Immediately after the murder of Moray came the bloodiest period in Scottish history. Agrandising families like the Douglases wrought confusion and bloodshed for a time, and there were many secondary causes of contention. Now, however, for the first time, the people of Scotland were divided, and that nearly equally, between two allegiances; and all who knew the nature of that people must have been prepared for a domestic war of extermination.

The troubled waters were now at hand in which it delighted such a politician as Lethington to angle. When the English general taunted him as to his doubtful conduct, it was with something like a jeer that he said of that general's army, "They have reasonably well acquitted themselves of the duty of old enemies, and have burned and spoiled as much ground within Scotland as any army of England did in one year these hundred years bypast, which may suffice for a two months' work, although you do no more."

The change in the political conditions found the duke, Lethington, and some others, inmates of the Castle of Edinburgh. It now served them for protection, as indeed it had Lethington from the beginning. He resumed his old office as Secretary of State, but now he was acting as secretary to the queen. He was nominally under accusation of treason and murder. The law even then afforded accused persons the means of relief from the continued suspension of a criminal charge over their heads by empowering them to force it to an issue. Lethington thus passed through the form of a trial. A verdict of acquittal, a "cleansing by assize," as it was termed, was a useful possession to almost any Scots statesman of that day. Hence, as in the memorable instance of Bothwell, we sometimes find that when a man is at the summit of his power he is clamorous to be put on trial for some grave crime.

Beside him was another person who was to be sadly conspicuous in the shiftings of the tragic drama - Kirkcaldy of Grange, the captain or governor of the Castle of Edinburgh. The commanders of the four great strongholds, Edinburgh, Stirling, Dunbar, and Dumbarton, were each a separate power in the State, and his appointment was a serious affair of policy. When with much difficulty the dubious Balfour as removed from the command, the choice of his successor seemed peculiarly happy. He was the first, through dangers and difficulties, to court the English alliance as the means of safety from the ambitious projects of France. He was one of the few laymen who had more than a self-interested attachment to the Reformed Church. He had been an enemy of the queen's cause-not ferocious or cruel, for these defects were not in his nature, but not therefore the less thorough and stanch. Had he been intrusted with his charge by the queen's party, and then held it for the enemy, there would have been no scruple in heaping terms of infamy upon his memory; but as it was to Queen Mary that he handed over the charge intrusted to him by the new Government, the transaction tended to increase his fame as a loyal and chivalrous soldier. Murray, as we have seen, doubted him. He was now the enemy of the king's party, and the manner in which he announced his new position was emphatic and picturesque. Morton was by force of circumstances the leader of the king's party. As he was riding with a train of followers along the fields under the castle rock, a gun was fired, and a ball came bounding into the cavalcade. This was Grange's announcement that Morton and he were enemies.

Lennox made Lieutenant-Governor
It remains that the king's party should have a new head to succeed to the murdered regent. Here the selection and its method tended to complete the splitting of Scotland into two parties. The Earl of Lennox was the man. He was appointed in the mean time Lieutenant-Governor of Scotland, that the business of the Government might not be interrupted while the question of his advancement to the regency was deliberately considered. It will be remembered that he married the daughter of Henry VIII.'s sister, and that he was the father of Darnley. He was now an old man. He abode, and might have continued to abide, in peaceful affluence on his English estate of Temple Newsome. It might have been forgotten, had not his return to political life reminded his countrymen, that when he was some thirty years younger he was punished for what his countrymen counted an attempt to sell them to King Henry. He was, as we have seen, claimed as a subject by Queen Elizabeth. He was much in her confidence, and virtually he was sent by her to rule Scotland in her interest. The method of the transaction gave the other party a fair ground for putting it in this form; for although he was chosen by the heads of the king's party at a meeting where they counted themselves to be the Estates of the realm, yet they put themselves into diplomatic communication with Queen Elizabeth, and it was by her sanction and permission that he accepted of the proffered office.

The form of the intervention was as important as the act itself. At a meeting at Stirling, the heads of the king's party, at which Lennox was present, sent to Queen Elizabeth a despatch requesting her advice on the question whom they should choose as regent. She said she was glad to help them, but loath to dictate. She would rather that they selected and she approved. In the mean time, however, she will not bide her opinion from them. If their choice should alight on the Earl of Lennox, their king's grandfather, she thinks " none cart be chosen in that whole realm that shall more desire the preservation of the king, and be more made to have the government for his safety, being next to him in blood of any noblemen of that realm or elsewhere."

