Craigmillar Castle — Its Historical Associations. 47 



after the battle of Rullion Green. He counselled 

 mercy, but in vain, as Sharp, who presided at the 

 council, was so much inflamed with rage that he 

 overruled all the opposition and remonstrances of 

 Sir John. Eleven prisoners constituted the first 

 batch of victims. Little time was lost : they were 

 quickly found guilty, and ordered to be hanged at the 

 cross, and their heads and right arms to be cut off. 



Sir John was said to be " most learned, though 

 unassisted with the aid of the civil law ; his own 

 natural endowments made him equally conversant in 

 the practice of the Scottish judicature as in that of the 

 Romans; he might be said rather to lay down the law 

 than to resolve questions in it; his clients consulted 

 him rather as a judge than an advocate; he prostrated 

 at his feet, as a second Hercules, the adverse parties 

 with his knotted club, unsmoothed by any art ; he was 

 eloquent without rhetoric, learned without literature." ^ 



Sir John altered and enlarged Craigmillar Castle 

 considerably, and in Chambers's ' History of Peebles- 

 shire ' it is stated that "in 1661 the Council of 



^ Iconographia Scotica. 



