[Footnote 1:  Carte’s Letters, i. 345.  Balfour, iii. 432, 439; iv. 8-13.  Whitelock, 435, 452, 453, 454, 455.  Clarendon, iii. 348-353.  Laing, iii. 443.  The neighbouring clans ravaged the lands of Assynt to revenge the fate of Montrose, and the parliament granted in return to Macleod twenty thousand pounds Scots out of the fines to be levied on the royalists in Caithness and Orkney.—­Balf. iv. 52, 56.]

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1650.  May 17.] [Sidenote b:  A.D. 1650.  May 18.] [Sidenote c:  A.D. 1650.  May 20.]

splendid, his mien fearless, his language calm, firm, and dignified.  To the chancellor, who, in a tone of bitterness and reprobation, enumerated the offences with which he was charged, he replied, that since the king had condescended to treat with them as estates, it became not a subject to dispute their authority; but that the apostasy and rebellion with which they reproached him were, in his estimation, acts of duty.  Whatever he had done, either in the last or present reign, had been done with the sanction of the sovereign.  If he had formerly taken up arms, it had been to divert his countrymen from the impious war which they waged against the royal authority in England; if now, his object was to accelerate the existing negotiation between them and their new king.  As a Christian, he had always supported that cause which his conscience approved; as a subject, he always fought in support of his prince; and as a neighbour, he had frequently preserved the lives of those who had forfeited them against him in battle.  The chancellor, in return, declared him a murderer of his fellow-subjects, an enemy to the covenant and the peace of the kingdom, and an agitator, whose ambition had helped to destroy the father, and was now employed for the destruction of the son.  Judgment, which had been passed in parliament some days before, was then pronounced, by the dempster, that James Graham should be hanged for the space of three hours on a gibbet thirty feet high, that his head should be fixed on a spike in Edinburgh, his arms on the gates of Perth or Stirling, his legs on those of Glasgow and Aberdeen, and his body be interred by the hangman on the burrowmuir, unless he were previously released from excommunication by the kirk.  During this trying scene, his enemies eagerly watched his demeanour.  Twice, if we may believe report, he was heard to sigh, and his eyes occasionally wandered along the cornice of the hall.  But he stood before them cool and collected; no symptom of perturbation marked his countenance, no expression of complaint or impatience escaped his lips; he showed himself superior to insult, and unscarred at the menaces of death.