REIGN OF CHARLES II.: 1660-1673.
The wild joy with which the people of England hailed the close of anarchy and military tyranny in the restoration of Charles II. to the throne, was fully participated in Scotland by a small loyalist party. The bulk of the community were also made happy by the event, for they were pleased to see the monarchy restored, accompanied as the event was by the revival of their national independence; but the general happiness was mixed with anxiety regarding the fate of their favourite church, to which they had long been accustomed to consider all other institutions as subordinate. In England, almost as a matter of course, the Episcopal Church was restored with the monarchy, to the slighting of that Solemn League and Covenant with which the interests of Presbyterianism had been so long bound up. The temper of the English people was now strongly against all that had been done during the troubles by those with whom the Scottish Presbyterians had been in alliance, and consequently against Scottish Presbyterianism itself. The joy of the Presbyterian monarchists of Scotland might therefore well be mixed with fear.
Very naturally, the men of high rank who had done and suffered most for the cause of monarchy in the late evil days, were appointed to be at the head of affairs in Scotland. The Earl of Glencairn, chief of the guerrilla resistance to Cromwell in 1653, was made Chancellor. Major-general Middleton, who had finally commanded in that insurrection, and was now promoted to the peerage as Earl of Middleton, was appointed to be his majesty’s commissioner to parliament. The Earls of Crawford and Lauderdale, Presbyterian monarchists of 1650-1, who had since suffered a ten years’ imprisonment in England, were made respectively Lord Treasurer and Secretary of State. With them came a host of inferior officials, all more or less under a sense of suffering through over-zealous Presbyterianism, and mostly eager to repair their broken fortunes at the expense of their enemies. A reassemblage in September of the remains of that Committee of Estates which had been captured at Alyth in 1651, was the first movement made. It was superseded by the new parliament, which sat down on the 1st of January 1661 and proceeded to pass many acts for the settlement of affairs on the new basis. One of these at a single blow annulled all the acts of the irregular parliaments of the last twenty-three years; another imposed on men holding offices an oath acknowledging the king to be ‘supreme governor in all cases, over all persons, ecclesiastical and civil.’ Finally, in July of that year, the Privy Council was reconstituted—a judicial as well as political body. At the same time, the Courts of Session and Justiciary were reconstructed, in place of the English judicatories which had sat for the last eight years.
The vengeance of the new government fell only on those who had carried the Presbyterian views to a disloyal extreme, or who had complied with Cromwell. The chief victim was the Marquis of Argyle—who no doubt had placed the crown on the king’s head at Scone in 1651, but who had also been the prime leader in nearly all those movements subsequent to 1638, which had been so destructive to the interests of royalty. His execution (May 27, 1661) was considered by the royalists as a righteous retribution for that of Montrose eleven years before. Mr James Guthrie, minister of Stirling, the leader among the Remonstrators, was hanged. Sir Archibald Johnston—who had perhaps done more than any other single man throughout the troubles to promote the pure Presbyterian cause—escaped to Holland, but after a little time was brought back and executed (July 1663). Several other ministers of the Remonstrant party, who failed to make timely submission, were imprisoned, and subsequently for the most part banished.
The one great subject remaining for consideration was the church—how was it to be settled? The king, unlike his father, could have endured the Presbyterian forms, though he is said to have privately declared Presbyterianism unfit to be the religion of a gentleman. But Presbyterianism involved something more than forms. As professed by its more zealous and intelligent adherents, it claimed to have Christ for its sole head, and therefore to be completely independent of all civil control. The men in whose hands its fate was now cast—for the reaction of popular feeling in the entire island made it helpless—had to consider that this claim had been a source of constant trouble to the state ever since the minority of King James; they had to judge whether the Presbyterian Church, holding such a claim as essential to it, would, if now established, comport with any species of civil government whatever. Under the light of recent experiences, and led by the general temper of the time, it was not surprising, though very unfortunate, that they resolved to restore the so-called moderate Episcopacy of 1638, minus the Book of Canons and Liturgy.
The moderate or Resolutionist party in the church, being the great majority, had sent Mr James Sharpe, minister of Crail, to represent their interests in the little body of men surrounding the king at his return from the continent. Full reliance was placed on Mr Sharpe, for he was thought to be a conscientious as well as able man: we find Robert Baillie speaking of him at the time with an affection which could not have been inspired in so virtuous a bosom without many merits. But Mr Sharpe proved unable to resist the contagion of feeling to which he was exposed: he was induced to consent to the restoration of prelacy, and to take the position of primate. The Presbyterians considered themselves as betrayed by their own representative. The bishops of 1638 being all dead but one, and he unable to travel, Sharpe and three other Presbyterian clergymen received the rite of consecration in London, and, returning, imparted it to the other bishops in Holyrood Church. In May 1662, an act of the Estates formally reconstituted the church on the Episcopal model; the bulk of the people quietly submitting to what they could not resist, while the more earnest regarded it as a desertion of Christ’s own standard, calculated to bring down judgments upon the land.
The burst of loyal feeling at the Restoration had probably led the government to believe that the settlement of Episcopacy would be an easy, if not popular act. If they had truly known the antipathy still entertained for the prelatic model, they might have hesitated to take such a step, for it might then have appeared more hopeful that the claim of independence for presbytery would be practically overcome or made innocuous—as it afterwards was at the Revolution—than that bishops could be maintained in peace amongst a hostile people. But here we must remember how force was universally looked to in that age as a proper and legitimate means of inducing conformity. Under the recent rule of the Presbyterian Church, there had been heavy fines, depositions, banishings, excommunications, and confiscations, for Episcopalian and popish non-conformists; hangings and beheadings for those who proceeded to an active opposition. And the apparent conformity which such means can produce had really been attained. The authors of the new episcopate, having no light beyond their age on the subject of toleration, might very naturally think that what had succeeded in 1650 would succeed in 1662: they would compel the people to be Episcopalians. There was a difference in the two cases which it would have been well for them to observe. The severe measures of 1650 were the measures of a majority of really religious men—or at least men of very earnest religious convictions—against a minority of dissenters or indifferents. The measures now called for were to be carried out by a minority, chiefly animated by secular maxims, against a mass of people generally earnest in their peculiar religious views, and who were liable to become the more so, and consequently the more troublesome, under persecution. In the one case, the dominant church was a great Reality, solidly founded in the affections of the mass of the people; in the other, it was little more than a piece of statecraft, with the affections of the majority of the people against it. The right of enforcing conformity we may allow to have been the same in both cases; but the consequences, we can easily see, were likely to be very different. The new church had scarcely been constituted, when the unwiseness of the step might have easily been seen. The clergy generally, but especially in the south-western counties, shewed their unwillingness to give up their collective powers into the hands of the bishops. On a precipitate edict of the Archbishop of Glasgow, calling on the ministers of his province who had been inducted since 1649 to take out new presentations from the patrons, and receive collation from their bishops, three hundred and fifty, being a third of the entire church, resigned their cures. This was a startling blow to the new system, for, under that incapacity of judging of the influence of religious feelings which is to be marked in worldly men, it had been supposed that not more than ten would resign. Of course these men became troublesome dissenters, notwithstanding all that could be done to disperse or silence them. In reality, the substitution of a new bishop-approved minister for one who would not submit to bishops, was a matter not very immediately affecting congregations, for, under the late alteration in the church, the forms of worship and professed Christian doctrine remained the same as before. But the Scotch, during the last twenty-five years, had been generally instructed regarding the Presbyterian polity, and trained up to regard it with veneration; insomuch that the parity of ministers in the church-courts and the headship of Christ, as exclusive of all supremacy of king or human law, were points for which they were as much disposed to martyr themselves as for the most essential points of faith contained in the catechism. They therefore began to desert the parish churches, and hold private meetings for worship under the displaced clergy. In our time, no statesman would think of opposing the people in such a course. They would be allowed quietly to raise dissenting meeting-houses for themselves and favourite clergymen, and the peace of the country would not be disturbed. But the reader must have been prepared to see that no such course could then be adopted. The Presbyterian establishment itself had only a few years before sternly put down all external expression of dissent. It had even forbidden private meetings of little groups of its own members for worship, lest these should lead to or give shelter to schism. If they, with their deep religious feelings, were thus intolerant of dissent, what might we expect from the worldly statesmen and prelates now at the head of affairs? What but the most vigorous measures for preserving an outward conformity? The extruded ministers were forbidden to live within or near their former parishes, lest their people should attend their ministrations. The people of those parishes were commanded under heavy pains to attend the regular church, however odious the new minister might be to them. Even to go to the church of some neighbouring parish where there was still one of the old clergy officiating, was forbidden under the like penalties. Finally, bodies of soldiery were sent to raise the fines, or to exact free quarters till the fines were paid. These soldiers would enter the churches of the old Presbyterian clergy yet in possession of their pulpits, noting such of the congregation as could not swear that they belonged to the parish, taking the money from their pockets, or stripping them of articles of wearing apparel, as a punishment for their breach of law. In some districts, where a very earnest feeling of religion prevailed, the people were harassed and impoverished to a degree that made them anxious to leave their native country.
Middleton’s administration came to a sudden close in 1663, in consequence of an intrigue against Lauderdale; and the latter noble then succeeded to the chief power. Although he had been a Presbyterian, and was not originally in favour of setting up the Episcopal Church, his rule brought no relief. Still, there was a certain leniency in high quarters, till Sharpe, in order to secure unfaltering severity, obtained the erection of a court of commission, in which the prelates should have chief sway. Then came a mercilessness greater than before. The doings of the soldiery were such as to produce an approach to desolation in certain districts. Ministers, for merely performing worship in their own houses, were thrown into vile prisons, or banished to half-desert islands. Even to give charity to any of the proscribed clergy was declared to be a crime. When the war with Holland commenced in the spring of 1665, it was feared that there would be an insurrection in the west of Scotland, and the whole district was consequently disarmed. Nevertheless, in November of the ensuing year, the extreme severity of the soldiery under Sir James Turner occasioned a partial resistance at Dalry, in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, and in a little time a small body of insurgents was collected. Marching through Ayrshire, their numbers increased to about two thousand, and they then turned towards Edinburgh, where they expected considerable accessions. It was a hasty and ill-considered affair, springing merely from the sense of intolerable suffering. The government, having a small standing army at its disposal, was at no moment in the least danger. About nine hundred poor half-armed peasants made a final stand at Rullion Green, on the eastern skirts of the Pentland Hills, where they were attacked by a strong body of dragoons under Sir Thomas Dalyell, routed, and dispersed (November 28, 1666). Many were killed on the field and in the pursuit, and eighteen were afterwards executed in Edinburgh. Several of these were previously tortured to extort confession, the instrument used being a loose frame of wood called the Boot, into which wedges were driven so as to crush the limb of the prisoner. Thirty-five more were executed in the country, not without some difficulty to the authorities, as the executioners generally refused to exercise their profession against such culprits.
Soon after this time, the extreme severity of the government in Scotland made itself heard of and felt at court, and orders were sent down for the adoption of gentler measures. In 1668, a milder rule was established under the Earl of Tweeddale, who would at once have proceeded to grant some ‘indulgence’ to the Presbyterians, but for an attempt being made to shoot Archbishop Sharpe, as he was about to step into his carriage in Edinburgh. As it was, the Indulgence was granted next year, and consisted in permitting such of the extruded clergy as had lived peaceably to return to their parishes when a vacancy occurred, receiving the whole temporalities if they should take collation from the bishops; and where they did not, to be allowed the use of the manse and glebe; further, allowing four hundred merks per annum to all outed ministers, while unpresented to charges, provided they had lived peaceably, and would agree to do so in future. This was in reality a measure of greater generosity than the Presbyterian Church had ever extended to dissenters; yet it was not attended with much good. It was denounced by all the more zealous sort of people as Erastianism, and consequently the indulged ministers were not popular. The government, moreover, professing to consider the holding of irregular meetings for worship as less excusable than before, became more threatening against them, and thus caused the people to hold conventicles in the open fields in remote places, attending, in some instances, with arms in their hands. Hence resulted the fining of a vast number of respectable people of the middle classes, women as well as men, and the imprisonment of a considerable number. The parliament also passed an express act against conventicles, whereby an ejected or unlicensed minister who should perform worship anywhere but in his own family, or who should be present at worship in any other family, became liable to a fine of five thousand merks; the people being also forbidden to be present at such meetings under pain of fines proportioned to their circumstances. By this act, the performance of worship in the fields inferred death, and attendance was to be punished with double fines. The king is said to have disapproved of the act, remarking truly that bloody laws did no good; it was detested even by those who in parliament gave it their votes. In spite of its severity, the people continued in some districts to meet in the fields for worship, feeling that there was a great show of the ‘divine presence’ on these occasions. It seemed as if every attempt to enforce conformity only sent a certain portion of them into a stronger dissent. Although nearly every one of the measures of the government had its prototype in those of the Presbyterian régime, and no one thought of demanding liberty of conscience upon principle, yet such was the effect of the large scale on which these severities were conducted, that the Scottish mind was generally impressed with an abhorrence of prelacy and all its belongings, a feeling which no lapse of time has yet been able to efface.
The years 1671 and 1672 were distinguished by few events of note besides the acts of severity against troublesome ministers. During this time, there was going on a conspiracy on the part of the king and his ministers to establish absolute monarchy in England, the Earl of Lauderdale undertaking to secure Scotland, while the French king was engaged to give his assistance; and to favour the object, a new war was commenced against Holland. In 1673, the spirit of the English nation was roused against the ministry, and the contagion was in some measure communicated to Scotland, where the Duke of Hamilton gave such a resistance to Lauderdale (now created a duke) that he was obliged to dissolve the parliament. But no marked improvement in the government resulted.
1660. June 19.
This day commenced a period of thanksgiving through all the parishes in Lothian, for the restoration of the king. The magistrates and town-council of Edinburgh went to church in solemn procession, all in their best robes, and with ‘the great mace and sword of honour’ borne before them. After service, they went with a great number of citizens to the Cross, where a long board, covered with sweetmeats and wine, had been placed, under a burgess guard numbering four or five hundred persons. Here the healths of the king and the Duke of York were drunk with the utmost enthusiasm, three hundred dozen of glasses being cast away and broken on the occasion. At the same time, bells rang, drums beat, trumpets sounded, and the multitude of people cheered. The spouts of the Cross ran with claret for the general benefit. At night, there were bonfires throughout the streets, and fireworks in the Castle and the citadel of Leith till after midnight. ‘There were also six viols, three of them base viols, playing there continually. There were also some musicians placed there, wha were resolved to act their parts, and were willing and ready, but by reason of the frequent acclamations and cries of the people universally through the haill town, their purpose was interrupted. Bacchus also, being set upon ane puncheon of wine upon the front of the Cross with his cummerholds, was not idle. In the end, the effigies of Oliver Cromwell, being set upon a pole, and the devil upon another, upon the Castle Hill, it was ordered by firework, engine, and train, that the devil did chase that traitor, till he blew him in the air.’—Nic.
1660.
The same chronicler notes a circumstance very likely to occur at a Restoration. ‘There went out from Scotland an innumerable number of people of all sorts, ranks, and degrees—earls, lords, barons, burgesses, and some ministers—pretending their errand to be to congratulate the king; but the truth is, it was for procuring of dignities, honours, and offices, and for sundry other ends; carrying with them great soums of money, to the vastation of this puir land, being altogether ruined of before in their means and estate.’
‘His majesty not being able to satisfy all, there did arise great heart-burnings, animosity, and envy among them,’ particularly ‘betwixt the Earl of Southesk and the Master of Gray, for the sheriffship of Forfarshire; and in that contention they drew to parties, and provoked other to duels, in the whilk the Earl of Southesk did kill the Master of Gray upon this side of London.’
Aug.
We hear at this time of a number of ‘louss and idle men in the Hielands,’ who had gathered themselves together in companies, and were employed in ‘carrying away spraichs of cattle and other bestial to the hills, and committing many other insolencies:’ that is to say, the more active spirits on the Highland border were taking advantage of this interval of regular authority to help themselves from the pastures of their Lowland neighbours. The newly reassembled Committee of Estates, having no force at their command for the repression of these disorders, were glad to revert to the old practice of holding the chiefs of clans ‘bund for the peaceable behaviour of their clan, kinsmen, followers, and tenants.’ They therefore (August 29) sent letters to the Earls of Seaforth, Tullibardine, Athole, Airlie, and Aboyne, the Lords Reay and Lovat, the Lairds of Ballingowan, Foulis, Assynt, Glengarry, M‘Leod, Locheil, Macintosh, Grant, Glenurchy, Auchinbreck, Luss, Macfarlane, Buchanan, and Edzell, Sir James Macdonald, the Captain of Clanranald, Callum Macgregor Tutor of Macgregor, and others, calling on them to take special notice of their dependents, ‘and of all others travelling through your bounds whom you may stop or let,’ that they carry themselves inoffensively; certifying these heads of clans, that they will be called to account for any depredations or insolencies hereafter committed.
1660.
Having immediately after heard of an assault committed by one Robert Oig Buchanan and a companion upon Robert M‘Capie, a tenant of Lord Napier (they had attacked him in his own house at night, wounded him, and cut off his ear, after which they drove off his cattle), the Committee ordered the Laird of Buchanan to forward the guilty persons to them before a certain day, in order that they might be brought to punishment. The two culprits failed to appear on summons, and their chief was then commissioned to seize them wherever they could be found.
At the beginning of October, the chancellor received a letter from the Laird of Grant, stating that he had apprehended ‘ane noted robber named Halkit Stirk.’[186] The Committee of Estates immediately sent an answer heartily thanking the laird ‘for doing so good a work for his majesty and the peace of the kingdom;’ further informing him that they would protect and maintain him against all injury that might be done to him or his followers on that account. They soon after gave the laird a commission to raise a band of forty men for the taking of Highland sorners and robbers.
The Halkit Stirk was subsequently ordered to be handed by the Laird of Grant to the magistrates of Aberdeen; by them to the magistrates of Montrose; from these again to those of Dundee; thence to Cupar and Burntisland in succession, under a suitable guard; to rest in the Tolbooth of Burntisland till further orders.
At the same time, the Highland bandit, John Dhu Ger, whom we have seen killed three times about twenty years before, is ordered to be brought under a sufficient guard from Stirling to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh.—R. C. E.
Sep. 13.
The Letter-office at Edinburgh was in 1649 under the care of Mr John Mean, a merchant noted throughout the reign of Charles I. for his zeal as a Presbyterian; which, however, had not forbidden him to be also a strenuous loyalist.[187] Latterly, the same function had been bestowed upon Messrs Mew and Barringer, who, from their names, may be supposed to have been Englishmen, friends of the Cromwellian rule. At the date now noted, the king bestowed the office upon Robert Mean, superseding the two above-mentioned officials, and the Committee of Estates accordingly inducted him, ‘requiring the postmaster of Haddington to direct the packets constantly from time to time to the said Robert Mean, and cause the same to be delivered to him at Edinburgh.’—R. C. E.
1660.
The post-system for correspondence underwent a considerable improvement under the régime of the Restoration. The parliament, in August 1662,[188] ordained that for this purpose posts should be established between Edinburgh and Port-Patrick, the intermediate stations being Linlithgow, Kilsyth, Glasgow, Kilmarnock, Ayr, Drumbeg, and Ballantrae. Robert Mean was commissioned to establish these posts for the next ensuing year, and allowed ‘for each letter from Edinburgh to Glasgow two shillings Scots (twopence sterling), from thence to any part within Scotland three shillings Scots, and for all such letters as goes for Ireland six shillings Scots.’ To encourage him in the business, and help him to build a boat for the Port-Patrick ferry, he was allowed a gift of two hundred pounds, on condition that the boat should carry the letter-packet free. ‘All other posts, either foot or horse,’ were discharged.—P. C. R.
The horse-post of Mr Mean had not been long in operation, when it was found that sundry persons carried letters along the same line on foot, to the injury of the postmaster, and possibly to the encouragement of treasonable designs. At his request, a warrant was granted (December 26) against such interlopers.
Sep. 28.
William Woodcock, ‘late officer in Leith,’ was this day licensed by the magistrates of Edinburgh, to set up ‘ane hackney-coach, for service of his majesty’s lieges, betwixt Leith and Edinburgh.’ The hire up and down for a single person was to be a shilling; and if the person engaging the carriage chose to wait for one or two persons more to accompany him, the same fare was to be sufficient. ‘If any mae nor three, each man to pay four shillings Scots [fourpence sterling] for their hire; and the persons coming up to Edinburgh, to light at the foot of Leith Wynd, for the steyness [steepness] thereof.’ This arrangement was not to prevent Woodcock from ‘serving others going to and from the country to other places, as he and they can agree.’
1660.
At the surrender of Edinburgh Castle to Cromwell in December 1650, one of the articles of rendition insured that the public registers, public movables, and private evidences and writs heretofore preserved there, should be allowed to pass forth, and that wagons and ships should be provided for transporting them. These precious documents, with certain exceptions, were accordingly taken to Stirling Castle, where, however, it was not their fate to rest long. In August next year, while the Scottish army was advancing through England, to be annihilated at Worcester, General Monk took Stirling Castle, with ‘all the Records of Scotland, the chair and cloth of state, the sword, and other rich furniture of the kings.’ These were soon after transported to the Tower of London, not under any such feeling as the wantonness of conquest, but with a view to their proving serviceable for the scheme then entertained by Cromwell of a complete union of the two countries. In the Tower, they were deposited in a building called the Bowyers’ House, which was also the residence of the keeper of the English Records, Mr Ryley.
After the establishment of an English judicatory in Scotland, it was found necessary that such documents as referred to the rights of private parties should be in possession of the English commissioners; and on the petition of these gentlemen (April 8, 1653), an order of parliament was issued for the sending of all such documents back to Scotland, to be deposited as formerly in Edinburgh Castle. This seems to have been done either partially now, and conclusively in 1657, or wholly at the latter date, the amount of documents returned being sixteen hundred volumes.
Dec.
1660.
After the Restoration, the Scottish records remaining in the Tower, being those of a public and historical character, were ordered to be returned to Edinburgh. Being put up in hogsheads, a ship was prepared to carry them down to Scotland. ‘But it was suggested to Clarendon, that the original Covenant signed by the king, and some other declarations under his hand, were among them. And he, apprehending that at some time or other an ill use might have been made of these, would not suffer them to be shipped till they were visited: nor would he take Primrose’s promise of searching for these carefully, and sending them up to him. So he ordered a search to be made. None of the papers he looked for were found. But so much time was lost, that the summer was spent. So they were sent down in winter.’—Burnet. They were shipped at Gravesend on board the Eagle frigate, commanded by Major John Fletcher; but, a storm arising, the captain was obliged, for the safety of his vessel, to trans-ship eighty-five hogsheads of these documents into a vessel called the Elizabeth of Burntisland. The Elizabeth having sunk with its whole cargo, the eighty-five hogsheads of registers were lost, ‘to the great hurt of this nation,’ as Nicoll with due sensibility remarks. From this wreck there escaped the records of parliament, and that of the Secret Council—the latter, we are bound to say, a specially fortunate escape for us, since the record in question has supplied the great bulk of what is at once new and curious in the present work. ‘The want of any inventory of the whole must leave us for ever in the dark as to the real extent of the loss which was then sustained. Among the lost records, however, we may probably reckon the rolls of the greater part of the charters of Robert I. and David II., and the far greater part of the original instruments of a public nature, which must be presumed to have existed in the archives of the kingdom, at their removal from Scotland in 1651.’[189]
One of the records, that of the Privy Seal, had escaped the general seizure by the English, and passed through some adventures not much less romantic than those of the Regalia. Consisting of about a hundred volumes, it rested in the care of Andrew Martin, writer in Edinburgh, who, on the approach of danger, carried it into the Highlands, and there preserved it from the enemy ‘with great expenses and fatigue, for ten years at least, to the hazard of his life and irrecoverable ruin of his family.’ After his death and that of his son, this record fell into the possession of John Corse, writer in Edinburgh, who had advanced considerable sums to the Martins, ‘on the faith of those books.’ On the 24th of March 1707, Mr Corse addressed a petition to the Scottish parliament, setting forth these particulars, and claiming a remuneration for ‘the expenses and great pains that has been expended in preserving these records,’ requesting at the same time that they should be taken into public custody. The parliament accordingly recommended Mr Corse’s claim to the queen.[190]
1661. Jan.
1661.
Reduced as the state of Scotland was at the close of the Interregnum, no sooner had the Restoration taken place than such a ‘bravery’ broke out as if there had been no such thing as poverty in the land. The City of Edinburgh surrounded the Cross at the proclamation of the first parliament with twelve hundred men in arms. When the Earl of Middleton came on the last day of the year to open the parliament next day, sixteen hundred persons met him on horseback a few miles from town—‘there was seldom the like shaw.’ ‘All the nobles at this time, as also the barons and burgesses, were metamorphosed like guisers, their apparel rich, full of ribbons, feathers, and costly lace, to the admiration of many.’ It was all from joy at the idea of the troubles of the country being now brought to an end.
The people were delighted to see the parliament sit down, merely as a token of the restoration of their national independency. They felt a peculiar joy in seeing the Earl Marischal and his two brothers come to Edinburgh, bearing with them the long-lost emblems of the native sovereignty.[191] Nicoll says, the gallant carriage of the people generally was ‘wonderful;’ ‘all of them, even the landward people [rustics], belted in their swords and pistols.’ ‘Our gentry of Scotland,’ he elsewhere adds, ‘did look with such joyful and gallant countenances as if they had been the sons of princes. It was the joy of this nation to see them upon brave horses, prancing in their accustomed places, in tilting, running of races, and such like, the like whereof was never seen in many score of years before.’
‘Our mischiefs,’ says the Mercurius Caledonius, ‘began with tumults and sedition, and we are restored to our former felicity with miracles. The sea-coasts of Fife, Angus, Mearns, and Buchan, which was famous for the fertility of fishing, were barren since his majesty went from Scotland to Worcester; insomuch that the poor men who subsisted by the trade, were reduced to go a-begging in the in-country. But now, blessed be God, since his majesty’s return, the seas are so plentiful, that in some places they are in a condition to dung the land with soles. An argument sufficient to stop the black mouths of those wretches that would have persuaded the people that curses were entailed on the royal family. As our old laws are renewed, so is likewise our good, honest, ancient customs; for nobility in streets are known by brave retinues of their relations, when, during the captivity, a lord was scarcely to be distinguished from a commoner. The old hospitality returns; for that laudable custom of suppers, which was covenanted out with raisins and roasted cheese, is again in fashion; and where before a peevish nurse would have been seen tripping up stairs and down stairs with a posset or berry for the laird or the lady, you shall now see sturdy jackmen, groaning with the weight of sirloins of beef, and chargers loaden with wild fowl and capons.’
1661.
Mercurius is careful to state that, on the 1st of January 1661, the swans which used to dwell on Linlithgow Loch, and which had deserted their haunt at the time of the king’s departure from Scotland, did now grace his return by reappearing in a large flock upon the lake. There was also a small fish called the Cherry of the Tay, a kind of whiting, which returned from a voluntary exile along with the king.
John Ray was at Linlithgow in August 1661, and heard from Mr Stuart, one of the bailies, about the return of the swans. Mr Stuart alleged that two had been brought to the lake for trial during the Commonwealth, but would not stay. ‘At the time of the king’s coming to London, two swans, nescio unde sponte et instinctu proprio, came hither, and there still continue.’[192]
The superstitious Wodrow notes the fact of the swans in his History, and adds: ‘Upon the citadel of Perth, where the arms of the Commonwealth had been put up, in May last year a thistle grew out of the wall near the place, and quite overspread them. Both these may be, without anything extraordinary, accounted for; but they were matter of remark and talk, it may be more than they deserve.’
1661.
The jollity so highly appreciated by Mercurius Caledonius is generally described in the writings of the Presbyterian clergy as beastly excess. ‘Nothing to be seen but debauch and revelling,’ says Kirkton; ‘nothing heard but clamorous crimes, all flesh corrupted their way.’ The Commissioner Middleton, keeping high festival daily during the sitting of parliament, sometimes was so manifestly drunk when he took his place on the throne, that it was necessary to adjourn the sitting. In his progress through the west country in autumn 1662, ‘such who entertained him best had their dining-rooms, their drinking-rooms, their vomiting-rooms, and sleeping-rooms when the company had lost their senses.’ It was averred that, while he and his court were at Ayr, ‘the devil’s health was drunk at the Cross there, in one of their debauches, about the middle of the night.’—Wod. ‘The commissioner had £60 English a day allowed him, which he spent faithfully amongst his northern pantalons; and so great was the luxury, and so small the care of his family, that when he filled his wine-cellars, his steward thought nothing to cast out full pipes to make way for others. They made the church their stews; you might have found chambers filled with naked men and women; cursing, swearing, and blasphemy were as common as prayer and worship was rare.’—Kir. It was thought a suspicious circumstance regarding a man that he exhibited any gravity; it smelled of rebellion. If he wished to pass for a loyal man, to advance his prospects, or even to escape being thought a dangerous person, it was necessary he should put on the air of a swaggerer and a drunkard.
Jan. 7.
By order of the king, the magistracy of Edinburgh raised the trunk of the Marquis of Montrose from under the gallows on the Burgh-moor, in presence of a great number of nobles, gentlemen, and others, who expressed the most lively interest in the scene.[195] This relic being wrapped in ‘curious cloths’ and put into a coffin, was carried along under a velvet canopy, to the Tolbooth, the nobles and gentry attending on horseback, while many thousands followed on foot, colours at the same time flying, drums beating, trumpets sounding, muskets cracking, and cannon roaring from the Castle. At the Tolbooth, the head of the Great Marquis, which had grinned there for ten years, was taken reverentially down, ‘some bowing, some kneeling, some kissing it,’ and deposited in its proper place in the coffin, ‘with great acclamations of joy,’ the trumpets, drums, and cannon giving all possible éclat to the act. The coffin was then carried in solemn procession to the Palace, to rest till a proper funeral-ceremony should be ordered. While the ‘excommunicat traitor’ of 1650 was thus treated, the triumphant and all-powerful noble of that time, the Marquis of Argyle, was a prisoner in the Castle, waiting a doom which was precisely to resemble that of Montrose, excepting in some particulars of inhumanity, which vengeful loyalty could not descend to.
1661.
The Presbyterian historians, however, have taken care to chronicle that the Laird of Gorthie, who took the head off the spike, died within a few hours, and the Laird of Pitcur, one of Montrose’s great adherents, went to bed in health, and was found dead next morning. This was a mysterious circumstance, which would probably be cleared up if we had a return of the quantity of brandy which Gorthie and Pitcur had drunk on the occasion. ‘Such was the testimony of honour Heaven was pleased,’ says worthy Mr Kirkton, ‘to allow Montrose’s pompous funerals.’
The four members of Montrose were also recovered from the four towns, Glasgow, Stirling, Perth, and Aberdeen, to which they had been severally sent for ignominious exhibition; and these being now placed in the coffin, the body was complete as far as circumstances permitted, excepting that the heart remained in the silver case where Lady Napier had enshrined it, and in which it continued to be preserved, under the care of the Napier family, till the period of the French Revolution.
1661.
Four months afterwards (May 11), the ceremonial funeral of Montrose was performed with an amount of joyful display that rendered it a most singular affair. Twenty-three companies of a burgess-guard lined the streets, that the procession might pass without interruption. First went the new Life Guard; next twenty-six boys in mourning, carrying the arms of Montrose and the great men of his house; then the provost, bailies, and council of Edinburgh, all in mourning habits; after whom, again, came the barons of parliament and the members representing burghs. A gentleman clad in bright armour was followed by eighteen others, carrying banners of honour, and the spurs, gloves, breast-piece, and back-piece of the deceased, on the ends of staves. Next came a led horse in the accoutrements used by the marquis at the riding of parliaments, and attended by his lackey in armour. The flower of the Scottish nobility followed in good order; then the Lord Lyon, and his officers. Followed the friends of the deceased, bearing the marquis’s cap of state, coronet, &c. Then the COFFIN, under its rich pall, carried by honourable lords and gentlemen, with six trumpets sounding before it. Some ladies clad in mourning followed. The Lord Commissioner (Middleton), in his coach of state, closed the long and splendid column, which, however, was closely followed by an honourable procession doing like honours to the corpse of Hay of Dalgetty, another royalist victim of the Civil War. The bells rang all the time while the corpse of Montrose went on to its final honourable resting-place in St Giles’s Cathedral. It was remarked that this was a funeral where the relatives of the deceased wore countenances of joy, while there were others, not related to him, who beheld it with sadness and gloom, or shrunk aside into holes and corners, not daring to look upon it.
The strong feeling which existed in loyal breasts at the Restoration regarding the treatment which Montrose had experienced, is shewn by the long imprisonment and sufferings of Neil M‘Leod of Assynt, who had taken the marquis prisoner after his defeat in Strathoikel, and delivered him up (for a mean reward, it is said, of certain bolls of meal). On the 10th of December 1664, the Council received a petition from M‘Leod, shewing that he had now been confined in the Tolbooth and city of Edinburgh for four years, so that, by the neglect of his affairs, he was ‘brought near the point of ruin.’ ‘Being,’ he said, ‘a stranger and far from his country and friends, and out of all credit and respect by reason of his long imprisonment,’ he could have ‘no one to engage for him as caution;’ but he offered to come under any kind of bond for his reappearance, if allowed a temporary liberty. The Earl of Kincardine offering to be security that M‘Leod would send a guarantee to the amount of twenty thousand pounds Scots, he was favoured by the Council with liberty to go home for the next four months. It was not till February 1666 that a special letter from the king at length freed M‘Leod from trouble on account of his concern in the doom of Montrose.—P. C. R.
Jan. 8.
1661.
This day appeared the first number of the first original newspaper attempted in Scotland. It was a small weekly sheet, entitled Mercurius Caledonius; comprising the Affairs now in Agitation in Scotland, with a Survey of Foreign Intelligence. The editor was Thomas Sydserf, or Saint Serf, son of a former bishop of Galloway, who was soon after promoted to the see of Orkney. Principal Baillie alludes to this ‘diurnaler’ in bitter terms—‘a very rascal, a profane atheistical papist, as some count him;’ the truth being that he was an Episcopalian loyalist of merely a somewhat extravagant type. Little is known of his previous history, beyond his having borne arms under Montrose, and published in London in 1658 a translation from the French under the title of Entertainments of the Cours, or Academicall Conversations, dedicated to the young Marquis of Montrose. Of the Mercurius Caledonius, only nine numbers were published, the last being dated March 28, 1661. It must be admitted that the style of composition and editorship was frivolous and foolish to a degree surprising even for that delirious period.
At various times throughout the Civil War, when transactions of moment were going on in Scotland—as, for instance, in the autumn of 1643, when the Solemn League and Covenant was in preparation—news-sheets referring to our country had been published in London. There does not appear, however, to have been any regular or avowed attempt to give Scottish news in connection with English and Irish, until June 1650, when the march of Cromwell with an army to put down the Scots and their puppet king excited of course an unusual interest regarding Scotland. Then was commenced by ‘Thomas Newcomb, near Baynard’s Castle, Thames Street,’ a weekly diurnal, under the title of Mercurius Politicus; comprising the Sum of all the Intelligence, with the Affairs and Designs now on foot in the three Nations of England, Ireland, and Scotland. In Defence of the Commonwealth and for Information of the People. A weekly number of this work, consisting of two sheets of dwarf quarto, being sixteen pages, presented letters of news from the principal cities of Europe; and during the years 1650, 1, 2, 3, and 4, the intelligence from Scotland, chiefly of military operations there, was a conspicuous department.[196]
1661.
According to Mr George Chalmers,[197] Cromwell conveyed to Leith in 1652 one Christopher Higgins, who, in November of that year, began to reprint, for the information of the English garrison, a London newspaper, entitled A Diurnal of some Passages and Affairs. This is said to have not survived many months. It was followed up by a reprint of the afore-mentioned Mercurius Politicus, which Higgins commenced at Leith in October 1653, but soon after transferred to Edinburgh, where it was carried on till the eve of the Restoration—the imprint being, ‘Edinburgh: Reprinted by Christopher Higgins, in Hart’s Close, over against the Tron Church.’ This paper was afterwards resumed under a slight change of title, and continued till not earlier than June 1662. Partly contemporary with it was a paper entitled the Kingdom’s Intelligencer, begun at Edinburgh on the same day with the Mercurius Caledonius, and carried on till at least December 24, 1663. The number for the latter date contained among other articles, ‘A Remarkable Advertisement to the Country and Strangers,’ to the following effect: ‘That there is a glass-house erected in the citadel of Leith, where all sorts and quantities of glasses are made and sould at the prices following: To wit, the wine-glass at three shillings two boddels; the beer-glass, at two shillings sixpence; the quart bottel, at eighteen shillings; the pynt bottel, at nine shillings; the chopin bottel, at four shillings sixpence; the muskin bottel, at two shillings sixpence, all Scots money, and so forth of all sorts; better stuff and stronger than is imported.’
Mar.
Horse-races were now performed every Saturday on the sands of Leith. They are regularly chronicled amongst the foolish lucubrations of Mercurius Caledonius; as, for example, thus: ‘Our accustomed recreations on the sands of Leith was much hindered because of a furious storm of wind, accompanied with a thick snow; yet we have had some noble gamesters that were so constant at their sport as would not forbear a designed horse-match. It was a providence the wind was from the sea; otherwise they had run a hazard either of drowning or splitting upon Inchkeith! This tempest was nothing inferior to that which was lately in Caithness, where a bark of fifty ton was blown five furlongs into the land, and would have gone further, if it had not been arrested by the steepness of a large promontory.’
In the ensuing month, there were races at Cupar in Fife, where the Lairds of Philiphaugh and Stobbs, and Powrie-Fotheringham appear to have been the principal gentlemen who brought horses to the ground. A large silver cup, of the value of £18, formed the chief prize. These Cupar races were repeated annually. It is said they had been first instituted in 1621.—Lam.
As a variety upon horse-racing, Mercurius Caledonius announced a foot-race to be run by twelve brewster wives, all of them in a condition which makes violent exertion unsuitable to the female frame, ‘from the Thicket Burn [probably Figgat Burn] to the top of Arthur’s Seat, for a groaning cheese of one hundred pound weight, and a budgell of Dunkeld aquavitæ and rumpkin of Brunswick Mum for the second, set down by the Dutch Midwife. The next day, sixteen fish-wives to trot from Musselburgh to the Canon-cross for twelve pair of lamb’s harrigals.’
1661.
Mercurius seems to have been thrown into great delight by the revival of a barbarous Shrovetide custom, which, strange to say, continued to exist in connection with seminaries of education down to a period within the recollection of living persons. ‘Our carnival sports,’ says he, ‘are in some measure revived, for, according to the ancient custom, the work was carried on by cock-fighting in the schools, and in the streets among the vulgar sort, tilting at cocks with fagot-sticks. In the evening, the learned Virtuosi of the Pallat recreate themselves with lusty caudles, powerful cock-broth, and natural crammed pullets, a divertisement not much inferior to our neighbour nation’s fritters and pancakes.’
One may in some faint degree imagine the sorrowful indignation with which the survivors of those who put down Christmas and Easter in 1642 would view these coarse celebrations of Shrovetide.
Apr. 2.
A royal life-guard, consisting of sixscore persons, noblemen and gentlemen’s sons, was this day embodied on the Links of Leith, under the command of the Earl of Newburgh. They then rode through the city, ‘in gallant order, with their carabines upon their saddles, and their swords drawn in their hands.’—Nic.
In July 1662, ‘it pleased his majesty to cause clothe their trumpeters and master of the kettle-drum in very rich apparel,’ also to give rich coverings of cramosie velvet for the kettle-drums. At the same time, a pair of costly colours was presented. Soon after, it is intimated that the king gave them each a buff-coat, and made an augmentation of their daily pay. Their chief occupation at this time seems to have been attendance on the royal commissioner, as he passed daily to and from the Parliament House.
May 27.
‘At two afternoon, the Marquis of Argyle was brought forth of the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, fra the whilk he was conveyed by the magistrates to the place of execution; the town being all in arms, and the life-guard mounted on horseback, with their carabines and drawn swords. The marquis, having come to the scaffold, with sundry of his friends in murning apparel, he made a large speech; after whilk and a short prayer, he committed himself to the block. His head was stricken from his body, and affixed upon the head of the Tolbooth, where the Marquis of Montrose[‘s] was affixed of before. It was thought great favour that he was not drawn and quartered.’—Nic.
1661.
All the men who came to the scaffold at this time, and also some of those who obtained high and unexpected preferment, became the subjects of popular rumours which mark the ideas of the age. Robert Baillie tells us, as a piece of information he had from his son-in-law, Mr Robert Watson, who was with the Marchioness of Argyle at Roseneath on the night the king landed, that ‘all the dogs that day did take a strange howling and staring up at my lady’s chamber-windows for some hours together.’ The venerable principal adds: ‘Mr Alexander Colvill, justice-depute, an old servant of the house, told me that my Lady Kenmure, a gracious lady, my lord’s sister, from some little skill of physiognomy which Mr Alexander had taught her, had told him some years ago that her brother would die in blood.’
It has been stated by Wodrow, that after spending the forenoon of his last day in settling ordinary accounts, a number of friends being in the room with him, ‘there came such a heavenly gale from the spirit of God upon his soul, that he could not abstain from tearing [shedding tears]. Lest it should be discovered, he turned in to[wards] the fire, and took up the tongs in his hand, making a fashion of stirring up the fire in the chimney; but he was not able to contain himself, and, turning about and melting down in tears, he burst out in these words: “I see this will not do. I must now declare what the Lord has done for my soul. He has just now sealed my charter in these words: ‘Son, be of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven thee.’”’ It is certain that the marquis stated in his speech on the scaffold that he had that day received such an assurance.
Mr A. Simson, who had been four years in the Marquis of Argyle’s family, lived to tell Wodrow that, on the night before his lordship’s execution—being a Sunday—he was at Inshinnan, where the communion had been administered, and where next day there were to be prayers in behalf of the suffering nobleman. He spent the hours from four to ten in religious exercises alone, and during this time, ‘with a power he scarce ever felt the like, eight or ten times that petition was borne in upon him: “Lord, say to him, My son, be of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven thee!” He did not much notice it till afterwards he saw his [lordship’s] speech, and saw the account that others had been put to wrestle for the same.’[198]
1661.
Mr James Guthrie, who suffered a few days after Argyle, had also had warnings, according to the historians of his party. When first induced in Mr Samuel Rutherford’s chamber at St Andrews to take the Covenant, ‘as he came out at the door, he met the executioner in the way, which troubled him; and the next visit he made thither, he met him in the same manner again, which made him apprehend he might be a sufferer for the Covenant, as indeed he was. He also had a warning of his approaching sufferings three years before the king’s return, and upon these he frequently reflected.’—Kir. The latter warning was probably a violent bleeding of the nose, which came upon him in the pulpit, while discoursing on the famous believers (Heb. xi.) who sealed their testimony with their blood.[199]
Guthrie seems to have been the very type of the extreme kind of the Presbyterians, perfectly inflexible in what he thought the right course, and wholly devoted to the doctrines of his church. When the generality of his brethren were tacitly allowing men who were only loyalists to come to the standard in 1651, and union was of the last degree of consequence, Guthrie, being the minister of Stirling, the very head-quarters of the army, denounced these backslidings, and really must have produced great inconvenience to the king. It is told of the inveterate protester, that Charles thought proper to visit him one day, hoping perhaps to soften him a little; when Mrs Guthrie bustling about to get a chair placed for his majesty, the stern divine calmly said to her: ‘My heart, the king is a young man; he can get a chair for himself.’
It is also related that, at the same crisis, when a resolution was adopted to excommunicate General Middleton, and Guthrie was to perform the duty, the king sent a gentleman on the Sunday morning, to entreat at least a brief delay, when Guthrie quietly told him to come to church, and he would get his answer. The unyielding divine duly proceeded to pronounce the excommunication.
1661.
It was generally believed that the doom of Guthrie was in some degree owing to the vindictive feeling which this act had engendered in Middleton. Wodrow relates that, some time after the execution, Guthrie’s head being placed on the Nether Bow Port in Edinburgh, Middleton was passing underneath in his coach, when a considerable number of drops of blood fell from the head upon the top of the coach, making a stain which no art or diligence availed to wipe out. ‘I have it very confidently affirmed, that physicians were called, and inquired if any natural cause could be assigned for the blood’s dropping so long after the head was put up, and especially for its not wearing out of the leather; and they could give none. This odd incident beginning to be talked of, and all other methods being tried, at length the leather was removed, and a new cover put on.’
A caustic wit of our age has remarked, ‘Whatever satisfaction the return of King Charles II. might afford to the younger females in his dominions, it certainly brought nothing save torture to the unfortunate old women, or witches of Scotland, against whom, immediately on the Restoration, innumerable warrants were issued forth.’[200] It is quite true that an extraordinary number of witch prosecutions followed the Restoration; and the cause is plain. For some years before, the English judicatories had discountenanced such proceedings. The consequence was, there was a vast accumulation of old women liable to the charge throughout all parts of the country. So soon as the native judicatories were restored, the public voice called for these cases being taken up; and taken up they were accordingly, the new authorities being either inclined that way themselves, or unable to resist a demand so intimately connected with the religious feelings of the people.
July 25.
1661.
On the day noted, the Council issued a commission for the trial of Isabel Johnston of Gullan, in the parish of Dirleton, who had ‘confessed herself guilty, in entering in paction with the devil, renouncing her baptism, and otherwise, as her depositions under the hands of several of the heritors and other honest men bears,’ and likewise to proceed to the trial of others in that district who might be delated of the same crime; for it was always seen that one apprehended witch produced several others. They at the same time commissioned three justice-deputes—the learned counsel Sir George Mackenzie being one of the number—to try a number of male and female wizards in the parishes of Musselburgh, Duddingston, Newton, Libberton, and Dalkeith. In this case, the judges were to have an allowance for their trouble ‘aff the first end of the fines and escheats of such persons as shall happen to be convict.’ Throughout the remainder of the year, and for some time after, the number of commissions issued for the trial of witches was extremely great. On one day, January 23, 1662, no fewer than thirteen were issued, being the sole public business of the council for that day, besides the issue of a commission for the trial of a thief in Sanquhar prison. Ray, the naturalist, who was in Scotland in August 1661, tells us it was reported that a hundred and twenty witches suffered about that time, and certainly much more than that number of individuals are indicated in the commissions as to be subjected to trial.
