"A gready earl soon after was, Burnin' in sik greediness, That his plough irons himself stall, And hid them in a peet pot all. He playned to the sheriff sare, That stolen his plough irons were; The sheriff than paid him shillings twa, And after that he done had sa, Soon a great court he gart set, Wytting of that stelth to get."
The fraud was discovered, and the perpetrator of it hanged.
The murder of James I. is one of the few crimes anterior to the commencement of the records, of which a contemporary account, circumstantial and truthlike, has been preserved.[P] Few historical tragedies bear comparison with this, either in the audacity with which the assassination was planned, or the relentless atrocity with which it was perpetrated. Nothing can afford so lively an illustration of the perilous tenure of the Scottish crown in the fifteenth century. We would fain have had the telling of this story, and of that part, especially, where, after the household traitor had removed the great iron bolt, a young damsel, a daughter of the house of Douglas, thrust her arm in the socket. "She was but young," says Hector Boece, "and her bones not solid, and therefore her arm was soon broken in sunder, and the door dung open by force." Poor child! few have been the acts of loyal devotion so heroic as hers; but the whole narrative has been so fully and minutely incorporated with history, as to afford us no excuse for here repeating it.[Q]
[P] It may be found at the end of vol. i. of Pinkerton's _History of Scotland_, and in vol. ii. of the collection of reprints called _Miscellanea Scotica_.
[Q] See Tytler's History, iii. 307, _et seq._
There are, on the other hand, among the early criminal records, two instances of conspiracy against the life of the monarch, of which the particulars are not sufficiently ample to give them the interest of mystery. To excite curiosity, we must see a certain way, while we are unable to see so far as we desire: but in these cases we have little more than the accusation and the condemnation. One of the sufferers was Janet Lady Glammis, condemned to be burned on the 17th of July 1537; we find her name in the criminal record five years earlier, charged with "art and part of the intoxication of John Lord Glammis her husband." The charge has not a very formidable sound, but it doubtless meant either poisoning or sorcery or both; for they were then held to be one concern, as the Romans showed that they deemed them by the title they conferred on the witch, "venefica." This trial is remarkable from the circumstance of a number of gentlemen having preferred paying a penalty to acting on the jury. Perhaps they were inclined, as a later bulwark of our constitution is said to have done, to find a verdict of 'sarved him right.' It was through the instrumentality of poison that the unfortunate lady was charged with intending to effect her design against the life of the king; but of her motive, or ultimate object there is no indication, beyond her relationship to the Douglas family, and probable connexion with their intrigues. The other charge of treason occurred so closely at the same juncture, that for this reason alone historians have supposed that they had both some untraced connexion with a common plot. The culprit in this instance was John Master of Forbes, who was charged with a design to shoot the king as he passed through the town of Aberdeen. It was a service which he was likely to have performed as successfully as Bothwellhaugh, for he had already shown his abilities in the murder of his neighbour, Seton of Meldrum. In those days, the people who took upon them to fire at kings--very different from the maudlin wretches whose diseased brains conceive such horrid projects in a civilised age--knew what they were about, and were generally successful. They were well accustomed to "break into the bloody house of life;" and the attempt on a crowned monarch was merely a higher range of practice, tasking their best abilities. The simple truth is this: that in the present age we are not accustomed to shooting people, and therefore, when any wretch takes into his frenzied brain a design to fire at a Louis Philippe, he gets confused and makes a bungle of it. It is not a practice suited to the age, and no man of any sense would adopt it.