REIGN OF CHARLES II.: 1673-1685.
For several years, there was little to be observed regarding Scotland, but that the non-conformity of its people in several of the more populous provinces provoked an incessant show of severities on the part of the government. During this time, literature and science remained wholly uncultivated; no department of industry shewed any decided tendency to advance. The energies of the nation were arrested by a frightful contention, most degrading to the object for which men were contending, and than which nothing could have been more hostile to the spirit of religion simple and undefiled.
A preacher named James Mitchell had, in 1668, attempted the life of Archbishop Sharpe, and had actually inflicted a mortal wound upon the Bishop of Orkney. Being apprehended in 1674, he was confined for several years, and at length condemned and executed. The crime was not so odious among his party as to extinguish their sympathy; accordingly, this wretched man was looked upon by them as a kind of martyr. After this, the persecution for field-meetings became more than ever severe. A calculation has been made that, previously to 1678, seventeen thousand persons had suffered fining and imprisonment on this account. The government resolved to try the expedient of pressing the subscription of a bond renouncing conventicles; and to support them in their efforts, an army of ten thousand men was collected at Stirling, of whom the greater part were Highlanders. At the end of January, this host was let loose upon the western counties, with instructions to enforce fines from all who would not take the bond. The resistance was passive, but universal. Only twenty out of two or three thousand householders in Lanarkshire could be prevailed upon to abandon a mode of worship which possessed so many charms. They preferred to see themselves spoiled of a great share of their worldly goods. Even the nobles, and other conspicuous persons, who lay most open to state persecution, generally refused the bond. The Council was deeply mortified at the passiveness of the people, for they had expected a rebellion, which would have justified them in severer measures. After a month, finding the attempt ineffectual, Lauderdale was obliged to order the army away. The Highland Host, as it was called, left a deep impression upon the memory of those who experienced its oppressions. It is not alleged that the mountaineers shed much blood, but they freely helped themselves to whatever movable articles they took a fancy for. As they returned to the north, the whole country seemed to be removing its household furniture from one district to another. Ayrshire alone suffered losses to the amount of £12,000 sterling, which, in those days, was a very large sum.
A deep spirit of resentment against the Council, and especially the prelatic part of it, was the natural result of all these occurrences. The worst passions of human nature mingled themselves with the purest and noblest aspirations; and men appealed, in language of bitterness, from the iniquity of their earthly rulers to the justice of God. The wisest and best natures were perverted by feelings which had become morbid by extreme excitement. On the 3d of May 1679, while the public mind was in this condition, a small party of Fife gentlemen went out with the deliberate intention of assassinating the sheriff at a chase. Disappointed in that object, they had not dispersed when a greater victim fell in their way. As they were riding over Magus Moor, near St Andrews, Archbishop Sharpe happened to pass. The opportunity appeared to their minds as a dispensation of Providence. They commanded him to come out of the coach, apparently that his daughter, who was with him, might not suffer from their shot. The archbishop tremblingly obeyed; he flung himself upon his knees, offered them mercy, forgiveness, everything, so that they would spare his life. The leader sternly reminded him of the deadly injuries he had inflicted upon the church and its martyrs. A volley of shot was poured upon his suppliant figure, and finally the unhappy prelate was hewed down with their swords, crying for mercy with his latest breath. They left his daughter lamenting over his body, which was afterwards found to bear such marks of their barbarity as could scarcely be credited.
The assassination of Sharpe produced a great alarm among the remaining members of the government, each of whom knew how much he had done to provoke the same fate. In another respect, it was perhaps a matter of rejoicing to these men, as it afforded them an excuse for increasing that severity on which alone they depended as a means of maintaining the state. The Presbyterians never by any formal act expressed approval of the deed; indeed, many of them must have felt that it was an affair of the worst omen to their party. Neither, however, did they ever express themselves as offended by the violence of their brethren; and even half a century after the event, their historians are more anxious to shew that the archbishop deserved his fate, than to apologise for the barbarity of his murderers.
The blame of the murder has been the more plausibly thrown upon the whole party, that it was immediately followed by an insurrection. On the 29th of May, which was the king’s birthday, a party of about eighty deliberately marched into the town of Rutherglen, three miles from Glasgow, where they publicly burnt all the acts of parliament against Presbytery. They afterwards extinguished the bonfires, in order to mark their disapprobation of all holidays of human institution, and concluded by fixing upon the Cross a declaration of their sentiments respecting the late proceedings of the government. Having done this, they retired to a mountainous part of the country between Lanarkshire and Ayrshire, where there was to be a grand conventicle on the ensuing Sunday. The government looked upon this proceeding as an act of rebellion, and despatched a military party after the offenders, consisting of three troops of newly levied dragoons, under the command of Captain Graham of Claverhouse, a man of remarkable energy of character, who had recently entered the king’s service in Scotland. On Sunday, Graham came up with the insurgents, at a place near Loudoun Hill, where they were assembled at devotion. They were about forty horse and two hundred foot, under the command of a gentleman named Hamilton, but without the least discipline or acquaintance with military affairs. Graham fired a volley, which they eluded in a great measure by falling upon their faces. He then tried to charge them through a morass, behind which they were placed, but in doing so threw his men into confusion, and exposed himself to the assault of the enemy. They took instant advantage of his distress, attacked the dragoons sword in hand, and soon compelled them to retire. Graham had his horse shot under him, and about twenty of his men were slain, while only one of the insurgents had fallen. A minister and some country-people whom he had brought along with him as prisoners were rescued by the victors.
The broken dragoons retreated to Glasgow, which was then garrisoned by about eight hundred troops. The insurgents, flushed with their success, and thinking it safer to go on than to draw back, marched next morning to that city with considerably increased forces. The troops barricaded the streets, so that the country-people could make little impression upon them, while they were greatly exposed in their turn. Eight were slain in this needless encounter; the rest retreated in rather low spirits to Hamilton, where they formed a kind of camp.
Their numbers were here augmented in a short time to about five thousand, chiefly peasants and farmers of Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, and Galloway, but comprising also a few gentlemen of property, though none of any note. Hamilton continued to exercise a nominal command, though rather from his having been the leading man at the commencement, than from any idea of his fitness for the situation. All of them had arms, and many of them horses; but there was neither discipline, nor any attempt to impose it. The whole insurrection proceeded upon mere impulse. The unfortunate people acted, it would appear, simply from the pressure of immediate circumstances, glad to protect themselves, for a while, even at the risk of utter destruction, against an oppression they could no longer endure.
The Privy Council collected all its disposable forces at Edinburgh, and requested instructions from the court. It was speedily determined that the Duke of Monmouth should be sent down to take command of the army. This was the eldest natural son of the king; a youth of amiable character, anxious for popularity, and intimately connected with the English non-conformists, whom he expected to favour him in his views upon the succession. The duke arrived in Edinburgh on the 19th of June, and led forward the army to meet the insurgents. He marched very slowly, in order, as was supposed, to afford them an opportunity of dispersing; but they shewed no disposition to avail themselves of his kindness. They had spent the three weeks during which they had existed as an army, not in training themselves to arms, or arranging themselves into proper divisions, but in disputing about the spiritual objects for which they were in arms. One great cause of division was the Indulgence, which some were for condemning, and others for overlooking; they were also greatly divided as to the propriety of acknowledging their allegiance to the king. In these abstractions they lost all view of practical measures. They called such things ‘trusting in the arm of flesh,’ for which, of course, they could adduce an abundance of condemnatory texts.
On Sunday, the 22d of June, Monmouth had advanced to Bothwell, a village about a mile distant from the insurgent camp. The river Clyde ran between the two armies, and was only to be crossed by Bothwell Bridge, a long narrow pass, highly capable of defence. The non-conformists, who lay upon the ground beyond the bridge, were still, at this late moment, holding high disputes, and there was even a proposal for remodelling the army, and appointing new officers. The moderate party sent two gentlemen in disguise—Mr David Hume and the Laird of Kaitloch—to present a supplication to the duke, in which it was proposed to disperse, on the condition that their grievances should be redressed. But Monmouth was unable, from his instructions, to treat with them unless they should have first laid down their arms. He charged the two deputies with a message to that effect, threatening if they did not throw themselves upon his mercy within half an hour, that he should advance with his army. When these gentlemen returned, they found the army on the point of falling to pieces through dissension. In truth, many must have now been only seeking for occasion to withdraw themselves from an adventure which they saw to be ruinous. The most zealous and clamorous were the first to retire. The rest remained, unable either to take advantage of the duke’s proposal, or to prepare for giving him battle. At the time he had specified, he advanced his troops to the brink of the river, and sent a large party to force the passage of the bridge. That point was stoutly defended, for nearly an hour, by some men from Galloway and Stirlingshire, under Hackstoun of Rathillet. At length, when their ammunition ran short, they sent back to the main body for a supply, which was denied. They were of course obliged to retire, and leave a free passage to the royal troops. When the horse soon after rode off from the field, the foot, left defenceless, could not stand an instant against the charge of the enemy. Excepting twelve hundred, who laid down their arms, the whole body took to flight, without having made the least effort at resistance. About three hundred were cut down in the pursuit.
The prisoners were brought in a body to Edinburgh, and confined, like sheep in a fold, within the gloomy precincts of the Greyfriars’ Church-yard, where, for four months, they had no seat or couch but the bare ground, and no covering but the sky. Two clergymen, Kid and King, were executed. Of the rest, all were set at liberty who would own the insurrection to have been rebellion, and the slaughter of the archbishop murder, and promise never more to take up arms against the government. Those who refused were sent to the Plantations; a mode of disposing prisoners which had been introduced by Cromwell.
Under all the severities of this reign, the spirit of English liberty was still kept alive. The king having been long married without any children, his brother, the Duke of York, was heir-presumptive. But this prince, besides various natural faults of character, had unfitted himself for governing a Protestant people by becoming an avowed convert to the Catholic faith. An attempt was made in the House of Commons to pass an act for excluding him from the succession; it was read a second time by a majority of 207 against 128; and the king only evaded the question by proroguing the parliament. The duke, seeing himself so unpopular in England, resolved to make friends, if possible, in Scotland; so that, in the event of any resistance to his succession in the former country, he might bring up an army of Scotch to his assistance. He therefore paid a visit to Edinburgh in October 1679, and revived the long dormant court of Holyroodhouse. As the persecution had been in a great measure a local affair, it operated little against his present views. The gentry, except in the western district, were chiefly Cavaliers; in the Highlands, altogether so. Among a people remote from a court, the mere presence of royalty—its slightest acts of condescension—are sure to communicate a favourable impression, although, perhaps, accompanied by but little merit or virtue in the royal person. We are not therefore to be surprised that the duke somewhat strengthened himself in Scotland on this occasion. He returned at the end of February 1680 to London.
The excitement of the time now gave rise to a new and more fanatical sect, who renounced their allegiance, and issued anathemas not only against their persecutors, but against the great mass of their brethren, who had submitted to the government. A minister named Cargill and his associate, Cameron, with about twenty armed men, appeared at Sanquhar on the 22d of June, and there affixed upon the market-cross a declaration, in which they disavowed all obedience to the king, and protested against the succession of the Duke of York. Cameron was soon after killed, with some of his friends, at Airdsmoss, and Hackstoun of Rathillet was seized and executed. Cargill, so far from being deterred, held a large conventicle at Torwood, where he formally delivered over the king, his brother, and ministers, to Satan, after the usual forms of excommunication. He was soon after taken prisoner and hanged. The whole proceedings of this sect were seriously injurious to the great body of Presbyterians; as the government, wilfully overlooking remonstrances to the contrary, held all that was done as criminating the whole body, and took occasion from that to exercise greater severities.
In October 1680, the Duke of York was again obliged, by the patriotic party in England, to take up his residence at Holyroodhouse. A bill for excluding him from the throne was now actually passed by the House of Commons, but was lost in the House of Lords by thirty-three against thirty. On Christmas Day, the spirit of the Scottish people against a Catholic successor was manifested by the students of the Edinburgh University, who, notwithstanding every effort to prevent them, publicly burnt the pope in effigy. A parliament, the first for nine years, sat down in July 1681, the duke acting as commissioner. A test oath was here framed, to be taken by all persons in public trusts, as an assurance of their loyalty; but it turned out to be such a jumble of contradictory obligations, that many persons, including eighty of the established clergy, refused to take it. The Earl of Argyle, son to the late marquis, and a faithful friend to the Protestant religion, would only receive it with an explanation, which was held to be an act of treason, and he was accordingly tried and condemned to death. The real object of this prosecution was to destroy a powerful Highland chief, who might be disposed to use his influence against the succession of the Duke of York. His lordship contrived to escape to Holland.
