14 Anniversary Address. 



refer to the encampment, to. the seizure of the favourite in the 

 King's tent, and to the gorgeous magnificence of Cochrane's 

 pavilion, who in vain entreated to be hanged with one of its 

 silken cords instead of the common hempen rope produced 

 for the occasion. There is no record nor trace of any other 

 bridge than the one of which the ruins still remain ; and 

 when it is considered that the army amounted to 50,000 men, 

 the encampment must have occupied the whole space between 

 the town and the Leader, the bridge across which, at the 

 spot marked by the ruin, offered the readiest and most 

 convenient place for completing the fell purposes of the con- 

 spirators. The vengeance, which involved these unhappy 

 men in a common doom, was not aroused altogether by the 

 anger of the haughty nobles at the elevation of a set of upstart, 

 favourites. The real purpose of the malcontents was the 

 dethronement of the King, in furtherance of a plot set on foot 

 by his brother Alexander, Duke of Albany, to secure the 

 crown for himself, in pursuance of which design he had fled 

 from Scotland and obtained the countenance and support of 

 the English Court, always ready to favour any cause tending 

 to establish their claim of superiority over the sister kingdom. 

 James himself, though unwarlike, inherited his grandfather's 

 enlightened tastes and love of literature so little suited to the 

 age. His favourites, chosen not as ministers of his pleasures 

 but as intellectual companions, were men of cultivated minds, 

 whose society the King found more agreeable than that of 

 his rude illiterate nobles.* Cochrane, an architect; Rogers, 

 a musician of eminence ; Schevez, Archdeacon of St. Andrews, 

 and afterwards Archbishop, an able geometer ; Ireland, an 

 ecclesiastic of great learning, and a distinguished mathe- 

 matician, educated in France, who had been sent by Louis 

 XL as his ambassador to the Scottish Court, were among 

 those who received the largest share of the royal favour. 

 Others, as Andrew, a physician, professing a knowledge of 



* "He was one that loved solitariness and desert, and never to hear of wars, nor 

 the fame thereof; hut delighted more in music and policies of higging than he 

 did in the government of the realm." Lindsay of Pitscottie, p. 115, 3rd. 



