Blood-red were the northern lights that flashed and shimmered so wildly in the heavens that night, red as the blood that had soaked into the sawdust of a scaffold; never before in the memory of living man had aurora gleamed with hue so startling.  But the sorrow in the hearts of his people passed not away like the fading of the northern lights.  His memory lives still in Northumberland; still, when they see the gleam and flicker of the aurora, folk there call it “Lord Derwentwater’s Light”; and even yet it is a tradition that dwellers by the stream which flows past Dilston were wont to tell how, on that fatal day, its waters ran red like blood.

When “a’ was done that man could do, and a’ was done in vain,” there remained but to convey his headless body, if it might be, to the spot where his forebears lie at rest.

     “Albeit that here in London Town,
     It is my fate to die,
     O, carry me to Northumberland,
     In my fathers’ grave to lie.”

The Earl’s body had been buried at St. Giles-in-the-Fields, and of those who went to recover it and to bring it home, there was one famous in Northumberland story, Frank Stokoe of Chesterwood.  A remarkable man was Stokoe, of enormous personal strength and of great height—­in stature a veritable child of Anak—­a man without fear, brave to recklessness, a good friend and a terrible enemy.  Added to all this, he was an extraordinarily expert swordsman.  He was a man, too, of much influence and acknowledged authority in the county—­a useful man to have on the side of the King—­one to whom the people listened, and to whom often an appeal for help was made in ticklish affairs.

There was, for instance, that affair of the feud between Lowes of Willimoteswick Castle and Leehall of Leehall, which kept a great part of Tynedale in hot water for so many years.  Leehall appears to have been physically the better man; at any rate, on more than one occasion Lowes seems to have escaped from the clutches of his enemy solely by the superior speed of the horse he rode, or possibly he was a light, and his enemy a heavy, weight, which would make all the difference in a rousing gallop across deep ground or heathery hill.  In any case, as a general rule, Lowes was more often the hunted than the hunter.  Yet, to the followers of Lowes—­there must always be two sides to a story—­it was he, and not Leehall, who was the finer man, for, of an encounter between the pair near Bellingham, when Lowes’ horse was killed by a sword-thrust directed at the rider’s thigh, the old ballad says: 

     “Oh, had Leehall but been a man
       As he was never ne-an,
     He wad have stabbed the rider
       And letten the horse alean.”