Ne'er to rise again.
Percy surmised that Young Waters related to the fate of the Earl of Moray, slain by the Earl of Huntly in 1592, not without the concurrence, as was suspected, of the king, whose jealousy, it has been surmised, was excited against the young noble by indiscreet expressions of the queen. To the same subject obviously referred the ballad of the Bonny Earl of Murray, which consists, however, of but six stanzas, the last of which is very like the second of Young Waters:
O lang will his lady
Look ower the Castle Downe,
Ere she see the Earl of Murray
Come sounding through the town.
Edom o' Gordon is only a modern and improved version of an old ballad which Percy found in his folio manuscript under the name of Captain Adam Carre. It clearly relates to a frightful act of Adam Gordon of Auchindown, when he maintained Queen Mary's interest in the north in 1571—the burning of the house of Towie, with the lady and her family within it. All that can be surmised here is that the revision was the work of the same pen with the pieces here cited—as witness, for example, the opening stanzas:
It fell about the Martinmas,
When the wind blew shrill and cauld, [ [14]
Said Edom o' Gordon to his men: