E2 Now doe your selves noe more so deck

Notes. This poem refers to the Sanquhar-Turner murder case of May-June 1612. On Tuesday, 23 June 1612, Robert Carlyle and James Irwin, the assassins commissioned by Robert Crichton, Earl of Sanquhar to murder the fencer John Turner, were tried and convicted for the crime. They were hanged early in the morning of Thursday 25 June on a gallows in Fleet Street (Chamberlain 1.362). Our poem’s reference to “scotts” (plural) being hanged “Just att Whitefriers gate” (the Whitefriars was just off Fleet Street), indicates that the verse was celebrating Carlyle’s and Irwin’s imminent executions and was probably written sometime between their trial and their hanging. Sanquhar himself was tried on Saturday 27 June and executed “before the coort gates” two days later (Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead 172). Lines 5-8 of this libel are very similar to the closing couplet in the Chamberlain transcription of the poem “They beg our goods, our lands, and our lives”.