done to us let us do
the like to him." He ended this discourse by an intimation that he was
about to besiege Edinburgh. "Let us also take up some band of
men-of-war, and every man after his power send secret messages to their
friends, that they and every one that favours us may convene together
quietly in Edinburgh earlie in the morning, so that the Chancellor
should not know us to come for the sieging of the castle till we have
the siege even belted about the walls; so ye shall have subject to you
all that would have arrogantly oppressed you."

This resolution was agreed to with enthusiasm, the Queen undertaking to
provision the army "out of her own garners"; but the Governor had no
sooner "belted the siege about the castle," an expression which renders
most graphically the surrounding of the place, than the Chancellor,
taken by surprise, prostrated by the loss of the King, and finding it
impossible to draw the powerful Earl of Douglas to his aid, made
overtures of submission, and begged for a meeting "in the fields before
the gates," where, with a few chosen friends on either side, the two
great functionaries of the kingdom might come to an agreement between
themselves.

By this time there would seem to have begun that preponderating
influence of the Douglas family in Scotland which vexed the entire reign
of the second James, and prompted two of the most violent and tragic
deeds which stain the record of Scottish history. James I. was more
general in his attempt at the repression and control of his fierce
nobility, and the family most obnoxious to him was evidently that of his
uncle, nearest in blood and most dangerous to the security of the
reigning race. The Douglas, however, detaches himself in the following
generation into a power and place unexampled, and which it took the
entire force of Scotland, and all the wavering and uncertain expedients
of law, as well as the more decisive action of violence quite lawless,
to put down. Whether there was in the pretensions of this great house
any aim at the royal authority in their own persons, or ambitious
assertion of a rival claim in right of the blood of Bruce, which was as
much in their veins as in those of the Stewarts, as some recent
historians would make out, it is probably now quite impossible to
decide. The chroniclers say nothing of any such intention, nor do the
Douglases themselves, who throughout the struggle never hesitated to
make submission to the Crown w