But bright things come quickly to confusion. As always, the undoing of the brave little land was brought about by England. Ten years after that marriage day at Holyrood there gathered at midnight, in the moonshine at the city Cross of Edinburgh, a spectral throng of heralds and pursuivants. Trumpets sounded, and the terrified spectators heard a ghostly voice read “the awful summons” to King James and to his Scottish chivalry: the long death-roll of all who were to fall at Flodden. Outside the city, on the Boroughmuir (part of the old hunting-ground of the forest of Drumsheugh, now a built-over suburb, but whose every inch is historic ground) lay the whole encamped host of the Scottish army. When the sun next morning rose in the August sky, it lit up a thousand pavilions white as snow, a thousand streamers flaunting over them, and reared in their midst the huge royal banner of Scotland, with its “ruddy lion ramped in gold,”--all in readiness to start on the fatal march towards Flodden. The army moved on southward, leaving every home, from the palace to the hovel, bereft of father and sons: and the women waited. Suddenly the stillness was broken, as the first wind whispers over the land and troubles the trees with warning of a storm; and the people--the women and the old men and the children--looked into one another’s blanched faces and ran out into the street to learn the truth. One man, escaped from the field of carnage, had brought the tidings to Edinburgh. And then the storm burst. Woe, and woe, and lamentation! What a piteous cry was there! Widows, maidens, mothers, children, Shrieking, sobbing in despair! Through the streets the death-word rushes, Spreading terror, sweeping on-- “Jesu Christ! Our King has fallen-- O Great God, King James is gone! Holy Mother Mary, shield us, Thou who erst did lose thy Son! O the blackest day for Scotland That she ever knew before! O our King--the good, the noble, Shall we see him never more? Woe to us, and woe to Scotland! O our sons, our sons and men! Surely some have ’scaped the Southron? Surely some will come again?” Till the oak that fell last winter Shall uprear its shattered stem, Wives and mothers of Dunedin, Ye may look in vain for them![13] All this Edinburgh has seen and known and felt. Remember it, as you walk in her streets to-day--it is not good for us for the heroic to be forgotten. And how did Edinburgh take the blow? The first sound the people heard, breaking through their cries of grief, was a Proclamation that “all maner of personis ... haue reddye thair fensible geir and wapponis for weir,” for defence of the town, and that “wemen of gude pas to the kirk and pray.”[14] An indomitable race, that nothing could crush! The arms in readiness were not needed, however; England was too crippled to move.