In the latter part of this year, the party left by Cargill and Cameron formed themselves into a secret society, and on the 12th of January 1682, published at Lanark a declaration of adherence to the transactions at Sanquhar, which they affected to consider as the work of a convention of estates. This, of course, only provoked new severities.
In March 1682, the Duke of York returned to England, in order to hold a conference with the king. Coming back in May for his family, his vessel was wrecked on a sandbank near Yarmouth, when a hundred and fifty persons perished, including some of the first quality. After spending about a week in Edinburgh, he returned to England.
The ancient Presbyterian spirit was now reduced so low, or so many of the clergy of that kind were destroyed and imprisoned, that there was not a single individual who preached in defiance of the king’s supremacy. The united societies, as the more unsubmissive termed themselves, were obliged to send a youth named Renwick to Groningen, in Belgium, in order to study divinity and receive ordination, as they could not in any other way obtain a preacher. A general disposition to emigration began to arise; and some gentlemen proposed to sell their property, and become settlers in the new colony of Carolina. While engaged at London in making the proper arrangements, they came in contact with the patriots of the House of Commons, who, defeated in the Exclusion Bill, were concerting measures for bringing about a change of government. Common desperation made them friends; and a correspondence was opened with the Earl of Argyle in Holland, for an invasion from that quarter, in connection with an insurrection in England. Some subordinate members of the conspiracy plotted the assassination of the king; and, being discovered, the whole affair was brought to light. Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney suffered death. Baillie of Jerviswood was sent to Scotland, and there, under the most iniquitous circumstances, consigned to the executioner. It was now hardly possible, by any course of conduct, to gain assurance of not being prosecuted. Masters were held liable for servants; landlords for their tenants; fathers for their wives and children; and to have the least intercourse with a proscribed person was the same as to be actually guilty. The soldiery were now permitted by an act of parliament to execute the laws without trial. If any one, therefore, refused to answer certain questions, or gave rise to suspicion by running away, he was shot. Numbers thus perished in the fields and on the highways. In short, the reign of Charles II. terminated, February 6, 1685, amidst a scene of oppression, bloodshed, and spoil, such as was never before witnessed in the country, even in the most barbarous times.
1673. June.
1673.
Died Sir Robert Murray of Craigie, Justice-clerk, and an eminent councillor; memorable above all as one of a small group of learned and thoughtful men who, in 1662, founded the Royal Society, of which illustrious body Sir Robert was the first president, and for a time ‘the life and soul.’ For the last six years of his life, he bore a leading part in the government of Scotland. Not a Whig had been fined, tortured, or banished; not a commission against ‘the horrid crime of witchcraft’ had been issued; but the act was sanctioned by this gentleman, ‘the most universally beloved and esteemed by men of all sides and sorts, of any man I have ever known in my whole life,’ and who ‘knew the history of nature beyond any man I ever yet knew;’ who ‘had a most diffused love to all mankind, and delighted in every occasion of doing good;’ and who ‘had a superiority of genius and comprehension to most men.’—Burnet. Sir Robert’s father was a younger son of a distinguished Perthshire family, Murray of Abercairney. He himself had been the friend of Charles I. and of Richelieu, and latterly he was a favourite of Charles II. When the daughter of Sir Robert was married in London to Lord Yester, eldest son of the Earl of Tweeddale, ‘the king himself led the bride uncovered to church.’—Kir.
To find two such amiable men as the Earl of Tweeddale and Sir Robert Murray taking part for many years in the severe measures against the Scottish Presbyterians—though, it must be admitted, with the effect of infusing a certain mildness—and to find day after day the bloody edicts of the Privy Council sanctioned by not only their names, but by those of the Duke of Hamilton and the Earl of Argyle, the latter of whom was to die the death of a martyred patriot, while the former was to preside in the convention which settled the Stuarts’ forfeited crown on William and Mary, certainly presents a striking view of the mixed nature of human tendencies. As regards, too, the philosophical character of the founder of the Royal Society, it can never be forgotten that one of his contributions to the Transactions of that sage body was an account of the development of barnacles into sea-birds—a most noted example of the power of preconceived notions to blind the perceptions of even a faithful and intelligent observer. His testimony on this subject was thus presented in the Philosophical Transactions:
1673.
‘Being in the isle of East [Uist], I saw lying upon the shore a cut of a large fir-tree, of about 2-1/2 foot diameter, and nine or ten foot long; which had lain so long out of the water that it was very dry; and most of the shells that formerly covered it were worn or rubbed off. Only on the parts that lay next the ground there still hung multitudes of little shells, having within them little birds perfectly shaped, supposed to be barnacles. These shells hang at the tree by a neck longer than the shell, of a kind of filmy substance, round and hollow, and creased, not unlike the windpipe of a chicken, spreading out broadest where it is fastened to the tree, from which it seems to draw and convey the matter, which serves for the growth and vegetation of the shell and the little bird within it. This bird, in every shell that I opened, as well the least as the biggest, I found so curiously and completely formed, that there appeared nothing wanting as to the external parts, for making up a perfect sea-fowl; every little part appearing so distinctly, that the whole looked like a large bird seen through a concave or diminishing glass, colour and features being everywhere so clear and neat. The little bill like that of a goose, the eyes marked, the head, neck, breast, wing, tail, and feet formed; the feathers everywhere perfectly shaped and blackish coloured; and the feet like those of other water-fowl, to my best remembrance. All being dead and dry, I did not look after the inward parts of them. But having nipped off and broken a great many of them, I carried about twenty or twenty-four away with me.... Nor did I ever see any of the little birds alive, nor met with anybody that did. Only, some credible persons have assured me they have seen some as big as their fist.’
After all, it must be acknowledged there is something very perplexing about these cirripeds, and calculated to excuse the mistake which so long existed regarding them, since it was not till about 1840 that naturalists could determine whether they belonged to the articulate or the molluscan division of the animal kingdom. It is scarcely necessary to remark that they are now concluded to be articulates, of the crustacean class. Even Cuvier had placed them under the mollusca, though regarding them as intermediate between these and the articulata. As to the eyes spoken of by Sir Robert Murray, it may be observed that the barnacle has latterly been found to have visual organs in an early period of its existence, and to lose them when at full growth. When Mr Thomson of Cork, about 1830, described the actual characters of the animal, many naturalists for a long time refused to believe in his statements.
A sumptuary law was passed in the parliament in 1672, ‘discharging the wearing of silver lace and silk stuffs, upon a design to encourage the making of fine stuffs within the kingdom, and to repress the excessive use of these commodies.’[231]
July 3.
1673.
An effort was made to carry this law into force. On information from Alexander Milne, collector of his majesty’s customs in Edinburgh, the Council had up before them Sir John Colquhoun of Luss, who, in breach of a late act of parliament forbidding the lieges to wear clothes ornamented with ‘silk-lace, gimp-lace, or any other lace or embroidering or silk,’ had appeared, during the bypast month, wearing ‘a black justicat,[232] whereupon there was black silk or gimp-lace.’ Sir John was condemned, in terms of the act of parliament, to pay a fine of five hundred merks, ‘one half to his majesty’s cash-keeper for his majesty’s use, and the other half to Alexander Milne.’—P. C. R.
Nearly about the same time, Manna Kinloch, wife of James Charteris, writer, was arraigned before the Privy Council for wearing fine apparel contrary to the same sumptuary act, but was discharged for lack of proof. Two legal questions arose in connection with this case. The first was: If a woman be convicted and punished for such an offence, ought her husband to be liable to make good the fine, or should she alone be punished by imprisonment? Obviously, if the husband be made liable, ‘many wives, to affront their husbands, or otherwise be avenged on them, would break the law of purpose.’ The second point was: How shall the offence, in most instances, be proved, if the evidence of women be rejected—as it seems to have then been in all except certain special cases—for it must often be that none but women have an opportunity of observing the offence?—Foun.
The summer of this year was exceedingly wet, and the harvest thereby much endangered.—Law.
1673. Aug. 20.
Most probably, the carriages proposed to be set up in 1610 by Henry Anderson the Pomeranian, to run between Edinburgh and Leith with a charge of two shillings Scots for each person,[233] were either not realised or quickly withdrawn, for nothing more is heard of them, and we find in 1702 one Robert Miller getting an exclusive privilege of putting coaches on that brief but important route, implying of course that no other such conveyances then existed. Street-carriages, which had been set up in London in the reign of Charles I., did not come into use in Scotland till after the Restoration. On the occasion of the unfortunate duel in 1667 between William Douglas of Whittingham and Sir John Home of Eccles,[234] we hear of the parties going to the ground in a hackney-coach. Six years later, regular arrangements were made by the Edinburgh magistrates for a system of street-carriages, and the number then in service appears to have been twenty. It was ordered that they should be numbered 1, 2, 3, &c., with a view to ready reference in case of any complaint from a passenger, and that they should have a fixed place on the High Street between the heads of Niddry’s and Blackfriars’ Wynds. The fare to Leith for two or three persons in summer was to be 1s. sterling, or for four persons, 1s. 4d.; the fare to the Abbey, 9d., and as much back again.[235]
It is pretty certain that this system of street-carriages maintained its ground, as in A Short Account of Scotland, written by an Englishman in 1688, the author tells us that, while there were no stage-coaches in Scotland, ‘there are a few hackneys at Edinburgh, which they may hire into the country on urgent occasions.’ It is to be remarked, however, that Edinburgh, being all packed within a space of a mile in length by half a mile in breadth, upon irregular ground, and with very few streets fit for the passage of wheeled vehicles, was a discouraging field for this kind of conveyance. Sedans maintained a preference over coaches till the extension of the city in the reign of George III. Arnot tells us that while there were, in 1778, only nine hackney-carriages in our city, there were a hundred and eighty-eight public chairs, besides about fifty kept by private families.[236]
Sep. 5.
During several by-past years, licences had been given in frequent succession to vessels, to carry off idle, vagrant, and criminal people to the plantations in Virginia and elsewhere. One ship engaged in this kidnapping service, and which bore the hypocritical appellative of The Ewe and Lamb, seems to have been particularly active. We now find complaints made that ‘the master and merchants of the ship called the Hercules, bound for the plantations, have apprehended some free persons and put them aboard the said ship, upon pretext that they are vagabonds, or given their consent thereto.’ The Lords therefore commissioned two of their number to go aboard and inquire, and to liberate any persons improperly detained.—P. C. R.
Oct. 11.
1673.
That indispensable conveniency of modern times, the coffee-house—which had taken its rise in London during the Commonwealth[237] —made its way into Scotland during the ensuing reign. The first time we hear of it north of the Tweed is when Colonel Walter Whiteford—are we to suppose some reduced soldier of the Scottish army of 1651?—was, on application, allowed by the magistrates of Glasgow to set up a house in that city ‘for making, selling, and topping of coffee.’—M. of G.
Under the date noted, the Privy Council Record tells us a note-worthy tale of an Edinburgh coffee-house.
‘In Thomas Robertson his new land[238] near to the Parliament House,’ one James Row kept a coffee-house, probably the first such establishment known in Edinburgh. On Sunday the 28th of October 1677, he so far risked the wrath of his neighbours the Privy Councillors, as to have an unlawful preacher holding forth in his house during the time of ordinary service in the churches. Robert Johnston, town-major, who had authority from the Privy Council to see after such matters, came to the place with some of his myrmidons, and found the ‘turnpike’ or common stair filled with people, the overflowing of the congregation. Making his way to the ordinary door of Row’s house, and demanding admission, he was kept there for some time, during which he heard a great noise of furniture and of people within. On being admitted, he found that the minister and his auditors had been smuggled out by ‘a laigh or privat entry.’ Johnston then returned to the street, and was walking quietly at the Cross, when Row came up and ‘did upbraid, threaten, and abuse him for coming to his house, and told him that he durst not for his hanging come to his house again and do the like, or, if he came that gait, he should not win so weel away.’ Thus he railed at the town-major all the way ‘from the Cross Well to the Stane Shop, shouting and crying so loud as the people gathered in multitudes,’ though, seeing what sort of affair it was, they soon dispersed. Afterwards, Row went to the magistrates and told them ‘he could not get God worshipped in his own house for that officious fellow the town-major, thereby insinuating that the due execution of his majesty’s laws did prejudge the worship of God.’
