ow the family of Albany was to be
treated. It is stated that the complaints and grievances of the people
brought him to a decision on this point, and helped him to carry out his
revenge upon the house which had, in popular belief at least, the guilt
of his brother's blood upon it as well as that of his own long
confinement. Walter Stewart, whose only other appearance in history is
that of a rebellious and undutiful son whom his father was incapable of
keeping in subjection, was arrested in Edinburgh Castle about a year
after James's restoration, and after an interval of several months his
arrest was followed by that of Duke Murdoch and his son Alexander, both
of whom were also seized in Edinburgh Castle, where they had probably
retired for safety. A few of their retainers arrested with them were
speedily liberated, and it became apparent that upon this doomed family
alone was King James's wrath directed. They were tried at Stirling, by a
court of their peers, under the presidency of the King himself. The
offences charged against them were misgovernment and oppression of the
people, the greatest of public sins: but it was no less the end of a
long tragedy. The younger branch of the race had been engaged in a
struggle with the elder for the last two generations at least: and it
had been the royal line that had suffered most during that period.
Bitterly, in blood and heartbreak and long suppression, they had been
weighed down under superior force: but now the time of reprisals had
come. As they stood there confronting each other, the stern young King
on one side and his kinsmen on the other, with a quarter of a century of
wrong between them, the shadow of the young prince at Falkland, and the
old father at Rothesay, and the eighteen years of captivity full in the
minds of all, what a day of reckoning at last! It makes the retribution
almost more tragic, like the overwhelming fate of the Greek drama, that
the men upon their trial had nothing to do with these crimes, unless it
might be the last. Murdoch of Albany had not exerted himself to liberate
James, but that was his only evident offence, and his sons were not
instrumental, so far as appears, in any injury to their royal cousin.
The sins of the fathers were to be visited upon the children. We are
told that the two sons, young men in the flower of their youth, were
executed one day, and their father and maternal grandfather, a very old
man, the Earl of Lennox, whose share