"He loop-holed the spacious vaults of the great cathedral, for the purpose of sweeping with musketry its steep church-yard to the south, the broad Lawnmarket to the west, and High Street to the eastward; while his cannon from the spire commanded the long line of street called the Canongate--even to the battlements of the palace porch. He seized the ports of the city, placed guards of his soldiers upon them, and retained the keys in his own hands. He ordered a rampart and ditch to be formed at the Butter Tron, for the additional defence of the castle; and another for the same purpose at the head of the West Bow, a steep and winding street of most picturesque aspect. His soldiers pillaged the house of the regent, whose movables and valuables they carried off; he broke into the Tolbooth and council-chamber, drove forth the scribes and councillors, and finally deposed the whole bench of magistrates, installing in the civic chair the daring chief of Fermhirst, (who had now become the husband of his daughter Janet, a young girl barely sixteen;) while a council composed of his mosstrooping vassals, clad in their iron jacks, steel caps, calivers, and two-handed whingers, officiated as bailies, in lieu of the douce, paunchy, and well-fed burgesses of the Craims and Luckenbooths." The Blue Blanket of Edinburgh--that banner which, according to tradition, waved victoriously on the ramparts of Acre--had fallen into singular custody! John Knox again fled, for in truth his life was in danger. Kirkaldy, notwithstanding their differences, exerted his authority to the utmost to protect him, but the Hamiltons detested his very name; and one night a bullet fired through his window, was taken as a significant hint that his absence from the metropolis would be convenient. Scandal, even in those times, was rife in Edinburgh; for we are told that-- "John Low, a carrier of letters to St Andrews, being in the 'Castell of Edinburgh, the Ladie Home would neids threip in his face, that Johne Knox was banist the toune, because in his yard he had raisit some _sanctis_, amangis whome their came up the devill with hornes, which when his servant Richart saw he ran wud, and so deid.'" It is hardly credible, but it is a fact, that a meeting of the Estates of Scotland, called by Lennox, was held in Edinburgh at this very juncture. Kirkaldy occupied the upper part of the town, whilst the lower was in the hands of the regent, protected, or rather covered, by a battery which Morton had erected upon the "Doo Craig," that bluff black precipice to the south of the Calton Hill. The meeting, however, was a short one. "Mons Meg" and her marrows belched forth fire and shot upon the town, and the scared representatives fled, in terror of the falling ruins. A sortie from the castle was made, and the place of assembly burned.