Note 530 — Chapter XIX

“He was lying a prisoner in Edinburgh castle in daily expectation of the order arriving for his execution, when woman’s wit intervened to save him, and he owed his life to the affection of his favourite step-daughter, the sprightly Lady Sophia, who, about eight o’clock in the evening of Tuesday, the 20th of December, 1681, effected his escape in the following manner, as related to Lady Anne Lindsay, by her father, Earl James, Lady Sophia’s nephew:—‘Having obtained permission to pay him a visit of one half-hour, she contrived to bring as her page a tall, awkward, country clown, with a fair wig procured for the occasion, who had apparently been engaged in a fray, having his head tied up. On entering she made them immediately change clothes; they did so, and, on the expiration of the half-hour, she, in a flood of tears, bade farewell to her supposed father, and walked out of the prison with the most perfect dignity, and with a slow pace. The sentinel at the drawbridge, a sly Highlander, eyed her father hard, but her presence of mind did not desert her, she twitched her train of embroidery, carried in those days by the page, out of his hand, and, dropping it in the mud, “Varlet,” cried she, in a fury, dashing it across his face, “take that—and that too,” adding a box on the ear, “for knowing no better how to carry your lady’s garment.” Her ill-treatment of him, and the dirt with which she had besmeared his face, so confounded the sentinel, that he let them pass the drawbridge unquestioned.’ Having passed through all the guards, attended by a gentleman from the castle, Lady Sophia entered her carriage, which was in waiting for her; ‘the Earl,’ says a contemporary annalist, ‘steps up on the hinder part of her coach as her lackey, and, coming forgainst the weighhouse, slips off and shifts for himself.’”—Lives of the Lindsays, vol. ii. p. 147.