As a specimen of the facts elicited on the trials for the condemnation of these poor people—Margaret Bryson, ‘having fallen out with her husband for selling her cow, went in a passion to the door of the house in the night-time, and there did imprecate that God or the devil might take her from her husband; after which the devil immediately appeared to her, and threatened to take her body and soul, if she entered not into his service; whereupon, immediately she covenanted with him, and entered into his service.’ Another example—Isabel Ramsay ‘conversed with the devil, and received a sixpence from him; the devil saying that God bade him give her that; and he asked how the minister did,’ &c. Marion Scott, a girl of eighteen, serving a family in Innerkip parish, Renfrewshire, would go out in the morning with a hair-tether, by pulling which, and calling out, ‘God send us milk and mickle of it!’ she would supply herself with abundance of the produce of her neighbours’ cows. She had a great deal of intercourse with the devil, who passed under the name of Serpent, and by whose aid she used to raise windy weather for the destruction of shipping. One day, being out at sea near the island of Arran, she caused Colin Campbell’s sails to be riven, but was herself overset with the storm, so as to be thrown into a fever. After a night-meeting with Satan, he ‘convoyed her home in the dawing, and when she was come near the house where she was a servant, her master saw a waff of him as he went away from her,’ &c.
1661.
The whole proceedings were usually of the most cruel description; and often the worst sufferings of the accused took place before trial, when dragged from their homes by an infuriated mob, tortured to extort confession, and half starved in jail. A wretch called John Kincaid acted as a pricker of witches[201]—that is, he professed to ascertain, by inserting of pins in their flesh, whether they were truly witches or not, the affirmative being given when he pricked a place insensible to pain. Often they were hung up by the two thumbs till, nature being exhausted, they were fain to make acknowledgment of the most impossible facts. The presumed offence being of a religious character, the clergy naturally came to have much to say and do in these proceedings. For example, as to Margaret Nisbet, imprisoned at Spott, in Haddingtonshire, the person ordered by the Privy Council to take trial of her case and report is Mr Andrew Wood, the minister of the parish. There are many instances in the Privy Council Record of witches being cleared on trial, but detained at the demand of magistrates, or clergymen, in the hope that further and conclusive evidence would yet be obtained against them. Such was the case of Janet Cook of Dalkeith, who had predicted of a man who beat her, that he would be hanged—which came to pass; who bewitched William Scott’s horse and turned him furious; and occasionally healed sick people by the application of some piece of an animal killed under certain necromantic circumstances. Janet had been tried, and acquitted; yet she was kept in durance at the urgency of the kirk-session, as they were getting fresh grounds of accusation against her.
Occasionally relenting measures were taken by the Council, though it is to be feared not always with the approval of the local powers. On the 30th of January 1662, they considered a petition from Marion Grinlaw and Jean Howison, the survivors of ten women and a man who had been imprisoned at Musselburgh on this charge. Some of the rest had died of cold and hunger. They themselves had lain in durance forty weeks, and were now in a condition of extreme misery, although nothing could be brought against them. Margaret Carvie and Barbara Honiman of Falkland had in like manner been imprisoned at the instance of the magistrates and parish minister, had lain six weeks in jail, subjected to ‘a great deal of torture by one who takes upon him the trial of witches by pricking,’ and so great were their sufferings that life was become a burden to them, notwithstanding that they declared their innocence, and nothing to the contrary had been shewn. The Council ordered all these women to be liberated.—P. C. R.
July.
1661.
‘By an act of the parliament, an order is issued out to slight and demolish the citadels of the kingdom which were built by the English. This of Inverness had not stood ten years. The first part they seized upon was the sentinel-houses, neat turrets of hewn stone, curiously wrought and set up on every corner of the rampart wall, these now all broken down by the soldiers themselves. The next thing was the Commonwealth’s arms pulled down and broken, and the king’s arms set up in their place; the blue bridge slighted, the sally-port broken, the magazine-house steeple broken, and the great bell taken down—all this done with demonstrations of joy and gladness, the soldiers shouting “God save the king,” as men weary of the yoke and slavery of usurpation which lay so long about their necks. I was an eye-witness of the first stone that was broken of this famous citadel, as I was also witness of the foundation-stone laid, anno 1652, in May. This Sconce and Citadel is the king’s gift to the Earl of Moray, to dispose of at his pleasure. A rare thing fell out here that was notarly known to a thousand spectators, that the Commonwealth’s arms set up above the most conspicuous gate of the citadel, a great thistle growing out above it covered the whole carved work and arms, so as not a bit of it could be seen, to the admiration of all beholders! This was a presage that the Scots therefore should eclipse [triumph.]‘—Fraser of Wardlaw’s MS. 1666.
1661.
The Privy Council Record, for a long time after July 1661, is half filled with the cases of ministers who had been deposed during the troubles, and who, having for years suffered under extreme poverty, now petition for some compensation. Sometimes it was a minister who gave offence by his dislike to the movement of 1638, sometimes one who had incurred the wrath of the more zealous party by his adherence to the Engagement of 1648 ‘for procuring the liberation of his late majesty of blessed memory;’ sometimes the cause of deposition was of later occurrence. For example: ‘Mr John M‘Kenzie, sometime minister of the kirk of Urray [Ross-shire], because he would not subscrive the Covenant and comply with the sinful courses of the time, [was] banished and forced to fly to England anno 1639, and thereafter was sent to Ireland, and though provided there with a competency, was by the rebellion forced to retire to Scotland. After his majesty’s pacification closed at the Birks, and by the moyen of his friends, [he] re-entered to the ministry; yet, still retaining his principle of loyalty and integrity, he was therefore persecuted by the implacable malice of the violent humours of those times, and again suspended and thereafter deposed, only for refusing to preach men’s humours and passions as a trumpet of sedition and rebellion.’ Mr Andrew Drummond had been deposed from Muthill parish, ‘for no other cause but his accession to ane supplication to the General Assembly, where he with divers others, out of the sense of their duty, did declare their affection to the Engagement, anno 1648,’ and had suffered under this sentence for five or six years. Mr Robert Tran, minister of Eglesham, had been deposed in 1645 for no other cause than loyalty to his late majesty. In some cases, the petitioner tells of the wife and six or seven children whom his deposition had thrown destitute, and who had gone through years of penury and hardship. The Council generally ordered £100 sterling, or, in such a case as that of M‘Kenzie, £150, out of the stipends of the vacant churches of their bounds.
1661.
The popular writers of this period of Scottish history do not advert sufficiently to those hard measures of the time of the Solemn League which may be said, in the way of reaction or retaliation, to have led to the severities now in the course of being practised upon the more uncompromising Presbyterians. The many petitions of the persecuted men of 1638-60 for redress are only slightly alluded to in a few sentences by Wodrow, while he fills long chapters with those sufferings of proscribed Remonstrators which would never probably have had existence but for their own harsh doings in their days of power. He dwells with much feeling on the banishment passed upon Mr John Livingstone, a preacher high in the esteem of the more serious people, and deservedly so. All must sympathise with such a case, and admire the heroic constancy of the sufferer; but it is striking, only a few months after his sentence to exile (February 2, 1664), to find a Mr Robert Aird coming before the Privy Council with a piteous recital of the distresses to which he and his family had been subjected since 1638, in consequence of his being then thrust out of his charge at Stranraer, merely for his affection to the then constituted Episcopal government, the clergyman put into his place being this same John Livingstone! Aird tells us that, being then ‘redacted to great straits, he was at last necessitat to settle himself in Comray, in the diocese of the Isles, where his provision [patrimony] was,’ that being ‘so little that he was not able to maintain his family.’ During the usurpation, ‘by reason of his affection to his majesty, he was quartered upon and otherwise cruelly abused, to his almost utter ruin.’ The Lords recommended that Mr Aird should have some allowance out of vacant stipends in the diocese of the Isles. Another of the zealous clergy whose resistance to the new rule and consequent troubles and denunciation are brought conspicuously forward by Wodrow, was Mr James Hamilton, minister of Blantyre. He was compelled to leave his parish, and not even allowed to officiate peaceably in his own house at Glasgow. Much to be deplored truly; but Wodrow does not tell us of a petition which was about the same time addressed to the Council by the widow of Mr John Heriot, the former minister of Blantyre, upon whom, in 1653, ‘the prevailing party of Remonstrators in the presbytery of Hamilton had intruded one Mr James Hamilton,’ by whom the whole stipend had been appropriated, so that Heriot, after a few years of penury, had left his widow and children in absolute destitution. So impressed were the Council by the petitioner’s case, that they ordered her to receive the whole stipend of the current year. To any candid person who would study the history of this period, it appears necessary that these circumstances should be told, not in justification of the cruel and most unwise measures of the government and the heads of the new church, but as a needful explanation of what it was in the minds of these parties which made them act as they did.
While men tore each other to pieces on account of religion in Scotland, and all material progress in the country was consequently at a stand, one sagacious Scotch clergyman visited Holland, and found a very different state of things there. ‘I saw much peace and quiet,’ he says, ‘in Holland, notwithstanding the diversity of opinions among them; which was occasioned by the gentleness of the government, and the toleration that made all people easy and happy. A universal industry was spread through the whole country.’—Burnet’s History of his Own Times.
Aug. 17.
1661.
This day, John Ray, the eminent naturalist, entered Scotland for a short excursion. In the Itineraries which he has left, he gives, besides zoological observations, some notes on general matters. ‘The Scots, generally (that is, the poorer sort), wear, the men blue bonnets on their heads, and some russet; the women only white linen, which hangs down their backs as if a napkin were pinned about them. When they go abroad, none of them wear hats, but a party-coloured blanket which they call a plaid, over their heads and shoulders. The women, generally, to us seemed none of the handsomest. They are not very cleanly in their houses, and but sluttish in dressing their meat. Their way of washing linen is to tuck up their coats, and tread them with their feet in a tub. They have a custom to make up the fronts of their houses, even in their principal towns, with fir-boards nailed one over another, in which are often made many round holes or windows to put out their heads [called shots or shot windows]. In the best Scottish houses, even the king’s palaces, the windows are not glazed throughout, but the upper part only, the lower have two wooden shuts or folds to open at pleasure and admit the fresh air. The Scots cannot endure to hear their country or countrymen spoken against. They have neither good bread, cheese, or drink. They cannot make them, nor will they learn. Their butter is very indifferent, and one would wonder how they could contrive to make it so bad. They use much pottage, made of coal-wort, which they call keal, sometimes broth of decorticated barley. The ordinary country houses are pitiful cots, built of stone, and covered with turves, having in them but one room, many of them no chimneys, the windows very small holes, and not glazed. In the most stately and fashionable houses in great towns, instead of ceiling they cover the chambers with fir-boards, nailed on the roof within side. They have rarely any bellows or warming-pans. It is the manner in some places there to lay on but one sheet as large as two, turned up from the feet upwards. The ground in the valleys and plains bears good corn, but especially beer-barley, or bigge, and oats, but rarely wheat and rye. We observed little or no fallow-grounds in Scotland; some layed ground we saw which they manured with sea-wreck (sea-weeds). The people seem to be very lazy, at least the men, and may be frequently observed to plough in their cloaks. It is the fashion of them to wear cloaks, when they go abroad, especially on Sundays. They lay out most they are worth in clothes, and a fellow that hath scarce ten groats besides to help himself with, you shall see him come out of his smoky cottage clad like a gentleman.’
Oct. 3.
1661.
Mr James Chalmers, commissioner for the presbytery of Aberdeen, came before the Privy Council with a representation that, in conformity with sundry acts of parliament, the synod had lately made diligent search within their bounds for papists and seminary priests. A list of the individuals, which the reverend gentleman handed in, is remarkable as containing many of the same names as those which we had under notice upwards of thirty years before for the same scandal. An age of the most rigorous treatment had failed to convince these people of their errors. There were the Lady Marquise of Huntly and her children, Viscount Frendraught with his brethren and children, the Laird of Gight and his children, the Lairds of Craig, Balgownie, and Pitfoddels, with many others whose names were not formerly noted, as the Lairds of Drum, Auchindoir, Monaltrie, Tullos, and Murefield. Altogether, it is a sad exhibition of pertinacity in unparliamentary opinions. Against these and many others, including several priests, the synod had proceeded with censure and excommunication; ‘notwithstanding whereof they continue in their accustomed course of disobedience and will onnaways conform to the laws of the church and kingdom, but on the contrair, in a most insolent manner avow their heretical seditious principles and practices, to the overthrow of religion, disturbance of church and state, and the seducing of many poor souls.’ It was suggested that the Council should issue letters of horning against the delinquents. The lords promised to give the subject their consideration.
Very soon after this date, the Privy Council are found dealing with the case of ‘John Inglis and William Brown, apprehended and imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh for being trafficking papists.’ Inglis had also been guilty of distributing popish books. Brown readily gave his promise, if liberated, ‘to take banishment upon him, and never to be seen within the kingdom hereafter;’ but Inglis was more obstinate. He ‘refused to give notice of such popish priests as of his knowledge were come within this kingdom,’ and would not on any account relinquish his own profession. He was told that he must leave the kingdom within twenty days, and that if ever again found within its bounds, he would be punished according to law—that is, hanged.—P. C. R.
Dec. 5.
On the 5th of December, the Privy Council granted a warrant to Robert Mean, ‘keeper of the Letter-office in Edinburgh, to put to print and publish ane diurnal weekly for preventing false news which may be invented by evil and disaffected persons.’—P. C. R.
1662. Mar. 13.
1662.
‘In the night-season, at Edinburgh, one Thomas Hepburn, a writer, being a young man, was strangled in his bed privately, and, fearing he should [have] recovered, a knife was stopped in[to] his throat. He was carried out naked by three or four persons, and laid down on a midden-head in the High Street. A young maid coming by at the time, being afraid, cried and went into the Court of Guard, and told the business; upon this, some of the guard went out and apprehended five men, drinking with a woman, in the lodging where he lay, and carried them to the Tolbooth. They all denied they knew any such thing.’—Lam.
Apr. 1.
The late storm of popular rage against witches would now appear to have spent the worst, though not the whole of its fury. The Privy Council was become sensible of great inhumanity having been practised by John Kincaid, the pricker—who, as has been stated, took upon him to ascertain whether a woman was a witch or not by inserting a pin into various parts of her body, with the view of finding if in any part she was insensible to pain! They ordered this man to be put in prison.[202] A few days afterwards, they issued a proclamation, proceeding on the assurance they had received, that many persons had been seized and tortured as witches, by persons having no warrant for doing so, and who only acted out of envy or covetousness. All such unauthorised proceedings were now forbidden. Nevertheless, proceedings of a more legal and less barbarous character went on. Twelve commissions for the trial of witches in different districts were issued on the 7th of May; three on the 9th; three on the 2d of June; one upon the 19th; and three upon the 26th. In these instances, however, a caution was given that there must be no torture for the purpose of extorting confession. The judges must act only upon voluntary confessions; and even where these were given, they must see that the accused appeared fully in their right mind.
Apr.
1662.
At Auldearn, in Nairnshire, the notable witch-case of Isobel Gowdie came before a tribunal composed of the sheriff of the county, the parish minister, seven country gentlemen, and two of the town’s men.[203] She was a married woman; her age does not appear, but, fifteen years before, she had given herself over to the devil, and been baptised by him in the parish church. She was now extremely penitent, and made an unusually ample confession, taking on herself the guilt of every known form of witchcraft. She belonged to a witch-covin or company, consisting, as was customary, of thirteen females like herself, who had frequent meetings with the Evil One, to whom they formed a kind of seraglio. Each had a nickname—as Pickle nearest the Wind, Over the Dike with it, Able and Stout, &c., and had a spirit to attend her, all of which had names also—as the Red Riever, the Roaring Lion, and so forth. The devil himself she described as ‘a very mickle, black, rough man.’
Meeting at night, they would proceed to a house, and sit down to meat, the Maiden of the Covin always being placed close beside the devil and above the rest, as he had a preference for young women. One would say a grace, as follows:
‘We eat this meat in the devil’s name,
With sorrow and sich [sighs] and mickle shame;
We shall destroy house and hald,
Both sheep and nolt intill the fauld:
Little good shall come to the fore
Of all the rest of the little store.’
And when supper was done, the company looked steadily at their grizly president, and bowing to him, said: ‘We thank thee, our Lord, for this.’
1662.
Occasionally he was very cruel to them. ‘Sometimes, among ourselves,’ says Isobel, ‘we would be calling him Black John, or the like, and he would ken it, and hear us weel eneuch, and he even then come to us and say: “I ken weel eneuch what ye are saying of me!” And then he would beat and buffet us very sore. We would be beaten if we were absent any time, or neglect anything that would be appointed to be done. Alexander Elder in Earl-seat would be beaten very often. He is but soft, and could never defend himself in the least, but would greet and cry when he would be scourging him. But Margaret Wilson would defend herself finely, and cast up her hands to keep the strokes off her; and Bessie Wilson would speak crusty, and be belling again to him stoutly. He would be beating us all up and down with cords and other sharp scourges, like naked ghaists, and we would still be crying: “Pity, pity, mercy, mercy, our Lord!” But he would have neither pity nor mercy. When angry at us, he would girn at us like a dog, as if he would swallow us up. Sometimes he would be like a stirk, a bull, a deer, a rae,’ &c.
Isobel stated that when the married witches went out to these nocturnal conventions, they put a besom into their place in bed, which prevented their husbands from missing them. When they had feasted in a house and wished to depart, a corn-straw put between their legs served them as a horse; and on their crying, ‘Horse and hattock in the devil’s name!’ they would fly away, ‘even as straws would fly upon a highway.’ She once feasted in Darnaway Castle, and left it in this manner. On another occasion, the party went to the Downy Hills, where the hill opened, and they went into a well-lighted room, where they were entertained by the queen of Faery. This personage was ‘brawly clothed in white linens and in white and brown clothes;’ while her husband, the king of Faery, was ‘a braw man, weel-favoured, and broad-faced.’ ‘On that occasion,’ says Isobel, ‘there were elf-bulls routing up and down, and affrighted me’—a trait which bears so much the character of a dream, as to be highly useful in deciding that the whole was mere hallucination.
The covin were empowered to take the shapes of hares, cats, and crows. On assuming the first of these forms, it was necessary to say:
‘I sall go intill a hare,
With sorrow, sich, and mickle care;
And I sall go in the devil’s name,
Aye while I come home again.’
‘I was one morning,’ says Isobel, ‘about the break of day, going to Auldearn in the shape of ane hare, and Patrick Papley’s servants, going to their labour, his hounds being with them, ran after me. I ran very long, but was forced, being weary, at last to take my own house. The door being left open, I ran in behind a chest, and the hounds followed in; but they went to the other side of the chest, and I was forced to run forth again, and wan into ane other house, and there took leisure to say:
“Hare, hare, God send thee care!
I am in a hare’s likeness now,
But I sall be a woman even now!
Hare, hare, God send thee care!”
1662.
And so I returned to my own shape again. The dogs,’ she added, ‘will sometimes get bits of us, but will not get us killed. When we turn to our own shape, we will have the bits, and rives, and scarts in our bodies.’
Sometimes they would engage in cures, using of course the power derived from their infernal master. For a sore or a broken limb there was a charm in verse, which they said thrice over, stroking the sore, and it was sure to heal. They had a similar charm for the bean-shaw or sciatica:
‘We are three maidens charming for the bean-shaw,
The man of the middle earth,
Blue bearer, land fever,
Manners of stoors,
The Lord flegged the Fiend with his holy candles and yird-fast stone;
There she sits and here she is gone:
Let her never come here again!’
Another was for cases of fever:
‘I forbid the quaking-fevers, the sea-fevers, the land-fevers, and all the fevers that ever God ordained,
Out of the head, out of the heart, out of the back, out of the sides, out of the knees, out of the thies,
Frae the points of the fingers to the nebs of the taes:
Out sall the fevers go, some to the hill, some to the hope,
Some to the stone, some to the stock,
In St Peter’s name, St Paul’s name, and all the saints of heaven,
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Haly Ghaist!’
More generally, however, they were employed in planting or prolonging diseases. Isobel Gowdie told the minister that, in the preceding winter, when he was sick, they made a bagful of horrible broth of the entrails of toads, parings of nails, the liver of a hare, pickles of beir and bits of rag, and, at the dictation of the devil, pronounced over it this charm:
‘He is lying in his bed, he is lying sick and sair,
Let him lie intill his bed two months and three days mair,’ &c.
1662.
‘Then we fell down upon our knees, with our hair down over our shoulders and eyes, and our hands lifted up, and our eyes steadfastly fixed upon the devil, and said the foresaid words thrice over.... In the night-time, we came into Mr Harry Forbes’s chalmer, with our hands all smeared, to swing [the bag] upon Mr Harry, where he was sick in his bed; and in the daytime [there came ane of our number] to swing the bag [upon the said Mr Harry, as we could][204] not prevail in the night-time against him.’
Isobel stated the charm for taking away a cow’s milk. ‘We pull the tow [rope] and twine it, and plait it the wrong way in the devil’s name; and we draw the tether, sae made, in betwixt the cow’s hinder feet, and out betwixt the cow’s forward feet, in the devil’s name; and thereby takes with us the cow’s milk.... The way to give back the milk again is to cut the tether. When we take away the strength of any person’s ale, and gives it to another, we take a little quantity out of each barrel or stand of ale, and puts it in a stoup, in the devil’s name; and, in his name, with our awn hands, puts it amang another’s ale, and gives her the strength and substance of her neighbour’s ale. [The way] to keep the ale from us, that we have no power of it, is to sanctify it weel.’
One of their evil doings was to take away the strength of the manure of such as they wished ill to, or to make their lands unproductive. ‘Before Candlemas, we went be-east Kinloss, and there we yoked a pleuch of paddocks. The devil held the pleuch, and John Young in Mebestown, our officer, did drive the pleuch. Paddocks did draw the pleuch as oxen. Quickens [dog-grass] were soams [traces]; a riglen’s [ram’s] horn was a coulter; and a piece of a riglen’s horn was a sock. We went several times about, and all we of the covin went still up and down with the pleuch, praying to the devil for the fruit of that land, and that thistles and briers might grow there.’ When they wished to have fish, they had only to go to the shore just before the boats came home and say three several times:
‘The fishers are gone to the sea,
And they will bring home fish to me;
They will bring them home intill the boat,
But they sall get of them but the smaller sort.’
Accordingly, they obtained all the fishes in the boats, leaving the fishermen nothing but slime behind.
1662.
Having conceived a design of destroying all the Laird of Park’s male children, they made a small effigy of a child in clay, and having learned the proper charm from their master, fell down before him on their knees, with their hair hanging over their eyes, and looking steadily at him, said:
‘In the devil’s name
We pour this water amang the meal,
For lang dwining and ill heal;
We put it intill the fire,
That it may be burned baith stick and stour.
