Edinburgh many a king has been born and many a king has been married. When Henry IV. of England besieged the Castle, the young Duke of Rothesay, eldest son of Robert III., was in command,--that gallant and fascinating and profligate prince who was afterwards, tradition and Sir Walter both aver, starved to death at Falkland. From the Castle he looked down on the hated English hosts, and the story is that he sent a challenge to Henry to meet him in mortal combat, with a hundred men of good blood on either side. Although it was the month of August, the invaders had been troubled with excessive rain and cold. The climate of Edinburgh had risen to the occasion; and the chilly Plantagenet on the plain sent a verbal message to the hot Stuart on the height, and hurried home amid dripping banners and rusty lances. The first of the royal Stuart widows who watched over a baby king in the Castle was Queen Jane,--that gentle consort of the poet King James I., who had seen her first from the window of his English prison, as she walked in the gardens of Windsor. And therewith cast I down mine eyes again Where as I saw, walking under the Tower Full secretly, new comen her to playn, The fairest and the freshest youngé flower That ever I saw, methought, before that hour: For which sudden abate anon astart The blood of all my body to my heart.... King James had married Jane Beaufort in London at St. Mary Overie,[1] and had brought her back to Scotland with him as his Queen. Thirteen years later he was assassinated in her presence at Perth. It was to Edinburgh Castle that she fled with her little son for safety after the tragedy. But “Fair and false and fickle is the South”; and, less than a year after the murder of the poet King, his “fairest and freshest youngé flower” married Sir John Stuart, the Black Knight of Lorn, and so passed out of view, leaving her little son to be wrangled over by the great rival barons of Scotland.