“While my head is my own, I will dress and adorn it; but when it becomes yours, you may treat it as you please.”
Montrose, proud of the cause in which he was to suffer, clad himself, on the day of his execution, in rich attire—“more becoming a bridegroom,” says one of his enemies, “than a criminal going to the gallows.” As he walked along, and beheld the instrument of his doom, his step was not seen to falter nor his eye quail; to the last he bore himself with such steadfast courage, such calm dignity, as had seldom been equaled, and never surpassed. At the foot of the scaffold, a further and parting insult was reserved for him: the executioner brought Dr. Wishart's narrative of his exploits and his own manifesto, to hang round his neck; but Montrose himself assisted in binding them, and smiling at this new token of malice, merely said:—“I did not feel more honored when his majesty sent me the garter.”
He then asked whether they had any more indignities to put upon him, and finding there were none, he prayed for some time, with his hat before his eyes. He drew apart some of the magistrates, and spoke awhile with them, and then went up the ladder in his red scarlet cassock, in a very stately manner, and never spoke a word; but when the executioner was putting the cord about his neck, he looked down to the people upon the scaffold, and asked:
“How long shall I hang here?”
His head was afterward affixed to a spike at the top of the Tolbooth, where it remained a ghastly spectacle, during ten years.
There is another execution scene, that of the courtly and enterprising Walter Raleigh, not usually accessible to general readers.
Sir Walter Raleigh, on the morning of his execution, received a cup of sack, and remarked that he liked it as well as the prisoner who drank of St. Giles's bowl in passing through Tyburn, and said, “It is good to drink if a man might but tarry by it.” He turned to his old friend, Sir Hugh Ceeston, who was repulsed by the sheriff from the scaffold, saying:
“Never fear but I shall have a place.”
When a man extremely bald pressed forward to see Raleigh, and to pray for him, Sir Walter took from his own head a richly embroidered cap, and placing it on that of the aged spectator, said:
“Take this, good friend, to remember me, for you have more need of it than I.”