some
uncertainty about Eviot. {30}

The position of the King, at this moment, was unenviable. He was shut up
in the little round turret room. On the other side of the door, in the
chamber, swords were clashing, feet were stamping. James knew that he
had four defenders, one of them a lame medical man; who or how many their
opponents might be, he could not know. The air rang with the thunder of
hammers on the door of the chamber where the fight raged; were they
wielded by friends or enemies? From the turret window the King could
hear the town bell ringing, and see the gathering of the burgesses of
Perth, the friends of their Provost, Gowrie. We know that they could
easily muster eight hundred armed men. Which side would they take? The
Murrays, as we saw, had done nothing, except that some of them had
crowded round Gowrie. Meanwhile there was clash of steel, stamping of
feet, noise of hammers, while the King, in the turret, knew not how
matters were going.

Cranstoun only saw his own part of the fight in the chamber. How Ramsay
and Gowrie sped in their duel he knew not. Ramsay, he says, turned on
_him_, and ran him through the body; Herries also struck him. Of Gowrie
he saw nothing; he fled, when wounded, down the turret stair, his
companions following or preceding him. Gowrie, in fact, had fallen,
leaving Ramsay free to deal with Cranstoun. Writers of both parties
declare that Ramsay had cried to Gowrie, 'You have slain the King!' that
Gowrie dropped his points, and that Ramsay lunged and ran him through the
body. Erskine says that he himself was wounded in the right hand by
Cranstoun; Herries lost two fingers. When Ramsay ran Gowrie through, the
Earl, says Erskine, fell into the arms of a man whom he himself knew not;
Gowrie's party retreated, but it seems they returned to the head of the
narrow staircase, and renewed hostilities by pushing swords and halberts
under the narrow staircase door. This appears from the evidence of
Lennox.

After pounding at the door so long, Lennox's party at last sent Robert
Brown (a servant of James's, who had brought the hammers) round to
discover another way of reaching the King. Brown, too, now went up the
narrow staircase, and in the gallery chamber he found the King, with
Herries, Erskine, Ramsay, Wilson, and the dead Earl. He reassured James;
the hammerers were his friends. They handed, says Lennox, one of the
hammers to the King's party, through a shattered pan