Row was fined in five hundred merks, and obliged to ask Johnston’s pardon; and immediately after, his coffee-house was ordered to be shut up.—P. C. R.
1673.
People were already accustomed to go to coffee-houses in order to learn the news of the day. In 1680, there was an order of the Privy Council, that ‘the gazettes and news-letters read in coffee-houses, be first presented to the Bishop of Edinburgh, or any other privy councillor, that they may consider them, and thereby false and seditious news and slanders may be prevented.’—Foun. And not long after—namely, in January 1681—by order of the Privy Council, the magistrates of Edinburgh called all the masters of coffee-houses before them, and obliged them to come under a bond for five thousand merks to suffer no newspapers to be read in their houses but such as were approved of by the officers of state.[239]
Dec. 11.
Mr Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, petitioned the Privy Council for liberty to print a translation, executed by himself, of the last hundred of the Psalms into the Irish tongue. The matter was referred to the approbation of the Earl of Argyle, and conferences were appointed about it, to take place at Inverary.
Mr Kirk’s translation of the Psalms into Gaelic was an important contribution to the means for establishing Protestant Christian worship in the Highlands. On account of the proficiency which he thus shewed himself to possess in the Gaelic language, he was sent for to London, to superintend the printing of the Irish translation of the Bible, prepared under the direction of Bishop Bedel, and published in 1685. He died in 1692, and was buried in the church-yard of Aberfoyle, under a stone bearing this inscription: ‘Robertus Kirk, A.M. Linguæ Hiberniæ Lumen.’
1673.
‘To suppress the impudent and growing atheism of this age,’ Mr Kirk printed in 1691 a small treatise, ‘An Essay on the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the most part) Invisible People, heretofoir going under the Name of Elves, Faunes, and Fairies ... as they are described by those having the Second Sight, &c.,’ which certainly forms a curious illustration of the quasi orthodox beliefs of a Highland minister of the seventeenth century. He describes the fairies as possessed of ‘light and changeable bodies of the nature of a condensed cloud,’ and living in little hillocks, where they are ‘sometimes heard to bake bread, strike hammers, and do such like services.’ Forced to shift their residences once a quarter, they are liable to be seen by second-sighted men on their travels at four seasons of the year; but are also often ‘seen to eat at funerals and banquets.’ At such festive meetings, each mortal guest is sometimes observed to have a double of himself ‘perfectly resembling him in all points,’ being one of these subterranean spirits. The ‘reflex-man’ or ‘co-walker’ haunts the original as his shadow, ‘whether to guard him from the secret assaults of some of its own folks, or only as ane apertful ape to counterfeit all his actions.’ ‘Being invited and earnestly required, these companions make themselves known and familiar to men; otherwise, being in a different state and element, they neither can nor will easily converse with them.’
Mr Kirk informs us that these spiritual people live in fair well-lighted houses, where all the usual affairs of human life go on in an immaterial fashion. ‘Women are yet alive who tell that they were taken away to nurse fairy children,’ an image of themselves being left in their place. ‘When the child is weaned, the nurse dies, or is conveyed back, or gets it to her choice to stay there.’ One woman thus carried away returned after two years, was taken in by her husband, and had some children afterwards. In speech and apparel, the fairy folk resemble those under whose country they live; they ‘wear plaids and variegated garments in the Highlands, and suanochs in Ireland.’ Second-sighted men can invoke them at pleasure, but in general do not relish the sight of them, on account of the hideous spectacles they present, and their sullen and dismal looks. ‘They [the spirits] are said to have many pleasant toyish books,’ producing in them fits of corybantic jollity, ‘as if ravished by a new spirit entering them.’ Other books they have of abstruse science, but no Bibles.
Men of the second-sight do not necessarily discover strange things when requested; only by fits and starts, ‘as if inspired with some genius at that instant, which before did lurk in or about them.’ Mr Kirk knew one whose neighbours often observed him disappear at a certain place, and some time after reappear at another, a hostile encounter with the spiritual people being the cause of his disappearance. These seers know what will happen to their friends, by means of the spirits with whom they have intercourse.
1673.
The people are said by Mr Kirk to believe that the souls of their ancestors dwell in the fairy hills, of which one was placed conveniently to each church-yard. He relates that, about the year 1676, ‘when there was some scarcity of grain, two women living at a distance from each other dreamed about a treasure hid in a certain fairy hillock. ‘The appearance of a treasure was first represented to the fancy, and then an audible voice named the place where it was to their waking senses. Whereupon both rose, and meeting accidentally at the place, discovered their design; and jointly digging, found a vessel as large as a Scottish peck, full of small pieces of good money, of ancient coin; which halving between them, they sold for dish-fulls of meal to the country people.’
Dr Grahame, the modern pastor of Aberfoyle, gives us[240] the traditionary account of the cessation of Mr Kirk’s life, in high keeping with the style of the mystic world which he endeavoured to expound. It is stated that, as Mr Kirk was one evening walking in his night-gown upon one of the fairy mounts above described in the vicinity of his manse, he sunk down in what seemed to be a fit of apoplexy, which the unenlightened took for death, while the more understanding knew it to be a swoon produced by the supernatural influence of the people whose precincts he had violated. After the ceremony of a seeming funeral, the form of Mr Kirk appeared to a relation, and commanded him to go to Graham of Duchray, who was the cousin of both, and tell him: ‘I am not dead, but a captive in Fairyland, and only one chance remains for my liberation. At the baptism of my posthumous child, I will appear in the room, when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the knife or durk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this opportunity is neglected, I am lost for ever.’ Duchray was apprised of what was to be done. The ceremony took place, and the apparition of Mr Kirk was seen while they were seated at table; but Duchray, in his astonishment, failed to perform the ceremony enjoined; consequently, Mr Kirk was left to ‘drie his weird’ in Fairyland.
Dec. 22.
The death of the Rev. John Burnet, minister of Kilbride, is noted as arising from an extraordinary cause, though the immediate disease was jaundice. He ‘had a son lately dead before him, and seeing his son dissected, and the physicians finding fault with his noble [vital] parts, [the father] presently apprehends a faultiness in his own, which apprehension stuck with him even to his death, which physicians took to be the cause of his sickness; so strong is the power of apprehension.’—Law.
1673.
Died this year, by a fall from a horse, at Tangier in Morocco, John Earl of Middleton, governor of that establishment. Of a family of the minor gentry in Kincardineshire, he had entered life as a pikeman in Hepburn’s regiment in France, but soon was called to take part in the civil wars of his own country, serving first the English parliament and Scottish Estates, and afterwards proving an active and vigorous partisan of the king. His preferment after the Restoration as commissioner to the Scottish parliament, and his magnificent but drunken administration, with all the ills that flowed from it, are part of our national history. He is said by a contemporary to have been a man of ‘heroic aspect,’ of ‘manly eloquence,’ ‘happier in his wit than in his friends;’ of ‘natural courage and generosity;’ ‘more pitied in his fall than envied in his prosperity.’[241] Though disgraced, the king could not entirely desert one who had risked and done so much for him in his worst days; so he appointed him governor of Tangier—a civil kind of banishment, in which, we see, he died.
1673.
It is scarcely wonderful that a man who went through such changes of fortune and so many strange adventures—taken prisoner at both Preston and Worcester, and escaping on both occasions from captivity—should have been the subject of some of the mystical speculations of his age. Aubrey relates: ‘Sir William Dugdale informed me that Major-general Middleton (since Lord) went into the Highlands of Scotland, to endeavour to make a party for King Charles the First. An old gentleman that was second-sighted, came and told him that his endeavour was good, but he would be unsuccessful, and, moreover, that they would put the king to death, and that several other attempts would be made, but all in vain: his son would come in, but not reign, but at last be restored.’ A second tale is told by Law and Wodrow,[242] and repeated by Aubrey, with slight variations, but to the following general purport: Being in the army of the Duke of Hamilton in 1648, he had for his comrade there a certain Laird of Balbegno, who seems to have been the neighbour of his family in Kincardineshire.[243] A few days before an expected battle, Middleton and Balbegno had a conversation about the risks they should run in fight, and agreed that, if one should die, leaving the other in life, he should return, if possible, and give the survivor some account of the other world. Balbegno fell in the battle. Middleton thought no more of the promise of his deceased friend, till some time after, when a prisoner in the Tower of London, and in some fear for his life, he one night was sitting alone in a room, ‘under three locks,’ and with two sentinels outside the door. Chancing to read a little in the Bible, he had no sooner closed the volume than, looking towards the door, he saw a human figure standing there in the shadow of his bed. ‘He called out: “Who is there?” The apparition answered: “Balbegno.” “That cannot be,” said Middleton, “for I saw him buried after he was slain in battle!” “Oh, Middleton,” said Balbegno, “do you not mind the promise I made to you when at such a place, such a night, on the Border?” and with that came forward and took him by the hand.’ Middleton, in narrating the circumstances, declared that Balbegno’s hand ‘was hot and soft, just as it used to be, and he in his ordinary likeness.’ Instead of giving him any intelligence regarding the dead, the spirit told him he should make his escape in three days—he should in time be a great man—but let him beware of his end! When Balbegno had delivered this message, he, according to Aubrey, gave a frisk, and said:
‘Givanni, Givanni, ’tis very strange
In the world to see so sudden a change!‘[244]
and then vanished. In three days, accordingly, Middleton escaped in his wife’s clothes. He did afterwards become a great man, and his end was tragical, for, ‘upon a certain time, he proving a young horse, was cast off by him, and in the fall hurt himself exceedingly, so that he sickens and dies of it.’[245]—Law.
1674. Jan.
1674.
At this time commenced a stormy period which was long memorable in Scotland. It opened with a tempest of east wind, which strewed the coasts of Northumberland and Berwickshire with wrecks. During February, the rough weather continued; and at length, on the 20th of the month, a heavy fall of snow, accompanied by vehement frost, set in, which lasted for thirteen days. This was afterwards remembered by the name of the Thirteen Drifty Days. There was no decided improvement of the weather till the 29th of March. ‘All fresh waters was frozen as if in the midst of winter; all ploughing and delving of the ground was marred till the aforesaid day; much loss of sheep by the snow, and of whole families in the moor country and highlands; much loss of cows everywhere, also of wild beasts, as doe and roe.’—Law. This storm seems to have fallen with greatest severity upon the Southern Highlands. It is stated in the council books of Peebles, that ‘the most part of the country lost the most part of their sheep and many of their nolt, and many all their sheep. It was universal, and many people were almost starved for want of fuel for fire.’
James Hogg has given a traditionary account of the calamity.[246] ‘It is said that for thirteen days and nights, the snow-drift never once abated: the ground was covered with frozen snow when it commenced, and during all that time the sheep never broke their fast. The cold was intense to a degree never before remembered; and about the fifth and sixth days of the storm, the young sheep began to fall into a sleepy and torpid state, and all that were affected in the evening died over-night. The intensity of the frost wind often cut them off when in that state quite instantaneously. About the ninth and tenth days, the shepherds began to build up huge semicircular walls of their dead, in order to afford some shelter for the remainder of the living; but they availed but little, for about the same time they were frequently seen tearing at one another’s wool with their teeth. When the storm abated on the fourteenth day from its commencement, there was, on many a high-lying farm, not a living sheep to be seen. Large mis-shapen walls of dead, surrounding a small prostrate flock, likewise all dead, and frozen stiff in their lairs, was all that remained to cheer the forlorn shepherd and his master; and though on low-lying farms, where the snow was not so hard before, numbers of sheep weathered the storm, yet their constitutions received such a shock that the greater part of them perished afterwards, and the final consequence was, that about nine-tenths of all the sheep in the south of Scotland were destroyed.
1674.
‘In the extensive pastoral district of Eskdale Moor, which maintains upwards of 20,000 sheep, it is said none were left alive but forty young wedders on one farm, and five old ewes on another. The farm of Phaup remained without a stock and without a tenant for twenty years subsequent to the storm. At length, one very honest and liberal-minded man ventured to take a lease of it, at the annual rent of a gray coat and a pair of hose. It is now rented at £500. An extensive glen in Tweedsmuir, belonging to Sir James Montgomery, became a common at that time to which any man drove his flocks that pleased, and it continued so for nearly a century. On one of Sir Patrick Scott of Thirlestane’s farms, that keeps upwards of 900 sheep, they all died save one black ewe, from which the farmer had high hopes of preserving a breed; but some unlucky dogs, that were all laid idle for want of sheep to run at, fell upon this poor solitary remnant of a good stock, and chased her into the lake, where she was drowned.’
