and countrymen, and secretly armed,
strolled up the hill into Scarborough Castle,
and began staring about, as excursionists
do, at the different towers and gates. At
a given signal rushing on the sentinels,
they secured them, and admitted their
expectant companions. Poor gallant lad!
The success was useless. Sir Thomas Wyatt
had been already defeated at Hyde Park
Corner, and at Temple Bar had thrown
away his sword. After holding Scarborough
Castle for three days of triumph only, Stafford
surrendered it to the Earl of Westmoreland.
The young nobleman, Captain Saunders,
and three of their associates, Shelley,
Bradford, and Proctor, were sent to the
Tower. Stafford was beheaded, the rest
hanged and quartered, and this was the
origin of the old saying, "A Scarborough
warning—a word and a blow, and the blow
first."

It was in April, 1642, that from the
battlements of the Beverley Gate at Hull,
Sir John Hotham refused the king admittance,
and by that refusal commenced the
civil wars. It was not till February, 1644,
that the storm fell upon Scarborough. The
watchful Parliament sent Sir John
Meldrum to succeed a general whom Fairfax
had appointed, and the steel head-pieces
mustering to the chanting of a sullen
psalm, the men in grey and buff stormed
the town at a rush, and carried St. Mary's
Church on the hill by assault, driving Sir
Hugh Cholmley, the Cavalier governor, into
the castle. It was a great victory for the
men of the sword and the Bible, for they
took in the town and the fortress-church
thirty-two pieces of cannon, with a great
quantity of arms and ammunition, and in
the harbour one hundred and twenty ships
laden with wheat and timber surrendered
to their blue flag. Sir John Meldrum then
regularly invested the castle, which still
tormented the sea, sands, town, and
harbour with its plunging fire, and fixing guns
in the east window of St. Mary's, opened a
battery on the stubborn fortress. The
garrison replied quite as hot and fast, and the
Cavaliers' incessant and close fire soon
demolished the choir of St. Mary's, the grey
old ruins of which still mark the site. It
was a tedious siege, and on the 17th of
May, 1645, the Puritans, weary at the
delay, made a general assault of the chief
gate, but they were repulsed, many of their
best officers killed, and their commander, Sir
John Meldrum himself, mortally wounded.
Sir Mathew Boynton, the new general,
brought reinforcements and pressed the
siege with great vigour; still it was not
till July, 1645, that brave Sir Hugh Cholmley
surrendered. Twelve months' battering
had made the inner towers, the barbican,
even the square Norman keep itself begin
to flake and crumble; the stores were all
but gone; fatigue, sickness, and above all,
scurvy, had worn out the garrison. The
pale and miserable survivors had to be
carried out in sheets, and nearly all required
support. During this staunch siege the
Cavaliers struck square silver crowns and
half-crowns, some of which still exist. In
old times there were only four churches in
Scarborough; St. Nicholas on the cliff; St.
Sepulchre's; St. Thomas in Newborough,
which was destroyed by the fire of the
castle-guns; and St. Mary's, the central
tower of which (shaken during the siege)
fell in 1659.

The Spa at Scarborough has a legend or
two of its own. It was discovered in the
reign of James the First by Mrs. Farrow,
a sensible and quick-sighted observer. She
had observed that the waters of a spring
at the foot of the south cliff turned the
stones, over which they trickled, a rusty
red. Tasting the waters and finding them
peculiar, and discovering also that they
became tinged with purple when mixed
with gall, she began to make further
experiments to ascertain if they possessed
medical properties. The Spa's value soon
became acknowledged by the citizens of
York and the gentry of the three Ridings.
In 1698 a cistern was first made to collect
the Spa waters. In December, 1737, a
slight earthquake (as it was supposed by
the curious) caused a very extraordinary
change in the Spa spring. The "straith,"
a stone breakwater bound with timber, to
protect the Spa House from the waves,
suddenly gave way, and a mass of the cliff,
containing nearly an acre of pasture land
and with cattle grazing upon it at the very
time, sank perpendicularly several yards.
At the same time, the sand under the cliff
for a hundred yards long rose six or seven
feet.

Many old historical legends of piratical
forays and daring revenges still hang about
Scarborough. The crow has his little eye on
one legend of the early part of the luckless
reign of Richard the Second. A Scottish sea
chief, named Andrew Mercer, being taken
by northern ships, was clapped in prison
in windy Scarborough Castle. The son of
Mercer, furious at this, sailed angrily into
the Yorkshire harbour with a little band of
Scottish, French, and Spanish ships, and