With one voice the whole city now accused, and without a moment's hesitation condemned, Jane Seton. The preparations for her trial went on rapidly; and the king, who was absorbed in his own grief, and remained secluded among the woods of Falkland, abandoned her to her fate; but the wretched Redhall suffered more than either the hapless Jane or the bereaved king, for remorse grew side by side with his anger. Those sentiments of generosity, of pity, and of lingering love, which ever and anon dawned in the arid desert of his heart, and impelled him to free her, to sue for pardon, or to fly his country, were invariably stifled under a torrent of jealousy and hate when he thought of Roland Vipont; and then his half-healed wounds would sting him anew, as if probed by poniards; the perspiration would burst from his temples, and he writhed on his sick bed in an agony indescribable. "She is indeed a sorceress!" he would exclaim; upon which his nurse and housekeeper, an old and wrinkled dame who attended him, and who never left his bedside, would make signs of the cross, and feel for the reliques which were sewed in the lining of her long piked stays, which, with her ruff and coif, made her resemble those quaint figures which still live in the pictures of Holbein. Credulity has existed in every age of the world; and thus chiromancy, astrology, physiognomy, and the wildest theories of abstruse science, have risen and flourished on the ignorance and folly of the human mind; but there were none that equalled the _witch-mania_, which, strange to say, grew in Scotland, and flourished side by side with religious freedom and reform. It is a curious fact, that before the epoch of Knox sorcery was almost unknown among us. In our earliest record of criminal trials, that comprehending the years 1493-1504, there is not one prosecution for sorcery. In the days of James V. it began to be much spoken of, and rapidly became a source of terror. Lady Jane's was nearly the first indictment; but the earliest statute against it was passed in 1563, by the first reformed parliament, and that portion of the law which refers to consultations "with sorcerers and witches" was not enacted until 1594--fully thirty years after the Reformation had been established by the law of Scotland. Then, indeed, from that period, kirk sessions and presbyteries, ministers, elders, sheriffs, and justiciars, went with heart and hand into the matter; for in the _witch-mania_, that atrocious madness which spread over Europe, though Scotland was the last to catch the contagion, she was in no way behind neighbouring countries in the cruelty of her prosecutions.