The Thirteen Drifty Days are the means of bringing the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth before us in an extraordinary relation of circumstances. He and his duchess, in December 1675, obtained a licence to import 4800 nolt of a year old, and 200 horses, ‘to be employed in stocking their waste lands in the south part of this kingdom,’ the bringing in of live-stock from Ireland being then forbidden by act of parliament. Walter Scott of Minto, sheriff-depute of Roxburghshire, became caution that the licence should not be exceeded. But 120 of the oxen were proved to have been above a year old; and the Council, accordingly (August 3, 1676), fined Scott in £200 sterling.—P. C. R.
Feb. 19.
1674.
Agnes Johnston, of Airth in Stirlingshire, an unmarried woman about fifty years of age, was tried in Edinburgh for the murder of an infant named Lamb, her own grand-niece. Living with the parents of the deceased, she took an opportunity, when there was nobody in the house but herself and the child, to take the infant out of its cradle, lay it in a bed, and cut its throat. The confession of the wretched woman bore that, for some time before she committed the deed, she felt a spirit within her that did draw her neck together, and which frequently tempted her to make away with herself. Once she actually did attempt to drown herself in a well at Clackmannan; but she cried to a woman near by, who helped her out. She had never told any one of her temptations, nor had she power to tell; but, her fits being thought fictitious by her relatives, and they having consequently threatened to turn her out of their house, she had in revenge resolved to destroy their child. Agnes, who would now be regarded as a person under hallucinations, expiated her sad act two days after in the Grassmarket.[247]
Feb.
Law, in noting the death of an eminent physician at this time, mentions the death, some time before, of another, Dr Purves, from an extreme cold, and because he ‘could not be kept in heat,’ ‘God letting us see that all means applied for our health without his blessing them, are ineffectual.’ Another writer of this age adverts to a Mr Dalgliesh, ‘curate’ of Parton, who ‘was so chilly, that he wore twenty fold of cloth on him all the year, and furs on his head day and night.’[248]
Mar. 4.
An act of grace towards the Presbyterians, passed at this time with the hope of conciliating them, had the effect of encouraging that disposition to private religious meetings, or conventicles, which for some years had given the government so much trouble. ‘From that day Scotland broke loose with conventicles of all sorts, in houses, fields, and vacant churches.... In Merse, Teviotdale, the Borders, Annandale, Nithsdale, Clydesdale, Lothian, Stirlingshire, Perthshire, Lennox, Fife, they fixed so many posts in the fields, mosses, muirs, and mountains, where multitudes gathered almost every Sabbath,’ until the time of Bothwell Bridge. ‘At these meetings, many a soul was converted to Christ, but far more turned from the bishops to profess themselves Presbyterians. The parish churches of the curates [that is, the regular parish clergy] came to be like pest-houses; few went to any of them, none to some, so the doors were kept locked. The discourse up and down Scotland was the quality and success of last Sabbath’s conventicle, who the preachers were, what the number of the people was, what the affections of the people; how sometimes the soldiers assaulted them, and sometimes killed some of them; sometimes the soldiers were beaten, and some of them killed.’
1674.
There appears to have been a band of about forty ministers who set the government at defiance in this manner, most of them young and active men. In the large towns, house conventicles prevailed; but in the country, ‘the people had a sort of affectation to the fields above houses.’ There came to be a regularity in these affairs; when the people in a rural district wished to have a conventicle minister, they sent to town to engage one. Danger made the congregations come armed. ‘Not many gentlemen of estates durst come, but many ladies, gentlewomen and commons, came in good multitudes. Wonderful conversions followed upon the sermons. People discovered their own secret scandals. Sometimes people of age bemoaned their want of baptism, and received it at these occasions. Sometimes a curate would come, and after the first sermon, stand up and profess his repentance, and afterwards would consecrate himself to that work by a solemn field-preaching. So the work of the gospel advanced in Scotland for several years.’—Kir.
June 4.
1674.
A strange scene was presented in the Parliament Close in Edinburgh. As the members of the Council approached their house of meeting, they found fifteen ladies prepared to present a petition, ‘desiring that a gospel ministry might be presented for the starving congregations of Scotland.’ There were present amongst them the widows of Mr Robert Blair and Mr John Neave, noted as entirely ‘faithful’ clergymen during the troubles; Lady Crimond, a daughter of Johnston of Warriston; a sister-in-law of the Laird of Dundas and a sister of the Earl of Melville; the rest being generally the wives of Edinburgh citizens. Seeing it was dangerous for men to appear in the form of remonstrants, these ladies had volunteered to undertake the duty. The singularity of the occasion had brought together a crowd, which filled the close, and which is said to have comprised a large proportion of the fair sex. The press was so great and so tumultuous around the councillors, that they could scarcely make their way to the council-house. As the chancellor descended from his coach, Archbishop Sharpe went close behind him, fearing bodily harm. It is alleged by Sir George Mackenzie that a design for doing some serious injury to the primate was entered into on this occasion, and that the ladies were to ‘set upon him’ when a certain member of the corps should raise her hand as a signal; but this would need confirmation. He was saluted with reproaches and cries of Judas! and Traitor! but the only approach to personal violence was a slap on the neck from one of the sisterhood, who at the same time took leave to tell him that that (meaning the neck) should yet pay for it ere all was done! One of the ladies, presenting her petition to the chancellor, he received it with a courteous salute, and listened to her with an inclined head till he got to the door of the council-chamber. Lord Stair tossed his copy to the ground, whereupon the fair petitioner reminded him he had not acted in that manner with the famous Remonstrance of 1651, which he helped to pen.
The Council took this matter in high dudgeon. They resented the personal disrespect of the scene in the Parliament Close, and they denounced the matter of the petition as tending to stir up hatred against his majesty’s government. For one thing, it ‘most falsely and scandalously bears that they [the supplicants] had long been deprived of the inestimable blessing of the public worship and ordinances of God, whereas it is notour that his majesty’s subjects do enjoy [those blessings] in great purity and peace, [there being] ane orderly ministry authorised and countenanced and established by law.’ In short, it was a seditious libel, calling for sharp punishment. Two of the ladies being brought before the Council, refused to take an oath or give evidence; the rest failed to appear on citation. The whole were put to the horn as rebels, and three suffered a short confinement.—Kir. P. C. R.
1674.
The Macleans had been a loyal clan, fighting with Montrose for the king, and suffering not a little in the royal cause. What the Campbells had been during the same period need not be particularised. Yet, when the clemency of the government had restored the Argyle estates to the earl, he was not the less disposed on that account to urge certain claims of his family upon its more loyal neighbours. Fountainhall speaks of them as ‘patched-up claims and decreets of his own courts for contumacy;’ while the fact was that the Macleans durst not make appearance in the grounds of their enemy, ‘and pretended casualties of superiority, as escheats, wards, non-entries, reliefs, &c.,’ a particularly hard case, as these arose in many instances from the deaths of Macleans in the king’s service, while their superior, the late Marquis of Argyle, had been ‘the great transgressor.’ Argyle, however, according to the alleged genius of his family in that age, ‘walked warily in all he did,’ and, the Macleans imprudently despising his efforts, and neglecting legal measures of resistance, he succeeded ultimately in obtaining a letter of fire and sword against them.[249] Behold, then, in the summer of this year, a clan muster of the Campbells and their connections, to the amount of 2000 men, designed to enforce certain payments from the Tutor of Maclean in Mull—the Maclean of the day being a minor under the care of an uncle so called. The Tutor, on his part, has seven or eight hundred kilted followers to make resistance; but either his means were inadequate, or his measures had been ill concerted. The earl ‘besetting the isle with ships and boats, enters at three several places; at one place, Lord Niel, the earl’s brother, lights upon the cows which the Highlanders had driven to that place for safety, and caused cut down and hough [hamstring] a considerable number of them; which occasioned a great cry by the women and children keeping them, and running to their husbands and friends to acquaint them how it stood; whereupon the islanders, being amazed, fainted and came to a composition of the matter. The earl gets the castle of Duart into his own hand, and mans it for himself. They all yield and submit, and promise payment and subjection to the said earl.’—Law. See further transactions next year.
Oct.
There was no shearing this year till October, and much of the corn green when cut even then. Consequently, meal, though of bad quality, went to a pound sterling the boll. ‘Yet there was not any time cows found fatter than in this harvest, and no scarcity either of cows or sheep for slaughter. Thus the Lord, who casts down with one hand, lifts up with the other.’—Law.
1674.
It is rather surprising that sheep and cattle should so quickly have become plentiful after the great destruction of such stock from the storms of the preceding January. But in as far as the fact was true, the good condition of the animals might be readily accounted for by the very humidity of the summer and autumn, producing an abundance of herbage, while destructive to cereal crops.
1675.
The winter of 1674-5 is stated to have been singularly mild and free of rain in Ireland, and probably it was of the same character in Scotland. In our country, as in Ireland, there was a good harvest; yet victual continued to be dear by reason of the stock of the preceding scanty season being so thoroughly exhausted. Another winter of extraordinary mildness followed. The weather, at the end of November and beginning of December, is described as very warm. Many people fell sick, and died. A feverish cold—what might now be called influenza—was epidemic in town and country, ‘whereof moe die than was observed in other years before.’—Law.
Patrick Walker tells us that one night in August of this year, but more probably the fact occurred in 1674, Mr Donald Cargill, being at Cowhill in Livingstone parish, saw a great mist come on, and told the family to be careful of it, keeping close within their houses. He also desired them to mark where it stood thickest, ‘for there they would see the effects saddest.’ There was a small place called Craigs, where they observed the mist unusually thick, and, within four months after, thirty persons died there. It is probable that Mr Donald’s predictions in this case were founded upon simple observation of natural facts.
Sep.
The Macleans having failed in their agreement with the Earl of Argyle, and set his claims at nought, his lordship now prepared a second expedition against Mull, and this time he added to his own forces some regular soldiers and militia. The Macleans, on the other hand, had obtained assistance to a considerable amount from Macdonnell of Glengarry, Cameron of Locheil, and Maclean of Lochbuy. There were probably not less than fifteen hundred armed Highlanders on each side.
1675.
The Campbells, proceeding in a great fleet of ships and birlins, under the command of the earl’s brother, Lord Niel, encountered a severe storm on the 21st and 22d of September, by which they were damaged and driven back, though fortunately no lives were lost. ‘This storm was so great, that ... great oaks were blown up by the roots ... old trees of two hundred years standing broken in the midst ... and the corns so shaken, that the people got little more than straw to cut down. A rumour went that there was a witch-wife, named Muddock, had promised to the Macleans that, so long as she lived, the Earl of Argyle should not enter Mull; and indeed many of the people imputed the rise of that great storm unto her paction with the devil, how true I cannot assert.’—Law. Might not the autumnal equinox somewhat better account for the fact?
The Earl of Argyle was so far baffled by this storm, that he had to give up for the meantime the design of vindicating his rights by force.
We find next year the cause of the Macleans taken up by the Earl of Seaforth, the Marquis of Athole, and some other chiefs, by whose means a suspension of Argyle’s powers was obtained, and his account subjected to a severe reckoning, ‘which he was most averse to.’ They also hounded out a creditor of his own upon him, and he was obliged to make a precipitate retreat from Edinburgh to escape caption, and to carry off the furniture of his Stirling mansion to a secure place in the Highlands, lest it should be seized for the debt.
The earl and the Macleans are found next year again at legal tilt, but with no particular result that appears. His own forfeiture for treason, which soon after occurred, probably saved them from further annoyance.
1676.
The winter of 1675-6 being singularly mild, was followed by a favourable spring, and there consequently was an abundant harvest. The characteristic mutability of our climate was, however, shewn immediately after. There was a drought in latter autumn, and about the 18th of December the temperature fell to an extraordinary degree, ‘the most aged never remembered the like. The birds fell down frae the air dead; the rats in numbers found dead; all liquors froze, even the strongest ale; and the distilled waters of apothecaries in warm rooms froze in whole, and the glasses broke.’—Law.
Jan.
1676.