It sall be brunt with our will,
As any stickle[205] upon a kiln.’
‘Then, in the devil’s name,’ says the culprit, ‘we did put it in, in the midst of the fire. After it was red like a coal, we took it out in the devil’s name. Till it be broken, it will be the death of all the male children that the Laird of Park will ever get.... It was roasten each other day at the fire; sometimes one part of it, sometimes another part of it, would be wet with water, and then roasten. The bairn would be burnt and roasten, even as it was by us.’ One child having died, the hags laid up the image till the next baby was born, and ‘within half a year after that bairn was born, we took it out again, and would dip it now and then in water, and beek and roast it at the fire, each other day once, untill that bairn died also.’
The devil made elf-arrows for them, and, learning to shoot these by an adroit use of the thumb, they killed several persons with them, also some cattle. ‘I shot at the Laird of Park,’ says Isobel, ‘as he was crossing the Burn of Boath; but, thanks be to God that he preserved him. Bessie Hay gave me a great cuff because I missed him.’ She spoke of having herself shot a man engaged in ploughing, and also a woman.
1662.
Not satisfied with what they had done against the Laird of Park, they held a diabolic convention at Elspet Nisbet’s house, to take measures for the entire destruction of his family and that of the Laird of Lochloy. Taking some dog’s flesh and some sheep’s flesh, they chopped it small and seethed it for a whole forenoon in a pot. Then the devil put in a sheep’s bag, which he stirred about for some time with his hands. ‘We were upon our knees, our hair about our eyes, and our hands lifted up, and we looking steadfastly upon the devil, praying to him, repeating the words which he learned us, that it should kill and destroy the Lairds of Park and Lochloy, and their male children and posterity. And then we came to the Inshoch in the night-time, and scattered it about the gate, and other places where the lairds and their sons would most haunt, and then we, in the likeness of craws and rooks, stood about the gate and in the trees opposite. It was appointed so that if any of them should touch or tramp on any of it, it should strike them with boils, &c., and kill them. Whilk it did, and they shortly died. We did it to make that house heirless. It would wrong none else but they.’
We are not informed of the fate of Isobel Gowdie, or her associate, Janet Braidhead, from whose confession the last particulars are extracted; but there can be no doubt that they perished at the stake. Theirs are clearly cases of hallucination, mistakes of dreams and passing thoughts for real events, the whole being prompted in the first place by the current tales of witchcraft, and then made to assume in their own eyes a character of guilt because the witches themselves believed in witchcraft and all its turpitude, as well as their neighbours.
Apr. 15.
The new-made Archbishop of St Andrews (Sharpe) commenced a sort of progress from Edinburgh, to take possession of his see. Dining with Sir Andrew Ramsay at Abbotshall, he came to lodge at Leslie, attended by several of the nobility and gentry. The anxiety of the upper classes to do honour to the new system is shewn in the cortège which accompanied the prelate next day to St Andrews. He had an earl on each hand, and various other nobles and lairds, and at one time between seven and eight hundred mounted gentlemen, in his train. Next Sunday, he preached in the town-church of St Andrews, on the text, ‘I am determined to know nothing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.’ ‘His sermon did not run much on the words, but in a discourse vindicating himself, and pressing Episcopacy and the utility of it.’—Lam.
May 20.
By an act of parliament, this day was henceforth to be held as a holiday, both as the king’s birthday and as the anniversary of his majesty’s restoration. All over Scotland, the ordinance seems to have been heartily complied with. Everywhere there were religious services and abstinence from labour, and in most places active demonstrations of rejoicing, as beating of drums, shooting of cannon, sounding of trumpets, setting up of bonfires, and ceremonial drinkings of royal healths in public places.
1662.
Through a peculiar loyal zeal, there was an extraordinary demonstration at Linlithgow. Not merely was the fine public fountain of that ancient burgh set flowing with divers coloured wines of France and Spain; not merely did the magistrates, accompanied by the Earl of Linlithgow and the minister of the parish, come to the market-place and there drink the king’s health at a collation in the open air, throwing sweetmeats and glasses among the people, but an arch had been constructed, with the genius of the Covenant (an old hag) on one side, a Whiggamore on the other, and the devil on the top—on the back, a picture of Rebellion ‘in a religious habit, with turned-up eyes and a fanatic gesture,’ while on the pillars were drawn ‘kirk-stools, rocks, and reels,’ ‘brochans, cogs, and spoons,’ with legends containing burlesque allusions to the doings of the zealous during the preceding twenty years: and at the drinking of the king’s health, this fabric was set fire to and consumed, together with copies of the Covenants, and all the acts of parliament passed during the Civil War, as well as many protestations, declarations, and other public documents of great celebrity in their day. When the fire was over, there appeared, in place of the late fabric, a tablet supported by two angels, and presenting the following inscription:
‘Great Britain’s monarch on this day was born,
And to his kingdom happily restored;
His queen’s arrived, the matter now is known,
Let us rejoice, this day is from the Lord!
Flee hence all traitors, that did mar our peace;
Flee, all schismatics who our church did rent;
Flee, Covenanting remonstrating race;
Let us rejoice that God this day hath sent.’
Then the magistrates accompanied the earl to the palace, where he, as keeper, had a grand bonfire, and here the loyal toasts were all drunk over again. Finally, the magistrates made a procession through the burgh, saluting every man of account.[206]
Wodrow tells us that this ‘mean mock of the work of reformation,’ was chiefly managed by Robert Miln, then bailie of Linlithgow, and Mr James Ramsay, the minister of the parish, subsequently bishop of Dunblane; both of whom had a few years before ‘solemnly entered into, and renewed these covenants, with uplifted hands to the Lord.’ ‘The first in some time thereafter came to great riches and honour [as a farmer of revenues], but outlived them, and the exercise of his judgment too, and died bankrupt in miserable circumstances at Holyroodhouse.’
1662. June 16.
One Grieve, a maltman at Kirkcaldy, was deliberately murdered by his son, in consequence of family quarrels. The wretched youth took some cunning measures for concealing the murder, but in vain. ‘He is had to the corpse; but the corpse did not bleed upon him (for some affirm that the corpse will not bleed for the first twenty-four hours after the murder): however, he is keepit, and within some hours after, he is had to the corpse again, and, the son taking the father by the hand, the corpse bleeds at the nose; but he still denies. Also, the man’s wife is brought, and they cause her touch her husband; but he did not bleed.’ The lad afterwards confessed, and was hanged.—Lam.
This was a year of uncommon abundance, in both grain and fruit, ‘the like never seen heretofore.’ ‘The streets of Edinburgh were filled full of all sorts of fruits ... sold exceeding cheap.’—Nic.
July 3.
Decision was given in the Court of Session of a singular case, in which several of the peers of the realm were concerned. ‘Lord Coupar, sitting in parliament, taking out his watch, handed it to Lord Pitsligo, who refusing to restore it, an action was brought for the value. Lord Pitsligo said, that Lord Coupar having put his watch in his hand to see what hour it was, Lord Sinclair putting forth his hand for a sight of the watch, Lord Pitsligo put it into Lord Sinclair’s hand, in the presence of Lord Coupar, without contradiction, which must necessarily import his consent. Lord Coupar answered that, they being then sitting in parliament, his silence could not import his consent. The Lords repelled Lord Pitsligo’s defence, and found him liable in the value of the watch.’[207]
1662.
The check lately imposed on the cruelty of proceedings in witch cases was not everywhere effectual; but in one instance of alleged wizardry in the Highlands, the tyranny of the usual process was controlled in a most characteristic manner. A group of poor people, tenants in the parish of Kilmorack and Kiltarnity, in Inverness-shire—namely, Hector M‘Lean; Jonet M‘Lean, his spouse; Margaret M‘Lean, sister of Jonet; and
ten or twelve other women of indescribable Highland names—had been apprehended and imprisoned for the alleged crime of witchcraft, at the instance of Alexander Chisholm, of Commer; Colin Chisholm, his brother; John Valentine, and Thomas Chisholm, cousins of Alexander. The women had been put into restraint in Alexander Chisholm’s house, while Hector M‘Lean was confined in the Tolbooth of Inverness. Donald, a brother of
John M‘Lean, was searched for as being also a wizard, but he kept out of the way. The Chisholms then set to torturing the women, ‘by waking them, hanging them up by the thumbs, burning the soles of their feet in the fire,’ drawing some of them ‘at horses’ tails, and binding of them with widdies [withes] about the neck and feet.’ Under this treatment, one became distracted, another died; the rest confessed whatever was demanded of them. Upon the strength of confessions extorted by ‘tortures more bitter than death itself’—such is the language of the sufferers—the Chisholms had obtained a commission for trying the accused.
It was alleged in a petition from M‘Lean and the other prisoners, that the whole of this prosecution arose from inveterate hatred on the part of the Chisholms, because they could not get them in a legal way put out of their lands and possessions, where they had been for between two and three hundred years past—so early was the fashion of eviction in the Highlands. And here comes in the characteristic feature of the case. These M‘Leans, though so long removed from the country of their chief and dwelling among strangers, were still M‘Leans, owning a fealty to their chief in his remote Mull fastness, and looking for protection in return. Accordingly, we have this insular chief, Sir Rory M‘Lean of Dowart, coming in with a petition to the Privy Council in behalf of these poor people, setting forth their case in its strongest light, and demanding justice for them. The Council ordered proceedings under their commission to be stopped, and sent to require the Chisholms to come before them along with the prisoners.
How this matter ended we do not learn; but it is evident that the clan feeling was effectual in saving the M‘Leans from further proceedings of an arbitrary and cruel nature.—P. C. R.
1662.
Early in the ensuing year, there occur a number of petitions to the Council from individuals who had been confined a long time on charges of witchcraft, either untried for want of evidence, or who had been tried and acquitted, but were further detained in hope of evidence being obtained. One of these was from a burgess of Lauder named Wilkison, in favour of his wife, who was kept in a miserable condition in prison, even after her accuser had expressed penitence for ‘delating’ her! The Council generally shewed a disposition to liberate such persons on petition; but there were cases which lay long neglected. We hear in January 1666 of a poor woman named, Jonet Howat, who had been a prisoner in Forfar jail on suspicion of witchcraft for several years, and was now ‘redacted to the extreme of misery,’ never having all the time been subjected to trial.[208] Jonet was ordered to be liberated, if her trial could not be immediately proceeded with. It is rather remarkable to find in the ill-reputed government of this time traits of a certain considerateness and humanity towards women under charges of witchcraft—for example, taking care that they should not be tortured by unauthorised persons, and making sure that even their voluntary confessions should appear as proceeding from a sane mind; thus shewing a feeling which was to all appearance unknown during the late régime.
July.
1662.
Jon Ponthus, a German, styling himself professor of physic, but who would now be called a quack-doctor, was in Scotland for the third time, having previously paid professional visits in 1633 and 1643. His proceedings afford a lively illustration of the state of medical science in our island, and of the views of the public mind regarding what is necessary to a good physician. Erecting a stage on the High Street of Edinburgh, he had one person to play the fool, and another to dance on a rope, in order to attract and amuse his audience. Then he commenced selling his drugs, which cost eighteenpence per packet, and Nicoll allows that they ‘proved very good and real.’ This honest chronicler seems to have been much pleased with the antics of the performers. Upon a great rope fixed from side to side of the street, a man ‘descended upon his breast, his hands loose and stretched out like the wings of a fowl, to the admiration of many.’ Most curious of all, ‘the chirurgeons of the country, and also the apothecaries, finding thir drugs and recipes good and cheap, came to Edinburgh from all parts of the kingdom and bought them,’ for the purpose of selling them again at a profit. ‘Thir plays and dancings upon the rope continued the space of many days, whose agility and nimbleness was admirable to the beholders; ane of these dancers having danced sevenscore times at a time without intermission, lifting himself and vaulting six quarter heigh above his awn head, and lighting directly upon the tow, as punctually as gif he had been dancing upon the plain-stones.’—Nic. The quack subsequently exhibited in like manner at Glasgow, Stirling, Perth, Cupar, and St Andrews.—Lam.
‘About the same time, another mountebank, a High German, had the like sports and commodities to gain money. He was at Edinburgh twice, as also at Aberdeen and Dundee. He likewise had the leaping and flying rope—viz., coming down ane high tow, and his head all the way downward, his arms and feet holden out all the time; and this he did divers times in one afternoon.’—Lam.
In December 1665, a doctor of physic, named Joanna Baptista, acting under his majesty’s warrant, ‘erected a stage [in Edinburgh] between Niddry’s and Blackfriars’ Wynd head, and there vended his drugs, powder, and medicaments, for the whilk he received a great abundance of money.’—Nic.
Sep.
‘It pleased the king’s majesty at this time to raise [five] companies of foot-soldiers, weel provided in arms, able stout Scotsmen, by and attour those of the life-guard, wha attended his majesty’s service in and about Edinburgh, ever ready to attend the king’s pleasure and the parliament’s direction.’—Nic.
Oct. 15.
Died, the Earl of Balcarres, a boy. ‘The lady, his mother, caused open him, and in his heart was found a notched stone, the bigness of one’s five fingers, Dr Martin and John Gourlay [apothecary] being present at his embalming.’[209]—Lam.
Nov.
The clergymen of Edinburgh, five in number, were all displaced for non-conformity to the new Episcopal rule, excepting one, Mr Robert Lowrie, who consequently obtained the name of the Nest Egg. He became Dean of Edinburgh. The inhabitants of the city, not relishing the new ministers, began to desert the churches and go to worship elsewhere. At the same time, the Monday’s sermon, which had for some years been in use, was discontinued.
1662.
In the new church establishment the chief object held in view was to get the church courts controlled by bishops and the royal supremacy. Matters of worship and discipline were left much as they had been. No ceremonies of any kind, nor any liturgy, were attempted. ‘The reading of Scriptures was brought in again, and the psalms sung with this addition: “Glory to the Father, to the Son, and to Holy Ghost,” &c.’ That was all. While the famous Perth articles were left in oblivion, it was felt to be necessary that there should be some respect paid to the day of the Nativity. Accordingly, the next Christmas-day was solemnly kept in Edinburgh, the bishop preaching in the Easter Kirk (St Giles) to a large audience, in which were included the commissioner, chancellor, and all the nobles in town. ‘The sermon being ended, command was given by tuck of drum, that the remanent of the day should be spent as a holiday, that no work nor labour should be used, and no mercat nor trade on the streets, and that no merchant booth should be opened under pain of £20 in case of failyie.’—Nic.
There was also a kind of volunteer effort in certain classes to get up an observance of the day consecrated to the national saint. November 30, a Sunday, being St Andrew’s Day, ‘many of our nobles, barons, gentry, and others of this kingdom, put on ane livery or favour, for reverence thereof. This being a novelty, I thought good to record, because it was never of use heretofore since the Reformation.’—Nic.
1663. Feb.
Died David Mitchell, Bishop of Aberdeen, ‘a little man, of a brisk lively temper, well learned, and a good preacher. He lived a single life, and his manners were without reproach.’ This prelate had experienced some strange vicissitudes of fortune. Originally a protégé of Archbishop Spottiswoode, and probably by his favour advanced from a parish pulpit in the Mearns to be a dean, he had been thrust out by the Covenanters in 1638, and retired to Holland. There, ‘being a good mechanic, he gained his bread by making clocks and watches.’ At the Restoration, being enabled to return to his native country, he was made a prebend of Westminster, and thence advanced to the see of Aberdeen.[210]
Mar.
1663.
‘There was ane lioness brought to Edinburgh with ane lamb in its company, with whom she did feed and live; wha did embrace the lamb in her arms, as gif it had been her awn birth.’—Nic.
‘This year was a very plentiful year of corns and stone-fruit,’ and the ensuing winter was ‘exceeding fair and warm weather, without any frost or snow.’—Nic.
Nov.
‘At this time, came here that valiant Colonel Rutherford, born and brought up in Edinburgh, a stout champion, late governor of Dunkirk, and now of Tangier, a man famous for his actions abroad. He came, having licence from his majesty to visit his friends here for a very few days.... It wald be here remembered that the Scottish nation in my time produced not a few such cavaliers; such as Colonel Edment, born in Stirling, a baxter’s son; Colonel Boog, Colonel Hepburn, Colonel Douglas, General Ruthven, General Leslie, General King, and many others, all valiant men, to the credit of this kingdom.’—Nic. Colonel Rutherford was ennobled under the title of Earl of Teviot, but did not long survive, being killed in May 1664, by an army of Moors. He left money to build eight rooms in the College of Edinburgh, where he had been educated.
1664. Jan.
This month and the succeeding, there were many robberies throughout the country, and even in the streets and closes of Edinburgh, ‘occasioned by the poverty of the land, and heavy burdens pressing upon the people; the haill money of the kingdom being spent by the frequent resort of our Scotsmen at the court of England.’—Nic.
Apr. 20.
One James Elder, a baker in the Canongate, Edinburgh, was tried for usury. The witnesses deponed that they saw him receive 8 per cent. from his debtor, and one of them deponed that he refused to accept 6 per cent. till he got 2 per cent. more. Being found guilty, his goods were escheat, and he ordered to find security that he would be ready to undergo any further punishment that might be inflicted upon him.—B. of C.
What was then, partly under religious feelings, regarded as a crime, has since come to be held as legitimate traffic; and it is not unworthy of remark that the Bank of England was, at the time of the preparation of this article (November 1857), charging on bills 2 per cent. more than that rate of interest which caused James Elder in 1664 to forfeit his whole possessions.
1664.July 15.
The Earl of Leven, a young man, grandson of the great commander, ended his life in a manner characteristic of this mad-merry time. ‘He died of a high fever, after a large carouse with the Earl of Dundee at Edinburgh and the Queensferry. Some say that, in crossing, they drank sea-water one to another, and, after their landing, seck.’ A funeral-sermon was preached for him, on the text, ‘Our life is but a vapour, &c.,’ being ‘the first funeral-sermon that hath been preached in Fife these twenty-four years last past, or more.’—Lam.
July.
At this time, while the plague raged with great violence in Holland, carrying off as many as 739 persons in one day in Amsterdam, ‘there was much death in Scotland by ane fever called the Purple Fever.’—Nic.
Nov.
‘There fell out much division between the king’s Customers [officers of customs] and the merchants of Edinburgh, anent the searching of their merchandise and goods, and payment of their customs; and the Customers being informed that the merchants had brought in privily from England certain braid claith, and had convoyed the same over the town-wall privily in the night, they thereupon received warrant from the Great Treasurer and his deputes for searching the haill merchants’ booths of Edinburgh, and to stamp and seal their haill braid claith, and to take their oaths of verity anent the quantity of their merchandise and goods customable. The merchants, hearing the report thereof, in a moment closed up all their shops and doors, and held out Sir Walter Simpson, principal Customer, and his associates, from entry to their shops; but he placed sentries at their doors, that they should receive nothing out.’ The affair ended in a riot, in the course of which Sir Walter’s house was pillaged and an apprentice shot, and which was only quieted by military force.—Nic.
This year, like the two preceding, was remarkable for abundance of the fruits of the earth. ‘Much corn cuttit down in July ... the cherries sold at twelve pennies Scots [that is, one penny sterling] the hundred.’ Great penury nevertheless complained of.—Nic.
Dec.
1664.
‘There appeared nightly, frae four hours in the morning till daylight, ane fiery comet, tending in our sight frae the south-east to the north-west, and seen in our horizon betwixt Arthur’s Seat and Pichtland Hills, with ane tail terrible to the beholders.... This comet, in the head, was, in our sight, the breadth of ane reasonable man’s hand, and sprang out in the tail the length of five or six ells.’—Nic. It ‘began to appear about three o’clock in the morning, very terrible in its first apparition; after that, it appeared at evening. It was a star of a more dim and bluish apparition (like a candle dying out) than the rest of the stars, with a long train of lightning from it, sometimes a fathom and a half in appearance, sometimes shorter.’—Lam.
Pepys relates that the king and queen sat up on the night of the 17th of December, to see this comet, ‘and did, it seems.’ He also tells us of a lecture he was present at, in Gresham College, where Mr Hooke made it seem ‘very probable that this is the very same comet that appeared before in 1618, and that in such a time probably it will appear again, which is a very new opinion.’[211]
The comet of 1664 passed its perihelion on the 4th of December, at a distance from the sun somewhat greater than that of the earth’s orbit. The remark of Mr Hooke is erroneous in point of fact, but nevertheless interesting, as shewing that the periodicity of comets was now a subject of speculation among the few then cultivating natural philosophy in England.
About the end of this year, Sharpe, Archbishop of St Andrews, purchased the lands of Scotscraig, a good estate in Fife, at 95,000 merks or thereby (about £5540). In the spring of 1669, he made a further purchase of the lands of Strathtyrum, near St Andrews, for about 27,000 merks. These doings argue the lucrative nature of the preferments for which Sharpe, as his brethren believed, had sold his party and his conscience. He had a brother William, who was at the same time rising in prosperity, and who, in 1665, bought the lands of West Newton, near Musselburgh, now called Stonyhill, at 27,000 merks. This William Sharpe was knighted by the Commissioner Lauderdale in 1669.
1665. Jan. 5.
1665.
The Laird of Lundie, a young unmarried man, was buried in Largo Church, with that novel and superfluous pomp with which all important matters had been conducted since the Restoration. The funeral was attended by a great number of the nobility and gentry of Fife, Lothian, and the Carse of Gowrie, including the Earls of Crawford, Athole, Kellie, Wemyss, Tweeddale, and Balcarres, Lords Lyon, Elphinstone, and Newark, who all dined at the house of Lundie before the corpse ‘was lifted.’ The coach or hearse, decorated with the armorial insignia of the deceased, and a pall of black velvet, was drawn by six horses, preceded by three trumpeters and four heralds in proper costume.
‘The heralds and painter got, for their pains, about 800 merks; the poor ten dollars; the coachmen seven dollars; the trumpeters forty-eight dollars; the baxter, James Weiland, seven dollars; George Wan, master of the household ...; the cooks, ...; Mr Waters, that dressed the coach, seven dollars; ... some men that served ...; the Kirkcaldy man, for the coffin, 40 lib.; John Gourlay, apothecary, for drogs, attendance, and bowelling of him, ...; James Thomson, in Kirkcaldy, for mournings, 412 lib. or thereby; at Edinburgh, for mournings, 600 lib. or thereby; Gid. Sword for drogs, 16 lib. or thereby; to the writer at Edinburgh for paper and the burial letters, 12 lib.; at Edinburgh, for claret wine, 200 merks; for seck, 100 lib.; at Edinburgh, two divers times, for spices, about 100 lib.; for sugar ... R. Dobie, for tobacco, seven lib.; R. Clydesdale, for ware, 54 lib., 11s.; Will. Foggo, for beef, 84 lib., 12s.; Capper, at Scoonie, for capps, 6s. ster.; An. Brebner, smith, for the chimlay and work, near ane 100 lib. or thereby; Robert Bonaly, for dyeing to the servants, 21 lib., 6s. 8d.; Glover in the Wemyss, for servants’ gloves, 4 lib.’—Lam.
Jan. 9.
