warden of the west marches, in consequence of his able conduct in the surprise at Annan, his district was soon invaded by the English, under Sir Anthony de Lucy; and in a battle which ensued near Lochmaben, towards the end of March, Douglas was taken prisoner, and carried to Edward III., by whose command he was put in irons, and imprisoned for two years. During this interval the battle of Halidon Hill occurred, in which the Scots were defeated with great slaughter, and their country again subdued. But in 1335, the knight of Liddesdale was set free, on payment of a heavy ransom; and on returning to Scotland, he was one of the nobles who sat in the parliament held at Dairsie, near Cupar-Fife, in the same year. He had not long been at liberty when a full opportunity occurred of vindicating the liberties of his country, and the rightful sovereignty of his young king, now a minor, and living in France. Count Guy of Namur having crossed the sea to aid the English, invaded Scotland with a considerable body of his foreign men-at-arms, and advanced as far as Edinburgh, the castle of which was at that time dismantled. A furious conflict commenced between these new invaders and the Scots on the Boroughmuir, in which the latter were on the point of being worsted, when the knight of Liddesdale opportunely came down from the Pentlands with a reinforcement, and defeated the enemy, who retired for shelter to the ruins of the castle, where they slew their horses, and made a rampart of their dead bodies. But hunger and thirst at last compelled these brave foreigners to capitulate, and they were generously allowed to return to England unmolested, on condition of serving no longer in a Scottish invasion.
This successful skirmish was followed by several others, in which the knight of Liddesdale took an important share. He then passed over into Fife, and took in succession the castles of St. Andrews, Falkland, and Leuchars, that held out for the English. After this he returned to Lothian, and betook himself to his favourite haunts of the Pentlands, thence to sally out against the English as occasion offered. The chief object of his solicitude was Edinburgh Castle, which he was eager to wrest from the enemy. On one of these occasions, learning that the English soldiers in the town had become confident and careless, he at night suddenly rushed down upon them from his fastnesses, and slew 400 of their number while they were stupified with sleep and drunkenness. It was to a warfare in detail of this description that the Scots invariably betook themselves when the enemy were in too great force to be encountered in a general action; and it was by such skirmishes that they generally recovered their national freedom, even when their cause seemed to be at the worst. After this, by a series of daring enterprises, William Douglas recovered Teviotdale, Annandale, Nithsdale, and Clydesdale from the English. These successes so raised his reputation, that Henry, earl of Derby, who was appointed to the command of the English troops in Scotland, was eager to try his valour in single combat with the bold insurgent. They accordingly encountered on horseback at Berwick, but at the first career, Douglas was so severely wounded in the hand by accident with his own lance, that the combat had to be stayed. Soon after, the knight of Liddesdale, in an encounter with Sir Thomas Barclay, was worsted, with the loss of all his followers except three, himself escaping with difficulty through the darkness of the night. But this mischance he soon retrieved by a series of skirmishes, in which, with greatly inferior numbers, he routed the English, and shook their possession of Scotland. But his most remarkable exploit of this nature was a desperate encounter, or rather series of encounters, which he had in the course