Two boys, named Clark and Ramsay, the one seventeen, and the other fifteen years of age, suffered in Edinburgh for an offence which had perhaps been suggested by the rumours attending the celebrated case of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers. John Anderson, a merchant, the master of Ramsay, had long been pining under an enfeebling malady, which was likely to have in time brought him to the grave. During his sickness, Ramsay, in conjunction with his companion Clark, purloined several articles of value belonging to his master, trusting that he would die, and that consequently no discovery would take place. Finding Anderson’s disease taking a turn, the young thieves became alarmed; and took into counsel another boy named Kennedy, an apothecary’s apprentice, who supplied them with a drug calculated to keep up the malady under which Anderson had suffered. The man receiving this in small doses, grew ill again, and in time died. No suspicion of foul play was entertained, and apparently the two lads would have been allowed to remain unnoticed, if they had not offered for sale a gold chain which formed part of their plunder. Being detained and questioned, they fell into such terror, that an ingenuous confession of their guilt was easily obtained from them, accompanied with many expressions of sorrow. They were hanged, ‘both in regard to the theft clearly proven, and for terror that the Italian trick of sending men to the other world in figs and possets might not come over seas to our island.’ Kennedy, ‘an outed minister’s son,’ was detained for want of proof, and ultimately banished.—Foun.
Wodrow adds a tale of wonder, as told him by his mother-in-law, Mrs Warner, who had visited the two boys in prison. After the burial of Anderson, his nephew, Sir John Clerk of Pennycuick, ‘was one night lying in his own house, in a room with some others, sleeping. In his sleep he imagined he heard a voice calling to him: “Avenge the blood of your uncle!” and wakened, and asked if any of them had been speaking to him. They declared not. He composed himself to sleep, and had it repeated; and he asked the former question the second time, and those in the room denied, as above. He slept again, and had the same repeated the third time; on which he got up, and went immediately to Edinburgh and made a particular inquiry into the circumstances of his uncle’s death, at the two apprentices, but found nothing to fix on at this time. In a little, Sir John met with a medal in a goldsmith’s shop which he knew to belong to his uncle. This he traced up till he landed it on the apprentices, who, upon this, confessed they had opened their master’s cabinet and taken out money, &c.’
1676.
Mr James Mitchell, who made an attempt on Archbishop Sharpe’s life in 1668, and wounded the Bishop of Orkney, was taken prisoner in February 1674, and being subjected to examination, and promised his life if he would confess, did make a confession—which, however, he afterwards retracted before the Court of Justiciary, having in the interval been told that nothing could be proved against him, and warned that perhaps the promise made to him might not be respected. This conduct put the government to a difficulty, and irritated them the more against him. At length, after keeping him in a very hard confinement for two years, they resolved to subject him to the torture, as the only means left to bring him back to his confession.
It is not proposed here to detail the sufferings of the wretched Mitchell; but those who know the courts of law, as they now exist, will probably view with some interest the arrangements that were made beforehand for that kind of procedure.
Jan. 6.
The resolution having been formed to put Mitchell to the torture of the boot, the Council ‘do hereby nominate the Earls of Linlithgow, Wigton, Seaforth, the Lords Ross and Treasurer Depute as a committee of Council to meet on the 24th day of January next, at nine o’clock in the forenoon in the Parliament House, where the justices do ordinarily hold their courts, and to cause put the said Mr James Mitchell to the question and torture concerning his being in the rebellion in the year 1666, and appoints the commissioners of justiciary in a fenced court to be present then and assistant, in their robes, with their clerks and other officers of court; and recommends to the said committee, or any three of them with the commissioners of justiciary, to meet before that time and consider of the way and manner of the said torture,’ &c.
The Council afterwards ordered that a bailie of Edinburgh should be present, ‘to receive and put in execution such orders as the lords shall think fit to give.’—P. C. R.
The unfortunate Mitchell sustained the torture with surprising firmness, and without making any admission criminative of himself. A proposal being afterwards made to torture him in the other leg, one of his friends (so the report went) dropped an anonymous hint to Archbishop Sharpe, that if he persisted in the resolution, he should have a shot from a steadier hand; ‘whereupon he was let alone, but still kept in prison.’—Law. At length the unhappy man was brought to a regular trial, when the state-officers all denied in the witness-box that fact of the promise of life upon confession, which their own record bore, and which Mitchell alleged had taken place. It is just possible that the record misrepresented what took place; but it is very difficult to make so largely charitable an allowance. Mitchell suffered in the Grassmarket (January 1678).
1676. July 9.
‘A star was seen at twelve hours of the day by a great company of people met for sermon on Gargunnock Hills, and that when the sun was shining.’—Law.
Sep.
One John Scott, a Quaker in Leith, was fined by Bailie Carmichael there, in a hundred dollars, and banished from the town, for brewing upon the Sunday, and answering, when challenged for it by the bailie and Mr Hamilton the minister, that ‘he might as weel brew on the Sunday as Mr Hamilton might take money for going up to a desk, and talking and throwing water upon a bairn’s face.’ He appealed to the Privy Council against the sentence as over-severe and beyond the power of the magistrate; but ‘he was ill set, for he had both the magistracy and the clergy—who solicited strongly—against him, for both of them would be baffled if the sentence were found unjust. The Council ratified the bailie’s sentence ... whereupon Bailie Carmichael arrested and seized eighty bolls of malt, the said Scott had paid ten or eleven pound the boll for, when victual was dear, and caused apprise and judge it to him, for his hundred dollars.’—Foun.
Dec.
For several years there had been a remarkable lull in the spiritual world, and, whether from the judicious mildness of the government in ordering that no women should be condemned for witchcraft except upon voluntary confession, or any other cause, witch cases had wholly ceased. All at once, the devil’s work recommenced, and a series of dismal tragedies ensued. It seems to have been primarily owing to a vagrant girl named Janet Douglas, who appeared deaf and dumb, and who may be reasonably set down as one of those singular young persons who, acting under a morbid love of mischief, have at the same time marvellous powers of deception. Whether she was the same person who figures in the anecdote below,[250] we have no means of ascertaining.
1676.
Sir George Maxwell of Pollock had for some weeks been very unwell, with a pain in his side and one in his shoulder. The illness had first come upon him suddenly in the night, when at Glasgow, in the form of a violent heat, attended with pain. At the time noted in the margin, Janet Douglas came to the neighbouring village, and began to frequent Pollock House. Attracting the attention of Sir George’s sister and daughter, she endeavoured to apprise them by signs that, at a certain cottage not far off, there was a picture of wax turning at a fire; and she expressed in her imperfect way a wish that a couple of men should go with her thither. Lady Maxwell, not being inclined to superstition, would have denied the girl’s request; but the two other gentlewomen consented. So Janet went away with two men-servants, and straight conducted them to the cottage of an old woman of evil fame, named Janet Mathie, whose son the laird had some time before imprisoned for stealing his fruit. ‘She going in with the men, the woman on some occasion stepping to the door, the dumb lass instantly put her hand behind the chimney, and takes out a picture of wax wrapped in a linen cloth, gives it to the men; away they all come with it, and let the gentlewomen see it. They find two pins stuck in the right side of it, and a pin on the shoulder downward, which they take out, and keeps quiet; and that night the laird had good rest, and mended afterward, though slowly, for he was sore brought down in his body: and in two or three days they made him understand the matter. The woman is apprehended, and laid up in prison in Paisley.’ On being searched, several witch-marks—that is, spots insensible to pain—were found upon her.
1677.
On the 4th of January, Sir George’s illness recurred with the same violence as before, and his face assumed the leaden hue of death. Amidst the anxieties which this occasioned, the dumb girl sent to inform the family that John Stewart, Mathie’s son, had made a new image of clay, for the purpose of taking away Sir George’s life. Two gentlemen went next day with the girl to Mathie’s cottage, and keeping her at a distance, but acting under her directions, found such an image under the bolster of a bed, with three pins sticking in it. The young man and his sister Annaple were immediately apprehended. From that day, it was said that Sir George began to recover his health.
1677.
Stewart at first denied all concern in the images, but, on witch-marks being found on his person, he was ‘confounded,’ and joined his sister in a confession, which described witch-conventions in their mother’s house, along with ‘a man dressed in black, with a blue band and white hand-cuffs, with hoggars over his bare feet, which were cloven!’ Three women of the neighbourhood, Bessie Weir, Margaret Jackson, and Marjory Craig, were accordingly apprehended and examined, when the second gave a confession to much the same effect, but the other two proved ‘obdurate.’
In the subsequent judicial proceedings, Annaple Stewart gave a clear statement regarding the making of the first wax image in October last in the presence of the Black Man, her mother, and the other three women. They bound it on a spit, and turned it round before the fire, saying: ‘Sir George Pollock! Sir George Pollock!’ The young man, who was not then at home, had returned and been present at the making of the second image in January. ‘After he had gone to bed, the Black Man came in, and called him quietly by his name, upon which he arose from the bed and put on his clothes. Margaret Jackson, Bessie Weir, and Marjory Craig did enter in at the window in the gable.... The first thing that the Black Man required was that he should renounce his baptism and deliver up himself wholly unto him, putting one of his hands on the crown of his head, and the other to the sole of his foot ... promising he should not want any pleasure, and that he should get his heart sythe on all that should do him wrong. [All having given their consent to the making of the clay image, which was meant as a revenge for Sir George Maxwell taking away his mother], they wrought the clay, and the Black Man did make the head and face, and the two arms. The devil set three pins in the same, one in each side, and one in the breast; and John did hold the candle all the time the picture was making.... The picture was placed by Bessie Weir in his bed-straw.’ On this occasion, they had all had nicknames given them by the devil, who himself bore the name of Ejool.[251]
It is noted that when the girl, after confession in bed in Pollock House, was asked what the devil’s name had been to her, ‘she, being about to tell, was stopped, the bed being made to shake, and her clothes under her blown up with a wind.’
1677.
When the two young people had been committed to Paisley prison, Janet, their mother, desired to see her son, and the request being granted, ‘they make a third and new picture of clay, which the dumb lass again discovers.’ It was supposed that this was intended for Sir George’s daughter-in-law, who had taken an active interest in detecting the diabolic conspiracy, and who fell ill about this time.
In consideration of her nonage and penitency, Annaple Stewart was not brought to trial, though retained in prison. On the 15th of February, the rest of the party were tried and condemned, Janet Mathie, Bessie Weir, and Marjory Craig continuing to deny their guilt to the last. The obduracy of Mathie was considered the more horrible, as her two children seriously exhorted her to confession, Annaple with tears reminding her of her many meetings with the devil, but all in vain. The four women and the boy actually suffered in Paisley (20th February). Mathie was first hanged, and then burned, along with the wax and clay effigies. When Weir, the last of the four, was turned off the gallows, ‘there appears a raven, and approaches the hangman within an ell of him, and flies away again.’—Law.
1677.
It is perhaps the most singular fact regarding this case, that the particulars of it are narrated with all seriousness by Sir George’s son and successor, Sir John Maxwell, who was subsequently Lord Justice-clerk—that is, supreme criminal judge in Scotland. He intimates not the least doubt of any of the facts, neither of any of the popular inferences from them. Other intelligent men in that age were struck by the manner in which the doings of the witches were detected, and Janet Douglas was for some time the subject of general attention. In the same month which saw the witches done to death on Paisley green, she detected a similar conspiracy against Mr Hugh Smith, the minister of Eastwood, who ‘was much afflicted with pain and sweating, to the changing of half-a-dozen shirts some days, and was brought very low, but after the discovery, and the effigy gotten, and the prins taken out, grew well again.’ It was given out regarding the girl, that she understood any language in which she was addressed. When she had somewhat recovered the use of her own tongue, which was about two months after these events, she told that three years before, she had had ‘an impression on her spirit’ to come to Pollock. ‘Being asked how she had knowledge of detecting witches and other secrets, she declared that she knew not from what spirit; only things were suggested to her; but denied that she had any correspondence with Satan.’—Law. According to Sir John Lauder, she stated that ‘she had all things revealed to her in her sleep by vision.’ This learned gentleman adds: ‘What made her very suspect to be haunted only by a familiar, was her dissolute idle life, having ... not so much as a show or semblance of piety in it, but much lightness and vanity.’[252]
The Privy Council, hearing much rumour of these things from the west, sent orders to search for and apprehend Janet Douglas, and she was brought to Edinburgh in May, and lodged in the Canongate Tolbooth. People flocked to see her, and she began to exercise her art of witch-finding amongst them, but with no particular effect. In June, nevertheless, five or six women of the west, whom she had detected in killing Hamilton of Barns by a wax image, were burned for their imaginary crime at Dumbarton. Next month we find a reference to her in another case.
