It was in this great hall that Charles I. sat, surrounded by Scottish and English nobles, on a June evening in 1633, at a great banquet given by the Earl of Mar in his honour, the day before he was crowned at Holyrood. It was here that, a few years later, Alexander Leslie, the Covenanting General, gave a banquet to Cromwell and the Covenanting lords, whilst a blue banner waved above them bearing the angry legend, “For an Oppressed Kirk and a Broken Covenant.” There is another room in the Castle, a smaller room, in which tangible symbols of the days of Scottish independence can be seen. There, under a vaulted roof, on a table covered with glass and set within an iron cage, are the Scottish Regalia. The dim light reveals the rubies and sapphires and diamonds and the big pearls set in the ancient golden diadem of the crown, of date unknown, but which must have rested on the head of the Bruce and have been worn by each of the Stuarts. It was James V., the “Red Tod,” who added to the old diadem the two arches of gold, surmounted by globe and cross; and it was in 1685 that, the former cap of purple having become faded and threadbare during the concealment of the Regalia in the Civil War times, the rather theatrical tiara of crimson velvet, ermine, and pearls was substituted. This is the crown worn by the hapless Mary, Queen of Scots, and that crowned her infant son, James VI., after her forced abdication. This is the crown that was set on the head of Charles I. at Holyrood; and this is what was so pointedly alluded to by the preacher as “a tottering crown,” the last time it was ever worn by a king of Scotland--when Charles II. was crowned and scolded and lectured at Scone. “The Presbyterian solemnity with which it was given to Charles II.,” says Mr. Robert Chambers,[4] “was only a preface to the disasters of Worcester; and, afterwards, it was remembered by this monarch, little to the advantage of Scotland, that it had been placed upon his head with conditions and restrictions which wounded at once his pride and his conscience.”