If the king's party thus courted the stigma of acting under English dictation, they gained some equivalent ill at length extracting from the Queen of England an acknowledgment of their new Government. Her despatch, dated on the 2d of July, was in this respect totally different in purport from the other just referred to, dated in April. The Scots had urged it upon her that "great inconvenients " had come of the lack on her part of any "resolute answer concerning the establishment of the realm under their young king." She was now, however, to be "resolute" in her undertaking. She accepts the political situation in the shape in which it is put. Scotland has a king; but he is a child, and another must in the mean time rule for him. There are a few words, to keep up consistency with her championship of Queen Mary. She has promised to hear what that queen has to say for herself, and will yet bear her, both for her own sake and the welfare of her realm. Then follows: "Yet not knowing what the same maybe that shall so be offered, we mean not to break the order of law and justice by advancing her cause, or prejudging her contrary, before we shall deliberate and assuredly see, upon the hearing of the whole, some plain, necessary, and just cause so to do."

That there was no chance of her finding just cause for advancing the claims of Queen Mary, the king's party might be well assured in what follows: " And therefore finding that realm ruled by a king, and the same affirmed by laws of that realm, and therefore invested by coronation and other solemnities used and requisite, and generally so received by the whole Estates; we mean not by yielding to hear the complaints or informations of the queen against her son, to do any act whereby to make conclusion of governments, but, as we have found it, to suffer the same to continue; yea, not to suffer it to be altered by any means that we may impeach, as to our honour it doth belong, and as by our late actions hath manifestly appeared, until by some justice and clear cause we shall be directly induced otherwise to declare our opinion; and this we would have them to know to be our determination and courtesy that we mean to hold, wherein we trust they for their king may see how plainly and honourably we mean to proceed, and how little cause they have to doubt of us, whatever to the contrary they hear or shall hear."

Hereafter we find the dictatorial feature somewhat strengthened in Queen Elizabeth's dealing with Scotland as I if she addressed rather her own subordinates than the rulers of a sovereign state. She issued a request equivalent to a demand to abstain from war until she should settle the affairs of Scotland, and was angry when her wishes were disregarded. It was to be war as well as peace just as she chose; for when the new regent recrossed the Border, it was as joint-leader with Sir William Drury of a part of the English army that had invaded Scotland.

To the Hamiltons the selection of Lennox as Governor of Scotland was a special blow. It pointed in the direction of the Lennox family being the next heirs of the crown. That he was the grandfather of the king was of course his chief qualification for the office. By the law of private rights the nearest relation on the male side, who would be the heir or the heir's parent, took the management of the estate. Thus had Arran acted as governor in Queen Mary's minority, and now, as the duke, he was, so far as her nomination sufficed, her regent or lieutenant over Scotland while she was under incapacity as a prisoner abroad. But the king's regent or lieutenant was his own nearest relation by the father's side. If the opportunity came for the house of Lennox pressing a claim for the succession to the crown, this appointment to the regency would of course strengthen their hands for a contest.

To the extent of one successful blow the new regency began auspiciously. The centre of support to Queen Mary's party was Dumbarton Castle. How available it was for immediate communication with France, was shown when she, an infant, was snatched from the grasp of Henry VIII., and sent to be reared at the French Court. Since the change of government it had been the means of constant intercourse with the Continent, whence it was supplied with arms and provisions. Such portions of Queen Mary's French dowry as, she could realise in that period of trouble to France as well as other countries was chiefly employed within the stronghold on which so much of her hope for the future rested. At a moment of difficulty we find her obtaining a loan of a thousand crowns from the renowned Spanish general Alva, chiefly for this purpose.

The cleft rock on which this fortress stood is too well known to need description. To keep up its name as a fort, a few buildings of late date, forming a sort of barrack, still stand in the cleft and the slope at the foot of the rock. Of old the fortifications, occupying accessible ledges on th way up, culminated to the top of the rock, as at Edinburgh and Stirling; while at its height, and its isolation from other eminences, were the reasons, under the old ideas of fortification, for selecting it as the site for one fo the chief national strongholds.

The place appears to have been hitherto unmolested, and there was no indication of preparation for a siege. This was all the more propitious for the project on band, since it is scarcely possible to support ceaseless vigilance in a small body of men who day after day and month after month find themselves let alone. It was resolved to make a sudden dash at the place and take it by assault, the shape in which it was most usual for Scots fortresses to change hands. The service was intrusted to the regent's kinsman, Thomas Craufurd of Jordanhill. We have twice crossed this man in the course of our story. It was he who kept the significant note of what passed between Queen Mary and her sick husband in Glasgow, and it was he who accused Lethington as one of the murderers of Darnley. Thus, for all he had hitherto done, his name might have been merely found in the obscure byways of history as belonging to something like a spy and informer. But his opportunity had now come, and he was to be remembered as the hero of one of the most daring and successful achievements in the warfare of his day.

