Lord Maxwell fled the country, but was tried in his absence and sentenced to death, with forfeiture of his estates. He came back to Scotland after four years, was basely betrayed into the power of the government by a kinsman, and was beheaded at Edinburgh May 21, 1613.[[17]]
“Thus was finally ended,” remarks Sir Walter Scott, “by a salutary example of severity, the ‘foul debate’ betwixt the Maxwells and Johnstones, in the course of which each family lost two chieftains: one dying of a broken heart, one in the field of battle, one by assassination, and one by the sword of the executioner.”
A 1, 2, and passim. The very affectionate relations of Lord Maxwell and his ‘lady and only joy,’ are a fiction of the ballad-maker. His wife was daughter of the first Marquis of Hamilton. Maxwell instituted a process of divorce against her, and she died while this was pending, before he fled the country in 1608. By his treatment of his wife he made her brother, the second marquis, and the Hamiltons generally, his enemies.[[18]]
5, 6. Carlaverock castle had from far back belonged to the Maxwells, and is theirs still. They had a house, or castle, at Dumfries, and the custody of the “houses” of Lochmaben, Langholm, and Thrieve.
9, 10. Douglas of Drumlanrig, Kirkpatrick of Closeburn, and Grierson of Lag fled in the sauve qui peut of Dryfe Sands, and the partisans of Lord Maxwell, who there lost his life, would naturally describe them as deserting their chief. They (or two of them) had entered into a “band” with Maxwell, as aforesaid. The ballad-maker seems to intimate that they were in a band with each other, or with somebody, to betray Maxwell.
11, and B 1. ‘Robin in the Orchet,’ ‘Robert of Oarchyardtoan,’ is properly Sir Robert Maxwell of Orchardton, Lord John’s cousin, but it is evident, from the conjunction of mother and sisters, that the person here intended is his brother Robert, to whom, some years after the execution and forfeiture of Lord John, the estates were restored.
14. Maxwell’s wife, as said above, was no longer living. The “offers” which he made, to save his life, contain a proposal that he should marry the slain Sir James Johnstone’s daughter, without any dowry.
“Goodnight” is to be taken loosely as a farewell. Other cases are ‘John Armstrong’s last Goodnight,’ and the well-known beautiful fragment (?) of two stanzas called ‘Armstrong’s Goodnight;’ again, Essex’s last Goodnight, to the tune of The King’s last Goodnight, Chappell, Roxburghe Ballads, I, 570, and Popular Music, p. 174. The Earl of Derby sings a Goodnight (though the name is not used) in ‘Flodden Field,’ No 168, III, 356, stanzas 36–58. Justice Shallow sang those tunes that he heard the carmen whistle, and sware they were his Fancies, or his Good-nights: Second Part of Henry IV, III, 2. Lord Byron, in the preface to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, says “the good-night in the beginning of the first canto was suggested by Lord Maxwell’s Goodnight in the Border Minstrelsy.”