'It means a bond of friendship and alliance, to the effect that they bound themselves to stand by each other, in peace and in war, in weal and woe, with all the might of their estates, castles, and retainers, in arms against all men; the cause of each to be the cause of all; and to this deed, which is now in the charter-room of Carlaveroc, they swore by their honours and souls, affixing thereto their signatures and seals.' 'This seemed somewhat like a league against the king.' 'Nay, madame, such bonds have been common in Scotland for ages, and have arisen from the wish to create a feudal relation between lords and vassals who have no affinity by tenure, and to strengthen the weak against the strong. Such leagues are certainly contrary to the laws of the land, yet they exist. But a time came to test the strength of my father's bond with the Earl of Nithsdale. King Charles being madly devoted to his father's rash project of assimilating the kirk of Scotland, in point of ceremony and in government, to the Church of England, with regular gradations of titled clergy, lately resolved, by an Act of Revocation, to resume and appropriate to the crown all the tithes and benefices which the barons and other laymen had seized during the plunder of temporalities at the Reformation; and from these he proposed to endow the intended Scottish episcopal bishoprics, deaneries, rectories, and so forth. The rage of our fiery barons was great, and their resolution was not less than their rage. There were many whose whole estates and possessions had been church property, and thus it was with us, for most of my father's barony of Blanerne had in ancient times been a fief of the Abbots of Tungland, and was of course comprehended in this new and most obnoxious resumption, though it had been a free gift to his grandfather by the Regent Lennox, and the Lords of the Congregation, for his valour at the great siege of Leith, where he routed and slew the Colonel-General of the Italian infantry.