, and half-savage Celts. Of venturing there alone, like a knight-errant, his recent expedition had fully illustrated the danger, and after the last terrible deed in Stirling the peril would be greater than ever.
That stern deed of the young king filled the Douglases with rage; but it was not without a salutary effect upon their adherents, as it evinced that he would no longer brook their insulting and rebellious conduct.
Posterity can have little sympathy for the fate of Douglas, "whose career from first to last," says Mr. Tytler, "had been that of a selfish, ambitious, and cruel tyrant, who, at the moment when he was cut off, was all but a convicted traitor, and whose death, if we except the mode in which it was brought about, was to be regarded as a public benefit."