1677.
Two sons of Douglas of Barloch having been drowned in crossing a river at one time, the father was induced by Janet Douglas to believe that the calamity was an effect of witchcraft. Barloch consequently caused John Gray, Janet M‘Nair, Thomas and Mary Mitchell, to be apprehended and carried to Stirling Tolbooth. There, ‘their bodies being searched by the ordinar pricker, there were witch-marks found upon each of them, and Janet M‘Nair confessed that she got these marks from the grip of a grim black man, and had a great pain for a time thereafter.’ After keeping these four persons in jail on his own charges for fourteen weeks, Barloch found the expense more than he was able to undergo, ‘being but a gentleman of a mean fortune;’ and on his petition, the Council ordered (July 5, 1677) that the magistrates of Stirling should in the meantime ‘entertein the prisoners.’ Against this ordinance, the magistrates immediately reclaimed, ‘seeing it is a great burden to the town, who have so many other contingencies to undergo;’ and the lords, reconsidering the matter, commissioned the Lairds of Kier, Touch, and Herbertshire, to examine the prisoners, and ‘try what they find anent these persons’ guilt of the crime of witchcraft, and report.’
What was ultimately done with the four Stirling prisoners, we do not learn. As to Janet Douglas, the Council began to feel that she was something of an inconvenience in the country; so they determined to banish her beyond seas. At first, no skipper could be found who was willing to take her in his vessel; some were disposed to set sail without a pass, to avoid being compelled to take such a dangerous commodity on board. But Janet was ultimately banished and heard of no more.
1676-7.
Lord Fountainhall notes a remarkable homicide as taking place this winter, at the village of Abernethy in Fife. A butcher and another man, sitting in an ale-house together, quarrelled, and in a sudden fit of passion, the butcher inflicted a mortal stab upon his companion. Some gentlemen sitting in a neighbouring room heard the fray, and, rushing in, found the butcher with the bloody knife in his hand. Excited by the atrocity of the deed, they hurried off the murderer to the regality gallows, and instantly hanged him, though they had no sort of authority to act in that manner. They probably acted upon a popular notion, that a murderer taken red-hand, or fresh from the act, may be instantly done to death by the bystanders; which appears, however, to be a mistake.
1677. Jan.
The celebrated Beau Fielding is supposed to have at this time paid a visit to Edinburgh, while in difficulties on account of his suspected share in the murder of Robert Perceval—a young libertine found dead one morning near the Maypole in the Strand. He and two Scotch gentlemen of his own sort, being met one evening at their cups in a house in Edinburgh, were reputed to have drunk three toasts, ‘horrid to think on’—namely, the Trinity, their own confusion, and the devil.—Law. The allegation is but too credible, for about this time there begins to appear an extreme form of profligacy and impiety—confined, indeed, to a few of the upper classes—such as had never before been known in Scotland.
Jan. 18.
1677.
The system formerly adopted for keeping peace and maintaining law in the Highlands—namely, the making heads of clans answerable for their dependents and inferiors—was now declared to have been found not to answer, ‘in respect the said duty doth lie upon many persons in general, and no person doth make it his work.’ Consequently, ‘the insolency and villainy of thieves, sorners, and other wicked and lawless persons do abound and increase, to the affront of our authority and oppression of the lieges.’ The government therefore deemed it necessary to try the effect of a different plan, and granted a commission to Sir James Campbell of Lawers to use means for apprehending thieves and broken men in the Highlands, in order that they might be brought to justice. It was also arranged that when any cattle or other property was stolen, Sir James should make restitution to the owners, only taking them bound to support him in the legal processes by which he should endeavour to rescue the goods from the thieves, and get due punishment inflicted. All sheriffs, chiefs, landlords, and others were enjoined to assist and countenance Sir James in this thief-taking commission.
Eneas Lord Macdonald was afterwards conjoined with Sir James Campbell; and for his service during the year ending the 1st of September 1677, Sir James was ordered the sum of one hundred and fifty pounds! But this seems to have been regarded as rather scanty remuneration, and it was (September 8, 1677) decreed that for the fture there should be a salary of two hundred pounds to ‘ilk ane of the said two persons.’
As necessary to support the two gentlemen in their task, a garrison of a hundred soldiers was sent to Inverlochy, care being previously taken to have dwellings built for them, ‘as the house there is altogether out of repair and unlodgeable.’ The Marquis of Huntly and the Laird of Grant were called upon to exert themselves to convince the minor chiefs in their several districts that the government was now determined to put down the lawless system in the Highlands. It was intimated by other means that letters of fire and sword would be granted against any district in which gentler means had been found unavailing.
1677.
In February 1680, James M‘Nab in Achessan represented to the Privy Council that, being engaged by Sir James Campbell of Lawers to assist in apprehending Highland robbers, he had, at the hazard of his life, taken John, Callum, and Duncan M‘Gibbons, and delivered them to the governor of the garrison at Finlarig—an unusually perilous piece of duty, for which he had been promised the sum of eight hundred merks, now refused by Sir James. As a plea at law ‘against a person of such dexterity’ would have exhausted the reward, he had had no alternative but to apply to the Council. Sir James was ordered to pay the reward as claimed.—P. C. R.
A very compendious view of some of the customs of the Highlanders in the seventeenth century was given by Mr John Fraser, an Episcopal minister, author of a Treatise on Second-Sight: ‘In general they were litigious, ready to take arms upon a small occasion, very predatory, much given to tables, carding, and dicing. Their games was military exercise, and such as rendered them fittest for war, as arching, running, jumping, with and without race, swimming, continual hunting and fowling, feasting, especially upon their holidays, the which they had enough, borrowed from popery. Their marriage and funeral solemnities were much like [those of] their neighbours in the low country; only at their funerals, there was fearful howling, screeching, and crying, with very bitter lamentation, and a complete narration of the descent of the dead person, the valorous acts of himself and his predecessors, sung with tune in measure, continual piping, if the person was of any quality or professing arms. Their chiliarchy had their ushers that gaed out and came in before them, in full arms. I cannot pass by a cruel custom that’s hardly yet extinct. They played at cards or tables (to pass the time in the winter nights) in parties, perhaps four on a side; the party that lost, was obliged to make his man sit down on the midst of the floor; then there was a single-soled shoe, well plated, wherewith his antagonist was to give him [the man] six strokes on end, upon his bare loof [palm], and the doing of that with strength and art was thought gallantry.’[253]
Feb. 1.
A travelling doctor, styling himself Joannes Baptista Marentini, under licence from the king, and with the permission of the magistrates of Edinburgh, had a stage erected in that city, ‘for practising his skill in physic and otherwise.’ His term of permission being about to expire, and the magistrates unwilling to renew it, he found it necessary to apply to the Privy Council for a further term, on the ground that he needed some more time for effecting the cure of certain persons under his hands. The Council gratified him with a prolongation till the 1st of April, in order that, ‘having finished the said undertaken cures, he may the more freely, and with the greater approbation, depart from this city to some other.’
1677.
A little case of the heart comes in as a pendant to the above narrative. Four days after the end of the term assigned in the act of the Privy Council, James Baynes, wright, came before that august body with a petition, setting forth how ‘one Monsieur Devoe, servant to the mountebank who was lately in this place, hath, by sinistrous and indirect means, secured and enticed the petitioner’s daughter and only child to desert her parents, and to live with him upon pretence of a clandestine marriage.’ There being reason to fear that he might escape, unless very prompt measures were taken, the Council granted warrant to have the offender imprisoned in the Tolbooth. After escaping from these matrimonial troubles, Devoe settled in Edinburgh as a dancing-master, and we shall find his name coming before us several times on other occasions.
Feb.
The deaf and dumb Laird of Duntreath, a noted person in those days, being at Paisley, ‘made signs to some of great fightings and troubles to be in the land in a few months.’—Law.
This gentleman, who was said to be, notwithstanding his deficiencies, of a very devout frame of mind, had in the preceding December made a more special divination. ‘There was one of his acquaintance went forth to a water at a good distance frae him upon the ice, and had fallen in; and he, at that instant of time, gave warning of it by a sign.’ On another occasion, when the Dumb Laird was sitting in his own house at Duntreath, ‘two of his neighbours falling out at two miles’ distance from him, the one striking the other with a whinger in the arm, he, in the same instant of time, makes a sign of it.’
It was a general belief that many persons born deaf and dumb possessed this supposed gift of clairvoyance or second-sight. One, attended by another man, coming to the Boat of Balloch, at the foot of Loch Lomond, and seeing a salmon-net drawing in, signed that there were five fish in it, and one of them with a hook in its mouth, indicating the hook by crooking his finger and putting it in his cheek. ‘The other man, being curious to know the truth of it, causes reckon the fishes, and see if any of them had a hook; and it was found so as it was signed by the dumb man. He tells the fishers what the dumb man had signed, and they gave the dumb man one of them.’—Law.
1677.
At Colzium House, the seat of Sir Archibald Edmondstone of Duntreath, there is a portrait of his predecessor, the Deaf and Dumb Laird, presenting an aspect of intelligence much beyond what could have been anticipated regarding one subject to so great an infirmity. It is a tradition in the family that, in early life, finding himself much overlooked on account of his inability to communicate, and being in particular left at home when the rest went to church, he was found one day, on the family returning from worship, sitting among the horses in the stable. When his mother let him know that this conduct excited surprise, he imparted to her by such means as were at his command, that, seeing himself treated as if he were something less than a human being, he had thought it only right and proper that he should place himself in the society of the animals which had the same deficiency as himself. The reproach was felt, and he was thenceforth treated more on a footing of equality, and allowed to go to church with the rest of the family.
June.
The public mind being again morbidly excited about witchcraft, the usual result of a fresh crop of cases—a witch-storm, it may be called—ensued. In the beginning of this month, a serving-woman, named Lizzy Mudie, was burnt at Haddington for witchcraft. Her mistress, Margaret Kirkwood, had hanged herself in her own house on a Sunday forenoon, while the people were at church. Lizzy on that occasion made some disturbance, by running aloud over the numbers, one, two, three, &c., till she came to fifty-nine, when she cried: ‘The turn is done!’ It being found that Margaret Kirkwood, whose age was fifty-nine, had ended her life at that moment, Lizzy was taken up on suspicion, and examined for witch-marks. These were found upon her, and she confessed herself to be a witch. She also delated five other women (two of them midwives) and a man, as likewise guilty of witchcraft, relating particular circumstances of their alleged guilt; but they denied all. Fountainhall says: ‘I did see the man’s body searched and pricked in two sundry places, one at the ribs, and the other at his shoulder. He seemed to find pain, but no blood followed.... The marks were bluish, very small, and had no protuberancy above the skin.’ He adds, with regard to the official pricker: ‘I remained very dissatisfied with this way of trial, as most fallacious; and the fellow could give me no account of the principles of his art, but seemed to be a drunken foolish rogue.’
1677.
The trade of a pricker of witches, which had some time before been a regular and a prosperous one, was beginning to fall under suspicion among the authorities. One Cowan, of Tranent, who had learned the art from ‘Kincaid, a famous pricker,’[254] was complained of by one Catherine Liddel, before the Privy Council, about this time, for subjecting her to the process on suspicion of witchcraft; and he was by that tribunal condemned to prison during their pleasure. It fully appears, indeed, that the present rulers of Scotland, while so ruthless towards religious dissenters, were more enlightened and humane than any of their predecessors in the matter of necromancy. While introducing the use of torture in the one case, they discontinued it in the other. They did, indeed, as we see, still allow of witch prosecutions; but this perhaps it was beyond their power to resist, and it must be admitted in their favour that the requirement of voluntary confessions was a great step in the right direction. On the other hand, the fact of voluntary confessions being so often made, where death was the certain consequence, and where a stout denial usually seems to have saved the accused, is one of a highly remarkable character, and which might give scope to some interesting speculations. One remark forcibly occurs regarding such cases, that the accused must have had intentions towards necromantic results and a full conviction of their possibility, if not of their occurrence; consequently must have felt guilty.