Died at Cupar, Thomas Seaton, who is described as ‘a great exciseman,’ meaning a farmer of the revenue over a considerable district. The event would not be worthy of notice, but for a connected circumstance. ‘He died a Catholic Roman, which was never divulged till his death.’—Lam. Such a fact, revealing a lifelong hypocrisy in a man of some consequence, is very startling amidst the universal professions of anxiety for ‘the true religion.’ But it may well be supposed to be but one of many instances in which intolerance produced one of its natural fruits, dissimulation.
Feb.
1665.
In the latter part of this month, for several days, ‘there appeared in the clear light of day, even at twelve, one, and two o’clock, and also in the haill afternoon, ane fiery blazing star in the firmament. This star continued and increased daily and nightly thereafter, by the space of many weeks, sometimes having a great brugh about it Nic.
Feb.
In consequence of the war between Great Britain and Holland, great stagnation of trade was experienced in Scotland, ‘to the heavy damage and wreck of the people.’ ‘The seamen were daily sought, taken, and warded, till they were shipped for that service.’ ‘The towns upon the north shore of the Firth of Forth had daily and nightly watches for their defence, in case they should be surprised by the Hollanders.’—Nic.
Snow had begun at Christmas 1664, and it lay upon the ground till the 14th of March this year—a storm of which the like had not been seen for many years before.—Nic. ‘Some began to say there would hardly be any seed-time at all this year; but it pleased the Lord, out of His gracious goodness, on a sudden to send seasonable weather for the seed-time, so that in many places the oat seed was sooner done this year [than] in many years formerly; for the long frost made the ground very free, and the husbandmen, for the most part, affirmed they never saw the ground easier to labour.’ Many sheep perished during the storm, and the frost was severe enough to kill the broom and whins in many places.—Lam.
Mar.
In the end of this month, appeared a new and fearful comet, greater than that seen in November. It was visible in all parts of Europe, and ‘set many heads at work.’ The recent alarms spread by the Turks through Europe, and which had affected even Scotland, and the feeling of anxiety occasioned by the Dutch war and constant threats of invasion, gave more than its proper share of terrors to this celestial stranger. ‘They write from Frankfort, Dresden, Berlin, and other places, of strange sights and terrible in the air; many of which are undoubtedly augmented by imagination and report, yet a great part of the story is looked upon as a truth.’—Nic.
This comet, which was seen in France two months earlier than it seems to have been in Scotland, was observed by Hevelius, Cassini, and others. It passed its perihelion on the 24th of April, at a comparatively small distance from the sun, and with a great eccentricity of orbit.
Apr.
1665.
We get some idea of the expense of building at this time, from the sum at which Robert Mylne, master-mason in Edinburgh, undertook to erect an hospital at the kirk-town of Largo. It was a house of fourteen fire-rooms and a public hall; each room containing a bed, a closet, and a loom; besides which there was a stone-bridge at the entry, and a gardener’s house, two stories high. ‘Some say he was to have for the work, being complete, 9000 merks [£506], and if it was found weel done, 500 merks more.’—Lam. In 1661, according to the same diarist, when some mason-work was executed at Lundie, in Fife, the master had tenpence a day, and the other men ninepence, ‘and all their diet in the house.’
June 11.
This day, being Sunday, the news of the great naval victory over the Dutch reached Edinburgh (in three days from London) during the time of service. ‘No sooner were these good news divulged, but they were saluted from the [Leith] Road and from the Castle; as also with all taikens of joy upon the morrow thereafter, by setting out of bonfires in the town and places adjacent, and by ringing of bells, shooting of cannons frae sea; the town of Edinburgh marching with their displayed colours frae the Abbey, the commissioner’s lodging, to the Castle yett; all of them dancing and louping for joy through the streets and bonfires as they went, drinking his majesty’s health at the bonfires.’—Nic.
July.
Scotland was now under great alarm on account of the terrific plague which had broken out in London, and which lasted with great violence till October. Orders were issued by the Privy Council, forbidding any to come on business from the south without a testimonial of health. ‘Albeit there were not a few travellers and resorters therefrae,’ it pleased God that the pestilence should not come to Scotland.—Nic. The exemption of our country is the more remarkable, as the plague made its way into Ireland, and proved highly destructive in Dublin.
1665.
The great plague of 1665 was the subject of serious remark in Scotland, in connection with circumstances much calculated to impress certain minds in that part of the world. ‘I find it taken notice of,’ says Wodrow, ‘by several papers written at this time, that the appearance of a globe of fire was seen above that part of the city where the Solemn League and Covenant was burnt so ignominiously by the hands of the hangman. Whatever was in this, it seems certain that the plague broke out there; and it was observed to rage mostly in that street, where that open affront had been put upon the oath of God, and very few were left alive there.’
Nov. 2.
The Lord High Commissioner, the Earl of Rothes, commenced a progress through the west country, attended by the life-guard, the foot companies, and a cavalcade of nine hundred gentlemen, with trumpeters, kettle-drum, and royal standard. He went to Hamilton, Paisley, Eglintoun, and Dumbarton, ‘in a triumphant and comely manner;’ next to the Earl of Montrose’s house of Mugdock, and thence by Callendar and Linlithgow, back to Edinburgh, everywhere ‘royally entertained,’ and spending in all eighteen days on the journey.—Nic. It is to be suspected that idle and costly amusements of this kind, which had come in with the Restoration, had something to do with the poverty now complained of.
Nov.
The light regard paid to the personal rights of individuals was shewn by a wholesale deportation of poor people at this time to the West Indies. The chronic evil of Scotland, an oppressive multitude of idle wandering people and beggars, was not now much less afflicting than it had been in the two preceding reigns. It was proposed to convert them to some utility by transferring them to a field where there was a pressing want of labour. On the 2d of November, George Hutcheson, merchant in Edinburgh, for himself and copartners, addressed the Privy Council on this subject, ‘out of a desire as weel to promote the Scottish and English plantations in Gemaica and Barbadoes for the honour of their country, as to free the kingdom of the burden of many strong and idle beggars, Egyptians, common and notorious thieves and other dissolute and louss persons, banished or stigmatised for gross crimes.’ The petitioners had, by warrant of the sheriffs, justices of peace, and magistrates of burghs, apprehended and secured some of these people; yet without authority of the Council they thought they might ‘meet with some opposition in the promoting and advancing so good a work.’ It was therefore necessary for them to obtain due order and warrant from the Council.
1665.
The Council granted warrant and power to the petitioners to transport all such persons; ‘providing always, that ye bring the said persons before the Lord Justice-clerk, to whom it is hereby recommended to try and take notice of the persons, that they be justly convict for crimes, or such vagabonds as, by the laws of the country may be apprehended, to the effect the country may be disburdened of them.’
Two months later, James Dunbar, merchant, bound for Barbadoes, was licensed to take sundry ‘vagabonds and idle persons prisoners in Edinburgh, content to go of their own accord.’
The population of Barbadoes includes a greater proportion of whites than that of any other island of the West Indies, and the industrial economy of the island is also admittedly superior. It is understood that this is in a great measure owing to the cruel deportations of the poor people of Scotland to that island in the seventeenth century.
Nov.
Another good harvest, ‘whilk was the cause that a number of fee’d servants, both men and women, did marry at Martinmas, by way of penny-bridals, both within the town of Edinburgh and other parts of the country.’—Nic.
1666. Jan. 1.
Although the preceding had been, according to Nicoll, ‘a dangerous, cruel, and bloody year,’ and though at this time an order stood forbidding commerce with the plague-stricken south, yet ‘upon the 1st day of January 1666, there was as much drinking and carousing as in former times.’
Apr. 3.
After the restoration of Episcopacy, the attendance at the churches in Glasgow fell so much off, that the collection for the poor no longer produced nearly what was necessary for their sustentation. At this date, we find the archbishop writing to the Town Council, adverting to the ‘several persons, men and women, who ordinarily dishaunts public ordinances, and flatters themselves with hope of impunity.’ His grace threatened to employ some of the officers of his majesty’s militia, ‘both to observe who withdraws from ordinances and to exact the penalties imposed by law.’ The magistrates then resolved to take steps for collecting the fines for non-attendance at church, as being better ‘than that any sodgers should have the collecting thereof.’—M. of G.
Apr. 12.
1666.
At a horse-race at Cupar, ‘the Lord Lithgow and the Lord Carnegie, after cups, there passed some words betwixt them, and about night they drew off from the rest, on the hill towards Tarbet Broom, and drew their swords one at another, till at last Carnegie gave Lithgow a sore wound. While this was noised abroad, divers of the nobility and others there present did ride to stop them; among whom was the Earl of Wemyss, who, labouring to ride in betwixt the parties, had both his own horse under him, and his man’s horse, thrust through by them, while they were drawing one at another, so that both the horses died; also one of Lord Melville’s horses was hurt, and the Lord Newark had one of his servants ridden down also and hurt. At night they were both put under arrest by his majesty’s commissioner [the Earl of Rothes] at Cupar, in their several quarters.’—Lam.
Apr.
1666.
For several years after the Restoration, various districts in the Highlands continued to be haunted by groups of wild and lawless men who made prey of their more industrious and peaceable neighbours. The only resource of the government was to appoint some considerable man of the disturbed district to raise a force among his tenants and dependents, for the execution of the laws against the delinquents. Thus, we find a small military party under the Marquis of Montrose appointed (April 5, 1666), under the name of a Watch, to keep the peace in the district of Cowal, in Argyleshire. Another watch of sixty men, under Mungo Stirling of Glorat, was appointed for Stirlingshire and Dumbartonshire. A third district, often and seriously disturbed by robberies, was Strathspey and the alpine ground extending from it towards Perthshire and Aberdeenshire—a country of Macphersons and M‘Intyres, now the scene of an improved agriculture, and the nursery of vast herds of sheep and cattle devoted to the sustenance of the industrial cities of England. In those days, men who would now be successful farmers, exemplifying the decent virtues of the Scottish middle class, were little better than banditti. Their names and localities will verify this fact to all who are acquainted with the Strathspey of our day. Besides Patrick Roy Macgregor, who seems to have been the leader of the set, there were ‘John M‘Inteir at Invereshie; M‘Phatrig M‘Inteir, in Auchnahad; Thomas M‘Pherson, in Tullilundley; John Reoch, there; Walter Mitchell, sometime in Tulliboe; Duncan M‘Connochy, sometime in Doghillocks; John Urquhart, sometime in Caldwell; Ewen Cameron, in Glensyth; John M‘Gremmon, in Rippach; John M‘Fillech, alias Breck, in Delvorer; John M‘Gremmon, in Bellerathens in Strathaven; Alaster M‘Phatrig, in Elsheirland; James Strauchen, in Cairlies; William Storach, in the Mill of Auchinhandach; Thomas Forbes, sometime in Muiresk; John M‘Andley, in Lesmurdie; Thomas Gordon, in Tilliesoul, called the Skinner; John Oig Gordon, in Strathaven, called Moonlight; Donald M‘Gillandries, who haunts in Spey; John Bane M‘Alister Gourlay, in Auchnakint in Badenoch; M‘Phatrig M‘Inteir, there; John Roy M‘Inteir, there; John M‘Inteir,
called the Ratton, in Glenlivet;’ and many other Gordons, Reochs, Forbeses, &c., together with the wives of several of the same individuals, all of whom were denounced at the horn for ‘not appearing to underly the law.’
The Council at length gave a commission of fire and sword to John Lyon of Muiresk and Alexander his second son, against these outlaws, and the two gentlemen were preparing means for its execution, when the whole banditti beset them at the house of Balcheiries, belonging to John Lyon. The outlaws set fire to the house in all quarters, and the two gentlemen were obliged to surrender themselves to their mercy. The assailants then unmercifully fell upon the unfortunate commissioner and his son with dirks and guns, and soon made an end of them (April 30, 1666). To the number of forty persons, they then made an attack upon the little burgh of Keith, which they plundered severely, after fighting with all who opposed them. A second commission to the Earl of Moray (May 9) had the effect of bringing Patrick Roy Macgregor and some others of the band into the hands of the authorities at Edinburgh, and these men were tried in the ensuing March for sorning, fire-raising, theft, and murder. Macgregor and one Patrick Drummond were sentenced to be hanged, their right hands being previously cut off. Pitmedden describes Macgregor as a short, strong-made man, of fierce countenance, and a quick, hawk-like eye. He bore the torture of the boots with the firmness of an Indian savage, and was perfectly undaunted at his execution, notwithstanding that the hangman bungled the cutting off of his hand, for which he was next day turned out of office.—B. A.
Two other men of this band were in like manner brought to justice in May 1668. On the 13th of July, there was an order in Council for a reward of £150 to John Ogilvie of Milltower and two others for their service in taking Patrick Roy Macgregor, on which occasion, it is stated, two of them had been wounded, and one of their attendants killed.
1666.
An unflattering light is thrown upon the internal condition of the Highlands at this time, by a petition from George Leslie, sheriff-clerk of Inverness-shire, to the Privy Council (April 8, 1669), shewing that it was not suitable for sheriff-clerks, ‘being but mean persons and not of capacity nor trust,’ to be employed in gathering his majesty’s taxation; and further stating, that it was particularly unsuitable for him to have such an employment, ‘who is clerk of the dismembered shire of Inverness, there being little or nothing left of that sheriffdom, but the Hielands and Isles, as Lochaber, Badenoch, Knoydart, Moidart, Glengarie, and other Hieland parts, whose inhabitants are not legally disposed, nor willing to pay his majesty’s dues, being infested with poverty and idleness—a task upon which account the petitioner is not able to undergo, seeing disobedience has been given by them to parties of his majesty’s forces of a considerable strength.’[212]
In harmony with this picture is an order from the Privy Council, August 25, 1670, proceeding on the information that ‘divers of the inhabitants of the Highlands are in the use, when they travel through the country, to be attended by a multitude of louss and idle persons, not being their domestic servants,’ whereby ‘occasion is given for stealing and sorning.’ All persons were strictly forbidden to travel or hold meetings in the Highlands in that manner.
1666.
Old grudges amongst neighbouring clans still occasionally worked themselves out in regular military invasions accompanied by extensive depredations. There was an old feud between the Clan Cameron in Lochaber, and Struan Robertson in the upper part of Perthshire; and on the 14th of August 1666, the renowned chief, Ewen or Evan Cameron, came with above eighty followers, including several good duniwassals,[213] to Struan’s lands of Kinloch—quartered there for a night upon the tenants, beat and threatened them, broke into and searched houses, all for the purpose of laying hold of their enemy, who, however, was out of the way. Disappointed of their primary object, the Camerons took twenty-six head of cattle, and made off with them to their own country. The misdeed being fully proven in November against Ewen Cameron Locheil, Sorlie Cameron, John Oig Cameron, and John and Duncan M‘Ewen Camerons, the lords of the Privy Council ordained the first (who did not appear) to pay Struan a fine of a thousand merks, and the others, who had been confined for some time in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, to restore to Struan the twenty-six stolen cattle.
As might be expected, the record of the Privy Council about this time contains many complaints from messengers-at-arms, regarding the violent resistance they had encountered in the Highlands when attempting to apprehend debtors or delinquents, or even to deliver letters in form of law.
The Earl of Airth had procured letters of caption against John Graham of Duchrae, and Thomas Graham, his son, and studied to obtain an opportunity of putting them in execution. Learning that Thomas Graham was to have a child baptised at the kirk of Aberfoyle, and judging that the whole family might probably be found together on such an occasion, he proceeded thither (February 13, 1671) with Alexander Mushet, messenger, and a strong party of his friends and dependents, all well armed. Duchrae, though he considered himself in possession of a sufficient protection from the king, deemed it necessary that his christening-party should also be well armed. Where debt and Highland blood were concerned, there could scarcely but be bloodshed in such circumstances.
At the Bridge of Aberfoyle, the Duchrae party—including, by the way, the minister and elders of the parish—met Alexander Mushet, who had come forward with a few attendants, to execute the writ, while the Earl of Airth remained with some others of his party at a little distance. When Mushet told Duchrae to consider himself as his prisoner, the latter took out a protection, which he held forth with words of scornful defiance, calling out: ‘What dar ye do? This is all your masters!’ the truth being that the paper was not a protection from civil debt, but merely bore reference to another question regarding the removal from certain lands. Meanwhile, the baby was set down upon the ground, and the Duchrae party prepared their swords, guns, and pistols for a conflict, avowing to Mushet and his friends that they would kill the one half of them, and drown the other. They did accordingly press first upon Mushet, and then upon the earl and his friends, who quickly gave way, but rallied and stood upon their defence. It was alleged that the earl was narrowly missed by several bullets, and it was certain that some of his servants were wounded, one Robert M‘Farlane losing two of his fingers. With great difficulty, they were allowed to get off with their lives.
1666.
Duchrae, notwithstanding an attempt at counter-action, was condemned to go into Edinburgh Tolbooth, and give ample caution that he would keep the peace towards the Earl of Airth and his tenants.
In the same year, John Campbell, a messenger, having to execute letters of caption and inhibition against certain gentlemen in Caithness, proceeded to that remote province with a couple of concurrents, and was seized upon by a Captain George Sinclair, and shipped off with his two associates for France. By mere chance of winds and waves, the ship, after being a considerable time at sea, came back to Thurso, when the three unfortunate officers of the law were put up in prison, where ‘they are keepit under a guard, as they were malefactors.’ The Council ordered them to be liberated, because they had given security to answer any charge that Captain George Sinclair might bring against them!
One evening in the spring of 1671, a number of gentlemen, including the Lairds of Lochnell and Lochbuie, and James Menzies of Culdares, were assembled in the house of John Rowat in Inverary, conversing about certain private concerns, when, some differences arising, and the candle having gone out, some one fired a shot whereby the Laird of Lochnell was killed. This could not but be a fact of considerable importance at Inverary, as Lochnell was the nearest relative of the Earl of Argyle after his brother, Lord Niel. It was soon ascertained by the confession of one Duncan Macgregor, who was present on the occasion, that he had fired the fatal shot; yet the earl thought proper to detain Culdares in durance, notwithstanding his protestations of innocence, and his being in reality grieved as a friend for the death of the murdered gentleman.
The case is perhaps chiefly worthy of notice on account of the traits of clan-feeling which it brought out. Culdares represented his case to the Privy Council as one of the greatest hardship. Here he was, a prisoner in a strange country, inaccessible to his friends, remote from the advice of lawyers, about to be subjected to a tribunal, the head of which was a near relative of the deceased, and where no assize of barons, his own compeers, could be had. The defunct, moreover, was ‘so related to all the gentlemen of that country,’ and ‘so generally beloved,’ that an impartial verdict was evidently not to be hoped for. In short, he ‘finds it very unsafe for him to pass to the knowledge of ane assize in these places.’ He was, however, ‘most willing to abide a severe and legal trial at Edinburgh, where he may have the opportunity of lawyers and ane fair and impartial proceeding.’
1666.
The Council ordered the earl before them, to shew cause why Culdares should not be sent to Edinburgh for trial; but we do not hear of any subsequent procedure.—P. C. R.
July 5.
In obedience to a letter of the king, the Privy Council decreed that, ‘in order to the conversion of the Marquis of Huntly and the better ordering of his affairs’ [the marquis was now about sixteen years of age], his mother should be removed from him and retire with her family to some of his lordship’s houses in the north. This she was ordered to do before the 1st of August. It appears that the lady had been dealt with privately on this matter; but being unwilling, as was very natural, to part with her son, the king had been obliged to send his special command to the Council to have the separation effected.
It may be remarked as a strange conjunction of circumstances, that Charles II., in whose name ran the letter expressing such anxiety for the Protestant upbringing of the young Gordon, was, in his private sentiments, a Catholic, while Lauderdale, by whom the letter was officially signed, was indifferent to all religion. The effort now made was not successful. The young marquis,—who was raised to be a Duke by James II., and distinguished himself by his fidelity to that monarch at the Revolution, when he held out Edinburgh Castle against the new government—continued a firm papist to the day of his death in 1716.
1666.
Another remarkable case of the same kind of interference with family arrangements on account of religion, occurs in the Council record of the same day. Walter Scott of Raeburn, brother of William Scott of Harden, had been converted to Quakerism, and on that account was incarcerated in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh. There it was soon discovered by his relations that he was exposed to the conversation of other Quakers, prisoners like himself, ‘whereby he is hardened in his pernicious opinions and principles, without all hope of recovery, unless he be separat from such pernicious company.’ There was, however, a more serious evil than even this, in the risk which his children ran of being perverted to Quakerism, if allowed to keep company with their father. On a petition, therefore, the Council gave the brother Harden warrant (June 22, 1665) to take away Raeburn’s children, two boys and a girl, from their father, that they might be educated in the true religion. He, ‘after some pains taken with them in his own family, sent them to the city of Glasgow, to be bred at the schools there.’ On a second petition from Harden, the Council ordered an annuity of £1000 Scots to be paid to him, out of Raeburn’s estate, for the maintenance of the children; and they also ordered the father himself to be removed to Jedburgh Tolbooth, ‘where his friends and others may have occasion to convert him.’ ‘To the effect he may be secured from the practice of other Quakers,’ the Lords ‘discharged the magistrates of Jedburgh to suffer any persons suspect of these principles to have access to him.’
The younger son of the Quaker Raeburn was Walter Scott, commonly called Beardie, great-grandfather of an illustrious modern novelist. Beardie, so styled from his wearing a long beard, escaped Quakerism, but fell into Jacobitism at a time when that was not less dangerous than Quakerism had once been. The circumstances here narrated form part of what is alluded to by Sir Walter Scott, when he makes Jedediah Cleishbotham confess himself as bound to a kind of impartiality between the Prelatic and Presbyterian factions of the seventeenth century, by reason that ‘my ancestor was one of the people called Quakers, and suffered a severe handling from either side, even to the extenuation of his purse and the incarceration of his person.’[214]
Raeburn continued to be a prisoner in Jedburgh jail in June 1669, when the Privy Council gave a fresh order that ‘none of his persuasion should have access to him, except his own wife.’ It was at that time found that ‘John Swinton, Walter Scott of Raeburn, Mr George Keith, and Mr Robert Burnett, Tutor of Leys, are not only Quakers themselves, but also studies by all means to pervert and seduce others from their duty and obedience and to engage them in the same error with themselves,’ for which purpose they, ‘in contempt of the laws, keep frequent meetings with other Quakers.’ Swinton was ordered to enter himself as a prisoner in Stirling Castle, where none but his son should have access to him. On the 29th of July, the Council gave warrant for the imprisonment of Mr George Keith, Quaker, in the Edinburgh Tolbooth, and that no one suspected to be of his persuasion should have access to him.
1666.
At length, on the 1st of January 1670, after suffering imprisonment for four and a half years, Raeburn was ordained to be set at liberty from jail, but still to remain within the bounds of his own lands, and to see no other Quaker under a penalty of a hundred pounds, his children meanwhile remaining as they were. Mr George Keith was set at liberty on the 6th of March, but only to go into voluntary exile.
