His friends and his adherents, however, were not disposed to take this calm view of the matter. His younger brother succeeded to his titles and estates, and was styled "Earl of Douglas and Duke of Touraine;" and he, with the earls of Murray, Ormond, Lord Balvenie, and others, all Douglases, proposed to storm the castle of Stirling, and put all within it to the sword, not even excepting James and his young queen, Mary of Gueldres; but a little reflection convinced them of the peril of such an enterprise, and, moreover, that they were without cannon or other resources to attempt it.
However, six hundred nobles, barons, and gentlemen, of the house of Douglas, mustered in full array, with all their vassals, within the town of Stirling, on the 25th day of March—the feast of St. Benedict—and dragged through mud and mire the king's safe conduct, which they nailed on a wooden truncheon, and tied to the tail of a sorry old jaded cart-horse. They then burned it publicly at the Market Cross, where after four hundred horns and twenty brass trumpets had proclaimed defiance, they stigmatized "the king, the lord Crichton, Sir Alexander Livingstone, Sir Patrick Gray, and all who adhered to them, as false and perjured traitors!"
They bade formal defiance to the royal garrison. Then, after completely pillaging the town, they set it on fire in every quarter, and, leaving it in flames and ashes, retired through the adjacent country, which they filled with tumult and outrage. Having thus expended their fury on all that came in their way, they retired each to his own fortress, to prepare for what might follow.
Not long after this, the new earl, with his brothers, friends, and kinsmen, daringly fixed on the doors of the parish churches a document, in which they solemnly renounced their allegiance to the king "as a perjured traitor, a violator of the laws of hospitality, and an ungodly thirster after innocent blood."
The parliament now resolved to aid their justly-incensed monarch in punishing these contumacious nobles, and in a short time he found himself at the head of thirty thousand carefully-selected men, who assembled on Pentland Muir, and with them he resolved to advance against the Douglases. Sir Patrick Gray and the royal guard, of course, accompanied him on this expedition.
The king had with him, William, the lord high constable, whom he had just created earl of Errol, and leader of feudal cavalry; Lord Crichton's son, whom he had created earl of Caithness and lord high admiral of the kingdom; the lords Hailes, Fleming, Boyd, and many other loyal nobles, with all their followers.
He had a fine train of artillery (as artillery was viewed in those days), under Romanno of that ilk, the principal cannon being the Lion, a great gun cast in Flanders and shipped at Bruges, for Scotland, by order of his father, James I., in 1430. It was of polished brass, covered by beautiful carvings and ornaments, and bore the following inscription:—
"Illustri Iacobo Scottorum, principe digno,
Regi magnifico, dum fulmine castra reduco,
Factus sum sub eo, nuncuper ergo Leo."
The white or gaudily-striped and bannered tents of the royal army covered all the great tract of land known as Pentland Muir, and clustered by the margin of lonely Logan Burn, which flows through a green sequestered vale, the solitude of which was now broken by the hum of the camp, the hourly din of horn and trumpet, the clanging of the hammers and anvils of the farriers and armourers; thus, the shepherd on the Pentland slopes could see the red glow of many a forge and watch fire reddening the sides of the hills by night, and in his shealing he could hear the unwonted sounds, that scared his herds and hirsels from their pasture, the eagle from its eyrie in Torduff, and broke the silence of the pastoral waste:—