power of its actual possessor. The
house of Angus crumbled into the dust as soon as their young prisoner
escaped their hands. They took refuge in England, where they vainly
attempted on various occasions to negotiate for their return, but with
no success. The name continued obnoxious to James during his whole life.
Sir Walter has done his best to rehabilitate that name in the noble
Douglas of _The Lady of the Lake_, who has been identified with
Archibald of Kilspindie, "the uncle of the banished Earl," the story of
whose appearance at the games at Stirling is said to have some
foundation of reality. But the historians of the house, who alone
mention this, state the facts in a very different way.

Thus the Angus branch of the Douglas family fell, as the Earls of
Douglas had fallen, and for a generation there was little heard of it
save in mutterings of treason in moments of difficulty, which never came
to much--until in the following reign the indomitable race rose again in
another branch and under another name, and furnished in the Regent
Morton one of the strongest as well as the most questionable figures of
a deeply disturbed time. Never was a race more difficult to subdue.

The escape of James from Falkland took place between Easter and June in
the year 1527. In 1528, the Douglases being clean swept out of the
country, the young King went on a professed hunting expedition to the
Borders, where, besides innumerable deer, its ostensible reason, his
ride through the southern district carried punishment and death to many
a Border reiver and especially to the famous John or Johnnie Armstrong,
the Laird of Kilnokie, and chief or at least best-known representative
of his name. Whether it was wise policy to hang the reiver who was the
terror of the Borders, yet "never molested no Scottis man," it is not
necessary to decide. He was a scourge to the English, of whom it was
said that there was none from the Scottish Border to Newcastle who did
not "pay ane tribute to be free of his cumber." Johnnie Armstrong had
the folly to come into the King's presence with such a train, his men so
completely armed and so many in number, as to compete with royal
magnificence, not very great in Scotland in those days. "What wants yon
knave that a king should have?" said the young James, who had certainly
had enough of such powerful subjects: and he would not listen to either
excuse or explanation from the Borderer, whose defiance as he was le