the Cowgate-port, along the outside of the town wall. I
then mended my pace, but not to any remarkable degree, and so returned
to the house of Mrs Brownlee.

Scarcely was I well in, when Heron, her son, came flying to her with a
report that a man was seized in the palace garden who had threatened the
Duke's life, and he was fearful lest it had been me; and I was much
grieved by these tidings, in case any honest man should be put to the
torture on my account; but the Lord had mercifully ordained it
otherwise.

In the course of the night Heron Brownlee, after closing his shop, came
again and told me that no one had been taken, but that some person in
the multitude had given the Duke a dreadful paper, which had caused
great consternation and panic; and that a council was sitting at that
late hour with the Duke, expresses having arrived with accounts of the
same paper having been seen on the doors of many churches, both in
Nithsdale and the shire of Ayr. The alarm, indeed, raged to such a
degree among all those who knew in their consciences how they merited
the doom we had pronounced, that it was said the very looks of many were
withered as with a pestilent vapour.

Yet, though terrified at the vengeance declared against their guilt,
neither the Duke nor the Privy Council were to be deterred from their
malignant work. The curse of infatuation was upon them, and instead of
changing the rule which had caused the desperation that they dreaded,
they heated the furnace of persecution sevenfold; and voted, That
whosoever owned or refused to disown the declaration should be put to
death in the presence of two witnesses, though unarmed when taken; and
the soldiers were not only ordered to enforce the test, but were
instructed to put such as adhered to the declaration at once to the
sword, and to slay those who refused to disown it; and women were
ordered to be drowned. But my pen sickens with the recital of horrors,
and I shall pass by the dreadful things that ensued, with only remarking
that these bloody instructions consummated the doom of the Stuarts; for
scarcely were they well published when the Duke hastened to London, and
soon after his man-sworn brother, Charles, the great author of all our
woes, was cut off by poison, as it was most currently believed, and the
Duke proclaimed King in his stead. What change we obtained by the
calamity of his accession will not require many sentences to unfold.

CHAPTER LXXXVI