There surely cannot be the smallest question, that if the king, with the treaty in his hand which promised him quiet possession of all the castles of Scotland, and with the declaration of the parliament of St. Andrew’s before him, had given the garrison of Stirling notice, that unless the castle was surrendered within three days, he would hang every one of them as rebels, he would have been fully justified. Yet, instead of this, he patiently submitted to the toils and perils of a long siege, in which many of his men were killed, and in which his own life was repeatedly endangered.
The castle was exceedingly strong, and the battering artillery of modern days was entirely unknown. It is probable that Oliphant, confident in the natural strength of the place, hoped that he might weary out Edward and his army, and so win for himself a lasting fame. “The siege,” says Mr. Tytler, “had continued from the 22nd of April to the 20th of May, without much impression having been made. But determination was a marked feature in the powerful character of the king. He wrote to the sheriffs of York, Lincoln, and London, commanding them to purchase and send instantly to him, at Stirling, all the balistæ, quarrells, and bows and arrows, which they could collect; and to the governor of the Tower, requiring a similar supply.”[124]
Two months more elapsed before these engines could be collected and brought to bear upon the castle. Meanwhile the king exposed himself in the siege as freely as any of his men. On one occasion a javelin struck him on the breast, and lodged itself between the steel plates of his armour. The king plucked it out, and shaking it in the air, called out to the besieged, that he would hang the man who had aimed it. On another day, a great stone, discharged from one of the engines in the castle, struck his horse such a blow, that he backed and fell. His soldiers rushed forward, and carried the king off—crying out against his rashness; to which he only replied, “We have undertaken a just war in the name of the Lord, and we will not fear what man can do unto us.”[125]
At last, in July, a considerable breach was effected, and the ditch was nearly filled up with the rubbish and faggots thrown into it. A general assault would now have carried the castle; but, seeing their imminent peril, the besieged sent to beg for terms of surrender. They asked for “security of life and limb,”—a request which the king would, doubtless, have granted readily, if preferred at the beginning of the siege, instead of at the end of it. But it was now too late. They had forfeited their lives, by all the military laws that ever were known. They had been making war for three months past, not in behalf of the king of Scotland, for there was no king except Edward; nor yet in behalf of the regency of Scotland, for the regents had submitted, and made their peace with the king. They had made war with their lawful sovereign, simply to gratify their own feelings of animosity; in a word, they were rebels, taken in the act. Hence Edward’s stern reply was a just and proper one: “I will not receive you to my _grace_, but only to my _will_.”