However, six hundred nobles, barons, and gentlemen, of the house of Douglas, mustered in full array, with all their vassals, within the town of Stirling, on the 25th day of March--the feast of St. Benedict--and dragged through mud and mire the king's safe conduct, which they nailed on a wooden truncheon, and tied to the tail of a sorry old jaded cart-horse. They then burned it publicly at the Market Cross, where after four hundred horns and twenty brass trumpets had proclaimed defiance, they stigmatized "the king, the lord Crichton, Sir Alexander Livingstone, Sir Patrick Gray, and all who adhered to them, as false and perjured traitors!" They bade formal defiance to the royal garrison. Then, after completely pillaging the town, they set it on fire in every quarter, and, leaving it in flames and ashes, retired through the adjacent country, which they filled with tumult and outrage. Having thus expended their fury on all that came in their way, they retired each to his own fortress, to prepare for what might follow. Not long after this, the new earl, with his brothers, friends, and kinsmen, daringly fixed on the doors of the parish churches a document, in which they solemnly renounced their allegiance to the king "as a perjured traitor, a violator of the laws of hospitality, and an ungodly thirster after innocent blood." The parliament now resolved to aid their justly-incensed monarch in punishing these contumacious nobles, and in a short time he found himself at the head of thirty thousand carefully-selected men, who assembled on Pentland Muir, and with them he resolved to advance against the Douglases. Sir Patrick Gray and the royal guard, of course, accompanied him on this expedition. The king had with him, William, the lord high constable, whom he had just created earl of Errol, and leader of feudal cavalry; Lord Crichton's son, whom he had created earl of Caithness and lord high admiral of the kingdom; the lords Hailes, Fleming, Boyd, and many other loyal nobles, with all their followers. He had a fine train of artillery (as artillery was viewed in those days), under Romanno of that ilk, the principal cannon being _the Lion_, a great gun cast in Flanders and shipped at Bruges, for Scotland, by order of his father, James I., in 1430. It was of polished brass, covered by beautiful carvings and ornaments, and bore the following inscription:-- "Illustri Iacobo Scottorum, principe digno, Regi magnifico, dum fulmine castra reduco, Factus sum sub eo, nuncuper ergo Leo."