Under apprehension that the Tutor of Leys would seek to affect the mind of his nephew Sir Thomas Burnett, who was now a minor, the mother of the child caused him to be carried away from all his father’s friends, ‘which,’ says the Tutor, ‘will inevitably ruin him in his education in literature and all other virtuous breeding.’ The Tutor brought the matter before the Privy Council, representing that, in order to clear himself of all suspicion of a desire to influence the child’s mind, he was arranging ‘to have sent him to Glasgow, to Mr Gilbert Burnett, professor of divinity there, who is ane brother son of the family, there to have been educat at schools and universities under the said Mr Gilbert his inspection and care,’ when the mother took the matter thus violently into her hands. The two parties being summoned before the Council, and having made their respective statements, it was ordered that the child should be restored to the Tutor, all Quaker as he was, that he might be sent to school.
Sep.
Another excellent harvest was secured in Scotland, and very early.—Nic.
Sep.
About this time the commencement of a standing army was made in Scotland, in the raising of two regiments of foot and five troops of horse, under the command of General Sir Thomas Dalyell.—Lam.
Nov.
In this month, while the poor west-country Presbyterians were engaged in their hopeless expedition, ‘there was sundry fresh, caller, ungutted herring taken upon the north side of the water of Forth ... like Dunbar herring, but smaller ... a thing rare and wondrous to the haill people.’—Nic. He notes that, all this winter, all kinds of fish, including herring, abounded, ‘whilk was very ominous.’
1666.
The defeat of the insurgents at Rullion Green (November 27), and the subsequent execution of upwards of fifty persons, made it a dreary yet exciting time. ‘I have,’ says Wodrow, the Presbyterian historian, ‘met with several prodigies seen in the air about this time; and persons who lived then, of good information, have left behind them a very strange passage, that several people about Pittenweem made public faith upon, that the night after the battle, and after some of these [subsequent] executions, they heard the voice of a multitude about Gilston Mount praising and singing psalms with the sweetest melody imaginable.’
‘In the year 1668 or 1669—in these places where the gospel was most frequently preached afterwards [fields and desert places], how surprising and astonishing was the sight, both by night and day, of brae-sides covered with the appearance of men and women with tents, and voices heard in them! Particularly the first night that Mr John Dickson preached in the fields in the night-time, east from Glasgow upon Clyde-side ... several people together, before they came to the appointed place, saw upon their way a brae-side covered with the appearance of people, with a tent, and a voice crying aloud: “This is the everlasting gospel; if ye follow on, to know, believe, and embrace this gospel, it shall never be taken from you.” When they came to join them, all disappeared. Other companies of people, in another way going there, heard a charming sweet sound of singing the 93d psalm, which obliged them to stand still till it was ended. Other people, who stayed at home, in several places, some heard the singing of the 44th psalm, others the 46th psalm. When the people who were there came home, they who stayed at home said: “Where have you been so long? for the preaching was near by, for we heard the psalms sweetly sung, and can tell you a note of the sermon”—which was the foresaid note. Worthy Mr John Blackadder, who ... used to call these years the Blink, was at all pains to examine the most solid Christians in that bounds, upon their hearing and seeing these things; who all attested the truth of the same.
‘Before the gospel came to that known place Craigmad [Stirlingshire] ... one day Alexander Stirling, who lived in the Redden, near that place, a solid, serious, zealous Christian, who told this several times to some yet alive, worthy of all credit, who told me of it. That he, with some others, one day was in that desert place, and saw that brae-side, close covered with the appearance of men and women, singing the 121st psalm, with a milk-white horse, and a blood-red saddle on his back, standing beside the people; which made that serious, discerning, observing Christian conclude that the gospel would be sent to that place, and that the white horse was the Gospel, and the red saddle Persecution.
1666.
‘That known place Darmead, where the gospel was more frequent afterward than any place I know betwixt Clydesdale and Lothian ... the like was seen there, singing the 59th psalm. And whoever will consider the foresaid psalms will see how suitable they are to these dispensations, and were oft sung by the Lord’s suffering people in that time....’—Pat. Walker.
Although these incidents are stated by Walker to have happened at places subsequently remarkable for preachings, it is evident that the people who saw and heard them were pious persons, deeply interested in the religious affairs of the time, and in an excitable state on that subject. Modern science is at no loss to account for such experiences under certain predisposing causes, without recourse to the supernatural. In the learned and laborious work of De Boismont on Hallucinations, they are fully treated and accounted for. ‘Illusions of sight and hearing,’ he says, ‘have often assumed the form of an epidemic. History records a number of facts of this character. One of the chief is the transformation of clouds into armies, and all sorts of figures; to which religious belief, optical phenomena, physical laws then unknown, high fevers of a pestilential character, and the derangement of the brain, all give a very natural explanation. Pausanias relates that, four hundred years after the battle of Marathon, the neighing of horses and the shock of armies were nightly heard on the spot. At the battle of Platæa, the air resounded with a fearful cry, which the Athenians attributed to the god Pan.... According to Josephus: Before sunrise on the 27th of May, there appeared in the air, throughout the whole country, chariots full of armed men, traversing the clouds and spreading round the cities, as if to enclose them. On the day of Pentecost, the priests, being at night in the inner temple to celebrate divine service, heard a noise, and afterwards a voice that repeated three several times: “Let us go out from hence.”’
History abounds in such facts, for facts they are in one sense. The predominant popular idea always appears in the vision. When a dreaming shepherd-boy in a Catholic country has a religious vision, the person most apt to be presented to him is the Virgin Mary. When a Scottish peasant had a similar experience in the seventeenth century, it took the form of preaching and psalm-singing.
1667. Jan. 31.
1667.
Heretofore there had been only an irregular transmission of letters by means of foot-messengers between Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and in the latter city there had been ‘long experience of the prejudice sustained, not only by the said burgh of Aberdeen, but by the nobility, gentry, and others in the north country, by the miscarrying of missive letters, and by the not timous delivery and receiving returns of the samen.’ It was now thought that there ought to be a constant post at Aberdeen, whereby ‘every man might have their letters delivered and answers returned at certain diets and times.’ It was therefore arranged with the consent of Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie, his majesty’s postmaster-general, that Lieutenant John Wales should establish a regular horse-post at Aberdeen, to carry letters to Edinburgh every Wednesday and Friday, returning every Tuesday and Thursday in the afternoon; every single letter to pay 2s., and every double letter 4s., every packet 5s. per ounce (in all cases Scots money). All other posts were discharged. Two years later (January 28, 1669) Inverness became sensible of a need for the same accommodation, though on a humbler footing. Accordingly, Robert Mean, keeper of ‘the Letter-office’ in Edinburgh, having, with concurrence of Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie, his majesty’s postmaster-general for Scotland, undertaken ‘to settle a constant foot-post between Edinburgh and Inverness, for the advancement of trade, correspondence, and convenience of the king’s subjects,’ the Privy Council, on petition, granted warrant for the purpose, the post ‘to go and return two times every week to Aberdeen, and once every week to Inverness, wind and weather serving,’ and the rates to be—‘For the conveyance of every single letter not exceeding one sheet of paper, to and from any place not exceeding forty miles Scots distant from the place where such letter shall be received, 2s. Scots money, and every double letter for the miles foresaid 4s. Scots, and for every ounce-weight the foresaid miles 5s.;’ for distances of threescore and fourscore miles, in proportion. ‘Wind and weather serving’ is an amusing qualification, considering that there was only one ferry of six or seven miles and another of two miles to cross. The Inverness post had not yet acquired the resolution which is said to have been expressed many years later by a carrying communication between Edinburgh and that northern burgh, when it was announced that ‘a waggon would leave the Grassmarket for Inverness every Tuesday, God willing, but on Wednesday whether or no.’
1667.
The interest connected with this important institution may perhaps justify the preservation of one or two notices in themselves trivial. February 20, 1668, a complaint was made to the Privy Council by certain Edinburgh merchants, against Robert Mean, as to his charges of 1d. for each single, 2d. for each double, and 3d. upon each triple letter, in addition to the former dues of 4d., 8d., &c., and Robert was peremptorily ordered to discontinue these extra charges.—P. C. R.
In August 1672, Anna Keith, relict of John Wales, keeper of the Letter-office in Aberdeen, complained to the Privy Council against the magistrates of Aberdeen, for having, on her husband’s death, extruded her from the office, in contravention of the contract between them and her husband, which provided that, in the event of his death before the expiration of the seven years engaged for, his heirs and representatives were to have the option of carrying on the business, by providing a qualified substitute. The magistrates had gone so far as to incarcerate Mrs Wales’s servants for going about their duties, ‘and by touk of drum discharged all persons from employing the complainer any further in the said office.’ They had also conferred the office on another person, without waiting to set it up to auction, ‘though several of the burgesses did offer considerably for the same.’ The Council replaced Mrs Wales in her husband’s office.—P. C. R.
There is a whimsical incongruity in the connection of a Graham of Inchbrakie with a thing of such modern and commercial associations as the Post-office. Patrick—his common name was ‘Black Pate’—was a semi-Highland cavalier of the purest lustre. It was at his house, situated on the skirts of the Highlands, that Montrose had raised his meteor-like standard in 1644. The trouble he had given to the lords of the Covenant and to Cromwell could only be rewarded at the Restoration with this office, which in 1674 descended to his younger son John. One could scarcely imagine a more heterogeneous assemblage of ideas than that of Montrose’s friend as postmaster-general, and the son of the lady who threw the anti-prelatic stool in 1637 as keeper of the Edinburgh office under him.
Apr.
1667.
During the unfortunate and discreditable war with Holland in 1665-6-7, a field was obtained for the enterprise of the Scotch in the trade of privateering. A very considerable number of cappers, as they were called, generally vessels of from a hundred to two hundred tons burden, were fitted out from Glasgow, Leith, and Burntisland, under clever and adventurous captains, in order to take the Dutch merchantmen. We hear of one belonging to Glasgow, so low as sixty tons burden, yet carrying five guns, and a crew of sixty persons, having further on board thirty-two firelocks, twelve half-pikes, eighteen pole-axes, and thirty swords, with provisions for six months.[215] A Glasgow privateer, commanded by one Chambers, distinguished itself by seizing a Dutch capper of eight guns and bringing it up the Clyde, along with a merchant-vessel laden with salt.
Towards the close of the war (February 1667), a Glasgow merchantman of three hundred tons, returning from Spain with wines, encountered a Dutch man-of-war. The captain sent most of his crew below, and remained on deck himself with seven men, to give tokens of submission. The Dutchman sent twenty-two men in a boat to take possession of his supposed prize, and, seeing another vessel at the moment, set off in pursuit of it. The captors suspecting no stratagem, the concealed crew came forth in the evening, and easily overpowered them, thus retaining possession of their vessel, which they brought safely into Glasgow with twenty-two prisoners.[216]
Apr. 30.
The ports of Leith and Burntisland having in this way given great annoyance to the Dutch, a resolution was made to attempt a retaliation; and little more than two months before the celebrated attack on the Thames shipping, a fleet of thirty sail appeared one day at the mouth of the Firth of Forth. At first it was supposed to be the English fleet under Sir Jeremy Smith; but the Dutch colours soon appeared, and there was then a hasty effort made to protect the coast. The royal commissioner Rothes placed militia along both shores. Some of the Burntisland privateers took their cannon on shore, and raised a battery to defend the harbour.[217] The Dutch ships lashed out with their ordnance against that town, and knocked down a few chimneys, but did no further harm. Seeing no great encouragement for landing, they yielded at length to a somewhat violent west wind, and ‘that night did tak sail and removed from our coasts, without hurt done to any person.’—Nic.
June 4.
1667.
Mr William Douglas, son of the deceased Laird of Whittingham, was tried for his concern in an unfortunate duel, in which Sir James Home of Eccles was killed. The affair took its origin in a quarrel in a tavern in Edinburgh, ‘after excessive drinking.’—Lam. We learn from the evidence of a hackney-coachman, that being employed by four gentlemen—namely, the two who have been mentioned, the Master of Ramsay, and Archibald Douglas of Spott—he drove them to a lonely spot on the shore near Leith, where they all came out, and drawing their swords, ‘went through other.’ He saw Sir James fall under the thrust of the accused party. Another person saw the accused standing over Sir James after he fell, and when the unfortunate gentleman was carried into Leith, he heard the accused ask him forgiveness. A third witness observed the Master of Ramsay with his foot on Spott’s neck, and when he (the deponent) removed the Master, Spott got up, ran at the Master, and called him ‘cullion!’ It seems to have been a barbarous quarrel barbarously wrought out; and when we see how the men acted after they began fighting, we cannot but wonder that they were able to come to the field in one vehicle. William Douglas was sentenced to have his head stricken off his body three days after at the Cross of Edinburgh.—B. A.
There was a great drouth this summer, so that the grass was burned up, and the victual whitened before the middle of July, and ripened at the end of that month.—Lam.
1668. May 7.
John Gibson of Durie had a petition before the Privy Council regarding his niece Anna Gibson, daughter of the deceased Sir Alexander Gibson of Durie. His complaint was, that Anna had been unwarrantably carried away into the Highlands by certain persons unknown, but for no other imaginable purpose than to acquire an influence over her mind in the choice of curators. We learn through other channels that the young lady was an orphan, scarcely eleven years of age, and that she was living at Perth at the time of her abduction. Her deceased mother was Marjory Murray, a sister of the Viscount Stormont, and we are informed by Lamont, as part of the gossip of the day, that it was by this nobleman’s means that the young lady was carried off, his aim probably being to prevent her paternal relatives from acquiring an exclusive influence over her. The Council, on the supplication of John Gibson, issued warrants for a search after Anna Gibson, and the taking of her from the hands of any into whose power she had fallen; also threatening punishment for her detention, and decreeing a fine of £20,000 Scots to any man who should marry her.
1668.
We hear nothing more of this case till the ensuing 11th of February, when the Lord Chancellor acquainted the Council that Anna Gibson had been brought to his lodging that forenoon. She was ordered to be placed in the family of Mr Alexander Gibson, one of the clerks of the Council, ‘ay and while she shall make choice of her curators after her age of twelve years complete.’ Apparently, the relatives on both sides had afterwards come to an agreement about this young heiress, as Lamont tells us that, on the 28th of August 1669, ‘Mistris Anne Gibson, Durie’s niece, remaining at Durie for the time, did choose her curators; among whom were the Earl of Rothes the chancellor, Sir Andrew Murray, and the Tutor of Stormont, her uncles on the mother’s side; Durie and his brother George Gibson, her uncles on the father’s side, &c. They dined that day at David Johnston, in Cupar, his house.’
Mrs Anna Gibson afterwards became the wife of John Murray of Touchadam and Polmaise. It is worthy of observation that she was the great-granddaughter of Lord Durie who was kidnapped by George Meldrum of Dumbreck; see under September 1601.
May 22.
The town of Kilmarnock was wholly destroyed by an accidental fire, ‘wherethrough about sexscore families are set to the fields destitute both of goods and houses’—indeed, ‘in a condition of starving.’ Matters were the worse for them, by reason that they, ‘being all poor tradesmen, and having no other means of livelihood but their daily employment,’ had some time before been reduced to ‘great misery and affliction,’ in consequence of the quartering upon them of a great party of the king’s forces, when these were sent to the west to prevent a rebellion. Under the sanction of the Privy Council, a collection was made at the parish churches for the succour of these poor people.
The event is chiefly worthy of notice as marking the smallness of Kilmarnock in those days, when as yet there was no such thing as manufacturing industry in the country. A hundred and twenty families speaks to a population of between five and six hundred: in 1851, this industrious town contained 21,443 inhabitants within the parliamentary boundaries.
1668.
In April 1669, a fire broke out at midnight in the town of Cupar (Fife), and spread so fast and with such violence, that ‘above the number of twenty considerable families being asleep in bed, did, unclothed with their apparel, with great difficulty escape their dwelling-houses,’ which were consumed with their entire contents. Thus, not only were these people, with their many young children, ‘ruined and reduced to begging,’ but ‘a great part of that ancient burgh, being the head burgh of the shire, [was] annihilat and turned to desolation.’ On a petition, the Privy Council ordered a charitable collection in Fife and the adjacent counties ‘for the relief of the poor indigent families of the said ancient burgh.’
July 9.
Cases of outrageous personal violence, so common in the reign of James VI., and even in the ensuing reign, continued to be now and then heard of. The Privy Council Record, under this date, adverts to one of a typical character, referring to a remote province, where early forms and fashions of society still obtained. It appears that Marion Peebles, ‘Lady Cardiness,’ widow of the late —— Gordon of Cardiness, was an aged and infirm lady living in the house of Bussabiel in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright. She was liferented in her husband’s lands; and her two sons, William and Alexander Gordon, resided with her; but the heir of the property was a grandchild in infancy. The allegation of William and Alexander Gordon was, that Sir Alexander M‘Culloch of Myreton had formed a design to possess himself of Cardiness, for which purpose ‘he did buy several pleas, debts, comprisings, and factories of the estate, and used all means to get himself intruded thereinto.’ For a series of years, he did his best to harass the Gordons and their tenantry out of their rights and possessions; and at length, on the 19th of August 1664, he came with a party, consisting of his sons Godfrey and John; Harry M‘Culloch, younger of Barholm; William M‘Culloch, younger of Locharduae; John M‘Culloch of Auchleoch; Alexander Fergusson of Kilkerran; and sundry other persons, attended by their servants, all armed with swords and pistols, to Bussabiel, where they broke up the house, and attacked the lady in her bed. They beat her till she fell in a swoon, then broke down the roof of the house upon her head; and afterwards, finding her son William, they also ‘wounded him dangerously in the arm and hand, to the hazard of his life, not permitting his servants to give him drink or go for a chirurgeon to dress his wounds, or administer any kind of help or comfort to him for a long time.’ Through their violent treatment, he was ‘forced to forsake the country, his infirm mother, and business.’
1668.
On a subsequent occasion (October 1665), the same persons came again to Bussabiel, and committed a fresh assault on Lady Cardiness, ‘striking her with her own stilt till she fell a-sound among their hands.’ Yet a third time did they come in March 1666, and with still more fearful violence. They ‘brake down the doors, and put forth all the servants, and pulled down the bed about Marion her head, and in ane most inhuman manner dragged her forth thereof. She not being able to go of herself by reason of her weakness, they carried her forth of the yett to the croft,’ letting her head fall against a stone by the way; then leaving her insensible, they proceeded to demolish and destroy all that was of any value in the house. The wretched lady was carried by some of her tenants into a barn, where she remained for the night. Two months afterwards, they beset her house with a guard, to prevent her from receiving any succour from friends or servants; and a woman detected taking in something to her mistress by a back-window, was beaten cruelly. Then entering the house, ‘they did keep her from sleep as weel as meat, and further did throw down water and other liquid matters upon her, so that she was forced to retire and shelter herself within the bounds of the kitchen chimney for her safety.’ In consequence of these ‘inhuman acts, and keeping of all her rents, corns, goods, and geir, whereupon she should have lived, from her,’ she was reduced to such a state of wretchedness, that ‘she within a short time thereafter did burst forth her heart’s blood and died.’
There were sundry deadly assaults upon the two sons, and some attacks of a destructive nature upon their house, all betokening a savage violence on the part of M‘Culloch and his friends.
There is some difficulty as to the decision of the Council. They first appear as condemning the accused parties to fine and imprisonment; then next day give an opposite verdict; yet after all, in April next year, we hear of Godfrey M‘Culloch and Fergusson of Kilkerran as still under threat of punishment on account of their offence.
July 11.
1668.
‘Saturday, in the evening, as the Archbishop of St Andrews and Bishop of Orkney were going abroad, the archbishop being in his coach, and the other stepping in, a wicked fellow standing behind the coach did shoot the Bishop of Orkney beneath his right hand; which broke his left arm a little above the wrist with five balls.’ So wrote the Privy Council to the king.—P. C. R. The assassin was a preacher named James Mitchell, ‘a weak scholar,’ according to Kirkton, but whom Wodrow describes as ‘a youth of much zeal and piety.’ We may charitably presume that he was a weak man infuriated by the sufferings of his party. His design was to slay the archbishop, who had become more and more odious to the malcontent Presbyterians. ‘After the shot, he crosses the street quietly, till he came near Niddry’s Wynd head, and there a man offered to stop him, upon which he presents the other loaden pistol, and so the pursuer leaves him. He stepped down the Wynd, and turning up Steven Law’s Close, entered a house, and shifting his clothes, passed confidently to the street. The cry arose, A man was killed. The people’s answer was, It was but a bishop; and so there was no more noise.’—Kir.
The government made much noise about this attempt, but failed to discover the murderer; nor was he discovered till six years after, when Sharpe himself recognised and had him arrested. Gilbert Burnett says: ‘I lived then much out of the world; yet I thought it decent to go and congratulate on this occasion. He [Sharpe] was much touched with it, and put on a show of devotion. He said with a very serious look: “My times are wholly in Thy hand, O thou God of my life!” This was the single expression savouring of piety that ever fell from him in all the conversation that passed between him and me.’
1668.
John Geddie, sheriff-clerk of Fife, residing at Falkland—a prosperous sort of person, who had gathered some substance while acting as clerk to the committee of war during the king’s residence in Scotland, 1650-1—attracted attention at this time by a novel plan for the management of bees. He constructed a bee-house, of wainscot, with eight sides, about sixteen inches in height, and twenty-three inches in diameter; containing various divisions, designed to allow of the swarming of the industrious insects, and save the necessity of destroying any in order to obtain the result of their labours. In an age when men seem to have had no extra occupation but that of wrangling about abstract matters in which they could never hope to convince each other, it is pleasant to light upon even so simple an exercise of ingenuity and economic wisdom as the bee-house of John Geddie. The inventor succeeded in obtaining for his plan the approving notice of the Royal Society. The king, too, was induced to have a bee-house of Geddie’s construction erected at Spring Gardens, near Whitehall, and another at Windsor Castle, ‘where, for several years, his majesty did come to the places himself, and with delight behold them, and saw the honey in its season taken forth without troubling the bees, to his great satisfaction.’ His majesty likewise ‘willed and commanded another to be erected in his park of Falkland, in the ancient kingdom of Scotland, for the good and benefit of his whole subjects, rich and poor therein, in order to stir up noblemen and gentlemen to follow his example.’ That this might be duly effected, the king granted to Geddie twenty acres of marsh-land in the east end of the park of Falkland, ‘to be enclosed, trenched, and planted with such herbs, trees, &c., as is most suitable and convenient for the maintenance and food of an apifacture; and ordered a convenient house to be built therein for that purpose, and did ordain the treasurer and receivers of his majesty’s revenues to pay John Geddie the sum of £200 sterling for building and accomplishing the said apifacture.’ In April 1673, a patent was conferred on Geddie for his invention, for fourteen years. In 1679, the king further granted him power to buy the island of Inchkeith, probably with a view to its being employed in apiculture. But owing to troubles on account of oaths—John being a Presbyterian—it does not appear that he greatly benefited by the royal favour. He published a small treatise on the subject, of which a third edition appeared in 1697.—Abbotsford Misc.
A pleasant year as to weather, and a great crop—nothing better in either respect these sixty years past.—Lam.
In October occurred a violent storm, which produced great damage at Dundee, both in the structure of the harbour and by loss of ships. An act of parliament was passed to encourage a voluntary contribution to repair these disasters.