One of the persons accused by Lizzy Mudie was Marion Phin, a woman of eighty years of age, living in Haddington. Being consequently thrown into jail, she lay there three months in a most miserable condition, suffering much, we presume, from the severity of the treatment, so unsuitable to her great age, and also distressed by the loss of her good name, she having hitherto ‘lived always under a good report, never being stained with the least ignominy, far less with the abominable crime of witchcraft.’ ‘It were hard,’ she said in a petition to the Privy Council, ‘that, being of so known integrity, she should suffer upon the account of such lying accusers, who may and ordinarily do blunder the best of God’s servants.’ Her petition for being liberated on caution (August 10) was not yielded to by the Council. They contented themselves for the meantime with ordering the commission for her examination to proceed with their duty.
1677.
The Florida, a large vessel of the Spanish Armada of 1588, carrying sixty guns, had been blown up and sunk in the Bay of Tobermory, in the island of Mull:[255] an old and consistent tradition represents it as having come to this fate by means of Smollett of Dumbarton, presumed to have been the ancestor of the celebrated novelist. The guns, treasure, and other valuable things, known or supposed to have been on board, made the incident a memorable one, and induced a desire, if possible, to weigh up the vessel, or at least to fish up from it such things as might be accessible to divers. In the seventeenth century, the recovery of sunk vessels and their contents was a favourite project among ingenious and adventurous men. The late Marquis of Argyle had obtained from the Duke of Lennox, Lord High Admiral of Scotland, a formal gift of this vessel, and had become ‘clad with possession’ by taking guns and other things out of it. In 1665, a more vigorous attempt was made to get up some of its treasures by the present Earl of Argyle, the immediate operator being, apparently, Maule of Melgum, a Forfarshire gentleman, who had invented an apparatus precisely of the nature of what was a century later revived as the Diving-bell. Another person engaged in the business was the almost sole active cultivator of physics in Scotland during this age—the celebrated George Sinclair, professor of philosophy in the University of Glasgow—who also obliged the world some years later with a treatise, entitled Satan’s Invisible World Discovered. Sinclair, in a work named below,[256] tells us that on this occasion they brought up three pieces of ordnance, one of brass, one of copper, and one of iron, two of which were eleven feet in length, and more things might have been recovered but for the coming on of tempestuous weather. He says they were surprised to find that the bullets employed for these guns were of stone, instead of metal.
July 27.
1677.
Hearing of these experiments of the Earl of Argyle, the eminent lawyer, Sir George Lockhart, prompted the Duke of York to claim the property as the present Lord High Admiral; and so there arose a litigation on the subject. Various arguments were presented against Argyle’s right, particularly that to make possession complete it was necessary that he should have stirred the ship from the place where it was when his father got the gift. The earl himself appeared in court, and made a few remarks, shewing the large expense he had laid out on the discovery of the lost vessel, and concluding with a wish that it were brought above board ere any dispute took place about the property, ‘lest it should verify the story of the king of Spain’s gold.’ The court gave the case in favour of Argyle.
It is curious to find these two men engaged in such a plea only seven or eight years before standing in the relative positions of rebellious subject and vengeful sovereign. Still more curious it is to hear of this unpopular prince, that ‘he wrote down a very complimentary letter to Argyle, approving the justice of the lords’ sentence, and shewing his hearty compliance and acquiescence therein.’—Foun.
It is worthy of notice that after ‘unfortunate Argyle’ had passed from life—namely, in May 1686—a warrant was given by James VII. for a patent to William Harrington and three others, merchants of London, for enabling them to ‘weigh up, recover, and obtain from under water, in the roads and seas of Scotland, ships, or ship guns, treasure, and other goods, which have been shipwrecked, lost, and sunk, and particularly one ship of the Spanish Armada, sunk in the western seas of his majesty’s kingdom of Scotland’—the patent to endure for fourteen years.[257]
Oct. 1.
1677.
The Egyptians or gipsies still roamed in a lawless manner over the country, without attracting much notice from the authorities, their conduct being now probably less troublesome than it had been in the reign of King James. Two bands of these people, the Faws and the Shaws, on their way from Haddington fair to Harestanes, in Peeblesshire, where they expected to meet and fight two other tribes, the Bailies and Browns, fell out among themselves at Romanno about the spoil they had lately acquired, and immediately engaged in battle. ‘Old Sandie Faw, a bold and proper fellow,’ and his wife, then pregnant, were killed on the spot, while his brother George was very dangerously wounded. The Laird of Romanno apprehended ‘Robert Shaw; Margaret Faw, his spouse; James, Patrick, Alexander, and Thomas Shaws, their sons; and Helen Shaw, their daughter; Robert and John Faws; John Faw younger; Agnes and Isobel Shaws; Isobel Shaw younger; and George Faw, and did commit them prisoners within the Tolbooth of Peebles;’ whence they were speedily removed to Edinburgh to be tried. We soon after find the Council despatching a warrant to the Laird of Romanno and Mr Patrick Purdie, to send to Edinburgh ‘the money, gold, gold rings, and other things which were upon these persons;’ likewise the weapons with which they had fought. An account of expenses sent by the magistrates of Peebles was disallowed, excepting only £15 Scots (£1, 6s. 8d. sterling) for the sustenance of the company while in jail.—P. C. R.
In February next year, ‘Old Robin Shaw’ and his three sons were hanged in the Grassmarket for this murder, and John Faw was executed in the following week for another murder. Two or three years after, the Laird of Romanno—a quaint physician named Pennecuik, who wrote verses—erected a pigeon-house on the scene of the conflict, with this inscription over the door:
‘The field of gipsy blood which here you see,
A shelter for the harmless dove shall be.’[258]
Nov. 3.
A great fire took place in Glasgow, by which a large part of the Saltmarket on both sides was burnt. It commenced near the Cross, through the instrumentality of a smith’s apprentice, who being beaten by his master, set the workshop on fire at night, and fled. This conflagration was considered an equal calamity to that of 1652. It threw between six and seven hundred families out of their homes, in a ruined and starving condition.—P. C. R. ‘The heat was so great, that it fired the horologe of the Tolbooth. There being some prisoners in it, of whom the Laird of Carsland [Kersland] was one [who had been confined in various jails for eight years on account of his concern in the Pentland rising], the people broke open the doors, and set them free.... Great was the cry of the poor people, and lamentable to see their confusion.’—Law.
1677.
The Town Council, in a minute of December 4, speak of ‘the great impoverishment this burgh is reduced to’ by the fire, which they regard as a just punishment from God for their iniquities, ‘which we pray him to mak us sensible of, that we may turn from the evil of our ways to himself, so his wrath may be averted.’ Yet, they go on to say, ‘because such things are more incident to burghs, by reason of their joining houses to houses ... especially being reared up of timber, without so much as the window of stone,’ therefore the Council think it well to enact that whenever any of the people are in a condition to rebuild their houses, they shall rebuild them of stone.—M. of G. On a petition from the magistrates, the Privy Council ordered a charitable collection to be made throughout the country for the poor starving people.
It does not appear that the engine made in 1657 for quenching of fire was of any use on this occasion. It had probably been allowed to fall out of order, as in December 1680, we find an order from the Town Council to ‘see if it can be yet made use of in case of need.’—M. of G. In 1725, another fire-engine was got from London, at an expense of £50.—Strang.
1677.
The late Laird of Ayton, in Berwickshire, had left an only daughter, under age, in the care of the Countess of Home. He had bequeathed to this young lady, Jean Home, his whole estate, though it was more customary in such cases in Scotland to destine land-property to the next heir-male. Home of Plendergast, who stood in that relation, was of course disappointed, but he hoped that a reparation might be made by the young lady marrying a member of his own family. When, in December 1677, the time approached for her choosing her curators—being then, we presume, twelve years of age—Plendergast presented a petition to the Privy Council, desiring that she should be brought as usual to their bar in order to pass through that ceremony in the presence of her general kindred. This gentleman, however, appears to have been in disfavour with the other gentlemen of his name in that province, as well as with the Countess of Home and Charles Home, the brother of the earl, with whom the young lady of Ayton at that time lived. On the evening of the very day when the petition was presented to the Council, Charles Home, accompanied by Alexander Home of Linthill, Sir Patrick Home of Polwarth, John Home of Ninewells, Robert Home of Kimmerghame elder, and Joseph Johnston of Hilton, proceeded to the residence of the young lady, and carried her off across the Border. ‘There they, in a most undutiful and unchristian manner, carried the poor young gentlewoman up and down like a prisoner and malefactor, protracting time till they should know how to make the best bargain in bestowing her, and who should offer most. They did at last send John Home of Ninewells[259] to Edinburgh, and take a poor young boy, George Home, son to Kimmerghame, out of his bed and marry him to the said Jean, the very day she should have been presented to the Council.’ The ceremony was wholly irregular, and performed by an English minister, ‘opening thereby a new way to slight the clergy of Scotland.’ At the same time, the countess appeared before the Council, and apologised for the absence of her ward, ‘as being sickly and tender, and not able to travel, and not fit for marriage for many years to come.’
1678. Mar. 16.
The Council took this matter up in high style, and dealt with the offending parties in strict terms of the statutes which they had broke. The young husband lost his interest jure mariti; the young wife hers jure relictæ. The former was fined in £500 Scots, and the latter in a thousand merks, for their clandestine marriage. Further, for contempt of the Council, the young wife was fined in a thousand merks, to be paid to Home of Plendergast. Ninewells and Hilton suffered amercement respectively in 1000 and 2000 merks, the former sum to be paid to Plendergast. The young couple were, moreover, to suffer three months’ imprisonment in Edinburgh Castle.—P. C. R.
1678. Mar. 7.
Three enterprising persons at Haddington, including William Lamb, one of the bailies, and Mr James Lauder, sheriff-clerk, formed a project for a twice-a-week stage-coach ‘to pass through the whole year betwixt Edinburgh and Haddington, which will be of great conveniency for travellers of all sorts who may have occasion to repair to Edinburgh from the eastward.’[260] It was their resolution ‘to employ a considerable stock of money for erecting the said stage-coaches, buying of horses, and all other furniture requisite, in expectation of some small profit by progress of time.’ Wherefore they petitioned for the exclusive right to have stage-coaches upon that road. The right was granted for seven years.—P. C. R.
July 29.
1678.
A very few months after this date, William Hume, merchant in Edinburgh, appears to have set up a stage-coach between his own city and Glasgow, encouraged thereto by the liberality of the two municipalities. The city of Glasgow undertook to pay four hundred merks annually for two years.—M. of G. Hume proposed that his conveyance should carry only six passengers, at £4, 16s. Scots each in summer, and £5, 8s. in winter (respectively 8s. and 9s. sterling), being at the rate of 2s. 8d. a mile in summer, and 3s. in winter. The Privy Council, on his petition, gave him an exclusive privilege for seven years, and assured him against his horses being pressed for any kind of public service.—P. C. R.
These are the first conveniences of the kind we hear of as established between one place and another in Scotland, except the coach between Edinburgh and Leith, first in December 1610, and secondly in September 1660 (which see). It is, however, probable that none of all these enterprises proved successful, or was carried on for any considerable length of time. A traveller in Scotland in 1688 tells us: ‘Stage-coaches they have none.... The truth is, the roads will hardly allow them those conveniences, which is the reason that their gentry, men and women, choose rather to use their horses. However, their great men often travel with coach and six, but with so much caution, that, besides their other attendance, they have a lusty running footman on each side of the coach, to manage and keep it up in rough places.’ It is added: ‘This carriage of persons from place to place might be better spared, were there opportunities and means for the speedier conveyance of business by letters. They have no horse-posts besides those which ply betwixt Berwick and Edinburgh, and from thence to Port-Patrick for the sake of the Irish packets.... From Edinburgh to Perth, and so to other places, they use foot-posts and carriers, which, though a slow way of communicating our concerns to one another, yet is such as they acquiesce in till they have a better.’[261]
What makes it the more improbable that William Hume’s enterprise was successful, notwithstanding the well-meant patronage of the Glasgow magistrates, is that, in October 1743, the Town Council of the western city was found considering a similar project of one John Walker, merchant in Edinburgh, who proposed to ‘erect’ a stage-coach betwixt the two cities, with six horses, and holding six passengers, to go twice a week from the one to the other in summer, and once in winter. The corporation was called upon to guarantee that as many as two hundred tickets should be sold each year. The proposal does not appear to have been entertained.
1678.
In 1749, a caravan—a kind of covered spring-cart—passed twice a week from the one city to the other, taking a day and a half to the journey!—Strang.
May 2.
