When the last day of the truce arrived, no step towards the pacification of the Kingdom had been taken. The King’s party continued to make demands which the Castilians, hopeful of help from the King of France, absolutely refused to entertain, and the resumption of hostilities was inevitable. On the 1st of January, at six o’clock in the morning, Kirkcaldy ‘warned all men to take heed to themselves, by a shot of a piece out of the Castle.’ A little later in the morning, ‘the war began by shot of arquebuss, but did no harm.’ Next day the Castilians fired eight rounds at the steeple of St Giles’s. No one was hurt in the church itself, but some shot that missed it, having broken down the neighbouring chimneys, one poor man was killed and two were wounded by their fall. If Killegrew’s reports to Burghley are to be believed, either the Castle gunners must have been poor marksmen, or Grange must at first have instructed them to discharge their artillery rather in the hope of frightening the citizens than for the purpose of causing them serious loss or injury. One despatch states that on the 16th of January they fired eighty-seven cannon and culverin shot at the town, ‘but did no more harm but killed one dog going to the Regent’s house.’ Men, women, and children, the writer asserts, walked quietly in the streets, as though there were no shot; and even went to the church, which had been fenced in with a rampart of turf, faggots, and other stuff. One of the chroniclers, on the other hand, presents a wholly different picture. ‘None,’ he says, ‘might walk safely on the streets of Edinburgh for shooting out of the Castle.’ The truth may not improbably be that the gunners could fire effectively enough when it was thought there was occasion for it. Before the end of the first month the besieged were already beginning to suffer from want of water. On the 25th, Killegrew informed Burghley that they had found it necessary to get their supply by sallying out of a postern beside St Cuthbert’s Church and drawing it from St Margaret’s well, hard by. The besiegers, noticing this, poisoned the well with white arsenic and new lime stones, and filled it up with dead carrion. The garrison then devised a plan for drawing water out of a ditch near the Castle; but before it could be put into execution, the Regent was informed of it by a deserter, and drained the ditch. In the same communication, Killegrew stated that the surveyor of Berwick and Mr Fleming, the master-gunner, had been with the besiegers for the last week, and were helping Morton to lay out the trenches, of which the works were progressing apace.