re should hang in
the king's bed-chamber, and that far from being troubled at his legs and
arms being dispersed among the four principal cities, he only wished he
had limbs to send to every city in Christendom, as testimonies of his
unshaken attachment to the cause in which he suffered. When Sir Archibald
Johnson of Warriston, the Clerk-Register, entered the prisoner's cell, and
found him employed, early in the morning, combing the long curled hair
which he wore according to the custom of the cavaliers, the visitor
muttered:

"Why is James Graham so careful of his locks?"

Montrose replied with a smile:

"While my head is my own, I will dress and adorn it; but when it becomes
yours, you may treat it as you please."

Montrose, proud of the cause in which he was to suffer, clad himself, on
the day of his execution, in rich attire--"more becoming a bridegroom,"
says one of his enemies, "than a criminal going to the gallows." As he
walked along, and beheld the instrument of his doom, his step was not seen
to falter nor his eye quail; to the last he bore himself with such
steadfast courage, such calm dignity, as had seldom been equaled, and
never surpassed. At the foot of the scaffold, a further and parting insult
was reserved for him: the executioner brought Dr. Wishart's narrative of
his exploits and his own manifesto, to hang round his neck; but Montrose
himself assisted in binding them, and smiling at this new token of malice,
merely said:--"I did not feel more honored when his majesty sent me the
garter."

He then asked whether they had any more indignities to put upon him, and
finding there were none, he prayed for some time, with his hat before his
eyes. He drew apart some of the magistrates, and spoke awhile with them,
and then went up the ladder in his red scarlet cassock, in a very stately
manner, and never spoke a word; but when the executioner was putting the
cord about his neck, he looked down to the people upon the scaffold, and
asked:

"How long shall I hang here?"

His head was afterward affixed to a spike at the top of the Tolbooth,
where it remained a ghastly spectacle, during ten years.

There is another execution scene, that of the courtly and enterprising
Walter Raleigh, not usually accessible to general readers.

Sir Walter Raleigh, on the morning of his execution, received a cup of
sack, and remarked that he liked it as well as the prisoner who drank of
St. Giles's bowl in passing through Ty