"Is it the opinion of your highness," said the wily baron, "that a king who is ruled by the stars (the moon as a fixed one not excepted) is fit to govern this kingdom, which has heretofore obeyed the statutes of parliament and the sword of the knight?"
"Upon the honour of my order of knighthood," cried the prince, "thy question goeth home into the heart and marrow of the matter, and my answer shall not be behind it: I opine not."
"And doth not the situation in which we stand," said Hume—"we, the greater number of the nobles in the land, liable every instant to forfeit our lives to an aspect of the heavens—to be hanged for hanging the favourites of the king five years ago—render it imperative on us to seek, in the spirited and knightly heir-apparent, a substitute for him who is declared unfit to rule, without danger to the country and ruin to us?"
"Assuredly," answered the flattered prince. "If the king is not deposed, you will be deposed, and I shall be scandalised by the sight of a star-gazing king, and a host of dangling nobles at the end of ropes not so fine as the silk cords of Cochrane the mason's tent, which he requested for the special convenience of his noble craig. What will ye?"
"That thou shouldst head our party," said Gray, "and be our king in place of thy father, who is unfit to govern this kingdom, and unwilling to pardon his friends."
"I object not," replied the prince. "The king, my father, can be cared for tenderly. Let him be sent to my palace of Rothsay, where he can gaze on the heavens from sunset to sunrise, and send me daily an astrological express, to enable me to govern the kingdom by this heavenly wisdom."
"All hail, our king!" now cried the voices of a hundred knights and nobles, who, on a signal, had hurried from the table, and surrounded the prince. "All hail, James the Fourth, King of Scotland, and our lawful sovereign!"
And the whole assemblage kneeled before the young prince, who received the homage with every feeling of gratified pride.
While this extraordinary scene was in the course of being enacted, in the midst of a brilliant assemblage, and the eulogistic flattery of the interested actors, James felt no compunctions of broken filial duty and ruptured affection. Swelled with the pride of his new and suddenly-acquired honour, the thought of the price at which its confirmation must be bought—the deposition and degradation of an up-right and humane, though weak, king, and that king his father—never interfered with the flow of his gratified and excited feelings. Everything was now grand, hilarious, and hopeful; and a far vista of wise legislative and noble knightly achievements, claimed the rapt eye of his mind, when his attention could be taken off the brilliant scene before him. His experience of the mind of man and the operations of fate did not inform him that there is a mysterious agreement between the one and the other, whereby their results are mutually and wonderfully magnified, and the individual who studies himself is brought to tremble at the height of joy, as the precursor of a cause ready to plunge him into the depths of melancholy anticipation and sorrow. We are told that kings are great examples in the hands of a teaching Providence; and hence our authority for approaching, with greater confidence than we could do in relation to ordinary individuals, the cause of the change that awaited the feelings and aspirations of the young prince on the night of his anticipated honour.
About twelve o'clock he was attended to his chamber, the royal apartment of the castle, by Shaw of Sauchie, the governor, and several of the nobles, who, after conversing with him for some time, left him, locking the door after them as they departed—a measure, they explained to him, as being necessary for his own safety, in the midst of so much dissension and distrust as prevailed at that time among the nobility. The circumstance did not alarm the royal prisoner, though he could not but think it strange that, on the first night of his installation, his palace should be converted into a jail, and the king of his country should be the jail-bird of the seneschal of one of his own castles. Free of all sense of personal danger, he contemplated the temporary privation of his liberty rather with a disposition to being amused than annoyed, and lay down to court that rest which joy, equally as sorrow, banishes from the pillow of mortals. His thoughts took now a direction the very reverse of what they had followed during the day. The image of his deceased mother, Queen Margaret, forced itself on his mind. Her pious, reserved, and meek manners, with her devotion to her consort and her affection to her eldest son, all sanctified and made more lovely and interesting by her death, softened his heart, and filled his eyes with the tears of a son's love; while his undutiful conduct that night, in agreeing to the dethronement of his father, silently censured, as it appeared to be, by her gentle spirit, called up a feeling of remorse, which wrung his heart with pain, and added to the tears which he was already shedding in profusion. If left to his choice, he would now have undone what he had been so ready to perform at the request of factious and interested men; and, if the door of his apartment had not been locked, the strength of his feelings might have urged him to seek for safety and forgiveness at the feet of his injured parent.