ng's departure. Young John Ramsay, one of
James's gentlemen, had met the Laird of Pittencrieff in the hall, and had
asked where his Majesty was. Both had gone upstairs, had examined the
fair gallery filled with pictures collected by the late Earl, and had
remained 'a certain space' admiring it. They thence went into the front
yard, the Close, where Cranstoun met them and told them that the King had
gone. Instead of joining the gentlemen whom we left loitering and
wondering outside the front gate, on the street, Ramsay ran to the
stables for his horse, he said, and, as he waited at the stable door
(being further from the main entrance than Lennox, Mar, and the rest), he
heard James's voice, 'but understood not what he spake.' {23}

The others, on the street, just outside the gate, being nearer the house
than Ramsay, suddenly heard the King's voice, and even his words. Lennox
said to Mar, 'The King calls, be he where he will.' They all glanced up
at the house, and saw, says Lennox, 'his Majesty looking out at the
window, hatless, his face red, and a hand gripping his face and mouth.'
The King called: 'I am murdered. Treason! My Lord of Mar, help, help!'
Mar corroborated: Inchaffray saw the King vanish from the window, 'and in
his judgment, his Majesty was pulled, perforce, in at the same window.'
Bailie Ray of Perth saw the window pushed up, saw the King's face appear,
and heard his cries. Murray of Arbany, who had come to Perth from
another quarter, heard the King. Murray seems to have been holding the
King's falcon on his wrist, in hall; he had later handed the bird to
young Ramsay.

On beholding this vision of the King, hatless, red-faced, vociferous, and
suddenly vanishing, most of his lords and gentlemen, and Murray of
Arbany, rushed through the gate, through the Close, into the main door of
the house, up the broad staircase, through the long fair gallery, _and
there they were stopped by a locked door_. They could not reach the
King! Finding a ladder, they used it as a battering-ram, but it broke in
their hands. They sent for hammers, and during some half an hour they
thundered at the door, breaking a hole in a panel, but unable to gain
admission.

Now these facts, as to the locked door, and the inability of most of the
suite to reach the King, are denied by no author. They make it certain
that, if James had contrived a plot against the two Ruthvens, he had not
taken his two nobles, Mar and Lennox, an