1669. June 4.
One Mungo Murray was tried before the Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, on a charge of having, on the 8th day of May preceding, committed an assault on Thomas Sydserf. The affair is only worthy of noting because it brings out the fact that there was at this time a theatre in the Canongate. Thomas Sydserf is the same person whom we have seen engaged in editing the Mercurius Caledonius. He had since turned his mind to dramatic literature, and written a play called Tarugo’s Wiles, which was acted with applause at the Duke of York’s Theatre in 1668, and on which the Earl of Dorset had written complimentary verses—representing Phœbus as saying to Scotland, with reference to such Scotsmen as Sydserf:
1669.
‘On thee I will bestow my longest days,
And crown thy sons with everlasting bays.
My beams that reach thee shall employ their powers
To ripen souls of men, not fruits and flowers,
Let warmer climes my fading favours boast,
Poets and stars shine brightest in the frost.’
Sydserf was now conducting a theatre in the Canongate, depending in all probability upon the yet unfaded spirit of cavalierism evoked at the Restoration, for a slender support which it was not in the nature of Scotland to give at ordinary times to such an establishment. It appeared that Mungo Murray broke into Sydserf’s theatre in time of rehearsal, and attacked him with his drawn sword, but was overpowered before he could inflict any hurt. He was found guilty, and sentenced to ask Sydserf’s pardon, and abstain from molesting him in future under pain of banishment from the city.[218]
June 16.
For several years after the Restoration, a very frequent entry in the record of the Privy Council is an application from a Scotsman of good family, resident abroad for a borbrieff [birth-letter], or certificate of his lineage and family connections, to be drawn up and transmitted to him, that he might be enabled to appear in a proper light before the strangers amongst whom he lived. At the date noted, there is an application of this kind from a lady! ‘Maria Margaret Urrie, eldest lawful daughter of the deceased Sir John Urrie of that Ilk, being abroad in a strange country, where her birth and pedigree is not known, to the prejudice of her fortune in those parts,’ had ‘purchased a certificate of her pedigree under the hands of the Earl of Panmure and several other noblemen and gentlemen of quality;’ and she now petitioned for ‘a borbrieff in her favours, conform to the said certificate.’—P. C. R. The requisite warrant for the Chancery was at once granted. We soon after (29th September 1670) hear of an application of the same nature from a lady of greater note, Elizabeth, Countess of Grammont, who states that she had obtained the needful ‘certificate of her descent and pedigree under the hand of the Earl of Lauderdale, his majesty’s High Commissioner; the Lord Duke of Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas, the Earls Marischal, Argyle, and divers other noblemen.’ She was a descendant of the Abercorn family. Her brother’s Memoirs of her husband, have made the world generally acquainted with this elegant woman.
1669.
Among applications for borbrieffs was one in June 1670, from ‘Thomas Kirkpatrick, secretary to the king of France and Councillor Lord Duplosse in Dunua, in France, son lawful of Thomas Kirkpatrick, a Scotsman and sometime one of the twenty-five Scots gentlemen soldiers of the life-guard of the king of France.’ Another, in 1686, was from the celebrated Colbert, minister of Louis XIV. of France, in whose behalf an act of parliament was passed, authorising the required document. It stated the descent of the Sieur Colbert, Marquis of Seignelay, at seven removes from Edward Culbert, a son of Culbert or Cuthbert of Castlehill, near Inverness, a family of king’s barons who often represented their county in parliament, and whose connections spread through the best branches of the peerage.—S. Acts.
Aug. 24.
The marriage-day of the unfortunate Bride of Baldoon. The story of this lady has been related with all the graces of fiction in the tale of the Bride of Lammermuir; but in its actual circumstances it is sufficiently impressive. She was the Honourable Janet Dalrymple, daughter of the first Lord Stair, so distinguished as a lawyer and by the part he took in the politics of his day. While still in girlish years, the young lady contracted a passionate attachment to Lord Rutherford, the distant relative and heir of that noble champion, Andrew Rutherford, Earl of Teviot, who is alluded to so respectfully in this chronicle under 1663. The young nobleman returned this affection, and the pair plighted their troth in the usual manner, by parting a coin between them, and imprecating dismal evils upon whoever should withdraw from or violate the compact. But this alliance did not suit the views of the parents, whether from deficient fortune in the young lord, or from contrarious politics, does not appear. They favoured a new suitor who appeared in the person of David Dunbar, younger of Baldoon in Wigtonshire.
1669.
On learning that Dunbar was advancing in his suit, Lord Rutherford wrote to his mistress to remind her of her engagement, but received an answer from her mother, to the effect that she was now sensible of the error she had committed in entering into an engagement unsanctioned by the parental authority; and this engagement it was not her intention to fulfil. The lover refused to take an answer which did not come directly from his mistress, and insisted on an interview. It took place, but in presence of the mother, a woman whom public report represented as master of her husband and whole family, and indebted for this influence to witchcraft, though for no reason that can be discerned beyond her uncommon talents and force of character. It may readily be supposed that even the resources of love would be of poor avail against the skill and resolution of such a person. When Rutherford was introduced, he found her ready to meet his arguments with what was then an unanswerable defence, a text of Scripture (Numbers xxx., 2, 3, 4, 5), clearly absolving a woman from a bond entered into in her youth, if her father shall disallow her fulfilment of it, and promising that, in that case, ‘the Lord shall forgive her.’ The poor girl herself sat mute and overwhelmed, while the lover vainly pleaded against the application of this text; and the scene ended with her surrender of her portion of the broken coin, and his flying distracted from the house, after telling her that she would be a world’s wonder from what she had done and was yet to do.
The union with young Baldoon went on, but entirely under the management of the mother, for it is inconceivable that the young man could have pressed his suit, if he had known the extent to which the bride was under constraint. The wedding was celebrated, as was customary in those days, in the presence of the relatives of both parties, and with great festivity; but the bride remained like one lost in a reverie, and who only moves and acts mechanically. A younger brother lived long enough to state to a lady who communicated the fact to Sir Walter Scott, that he had the duty of carrying her on horseback behind him to church, and he remembered that the hand with which she clasped his waist was ‘cold and damp as marble.’ ‘Full of his new dress, and the part he acted in the procession, the circumstance, which he long afterwards remembered with bitter sorrow and compunction, made no impression on him at the time.’
1669.
In the evening, the newly wedded pair retired to their chamber, while the merry-making still proceeded in the hall. The room had been locked, and the key taken possession of by the brideman, to prevent any of the unseemly frolics which, it would seem, were sometimes played off on such occasions. But, suddenly there was heard to proceed from the bridal-chamber a loud and piercing outcry, followed by dismal groans. On its being opened, the alarmed company found the bridegroom weltering in his blood on the threshold, and the bride cowering in a corner of the chimney, with no covering but her shift, and that dabbled in gore. She told them ‘to take up their bonny bridegroom.’ It was evident she was insane, and the general belief was that she had franticly stabbed her husband. From that moment, she made no other rational communications, but pined away and died in less than three weeks. Young Baldoon recovered, but would never enter into explanations regarding the tragic occurrence. Perhaps it is this mystery alone which has given rise to the favourite belief of the many descendants of Lord Stair,[219] that the wound was not inflicted by their unhappy relative, but by Lord Rutherford, who, they say, secreted himself in the chamber beforehand, and escaped afterwards by a window. This notion seems to us contrary to all probability, not merely because the conception of such an act was too gross for a man of rank even in that day, but because, had it been acted on, something must have come of it, either in the way of private revenge or of procedure before a criminal court. The idea was prevalent at the time; but it may be classed, we think, with another recorded by the credulous Law, that the poor bride was taken from her bed and harled through the house by spirits.
David Dunbar is described in an elegy by Mr Andro Simpson, as a most respectable country gentleman, an agricultural improver,[220] and yet of studious habits. He died by a fall from his horse while riding between Leith and Edinburgh in 1682, and was interred in Holyrood Chapel. Andrew Lord Rutherford is stated in the Peerage to have died childless in 1685.
Aug. 24.
An old man named George Wood, who died this day at the Grange above Elie in Fife, was interred at Kilconquhar in the evening of the next day, ‘his funerals being hastened for fear of arresting his corpse by his creditors.’—Lam.
1669.
This sufficiently shews that creditors were supposed in Scotland to have such a power by the law. In June 1677, it became a debate among the advocates in the Court of Session, whether a dead body could be arrested and stopped from interment on account of debt. What raised the question was the death of the Countess of Wemyss, and the clamour made by her numerous creditors among the merchants of Edinburgh, who feared that her husband, from whom she had been separated, would not own her obligations beyond her annuity of 6000 merks, all of which was already ‘fornailed.’ They talked seriously of arresting her ladyship’s body. Lord Fountainhall says that, though it is a custom in Holland and some other places, it is reprobated amongst us as a barbarity, and could in no way be done, except on an express supplication to the Lords of Session, or the Privy Council, ‘which would never be granted.’[221]
Nov.
Robert Donaldson, of Birdstown in Campsie, being in Edinburgh on business, fell into the company of one Thomas Scott, an English borderer, who travelled in the equipage of a gentleman. Scott, learning that Donaldson possessed money, pretended an errand to Glasgow, and so accompanied him on his way home. The two dined at Falkirk together, and then set forward, Donaldson inviting Scott to spend the night with him at his house. Just as they were turned off the main road into that leading to Donaldson’s house, Scott gave his travelling companion a stab in the neck with his rapier, and thrust him to the ground, where he cut his throat. Donaldson was, it seems, a strong man, and might have defended himself, if he had not been taken by surprise and encumbered with his cloak, which was buttoned down and heavy with rain. Scott carried off the horse and money of his victim.
Donaldson’s servants went in search of the murderer, and had gone many miles in his track when they came up to a carrier wearing their master’s hood. Immediately the man was interrogated, and told that he had got the hood from a person now riding on in advance, near Haddington. They soon came up with the said rider, and laid hands on him. He being struck with a panic fear, confessed his guilt, for which he was soon after hanged in Edinburgh.—Law.
1669. Nov.
After an interval of a few years, during which no witch-cases appear on the Privy Council Record, we find a considerable number in the autumn of this year, some at Aberdeen, some at Fogo in Berwickshire, some at Castle Tirrim in Inverness-shire. On the 11th of November, the Council issued a commission for the trial of Grizzel Jaffray, spouse of James Butchard, maltman, now prisoner in the Tolbooth of Dundee, on suspicion of ‘the horrid crime of witchcraft.’ The gentlemen of the commission were empowered to put her to the knowledge of an assize, ‘and if, by her own confession without any sort of torture or other indirect means used, it shall be found she hath renounced her baptism, entered into paction with the devil, or otherwise that malefices be legally proven against her, that then and no otherwise they cause the sentence of death to be execute upon her.’ It is believed that, notwithstanding these enlightened orders, Grizzel suffered incremation.
Tradition connects an affecting anecdote with the case of Grizzel Jaffray. It is stated that her only son, having been long absent at sea, returned in command of his vessel to Dundee, and entered the port at the very time that the execution of his mother was proceeding in the Sea-gate. On hearing the cause of the unusual bustle seen in the town, he set sail again, and was never more seen in Dundee.
On the 6th of January 1670, we find the Privy Council engaged in a new kind of proceeding regarding witchcraft. A woman called Mary M‘Donald, ‘being maliciously pursued by the captain of Clanranald and M‘Donald of Morar for the alleged crime of witchcraft,’ came before the Council for protection, being ‘in fear to be apprehended by the said persons,’ notwithstanding her having given caution to appear and underlie the law in June next. The desired protection was given.
1669.
Amidst the incessant religious troubles of the period, there were some symptoms of a disposition to mercantile enterprise. At the suggestion of sundry ‘expert merchants,’ a Society for Fishing was formed, with the design of prosecuting that employment around the coast, where it was notorious that the Dutch were driving a profitable trade. One of the considerations that weighed with the enterprisers was, that there were many poor people who would work cheaper than the Dutch, ‘and by this the country would get vent for their meal and beasts, which gave no price.’ No one was admitted who did not subscribe at least £100 sterling. The king subscribed £5000, and ‘obliged himself that all materials should be freed from custom and excise. Yet many gentlemen refused to enter, fearing that the merchants, who behoved to manage all, would cheat the other partners; and many merchants refused to enter a society where so many noblemen were engaged, by whom they were afraid to be overawed. Yet the stock did soon increase to £25,000 sterling.’[222]
Every mercantile design in that age was clogged by the spirit of monopoly. If a man proposed to set up a stage-coach, there must be no other stage-coaches but his upon the road. If a company designed to introduce the manufacture of glass, or soap, or any other article, they must have the exclusive right of making the article for a generation. The Royal Company, as it was called, began as usual by securing monopolies. ‘No others might import or export salt or fish for certain months of the year but only of that company.’ This ‘impoverished many families which traded that way,’ and ‘did occasion great grumbling among the people.’—Law.
In 1677, the Royal Company passed an ordinance for strictly enforcing their exclusive right to fish around the Scottish shores, demanding that any other party fishing should take out a licence from them. They themselves being bound only to fish for the service of the country, and not to send any fish abroad, by this restriction, says Fountainhall, ‘many in Glasgow, Dunbar, &c., will be great losers, who, by the export of fish on their own private adventures, brought in above 400,000 merks yearly.’ ‘The remedy,’ he adds, ‘will be to enter into the said company; only, they would be abler with £50 sterling alone to manage the said trade, than with £200 given in there.’
We have here a curious complication of errors in political economy—private enterprise and fair competition checked, and foreign trade forbidden. One would think that the most ingenious contrivances of an enemy could scarcely have devised a state of things more harassingly detrimental to a country; and the wonder is that even selfishness should have been so blind as not to see that the free industry of all was calculated to give better results.
1669.
There is so much in the religious troubles of this period to attract attention, that history takes little note of anything else. Yet there was also a complete suite of chronic evils arising from the little advancement made in the arts and economy of life. The king appropriated an exclusive right to make salt, though only to hand it over to a courtier; the salt was consequently bad and dear. In some districts—as Galloway, the west, and the Highlands—to which the native article could not be carried, salt was wholly wanting, and the people used salt-water instead, ‘by which many of them died as of a plague; others being forced to buy at intolerable rates, as sixteen shillings the boll, though they formerly had it for four.’ Another statesman, married to a niece of Lauderdale, had a control over the importation of brandy, and managed to make that liquor to some extent supersede both native ‘strong waters’ and Spanish wines. A third, Sir John Nicolson, was allowed to put a tax on tobacco. He was grandson of Sir William Dick, and it was thought by this means to repay in some measure the public debt incurred to that famous merchant in the time of the Civil War. Moralists of a loyal type tried to make out that it was well to check the use of ‘an unnecessary and expensive drug;’ but ‘custom had made tobacco as necessary as nature had made meat and drink, and consequently this imposition was as grievous as if bread or ale had been burdened.’[223] Add to these vexing imposts a coin debased for the profit of the mint-master—a brother of Lauderdale—and it will be seen that the evils of Scotland during this reign were not wholly of a sentimental nature.
1670. Apr. 11.
1670.
Major Weir was strangled at a stake and burnt in Edinburgh, for a series of sexual offences of the most abominable kinds. His sister, Jean Weir, who was involved in her brother’s guilt, suffered next day the less severe penalty of hanging. These were old people, and hitherto of good character.[224] The major, indeed, was a religious professor of the highest style of sanctity, making unusual pretensions to strictness in piety, and noted for his power in prayer. He seems to have been a singular example of a paradox in human nature far from uncommon, and which may well make us all humble—an exalted strain of moral sentiment, refining overmuch, in coexistence with secret and inexpressibly degrading propensities. The poor man seems to have been at length unable any longer to endure the sense of secret guilt and hypocrisy; he sent to the public authorities to come and take him up. Unable to believe in the turpitude of one externally so well reputed, they sent physicians of his own religious party to see if he were not speaking from a disordered mind; and it was only when these reported him perfectly sane and collected, that he was taken into custody. It appeared that he had been addicted to his loathsome offences for a long course of years. The major was condemned upon his own confession, and thenceforth remained stupid and inaccessible to all that was said to him. He would not hear any minister pray to or for him, telling them, when they offered, that it was in vain—‘his condemnation was sealed; and since he was to go to the devil, he did not wish to anger him!‘—Law.
Jean Weir confessed, besides, to intercourse with evil spirits. The devil had supplied her with lint to her wheel, and when she lived at Dalkeith, she had had a familiar, ‘who used to spin extraordinary quantities of yarn for her in a shorter time than three or four women could have done the same.’ That this wretched old woman was under the influence of hallucinations, there can be no doubt. When she and her brother were apprehended, ‘she desired the guards to keep him from laying hold of a certain staff, which, she said, if he chanced to get into his hands, he would certainly drive them out of doors, notwithstanding all the resistance they could make. This magical staff was all of one piece of thornwood, with a crooked head; she said he received it of the devil, and did many wonderful things with it.... It was ordered by the judges to be burnt with his body.’[225]
July 29.
1670.
Lord Rutherford, whom we have seen so recently figuring in the romantic affair of the Bride of Baldoon, was now engaged in one of a very different kind—prosecuting a Captain Rutherford for the improbation of certain documents believed to have been forged by him, in order to establish claims on the estate of his lordship’s late brother, the second lord. The captain, after lying a long time in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, was sent for by the Lords of Session (July 27, 1671) to be interrogated about the case. As he was coming along under the care of Robert Hamilton, macer of the court, ‘he pretends there were some papers in Colliston’s chamber in Bess Wynd, which would be of great use to him if he took them with him; and therefore begged leave to fetch them, and paroled he should presently return. The macer trusting him simply, Rutherford makes his escape; the rumour whereof running up and down the town, Towie Barclay, who was but lately released from his confinement in Glasgow, comes in to the Lords in the Inner House, and proffered to find him out and fetch him again within an hour; which accordingly he did with a great deal of zeal, expressing that he could not abide cheatry by anything in the world; such persons know one another’s lurking-places so weel.’—Foun.
Captain Rutherford was kept in prison seven years, while justice hesitated about his deservings; but at length, on Sir George Mackenzie coming in as king’s advocate, with resolutions to be more vigorous, the culprit was tried along with William Rutherford, messenger, for the crime of forging writs, and both were soon after (November 28, 1678) executed in the Grassmarket.
Aug.
1670.
The Privy Council was pretty fully occupied at this time in summoning and fining individuals who had been present at unauthorised religious meetings. For example, ‘Robert Burnes, merchant in Glasgow,’ expiated by a fine of 300 merks his having been at a conventicle lately held at Kirkintilloch. Four persons, described as merchants, were fined each in £100 Scots for being at such a meeting in Hilderston House, Linlithgowshire. A fifth, who had not only been there, but had a child baptised on the occasion, suffered to double the amount. A great number were brought into trouble by having been present at a famous conventicle held a short time before at the Hill of Beith, near Dunfermline. Adam Stobie and eight other men, who had been at both that conventicle and another at Livingseat, and who refused to take an oath regarding them, were ‘ordained to be carried to the plantations in America, and discharged to return under pain of death.’ In thus so harshly thwarting the extreme Presbyterians in their predilections as to clergymen and meetings for worship, the government must have calculated on a certain support from the reactionary feeling engendered by the recent twenty-two years of troubles—that feeling under which we may presume they themselves acted. But a constant repetition of such proceedings against members of the community who were only exercising a natural privilege, and meaning no harm to their fellow-creatures, could not fail to create very bitter feelings, and gradually muster elements for the destruction of the existing régime. There was at the same time an effort to deal what was doubtless intended to be equal justice towards the various dissenters whom the Presbyterians themselves were accustomed to persecute when in the possession of power. There were even now Quakers in the tolbooths of Aberdeen, Inverury, Montrose, Edinburgh, and other towns, charged with no other offence than that of holding meetings for their own kind of devotion. Professors of the Catholic faith were also from time to time assailed in ways which, one would think, must have been sufficiently annoying to them, although, there is reason to believe, not quite up to that point of severity which would have been satisfactory to the people on the opposite extreme.
On a slight eminence beside the pastoral Doveran in Banffshire, is a little old-fashioned manor-house, surrounded as usual by a few trees, and bearing the descriptive name of Kinnairdie. Rothiemay and Frendraught—names of painful memory—are in the neighbourhood. Kinnairdie was occupied by the Crichtons of Frendraught, zealous, though unobtrusive Catholics. Word came to the Council as it sat in Edinburgh (August 1670), that in this retired villa ‘there is usual resort publicly to mass every Lord’s day, and four families of the heritors in the parish do, upon the ringing of a bell, go to a room in the said house where there is ane altar erected, and priests do officiate.’ The sheriff of the county was immediately ordered to go and inquire into the matter, to apprehend the priest if he could, and also ‘seize upon any vestments or other popish ornaments made use of in their superstitious worship.’
1670.
The sheriff soon after reported that he had seized a Mr Patrick Primrose, who was believed to have officiated as priest at Kinnairdie. He was ordered by the Council to keep this person strictly secured till he should be subjected to trial. By and by, however, ‘being informed that Mr Patrick Primrose, prisoner in the Tolbooth of Banff, doeth belong to the queen’s majesty as one of her servants,’ the Council ordered his liberation, ‘he always obliging himself to depart furth of the kingdom, and shall never return thereto under the pain of death.’ This was a comparatively merciful dealing; but poor Primrose was not destined to be benefited by it. Whether the Tolbooth of Banff had not agreed with his health, or some natural disease fell upon him, so it was that he soon after died.
On the 3d of August 1671, severe proceedings were taken with several north-country Catholic families, Gordon of Carmellie, Gordon of Littlemill, and Grant of Ballindalloch, for harbouring papist priests, and being present at mass; also against four priests named Leith, Ross, Forsyth, and Burnet, for saying mass, baptising children, and performing the ceremony of marriage, contrary to divers acts of parliament. On the 1st of February 1672, the Council, understanding that the Countess of Traquair, ‘being popishly affected, doth keep in family with her her son, the Earl of Traquair, and endeavours to educate him in the popish profession, and for that effect doth keep ... Irving, a priest, to instruct him therein,’ ordered messengers-at-arms to apprehend her ladyship, or if she could not be laid hold of, to summon her at the Cross of Edinburgh, that she and her son might come before them, in order that they might arrange for his ‘education and breeding conform to act of parliament.’
Accordingly, eight days after, the countess having obeyed the citation, the Council ordained that before the 22d instant she should ‘send her son to Glasgow, and cause deliver him to Mr Gilbert Burnet, Professor of Divinity, to be educat and bred at the College of Glasgow, in the company of the said Mr Gilbert, at the sight, and by the advice, of the Archbishop of Glasgow,’ no servants to be allowed to attend the young earl ‘bot such as are of the reformed religion.’ On the same day, Wauchope, younger of Niddry, and the Lord Semple, were ordered to bring and deliver up their children, ‘in order to their education with some Protestant friend,’ Lord Semple being at the same time called to account ‘for sending his eldest son abroad contrair to the Council’s order.’ Wauchope was on this occasion ordered to give up his eldest son into the charge of his own father, the elder laird, and the parents were forbidden to have for the future any intercourse with their child, except in presence of the Protestant preceptor, into whose charge he was to be put.
1670.
We soon after hear of the Countess of Traquair being subjected to a horning for disobeying the Council’s order, while Lord Semple was put into ward in Edinburgh Castle for sending his son to Doway, and only liberated on a petition craving pardon for his offence, and giving caution to the extent of ten thousand merks for ‘sending his third son to be educat in schools in Glasgow.’
