At that juncture delay was death to success. It was impossible to pass him. To tumble him off the ladder and let him be dashed to pieces, as some of the men both above and below roughly bade my grandfather do, was cruel. All were at a stand.
Governed, however, by a singular inspiration, my grandfather took off his own sword-belt and also the bailie's, and fastened him with them to the ladder by the oxters and legs, and then turning round the ladder, leaving him so fastened pendent in the air on the lower side, the assailants ascended over his belly, and courageously mounted to their perilous duty.
Jordanhill shouted as they mustered on the summit. The officers and soldiers of the garrison rushed out naked, but sword in hand. The assailants seized the cannon. Lord Fleming, the governor, leaped the wall into the boat that had brought the scaling ladders and was rowed away. The garrison, thus deserted, surrendered, and the guilty prelate was among the prisoners.
As soon as order was in some degree restored, my grandfather went with two other soldiers to where the bailie had been left suspended, and having relieved him from his horror, which the breaking daylight increased by showing him the fearful height at which he hung, he brought him to Jordanhill, who, laughing at his disaster, ordered him to be one of the guard appointed to conduct the Archbishop to Stirling.
In that service the worthy magistrate proved more courageous, and upbraided the prisoner several times on the road for the ill he had done to him. But that traitorous high priest heard his taunts in silence, for he was a valiant and proud man; such, indeed, was his gallant bearing in the march that the soldiers were won by it to do him homage as a true knight: and had he been a warrior as he was but a priest, it was thought by many that, though both papist and traitor, they might have been worked upon to set him free. To Stirling, however, he was carried; and on the fourth day from the time he was taken he was executed on the gallows, where, notwithstanding his guilty life, he suffered with the bravery of a gentleman dying in a righteous cause, in so much that the papists honoured his courage as if it had been the virtue of a holy martyr; and Bailie Kilspinnie all his days never ceased to wonder how so wicked a man could die so well.
CHAPTER XXXIV
Having thus set forth the main passages in my grandfather's life, I should now quit the public highway of history, and turn for a time into the pleasant footpath of his domestic vineyard, the plants whereof, under his culture, and the pious waterings of Elspa Ruet, my excellent progenitrix, were beginning to spread their green tendrils and goodly branches, and to hang out their clusters to the gracious sunshine, as it were in demonstration to the heavens that the labourer was no sluggard, and as an assurance that in due season, under its benign favour, they would gratefully repay his care with sweet fruit. But there is yet one thing to be told, which, though it may not be regarded as germane to the mighty event of the Reformation, grew so plainly out of the signal catastrophe related in the foregoing chapter, that it were to neglect the instruction mercifully intended were I not to describe all its circumstances and particularities as they came to pass.
Accordingly to proceed. In the winter after the storming of Dumbarton Castle, Widow Ruet, the mother of my grandmother, hearing nothing for a long time of her poor donsie daughter Marion, had, from the hanging of Archbishop Hamilton, the anti-Christian paramour of that misguided creature, fallen into a melancholy state of moaning and inward grief, in so much that Bailie Kilspinnie wrote a letter invoking my grandfather to come with his wife to Crail, that they might join together in comforting the aged woman; which work of duty and of charity they lost no time in undertaking, carrying with them Agnes Kilspinnie to see her kin.
Being minded both in the going and the coming to partake of the feast of the heavenly and apostolic eloquence of the fearless Reformer's life-giving truths, they went by the way of Edinburgh; and in going about while there to show Agnes Kilspinnie the uncos of the town, it happened as they were coming down from the Castlehill, in passing the Weigh-house, that she observed a beggar woman sitting on a stair seemingly in great distress, for her hands were fervently clasped, and she was swinging her body backwards and forwards like a bark without a rudder on a billowy sea, when the winds of an angry heaven are let loose upon't.