FullReads

The night of April 13, 1596, was dark and stormy. All the Border burns and rivers were in spate; the winds blew shrewd and chill through the glens of Liddesdale, and sleet drifted down in the teeth of the gale. The trees that grew so thick round Woodhouselee bent and cracked, and sent extra drenching showers of rain down on the steel jacks of a band of horsemen who carefully picked their way underneath them, on to the south. Buccleuch was leader, and with him rode some forty picked men of his friends and kinsmen, to meet some hundred and fifty or so of other chosen men. Scotts, Elliots, Armstrongs, and Grahams were there, and although Buccleuch had requested that only younger sons were to risk their lives in the forlorn hope that night, Auld Wat o’ Harden and many another landowner rode with their chief. “Valiant men, they would not bide,” says Scott of Satchells, whose own father was one of the number. Kinmont Willie’s own tower of Morton, on the water of Sark, about ten miles north of Carlisle, was their rallying point. Buccleuch had arranged every detail most carefully at a horse-race held at Langholm a few days before, and one of the Grahams, an Englishman whose countrymen were not yet aware that the Graham clan had allied themselves to that of the Scotts, had conveyed his ring to Kinmont Willie to show him that he was not forgotten by his feudal lord. One and all, the reivers were well armed, “with spur on heel, and splent on spauld,” and with them they carried scaling ladders, picks, axes, and iron crowbars. The Esk and Eden were in furious flood, but no force of nature or of man could stay the reivers’ horses that night.

“We go to catch a rank reiver
Has broken faith wi’ the bauld Buccleuch.”

That was the burden of their thoughts, and although they well knew that ere the dawning each one of them might be claiming the hospitality of six feet of English sod, their hearts were light. To them a message that the fray was up was like the sound of the huntsman’s horn in the ears of a thoroughbred hunter.

“‘Where are ye gaun, ye mason lads,
Wi’ a’ your ladders, lang and hie?’
‘We gang to berry a corbie’s nest,
That wons not far frae Woodhouselee.'”

No light matter was it to harry that corbie’s nest. Carlisle Castle was a strong castle, strongly garrisoned, and to make a raid on an English town was a bold attempt indeed. But fear was a thing unknown to the Border reivers, and the flower of them rode with Buccleuch that night–close on his horse’s heels Wat o’ Harden, Walter Scott of Goldielands, and Kinmont’s own four stalwart sons–Jock, Francie, Geordie, and Sandy. As the dark night hours wore on, sleet and wind were reinforced by a thunderstorm.

“And when we left the Staneshaw-bank,
The wind began full loud to blaw,
But ’twas wind and weet, and fire and sleet,
When we came beneath the castle wa’.”

When the besiegers reached the castle they found some of the watch asleep, and the rest sheltering indoors from the storm. The outside of the castle was left to take care of itself. It was dismaying to find the scaling ladders too short to be of any use, but a small postern gate was speedily and quietly undermined. Drifting sleet, growling thunder, and the wails of the wind drowned all sounds of the assault, and soon there was no further need for concealment, for the lower court of the castle was theirs. The guard started up, to find sword-blades at their throats; two of them were left dead, and the rest were speedily overpowered. Buccleuch, the fifth man in, gave the command to proclaim aloud their triumph: