n attendance of few more than a hundred horse, and about as many
foot, the Earl of Argyle and the Lord James set out from St Andrews to
frustrate, as far as the means they had concerted might, the wrathful
measures which they well knew her Highness would take. But this small
force was by the next morning increased to full three thousand fighting
men; and so ardently did the spirit of enmity and resistance against the
papacy spread, that the Queen Regent, when she came with her French
troops and her Scottish levies, under the command of the Duke of
Chatelherault, to Cupar, found that she durst not encounter in battle
the growing strength of the Congregation, so she consented to a truce,
and, as usual in her dissimulating policy, promised many things which
she never intended to perform. But the protestants, by this time knowing
that the papists never meant to keep their pactions with them,
discovering the policy of her Highness, silently moved onward. They
proceeded to Perth, and having expelled the garrison, took the town, and
fired the abbey of Scone. But as my grandfather was not with them in
those raids, being sent on the night of the great demolition at St
Andrews to apprise the Earl of Glencairn, his patron, of the extremities
to which matters had come there, it belongs not to the scope of my story
to tell what ensued, farther than that from Perth the Congregation
proceeded to Stirling, where they demolished the monasteries;--then they
went to Lithgow, and herret the nests of the locusts there; and
proceeding bravely on, purging the realm as they went forward, they
arrived at Edinburgh, and constrained the Queen Regent, who was before
them with her forces there, to pack up her ends and her awls, and make
what speed she could with them to Dunbar. But foul as the capital then
was, and covered with the leprosy of idolatry, they were not long in
possession till they so medicated her with the searching medicaments of
the Reformation, that she was soon scrapit of all the scurf and kell of
her abominations. There was not an idol or an image within her bounds
that, in less than three days, was not beheaded like a traitor and
trundled to the dogs, even with vehemence, as a thing that could be
sensible of contempt. But as all these things are set forth at large in
the chronicles of the kingdom, let suffice it to say that my grandfather
continued for nearly two years after this time a trusted emissary among
the Lords of the Cong