Some of the precautions against turbulent offences are not less curious than this method of dealing with them when they were committed. An heiress might be compelled to find security, or enter into recognisances that she shall not give her hand and fortune to an outlaw or scapegrace. Thus, on the 13th of September 1563, Mariene Carruthers, being "ane of the twa heretrixes of Moweswald," produced two landed proprietors who became bound that she "shall not mary ane chief traiter nor other broken man of the country, nor join herself with any sic person, under the pain of ane thousand pounds."
Whatever it may have been in England, there was little divinity hedging a Scottish king of the sixteenth century. Perhaps, as a rich peer and a poor peer are very different things in popular estimation, though equal in the Lord Chamberlain's list of precedence, so it may have been with kings. The Scottish king was poor, ill-housed, parsimoniously served, meagerly guarded. His pulse might beat with the blood of a hundred monarchs; but the far-stretching palaces, the long gorgeous trains of attendants, the wealth at command, were wanting, and divine right was but a theory, that could neither give parasites rich offices, nor dazzle the eyes of worshippers. Thus it happens that, side by side with the most magnificent theoretical assumptions of regal prerogative, stand the most ludicrous instances of the crown's weakness and smallness. On the 11th July 1526, Robert Bruce of Airth and others are respited for having committed a highway robbery on his Majesty's artillery--"for art and part of the stouthrief of certain manganels and artillery coming from the castle of Stirling to the king's Majesty, at his burgh of Edinburgh, for the defence of his person; and for art and part of the stouthrief of the king's letters from his officers, and laying violent hands on them." We have not far to wander for like instances, making the monarch a simple human being, against whom one commits, not the majestic crime of high treason, but the vulgar offences of theft and robbery. Thus, in the very next entry, we find "Walter Drummond acquitted by an assize of art and part of the theft and concealment of the king's crown from his crown-room, with the precious stones therein contained, forth of the palace and monastery of Holyrood."