What sorrowings then for those who would never return must there have been within these walls--what aching hearts for those who had escaped! The smoke of the houses in Clydesdale, fired by the victorious army of the Regent, could almost be seen from here; and day after day news came of friends taken and friends in flight, until it was whispered that the Queen herself was a prisoner in the hands of the English Warden. A weary and anxious time it must have been; but the danger passed, and the hour of reprisal came.
Through these woods, according to the tradition preserved by Sir Walter Scott, on a January afternoon less than two years after the battle of Langside, a hunting-party was returning to the castle. Amid the fast-falling shadows of the winter day they were bringing home their quarry--the wild bull whose race still roams these glades; and the guests and huntsmen were making merry over the success of their sport. There was the jingle, too, of hawk-bells, and the bark of hounds in leash. But their lord rode in front, silent, with clenched hand and clouded brow. He had not forgotten the misfortune that had befallen his house, and news of a fresh insult had but lately quickened his anger over it. The estate of one of his kinsmen, Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, had been confiscated to a favourite of the Regent, and the new possessor, it was said, had used his power with such severity, in turning out Bothwellhaugh’s wife and new-born infant on a freezing night, that the poor lady had become furiously mad. Brooding darkly and bitterly on these evils, the chief was drawing near the castle, when there was suddenly heard approaching the heavy gallop of a horse, and in another moment Bothwellhaugh sprang to the earth before him. His face was wild and pale, and his steed, bespattered with foam and blood, drooped its head in exhaustion. Vengeance swift and dire had fallen upon the Regent, and, twenty miles away, in Linlithgow Palace, the birthplace of the sister he had dethroned, he lay dying. It is for a higher Judge than man to say whether his death was that of a martyr or of a miscreant; but at the time there were not wanting those who held that Bothwellhaugh satisfied with one blow his own private feud and the wrath of heaven over the distresses of the Queen. The brass matchlock, curiously enough a rude sort of rifle, with which the deed was done, lies yet in the palace of the Hamiltons.