k with the sword, she
shall not die by the sword, but on account of the unlawful coronation
which she performed, let her be closely confined in an abode of stone
and iron, made in the shape of a cross, and let her be hung up out of
doors in the open air of Berwick, that both in her life and after her
death she may be a spectacle and an eternal reproach to travellers."
For four years she suffered the imposition of this heinous punishment,
which was then mitigated to imprisonment in the monastery of Mount
Carmel at Berwick. After three years she was removed to the custody
of Henry de Beaumont. Her final fate is unknown, but it is presumable
that, if she lived, her release from durance was secured by the
victory of Bannockburn.

Amid the misfortunes which pressed thickly upon the house of those
whose name, more than that of any other, is linked with Scotland's
history--the mighty Douglases--must ever appear the sad-visaged Janet,
Lady Glamis. When under the royal ban, remorseless as the will of
fate, the house of Douglas was expelled from its native heath, a woman
of unusual nobility suffered death in the general disaster to her kin.
Gratitude is not a virtue of kings, or else there would have been
some remembrance of that earlier lady of the Douglas line, Catherine
Douglas, who, when the assassins upon midnight murder bent appeared
at the chamber of the queen of James I., opposed to their
entrance--fruitlessly, indeed, but none the less nobly--her slender
arm, which she thrust into the staple to replace the bar that had been
treacherously removed. The ambition of the Douglases, however, knew
no bounds, and in actual fact their power often not only rivalled
but overtopped that of the crown. The feud, with varying degrees of
irritation and occasions of outbreak, had gone on until the time of
James V., when the reverses suffered by the Douglases effectually
destroyed their power and made them fugitives during the reign of that
monarch. That king had an undying resentment to the Earl of Angus, who
had obtained possession of his person as a child and had continued
to be his keeper until he finally slipped the leash to take up the
sovereignty unhampered. One of the sisters of the mighty earl, in the
flower of her youth, became the wife of Lord Glamis. While her kinsmen
were in exile, she secretly did what she could to further their
designs against the Scottish throne. Charges were formulated against
her, but do not appear to h