178 Transactions. 
Surrender was out of the question. The captain would hold the 
steeple. Such were the Regent’s orders, and they would be 
implicitly obeyed. The odds against him were fifty to one—his 100 
men against Wharton’s 5000. But there was hope that by the 
morrow a detachment from the Regent might arrive to raise the 
siege. 
That night the English laid their plans for the morning’s work. 
They had few guns, a falcon, a falconette, and four falcons, a 
battery of only six small pieces,which they planted so as to assail 
the battlements of the steeple. The guns appear to have been 
placed to the west or south-west of the church where the steeple 
was fully exposed. Such at least would have been a natural 
inference from the position of the place even had there been no 
confirmatory fact. It happens, however, that Annan has, in a 
street name, preserved a memory of that eventful 1 2th of September, 
and commemorated the position ofthe siege train until this day inthe 
“ Battery Brae,” which, descending from the High Street to the 
Kirk Burn on the way to the Moat, exactly conforms to the 
requirements of the contemporary account of the siege given by 
Wharton in his despatch. 
With daybreak, the fight began, archers and hackbutmen 
assailed the defenders from every side; the artillery played upon 
the embattled top ; and Wharton’s ancient animosity at last found 
its echo amid smoke and flame and the crackle of ordnance. 
The garrison bated no jot of heart or hope; the ‘“ pensall of 
defyaunce” fluttered free ; Lyon, the captain, and his colleagues, 
did their duty like men. The Master of Maxwell by some 
accounts* was there, and so were the Laird of Johnstone and 
Murray of Cockpool. The English writers were not slow to 
recognise the strenuous gallantry of Lyon and the Borderers, 
who kept the tower with him. The Scots “made sharp war,” is the 
laconic phrase of adespatch. They valiantly defended themselves, 
says Holinshed. The steeple was ‘‘well defended,” says yet 
another old historian.t Both church and steeple were stoutly 
held. They were, says an English chronicler{ “places of themselves 
verie strong and mightlie reinforced with earth.” Deftly the 
Regent’s gunners handled the few guns at their command. The 
*Lesley’s Historie of Scotland, p. 202 ; Holinshed, ii., 241. 
+Herries Memoirs (Abbotsford Club), p. 22. 
t Holinshed, 1. 241. 