The truce expired with the month of March, and on the 1st of April the regent and Craufurd adjusted the project in Glasgow. The first step was to send on small parties to hold the ways between Glasgow and Dumbarton, so that no intimation of the design might reach the garrison. The drum was then "truck" in the streets of Glasgow, and a hundred men were picked out of those who agreed to serve on the expedition.

Siege of Dumbarton
The leader had the assistance of a guide who had once served as a sentinel in the castle, "who knew all the crags, where it was best to climb, and where fewest ladders would serve." The party marched in silence, so as to reach the spot when the moon disappeared about one o'clock. They occupied an hour in preparation, and then they had little more than three hours for their work before sunrise. Meanwhile a fog helped the darkness. Their siege - apparatus consisted of ladders with "craws" or clamps of iron to catch the angles of the trap-rock. Their plan of operation was that, each man having his hackbut or musket slung on his back, all were to move in single file, the guide leading, followed by Craufurd. A rope passed along the whole line. It strung them together, so that without light each man had the means of keeping his place in the line. For the first part of the ascent they had to use the ladders. There were several discouraging casualties at this point, one of which, as told by Buchanan, and by him only among contemporaries, gives much picturesqueness to the feat. One of the men was seized with a.fit of epilepsy. He held to the ladder with a convulsive grasp, completely blocking the way. The leader ordered him to be tied to the ladder; it was then turned round, and the passage was once more free.

The top of the ladder was still some twenty feet from the first ledge or terrace. Craufurd, who seems to have been an expert cragsman, scrambled up to it along with the guide. Apt to their purpose a small tree grew on the ledge; to this they fixed ropes, dropping them for the assistance of the others. They were still fourscore fathoms from the wall. Up to this distance Craufurd and the guide again scrambled, letting down ropes to the others. It was not till they began mounting the wall and descending within that a sentinel saw them and roused the garrison. This part of the works seems to have been left unguarded, in reliance on its natural inaccessibility. Once gained, it was the most available part of all the fortress for those who had it. It was in itself, in fact, a separate fortress overlooking that of the garrison. The assailants turned the cannon upon the lower processes of the fortress, and that, not as a besieger's artillery would play, on the face of the walls and ramparts, but on the open sloping space behind them, before which they were raised to give protection against enemies from below, not from above. Thus the garrison were utterly helpless.' Fleming the governor escaped by a boat, leaving his wife, who, by the admission of all parties, was courteously treated by the victors. Of the few casualties, all fell to the garrison Some of them got over the wall, and a few were taken.

The king's party bad some other successful affairs, one especially at Brechin and another at Paisley; but the taking of Dumbarton was the crowning, triumph, to which these were mere auxiliaries. There was no longer a place of absolute refuge for the queen's party-a door of communication with their friends abroad, and a secure entrance into Scotland for a foreign force.

John Hamilton Hanged
Among the merciful precepts which philosophers have endeavoured to teach to statesmen and warriors, one is, that in war all great blows should be directed against some centre of the enemy's power, where his capacity for hostility may be paralysed with the smallest cost in human life and misery. It would be difficult to find an achievement so thoroughly fulfilling this condition as the taking of Dumbarton Castle. More than any other event it is entitled to the credit of turning the balance between King James and Queen Mary, which means the balance between the English and the French alliance. The acquisition cost only four human lives. The assailants lost none: four of the garrison were killed; and a local historian thinks it right to add that their death was " more by accident than design." On the day of the capture the regent triumphantly dined in the castle on the good cheer supplied for the garrison by the French. Much valuable spoil was obtained; but the most precious of all the acquisitions made by the victors was John Hamilton, the Archbishop of St Andrews, who was found with his harness on ready to fight. He was conveyed in custody to Stirling Castle. It will be observed that the 2d of April was the day of his seizure; on the 7th, at two o'clock in the afternoon he was hanged on the common gibbet in the market-place of Stirling. There is no record of his trial and condemnation, but it is generally stated by contemporary writers that there was the form of a trial. It went on three charges of crime in which he was principal or accessory-the murder of Darnley, a conspiracy against the young prince, and the murder of the Regent Murray. Even in the mere form of a trial there was a touch of scrupulosity for Hamilton, as we have seen, had been " forefaulted" or outlawed in Parliament. A wolf's head, as it used to be metaphorically said, was put upon his shoulders, and he was placed beyond the protection of the law. Taken, too, as he was, in an enemy's fortress which he was accoutred to defend, it would have been but a slight addition to the violences of the age had he been killed on the spot.

* - certain edits to the original text have been made for clarity