e to have perceived their danger. They
started from the table, and for one despairing moment looked wildly
round them for some way of escape. The stir and commotion as that tragic
company started to their feet, the vain shout for help, the clash of
arms as the fierce attendants rushed in and seized the victims, the
deadly calm of the two successful conspirators who had planned the
whole, and the pale terrified face of the boy-king, but ten years old,
who "grat verie sore," and vainly appealed to the Chancellor for God's
sake to let them go, make one of the most impressive of historical
pictures. The two hapless boys were dragged out to the Castle Hill,
which amid all its associations has none more cruel, and there beheaded
with the show of a public execution, which made the treachery of the
crime still more apparent; for it had been only at most a day or two,
perhaps only a few hours, since the Earl and his brother in all their
bravery had been received with every gratulation at these same gates,
the welcome visitors, the chosen guests, of the King. The populace would
do little but stare in startled incapacity to interfere at such a scene;
some of them, perhaps, sternly satisfied at the cutting off of the
tyrant stock; some who must have felt the pity of it, and had
compunction for the young lives cut off so suddenly. A more cruel
vengeance could not be on the sins of the fathers, for it is impossible
to believe that the Regents did not take advantage of the youth of these
representatives of the famous Douglas race. Older and more experienced
men would not have fallen into the snare, or at all events would have
retained the power to sell their lives dear.

If the motives of Livingstone and Crichton were purely patriotic, it is
evident that they committed a blunder as well as a crime: for instead of
two boys rash and ill-advised and undeveloped they found themselves in
face of a resolute man who, like the young king of Israel, substituted
scorpions for whips, persecuting both of them without mercy, and finally
bringing Livingstone at least to destruction. The first to succeed to
William Douglas was his uncle, a man of no particular account, who kept
matters quiet enough for a few years; but when his son, another William,
succeeded, the Regents soon became aware that an implacable and powerful
enemy, the avenger of his two young kinsmen, but an avenger who showed
no rash eagerness and could await time and opportunity, was