In the preceding pages a description was given of the buildings of the castle as they stand at the present day. In this chapter the purpose is to remind the reader of the celebrated events that took place within or beside these existing edifices, and to enable him to picture to himself some of the scenes that have been enacted on the “well-trod stage” of Stirling rock. Since the gay days of the Jameses, and still more since the troubled years of Robert Bruce, important changes have been wrought in the buildings that have occupied Snowdon Crag. War has done its work of destruction; government officials have disfigured noble halls; fire has eaten up the dwelling-rooms of kings; and monarchs themselves have sometimes thought it right to remove the ancient landmarks which their fathers had set. Yet there still remains at Stirling a large cluster of historical buildings sufficient to make the castle the most notable place of its kind in Scotland, if not in the British Isles. [Illustration: THE PARLIAMENT HOUSE.] The first thing to strike the visitor after he has passed through Queen Anne’s gateway is the ancient Keep, with its corbelled turrets, that rises from the lawn and the Prince’s Walk. Associations lend interest to the beauty, for there is the staircase leading to the schoolroom where George Buchanan taught and punished his wilful pupil, James VI., and on the terrace below the old wall that King’s eldest son, Prince Henry, was accustomed to walk when released by his tutor for a few minutes’ breathing-space in the fresh air. Other incidents are quickly brought to mind on this same approach to the castle. Just in front is James IV.’s entrance, shorn, it is true, of its lofty towers, but still the same archway that witnessed, besides other memorable events, two striking scenes in the time of James V. The first was when Margaret Tudor, standing hand-in-hand with her son, the young King, rang down the portcullis in these self-same grooves, suddenly placing the ponderous grating between her precious child and the Regent Albany’s dumfoundered commissioners. The second occurrence took place some years later when James had become a grown man. A panting horse clattered up the ascent, bearing a stern-eyed, hard-visaged monarch. At the side ran Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie, almost collapsing with fatigue, but gazing into the rider’s face in his eagerness to catch a look of recognition. Here, at the entrance, Kilspindie sank down exhausted, while the King, unheeding, rode on through the archway into the castle yard. In his exile Douglas had thought the English people too proud, “and that they had too high a conceit of themselves, joined with a contempt and despising of all others.” But his treatment at the hands of his sovereign and former friend must have been the bitterest experience of his life. No affront that he received in England had been harder to bear than this. It would be difficult to find in history a more cruel, silent rebuff.