[276]. History of the Church of Scotland, ed. 1666, p. 259.
[277]. “For many miserable months Scotland presented a sight which might have drawn pity from the hardest heart: her sons engaged in a furious and constant butchery of each other; ... nothing seen but villages in flames, towns beleagured by armed men, women and children flying from the cottages where their fathers or husbands had been massacred; ... prisoners tortured, or massacred in cold blood, or hung by forties and fifties at a time.” Tytler, VII, 370.
[278]. These are nearly the words of Lieut.-Col. Lumsden, upon whom I am very glad to lean. That Ker was a valuable officer is well known.
[279]. The History of the Feuds and Conflicts among the Clans, p. 54 f.
[280]. Diurnal of Occurrents, p. 304 f. Also The Historie of King James the Sext, p. 111.
As to the ‘Bank of Fair,’ otherwise called Corrichie, the Earl of Huntly and two of his sons, John and Adam, were made prisoners at the battle there in 1562. The father, a corpulent man, “by reason of the throng that pressed him, expired in the hands of his takers.” John was executed, but Adam was spared because of his tender age. (Spottiswood, p. 187.)
Tytler observes of Adam Gordon: “In his character we find a singular mixture of knightly chivalry with the ferocity of the highland freebooter.... Such a combination as that exhibited by Gordon was no infrequent production in these dark and sanguinary times.” VII, 367. But it would have been a good thing to cite other instances.
[281]. Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, II, 355 f., 420, 480, 720. Diurnal of Occurrents, p. 350. Chronicle of Aberdeen, in The Miscellany of the Spalding Club, II, 53.
[282]. Register of the Privy Council, II, 199, 725; III, 10; V, 46, 187. Register of the Great Seal, No 1554, vol. V. Miscellany of the Spalding Club, III, 163. Historie of King James the Sext, pp 339 f., 342. The so-called ballad in Dalzell’s Scotish Poems of the Sixteenth Century, II, 347, which was in circulation as a broadside.
[283]. That a Margaret Campbell was the wife of John Forbes of Towie in 1556–63 appears from the Register of the Great Seal of Scotland, Nos 1124, 1404, 1469. But Lieut.-Col. Lumsden remarks that Sir John Campbell of Calder had no daughter of the name of Margaret, and that there is no record of such a marriage in the Cawdor papers. It may be observed in passing that Buchanan’s and Spottiswood’s error (as it seems to be) of substituting Alexander Forbes for John might easily arise, since, according to the Genealogy, John’s father, one of his brothers, a son, and a grandson, all bore the name Alexander.