Stirling more often than the other two castles has been sought by kings as a tower of refuge. When the party of the Comyns, in Alexander III.’s minority, stealthily carried the King from Kinross, it was to the fortress above the Links of Forth that they bore their rescued charge. The faction favouring England, from whose power the sovereign was snatched, did not attempt a counter-surprise; but although the walls of the castle secured Alexander’s person, for a number of nights he must have quivered in his bed lest his former guardians should attempt to storm the fort. It was to Stirling in a later century that James V. took headlong flight when bolting from the exasperating tutelage of the Douglases. Like his early predecessor, James for many nights lay trembling on his couch. The Douglases, he knew, could command a large following. They were bold enough and disloyal enough to attack their King in his castle. When the wind groaned round the turrets and the gables he must have started from his restless sleep, thinking that his enemies were thundering at the gate. Still, he was now a free King, and he soon felt secure in the homely castle that had sheltered him from kidnapping nobles in the early years of his life. [Illustration: OLD BUILDINGS IN UPPER SQUARE.] Stirling was held to be the safest place of residence for James V.’s daughter, the child Queen Mary. In this case grasping nobles were not so much to be feared as King Henry VIII. of England. Edinburgh lay too near the Border, and was subject to devastation at the hands of the English soldiers, while the ruthless Tudor’s agent, the Earl of Lennox, was ever seeking to capture Dumbarton. The death of the dreaded Henry did not put an end to Scotland’s fears. The “Black Saturday” of Pinkie soon followed, and although the child Queen remained in innocent happiness, not realising that for her sake hundreds of her subjects had given up their lives, her mother and the Earl of Arran were filled with the greatest fear lest the victorious English soldiers should seek out the young sovereign of Scotland. At the height of their alarm the anxious guardians sent the little Queen to the borders of the Highlands; but Stirling, as it turned out, was a safe enough abode, and soon she was brought again within its friendly protection. Twenty years later, however, when Mary escaped from Loch Leven, Dumbarton and not Stirling was the goal towards which she pressed; but the Earl of Moray came up with her near Glasgow, and having defeated her troops at Langside, turned her course southwards to England. In the wars that followed Queen Mary’s flight Stirling became the centre of the young King’s party, while Edinburgh and Dumbarton Castles were held for his captive mother. Dumbarton, as has been observed, was afterwards forced to capitulate, and later Edinburgh underwent a siege, which ended in its also falling to the winning side and in Queen Mary’s ill-fated cause being irretrievably lost.