Lord and Lady Semple yielded to the order of the Council regarding their third son; but the result appears to have been of a kind satisfactory to neither party. In April 1678, Lady Semple (her husband being then dead) complained to the Council regarding her son, that, ‘either through the neglect of those he was recommended to, or through the general humour and corruption of the place, he has been frequently withdrawn from the public ordinances, and so seduced and poisoned with bad principles anent his majesty’s government and laws, as may not only hazard his small fortune, but render his loyalty altogether suspect.’ At her ladyship’s request, the Council gave commission to the Bishop of Argyle and Lord Ross to appoint ‘a person of sound principles’ to attend the boy as his pedagogue.
In March 1672, the Council sent orders to the sheriffs of Aberdeen and Banff for taking stern measures with the papists of their bounds. Sayers and hearers of mass were to be summoned to answer for their ‘crimes,’ to be excommunicated and escheat, and their estates given to the universities. The sheriffs were enjoined to give their support to the bishop and clergy of the diocese in ‘suppressing and rooting out of Popery and Quakerism.’ And ‘whereas we are informed that there is a superstitious monument erected upon the grave of the late Mr Patrick Primrose, priest, in St Peter’s Chapel in the parish of Botarie, we authorise and require you to cause demolish the same.’ Very likely, some of Patrick’s skulking flock had ventured to put upon his tomb that emblem which most expressively recalls what the Saviour suffered for all sects alike. No such thing could be for a moment endured.
1670.
The Presbyterian historians of the age speak of these papist persecutions as not springing from a right zeal. Wodrow says the rulers could not ‘for shame’ but do something of that sort, while at the same time doing so much against the Whigs. Indeed, Sir George Mackenzie plainly confesses, it was for ‘allaying the humour of the people,’ to convince them that the rulers were themselves disinclined to popery, the people being ‘bred to believe that episcopacy was a limb of antichrist.’[226] A most deplorable exhibition of Christian feeling on all hands truly. As regards the persecution of the extreme Presbyterians, which was beyond all comparison the deadliest then going on, it takes one of its most curious aspects when, as sometimes happened, an element of benevolence towards some other kind of person intruded. For example, Mr Walter Birnie, preacher, having shewn that he was thrown out of bread in his own profession, and, being blind, could go about no other employment, the Council ordered him two hundred merks to be taken in equal parts out of fines lately imposed on John Tennant in Moss-side and the Lady Glanderston. The pages of Wodrow have familiarised us so much with the idea of the Privy Council as a kind of inquisition for the suppression of a respectable dissent, that we can scarcely think of it in any other character. Yet a survey of its records would shew many beneficent and merciful edicts mingling with the severe orders against conventiclers. Petitions for freedom from sickly prisoners or for an abatement of fines, are yielded to in numberless instances—indeed, they appear to have never been refused. In all matters apart from the unhappy religious disputes, there is no lack of humane feeling or of a desire to promote the good of the community.
Aug. 16.
1670.
Francis Irving, brother of the Laird of Drum, was before the Privy Council, on account of some very offensive demonstrations which he had lately made. Being a convert from the Protestant faith, he was unusually given to the entertaining of Jesuit priests and the getting up of masses. Under his favour and that of a few similar zealots, a priest had been emboldened to hold a public disputation in favour of his religion, an ‘insolency’ of which there had not been an example in Scotland since Quentin Kennedy argued with John Knox at Maybole. On a recent occasion, at Aberdeen, when certain persons were to be burned for sorcery and witchcraft, and a great crowd was assembled, ‘though he knew that it is a Christian and usual custom that the ministers and people do join in prayers to God for the persons who are to suffer, yet he ... when the minister and people went to prayer, stood covered to the great offence of the people, who knew him,’ and when some reminded him of his duty, ‘he quarrelled, at least caused his servant quarrel them.’ His sister Elizabeth, also a papist, being deceased, he resolved to have her buried in a public way in St Nicolas’ Church in Aberdeen, being the principal church there, and for this purpose he collected a great company of his own persuasion, and ‘that the strength, interest, and boldness of the papists there might the more appear,’ he ‘in a most insolent and treasonable way, did raise in arms and bring to the town, from Comar, a band of Highlandmen, armed with guns, hagbuts, pistols, bows and arrows, and other weapons.’ These, ‘after they had entered at the —— Port, albeit they might have taken a nearer and more private way to the Lady Drum her lodging, where the corpse lay, in the Guestraw,’ being resolved to affront and provoke the magistrates and people, ‘had the confidence to march to the said house alongst ——, being the most populous and public street in the said town, in rank and order and in warlike posture, a commander marching before and another behind, to the great astonishment and grief of his majesty’s good subjects, affected to the purity of religion.’ On the morning of the day of the funeral, a gentleman went at the order of Francis to the provost of the burgh, told him what was to be done that night, and warned him that, if the people thronged about the funeral company, and any ‘inconvenience ensue therethrough,’ it should be at the peril of the magistracy, who ought to restrain their people—‘which was a practice without parallel for insolency and boldness.’ ‘About eleven o’clock that night, the corpse being lifted was carried to the church of Aberdeen, with great show and in a public way, with many torches, a great multitude of persons accompanying, the coffin being covered with velvet or cloth, with a cross upon the same, and a priest or some other person going before the corpse, holding out his arms before him, and carrying a crucifix under his cloak or using some other superstitious ceremony.’ The Highlandmen, having their swords drawn, guarded the corpse and torches, ‘and when they came to the church-door, divers others of the company drew their swords and did hold them drawn in the church all the time the corpse was [being] buried.’ ‘In the throng, two of the inhabitants of the town was wounded.’ ‘Next morning, the Highlandmen having marched out of the town, many of them in a braving and insulting manner did shoot and discharge their guns as they went by the provost’s lodging.’
1670.
Francis was found guilty of ‘a high and insolent riot,’ and condemned to be imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh during pleasure, besides paying the expenses incurred in his prosecution. It does not appear that he suffered much confinement in jail; but he was forbidden to approach within a mile of Aberdeen. It was only on petition that he obtained so far a relaxation from this sentence as to be permitted to visit his mother there, in order to settle some weighty affairs of hers, on which he acted as trustee. On a subsequent petition in July 1671, he was freed from this restraint.—P. C. R.
Sep. 12.
One Campbell, a writer in Edinburgh, having obtained decreet for a debt against Sir Alexander Cunningham of Robertland, sent a messenger to the baronet’s house with a band of armed Highlanders to poind goods for the amount. Sir Alexander being from home, the party found no difficulty in taking some horses from his grounds, and bringing them to the cross of Irvine to be sold. ‘Sir Alexander gets notice of it; he runs to the Earl of Eglintoun, as bailie of the district; complains how he was affronted, that some had come and plundered his horse under pretence of poinding; [and] procures from him some twenty men to go and recover them. With thir men he enters Irvine, and with violence offers to hinder their poinding. The provost being present, entreated them to behave civilly, and remember they were in a burgh-royal. Robertland’s man [Alexander Kennedy], after much insolent boasting, drew his sword and ran at the provost, and would undoubtedly have slain him, had he not been immediately knocked down by some of the town-officers, and killed.’
The baronet prosecuted the burgh for this slaughter, before the Privy Council, but without success. How the burgh sped, in a counter-prosecution for riot in their bounds, does not appear.—Foun.
Sep.
The Marquis of Douglas, a young man, after being engaged for marriage with the daughter of one Widow Jack, a taverner at Perth, was wedded at Alloa House to Lady Barbara Erskine, daughter of the Earl of Mar.—Lam.
This was an unfortunate marriage for the lady. The marquis, a man of profligate conduct, was subsequently led by his factor, Lowrie of Blackwood (said to have been a rejected suitor of the lady), to suspect his marchioness of infidelity, and they were consequently separated, after she had born him one child. The sorrows of the Marchioness of Douglas were described in a popular ballad of the day, some verses of which constitute the favourite song of Waly, waly!
‘O wherefore should I busk my head,
Or wherefore should I kaim my hair,
Since my true love has me forsook,
And says he’ll never love me mair.
1670.
Now Arthur’s Seat shall be my bed,
The sheets shall ne’er be pressed by me,
St Anton’s Well shall be my drink,
Since my true love’s forsaken me.
O Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw,
And shake the green leaf aff the tree?
O gentle death, when wilt thou come,
And take a life that wearies me?’
The prose reality of all this was, that the marchioness by and by obtained a decree of the Privy Council, allowing her a provision out of her husband’s estate.
The marquis, by a subsequent marriage, was the father of the semi-mad Duke of Douglas and of the celebrated Lady Jane Douglas.
1671. Jan. 19.
William Head and John Fergusson, who had ‘practised a lottery by authority in the kingdom of England,’ were authorised by the Privy Council to set up a similar adventure in any part of Scotland they pleased, ‘without let or molestation, they behaving themselves as becometh.’—P. C. R.
Mar. 2.
During the early years of the reign of Charles II., a custom prevailed to a great extent of obtaining from the Privy Council protections against the diligence of creditors. Sometimes a Highland chief could not come to Edinburgh on important affairs of his own, without this safeguard; sometimes the Council could not otherwise be favoured with the company of some man of local influence, whom it desired to see upon important public business. Sir Mungo Murray was unable to attend the funeral of his cousin and namesake, ‘late lieutenant of one of his majesty’s troops of guards,’ unless he got ‘protection against the rigidity of his creditors.’ At this date, the Council received an application for a protection from James Arnot, postmaster at Cockburnspath, an important station on the road from Edinburgh to Berwick. James having involved himself in debt, not only was his person ‘in hazard to be taken with captions, but the horses and furniture reserved for the public use of the lieges upon the post-road are threatened to be poindit.’ As the government owed him as much as would pay his debts, it seemed but reasonable that they should save him from his creditors, which they accordingly did by granting him and his horses protection for a year.—P. C. R.
1671. May 14.
A young woman named Elizabeth Low had an excrescence upon her forehead, eleven inches long, and usually regarded as a horn. It was this day cut out by Arthur Temple of Ravelrig, and deposited in the museum of the Edinburgh University, with a silver plate attesting its history. Law notes that the girl was alive in 1682, and had another horn growing out of the same place.
June 1.
Heriot’s Hospital having been for some years established, with sixty boys as inmates, it was customary to hold the 1st of June as a holiday in honour of the founder, one part of the formalities being a procession of the magistrates to the Hospital at nine in the morning ‘to hear sermon.’ David Pringle, ‘nearest of kin to the founder,’ acted as surgeon and barber to the boys, these two heterogeneous crafts being somehow combined by our ancestors. To prepare the boys for appearance this morning before the civic dignitaries, it was necessary that they should be polled; accordingly, about seven in the morning, Mr Pringle, his other servants being absent about his business, sent a boy to the Hospital, desiring him to take with him any person he could readily get to further the work. The boy unluckily omitted to look for a barber free of the city corporation of barber-chirurgeons, and took with him one William Wood, who was only free of the suburban district of Portsburgh.
1671.
This coming to the ears of Archibald Temple, deacon of the said city corporation, a court was speedily held, and David Pringle summoned before it, to answer for the irregularity committed by his boy. The medical officer of Heriot’s Hospital ingenuously confessed the error; but represented his boy as having simply taken the readiest assistant he could get, ‘without the least intention to give the calling offence:’ he added his solemn promise that no such impropriety should ever again occur. The court was disposed to pass over the matter as trivial; but the deacon, having reason to believe that Pringle designedly employed Wood, pressed for punishment, and solemnly vowed he would see it inflicted. He very soon caused Wood to be put up in the Tolbooth. Pringle hereupon appealed to the Town Council for the liberation of Wood, and so further incensed the corporation against himself. By using influence with the magistrates, they obtained a warrant for the apprehension of Pringle, by which he was ‘necessitat for some time to keep his house, and durst not come abroad, they having officers both at the head and foot of the close to watch and catch him.’ Notwithstanding a petition from him to the Town Council, representing the case, Temple and some of his colleagues persevered till they got Pringle put up in jail, there to be during the Council’s pleasure, and till he should give satisfaction to ‘the calling.’ They also, during his confinement, passed an ordinance depriving him of all the benefits of his own connection with the corporation, till he should have made full acknowledgment of his offence in writing, and submitted to appropriate censure. In short, the affair, trivial at first, came to be a passionate contention between the barber corporation and their delinquent member, they determined to assert their privileges, and he resolute to make no unworthy submission. After much altercation, the affair came before the Privy Council, who employed the Earl of Argyle and the Earl of Linlithgow to inquire into and report upon it, and it was not till the 11th of January 1672 that the case was adjusted by Pringle making an apology, and the corporation reponing him in his privileges.—P. C. R.
Sep. 5.
Donald M‘Donald, commonly called the Halkit Stirk,[227] had been liberated from the Edinburgh Tolbooth in December 1660, on caution being given by Donald M‘Donald, younger of Slate, to the extent of £1000 sterling, that the prisoner should present himself, when called upon, to answer anything that could be laid to his charge. It being found that the Halkit Stirk had ever since lived the life of a robber, and had committed divers slaughters, the young Laird of Slate was now called upon to render up the delinquent or forfeit his caution. The young laird accordingly brought the Halkit Stirk before the Council, and got a discharge of his bond. The robber was committed to the Tolbooth.
1671.
During this year, a great impulse seemed to be given to Quakerism both in England and Scotland. It being found, says Law, that a rejection of ordinances and the Scriptures were not taking with the people, they began to have preaching and prayer at their meetings, and to acknowledge the Bible as the rule of their life and judge of controversies. The profession was found thus to be more ‘ensnaring.’ Some men of note, and of parts and learning, such as Robert Barclay of Urie, who afterwards wrote the Apology for the Quakers, now joined the society.
In his dedication to the king, written in 1675, Mr Barclay claimed credit for his sect, not only that they meddled with no civil affairs, but that, in the times of most violent persecution, being ‘clothed in innocency, they have boldly stood to their testimony for God, without creeping into holes or corners, or once hiding themselves, as all other dissenters have done’—rather a severe taunt at the extreme Presbyterians, who had been contenders for the political supremacy of their church, and had now to comport themselves as rebels. The Presbyterians, while themselves suffering, approved of the severities against these most innocuous of all Christians; they only thought them not severe enough. Wodrow speaks of the Council as, in 1666, ‘coming to some good resolutions against Quakers,’ but complains generally of its slackness concerning ‘that dangerous sect,’ which, he says, ‘spread terribly during this reign.’
One William Napier, a seafaring man in Montrose, had turned Quaker, and other Quakers began in consequence to draw towards that place, keeping frequent meetings in Napier’s house, ‘to the great scandal of religion and disturbance of the peace and quiet of the burgh.’ On the 12th of January 1672, ‘betwixt twenty and thretty persons did convene at William Napier his house, where they had such pretendit devotion as they pleased to devise, whereupon a great tumult and confusion was like to have been made,’ and the magistrates, to settle matters as far as possible, clapped up fifteen of the congregation in the Tolbooth. On a petition from the magistrates, representing how by these doings the people were becoming ‘deboshed in their principles,’ the Council ordered that William Napier should be sent to Edinburgh, and imprisoned during pleasure in the Tolbooth there, while the rest of the prisoners should remain in durance at Montrose. In this case the Council ultimately took a lenient course. On a humble petition from Napier, representing the injury he would sustain in his business from an intended voyage being stopped, he was ordered to be set at liberty after about a fortnight’s confinement. Three of the company were ordered, on petition, to be liberated eight months after, and on the ensuing day a general order was issued for the liberation of any other Quakers that might still remain in confinement at Montrose.—P. C. R.
1671.
A general order was issued by the Council, in March 1672, to the magistrates of Aberdeen, commanding them to execute the laws against a number of the citizens who had deserted the parish churches on account of Quakerism, enjoining that these people should be strictly punished according to act of parliament—that is, fined in the proportion of a fourth of their means for the offence.
In March 1673, there were eleven men in prison at Kelso for attending a Quaker meeting; but the Council, unwilling to keep them confined till the circuit court could try them, sent the Earl of Roxburgh with a commission to judge whether they might be set at liberty or not.
The liberty of conscience which the Quakers asserted as a principle made them unscrupulous in associating with papists, and this formed one of the strongest grounds of prejudice against them. Law relates a childish story of a gentleman Quaker at Montrose being induced by his daughter to repent, and return to church, where he confessed that the chief Quakers kept up a correspondence with the chief papists and with the pope; as also that they ‘had converse with Satan.’
We are assured by Robert Law,[228] that while Quakerism was spreading with an alarming rapidity, there was also a startling abundance of profanity and of abominable offences. Some propensities were indulged with great licence; ‘drunkenness without any shame, men glorying in it;’ ‘dreadful oppression; high contempt of the gospel; gross idolatry; a woman in the south drinking the devil’s health and [that of] his servants; self-murder; and witchcraft and sorceries very common; all which threatened a sad stroke from God upon us.’
The woman here adverted to by Law seems to have been one Marion M‘Call, spouse to Adam Reid in Mauchline. She was tried, May 8, 1671, before the Court of Justiciary at Ayr, for ‘drinking the good health of the devil,’ and judged to be taken on the first Wednesday of June to the Market Cross of Edinburgh, ‘to be scourged by the hangman from thence to the Nether Bow, and thereafter to be brought back to the Cross again and have her tongue bored and [be] burnt on the cheek;’ further, she was not to return to the county of Ayr on pain of death.[229]
1671.
Law elsewhere tells of a debauch, at which a similar indecorum was committed, and which was the means of carrying off two members of the Scottish peerage. It was the more remarkable as occurring in January 1643, when the nation at large had certainly some most serious concerns on hand, and the general tone was earnestly religious. It is stated that the Earl of Kelly, the Lord Kerr, and David Sandilands, ‘Abercrombie’s brother,’ with other two gentlemen, being met one day, fell a carousing, and, to encourage each other in drinking, began to give healths. When they had drunk many healths, not knowing whose to give next, ‘one of them gives the devil’s health, and the rest pledges him. Sandilands that night, going down stairs, fell and broke his neck; Kelly and Kerr within a few days sickened of a fever and died; the fourth also died shortly; and the fifth, being under some remorse, lived some time.’ It may be added that ‘ane great drink,’ as it was called in a chronicle of the day, having thus carried off Lord Kerr, the titles of his father, the Earl of Roxburgh, passed by his daughter into a branch of another family, the Drummonds of Perth. This victim of the wine-cup had appeared for the Covenant at Dunse Law, but afterwards became a royalist.
1672. Feb. 26.
From the commencement of the religious troubles in 1638, the Privy Council Record gives comparatively few of those notices of new manufactures attempted in Scotland, or proposed to be introduced by strangers, for which the previous thirty years of peace were so remarkable. Amidst endless notices of religious persecution, it gives an agreeable surprise, at the date noted, to light upon an application from Philip Vander Straten, a native of Bruges, for the benefit of naturalisation and freedom of working and trafficking, while embarking a considerable sum of money in a work at Kelso ‘for dressing and refining of wool.’ The petition was at once complied with.—P. C. R.
1672.
Two years later (March 19, 1674), the commencement of a humbler and less useful branch of industry is noted. At that date, Andrew M‘Kairter represented to the Privy Council that, being a young boy at the schools of Dalmellington at the time of the Pentland insurrection in 1666, he had joined in that affair, and after its conclusion, ‘out of a childish fear did run away to Newcastle, and having there, and in London, and Holland, served ane long apprenticeship? in spinning of tobacco,’ he was now returned to his native country, and ‘hath set up the said trade at Leith.’ His desire was to make his peace with the government by signing the bond for the public peace. The Council entertained the petition graciously, and Andrew became, we may suppose, the first practitioner of tobacco-spinning in Leith.
Apr.
At this time, and for six months previously, the small-pox raged in Glasgow. Hardly a family escaped the infection, and eight hundred deaths and upwards occurred.—Law.
Some sensation was excited by the rumour that in a ship lying at Newcastle, called the Cape of Good Hope of London, the devil had appeared in bodily shape, in the habit of a seaman, with a blue cravat about his neck, and desired the master of the ship to remove out of her; which he did not obey till sic time as she began to sink in the ocean. Then he, with his company, took his cock-boat, who were saved by another ship coming by. This was testified by the oaths of them that were in her.—Law. It is seldom that the devil is found so obliging as he seems to have been in this case.
It may serve to verify the possibility of such a rumour in the reign of Charles II., that, in March 1682, the Privy Council was informed that ‘one Margaret Dougall is imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Ayr, as alleged guilty of raising and consulting the devil;’ and an order was given that she be transported from sheriff to sheriff until brought to and placed in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, that she might be brought to a legal trial.—P. C. R.
May 27.
Aug. 22.
Joannes Michael Philo, physician, and ‘sworn operator to his majesty,’ was, on petition, allowed to erect a public stage in Edinburgh for the practice of his profession, but ‘discharged to have any rope-dancing.’—P. C. R. It was some time after stated regarding this personage, that he did erect a stage in Edinburgh, and ‘thereon has cured thretteen blind persons, several lame, and cut several cancers, and done many other notable cures, as is notourly known, and that out of mere charity.’ He was therefore invested by the Council, on petition, with a warrant to go and do likewise in all the other burghs of the kingdom, up till February next; the Council further recommending him to the magistrates of these burghs, that they may give him due help and countenance.
1672.
His stage was then taken down by the magistrates of Edinburgh, ‘before he could have time to complete many considerable cures,’ which he had had on hand. There also came to him from remote parts of the country ‘five or six poor blind people, and as many with cancers, whose poverty will not admit the same to be done otherwise than upon the public stage, where they have their cure gratis and their entertainment in the meantime upon [the operator’s] charges.’ He therefore petitioned to have his stage re-erected in Edinburgh for a time; which was complied with.
June 12.
On the parliament sitting down to-day, under the Duke of Lauderdale as commissioner, his ‘lady, with the number of thirty or forty moe ladies, accompanies the duke to the parliament in coaches, and are set down in the Parliament House, and sat there to hear the commissioner’s speech.’—Law. ‘A practice so new and extraordinary, that it raised the indignation of the people very much against her; they hating to find that aspired to by her, which none of our queens had ever attempted.’ It ‘set them to inquire into her origin and faults, and to rail against the lowness of the one, and the suspicions of the other.... This malice grew daily against her.’
The duke, at fifty-seven, and, it is said, only six weeks a widower, had married the duchess in the preceding February in London, all their friends in Edinburgh making feasts on their marriage-day, while ‘the Castle shot as many guns as on his majesty’s birthday.’ Her grace, now forty-five years of age, was in her personal qualities and history a most remarkable woman. Her wit and cleverness were something singular; ‘nor had the extraordinary beauty she possessed while she was young, ceded at the age at which she was then arrived.’ The daughter of one who had been minister of Dysart, she was Countess of Dysart in her own right, and by Sir Lionel Tollemache had had a large family, which is still represented in the peerage. There was something romantic in her union with the now all-powerful Lauderdale. He had owed to her his life, through her influence with Cromwell, and in his marriage, which was discommended by all his friends, ‘he really yielded to his gratitude.’[230] For the next ten years, it might be said that Lauderdale and his clever duchess were all but nominally king and queen of Scotland.