Two old women, belonging to the village of Prestonpans, were tried for witchcraft by a commission, and, ‘on their confession, no ways extorted, were burnt.’ Before their death, they gave information regarding some other persons who, they said, were also witches; and, one telling on another, there were in September as many as eight or ten collected from the parishes of Ormiston, Pencaitland, and Crichton, besides seven who belonged to Loanhead of Lasswade. The justices shewed a disinclination to treat all these poor creatures as witches; and Sir John Clerk of Pennicuik—first baronet of a family which has produced many scholars, judges, antiquaries, and men of general talent—declined to be upon the commission appointed for the seven of Loanhead, ‘alleging drily that he did not feel himself warlock (that is, conjuror) enough to be judge upon such an inquisition.’[262] The leniency of the justices was cried out upon by some, as interfering with the discovery of these enemies of mankind. As usually happened, the accused made confession of guilt, telling much the same story of intercourse with the devil, renouncing their baptism, and going about in the form of ravens, &c., as was set forth by the witches of Auldearn in 1661—a traditionary set of hallucinations, they may be called, the uniformity of which ought in itself to have put judges sooner on their guard against a misjudgment of these unfortunate beings. Fountainhall, who conversed with a few of the present group, speaks somewhat rationally about them, and it is evident he was inclined to regard their adventures with the devil as mere dreams. ‘Only,’ he says, ‘in these diabolic transports their sleep is so deep, that no pinching will awake them scarce’—an intimation, some will think, of the sleep being mesmeric. Sad to say, however, nine of the East Lothian women were condemned on their confession, although seeming rational and penitent; and were burnt, five between Edinburgh and Leith, and four at Painston, while the seven of Loanhead were reserved for future procedure.
1678.
The statement of this case has induced Fountainhall to mention one or two others by way of digression. In the time of James VI., a Scottish gentleman, being troubled with a disease, sought relief from a magician in Italy, but was told he need not have come so far from home, as there was a person in Scotland who could cure him, and this person he particularly described, so that the gentleman might know him. Some years after, being returned, the patient met, on the Bridge of Earn, one to whom the description in every particular applied; and, having accosted him, and asked for his aid, he was cured by this stranger with a few simple herbs. The story being told, the curer of the disease was prosecuted as a necromancer, in compact with the devil, and found guilty, notwithstanding his protestation that the cure was natural, and the devil’s having named or described him was no fault of his. In this narration, the reader will recognise a story which has been told with many variations, as to person, place, and circumstances, but always with the assumption of what would now in certain circles be described as an exercise of the power of clairvoyance regarding a person unknown and living at a great distance.
1678.
The other story is even more curious in its details. Fountainhall says: ‘As for the rencontre between Mr Williamson, schoolmaster at Cupar (he has writ a grammar), and the Rosicrucians, I never trusted it till I heard it from his own son, who is present minister of Kirkcaldy.’ A stranger coming to Cupar called for Mr Williamson, and they went to drink together at a tavern. When the reckoning came to be paid, the stranger whistled for spirits, and one in the shape of a boy came and gave him some gold. It is to be remarked that no servant had been seen attending the stranger while riding into the town, or at his inn. ‘He caused his spirits next day bring him noble Greek wines from the pope’s cellar, and tell the freshest news then was at Rome.’ Some time after, Mr Williamson, being in London, and passing along London Bridge, heard himself called by name, and turning about, discovered it was his Rosicrucian. At the request of the stranger, he met him at dinner in a house to which he was directed, and there found a magnificently spread table, with a company of good fashion, all being served by spirits. The conversation turned on the advantage of being served by spirits, and Mr Williamson was asked to join their happy society; but he started back with dismay, when it was mentioned as a necessary preliminary, that he should abstract his spirit from all materiality, and renounce his baptism. In his alarm, he fell a praying, whereupon they all disappeared. He was then in a new alarm, dreading to have to pay a huge reckoning; but the boy who answered his summons, told him that ‘there was nothing to pay, for they had done it, and were gone about their affairs in the city.’ It is barely necessary to remark to those who have seen and believed in the wonders of what is called electro-biology, there is nothing in Mr Williamson’s case which might not be explained on that principle—namely, a condition of brain artificially produced, in which the suggestion of objects and events is enough to make the patient believe them real.
After this date, witch-cases before the high court are rare, and there had evidently set in a disrelish for such prosecutions. The fact may reasonably be attributed in some degree to the publication, in 1677, of Webster’s rational treatise, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft.
July 19.
James Gray, a ‘litster,’ that is, dyer, in Dalkeith, went to Glasgow in March this year as a lieutenant in the Midlothian Militia. He there met, over a bottle, a young man, named Archibald Murray, son of the Laird of Newton, and who was a trooper in the king’s Life Guard. When heated with liquor, Gray began to boast that to be a lieutenant under the Duke of Lauderdale was as good as to ride in the king’s Life Guard—rather a petulant speech from a Dalkeith craftsman to the son of a laird in its neighbourhood. Murray stormed and called him a base fellow, to compare himself with gentlemen! They went out and fought, and Gray soon returned, saying: ‘I trow I have pricked him,’ never imagining that he had taken the young man’s life. Such, however, proved to be the case. Gray, who was a handsome, vigorous man, of about fifty, was tried for the act, and much interest was felt in his behalf, as it was believed that he had meant nothing like murder. Five thousand merks were offered to the friends of the deceased, by way of assythment. But all was in vain. On the day noted in the margin, ‘he was beheaded, dying with courage, and declaring that ambition, leading to discontents and quarrels, joined to marrying an old woman, had ruined him.’—Foun.
Aug. 15.
1678.
Scotland now had a visitor of an extraordinary kind. In a petition presented to the Privy Council, he described himself as Mercurius Lascary, a Grecian priest, a native of the island of Samos. He stated that himself, his brother Demetrius, who was also a priest, and two sons, had been seized by night by Algerine pirates; and his brother had now been detained for three years in a most miserable condition in Barbary. Testimonials from the patriarch of Constantinople and various Greek bishops confirmed this sad tale; and on his petition, a general charitable contribution was ordered to be raised in his behalf.—P. C. R.
Sep. 12.
In the history of the introduction of the more refined arts into Scotland, there is no reason why one so ingenious as cabinet-making should not be included. We now first hear of it on the occasion of a petition from one James Turner, styling himself ‘cabinet-maker and mirror-glass maker.’ He having, as he says, ‘with much labour, pains, and expenses, attained to the art of making cabinets, mirror-glasses, dressing-boxes, chests of drawers, comb-boxes, and the like curious work, of the finest olive and princes’ wood, not formerly practised by any native of this country,’ had been peaceably exercising his craft, when he was assailed by the deacon of the corporation of wrights as an unfreeman. He had first been forbidden to work, and then they took away his tools and materials. On his petition, however, he received the protection of the Council.—P. C. R.
Not long after (February 1682), we hear of a kindred trade as being practised in Edinburgh. Hugh M‘Gie, mirror-maker in the Canongate, gave in a bill to the Privy Council, representing that, by the practice of other nations, any tradesman having seven sons together, without the intervention of a daughter, is declared free of all public burdens and taxes, and has other encouragements bestowed on him, to enable him to bring up the said children for the use and benefit of the commonwealth; and claiming a similar privilege on the strength of his having that qualification. The Council recommended the magistrates to take Hugh’s seven sons into consideration when they laid their ‘stents’ upon him.—Foun.
Some years later (January 1685), Turner being again troubled by the wrights’ corporation, the Privy Council, on his producing an essay piece of ‘an indented cabinet and standishes,’ gave him a licence to set up as a freeman.—Foun. Dec.
Sep. 13.
1678.
At Prestonpans dwelt a respectable old widow named Katharine Liddell, or Keddie. During the late panic in East Lothian regarding witches, she had been seized by John Rutherford, bailie of Prestonpans, as one liable to suspicion of that crime. With the assistance of a drummer, two salt-makers, and other persons, he barbarously tormented her in prison in order to extort a confession, ‘by pricking of pins in several parts of her body, to the great effusion of her blood, and whereby her skin is raised and her body highly swelled, and she is in danger of her life.’ She had also been kept from sleep for several nights and days. It was not till she had undergone this treatment for six weeks, that on her petition an order was obtained from the Privy Council for her liberation.
There must have been some unusual force of character about Katharine Liddell, for not only had she stood her tortures without confessing falsehood, as most of her sister unfortunates did, but she turned upon her tormentors by presenting a petition to the Council, in which she charged them with defamation, false imprisonment, and open and manifest oppression, and demanded that they should be exemplarily punished in their persons and goods. After hearing the accused in answer, the Council declared Liddell entirely innocent and free, and condemned Rutherford and his associates for their unwarrantable proceedings. In respect, however, of ‘the common error and vulgar practice of others in the like station and capacity,’ they let him off without any punishment. ‘David Cowan, pricker,’ the most active of the tormentors, they sentenced to be confined during pleasure in the Tolbooth.—P. C. R.
Oct.
At this time, eighty persons were detained in prison in Edinburgh, on account of matters of religion, waiting till they should be transported as slaves to Barbadoes.[263]—Foun. Dec.
In connection with this distressing fact may be placed one of a different complexion, which Fountainhall states elsewhere. The magistrates, he tells us, were sensible of the inadequacy of their Old Tolbooth for the purposes of justice in these days of pious zeal. Consequently, one Thomas Moodie leaving them twenty thousand merks to build a church, they—declaring ‘they have no use for a church’—offered to build with the money a new Tolbooth, above the West Port, ‘and to put Thomas Moodie’s name and arms thereon!‘—Foun.
1678.
In the entire history of the municipality of Edinburgh, this is not the worst of its attempts at the perversion of funds intended for the building of a church. And it really appears that our ancestors looked upon the building of a jail as a public act of some dignity and importance. Patriae et Posteris [for our country and posterity] is the self-complacent inscription on the front of the Canongate Tolbooth.
Nov. 13.
A civil process of this date between Sir R. Hepburn of Keith and David Borthwick his tenant, reveals the fact that lime was ‘the usual way of improving and gooding land in East Lothian, at least in that corner of it.’—Foun. Dec.
1679.
So early as 1590 a foreigner came to Scotland, and applied for some encouragement to his design of erecting a paper-work within the kingdom.[264] There is reason to believe that this design proved abortive, and that there was no further attempt at a native manufacture of paper till 1675, when a work was established at Dalry Mills, a place on the Water of Leith, in the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh. This work obtained the benefit of an act passed in 1662, offering privileges to those who should erect such manufactories within the kingdom, and French workmen were introduced as necessary for the instruction of the natives. After suffering a temporary stoppage in consequence of the burning of the buildings, the work was again in such a condition in 1679, that it was able, according to the statement of its owners, to produce ‘gray and blue paper much finer than ever this country formerly offered to the Council.’
Mar. 7.
1679.
At this date, Alexander Daes, merchant, one of the proprietors, presented a petition setting forth how this work not only supplied good paper, but promised another general usefulness in the ‘improvement of rags, which formerly were put to no good use,’ and in the gathering of which many poor and infirm people could make their bread: in the work itself, moreover, ‘many Scotsmen and boys are already, and many mo may be, instructed in the art of making paper.’ There was but one thing wanting for the due encouragement of the work, and that was the suppression of ‘a faulty custom, not practised anywhere else,’ of employing fine rags in the making of wicks for candles. This custom, it was alleged, involved a cheat to the lieges, in as far as these rags, not exceeding eight or ten shillings (8d. or 10d. sterling) per stone in value, formed part of the weight of the candles, of which the price was three pounds ten shillings (5s. 10d. sterling). It was represented that cotton-wicks should be employed, which, if dearer, were also better, as they gave more light. Thus it was that, in those days, hardened as every one was in the spirit of monopoly, one trade made no scruple in interfering with another, if its own selfish ends could thereby be advanced.
The Council did actually ‘discharge the candlemakers to make use of clouts and rags for the wicks of candles.’
A subordinate branch of the petition for an extension of the time during which the privileges granted by statute were to last, was silently overlooked.—P. C. R.
There is reason to conclude that this paper-mill was not continued, and that paper-making was not successfully introduced into Scotland till the middle of the succeeding century.
July 11.
Robert Mean, keeper of the letter-office in Edinburgh, was brought before the Privy Council, accused of ‘sending up a bye-letter with the flying packet upon the twenty-two day of June last, giving ane account to the postmaster of England of the defeat of the rebels in the west, which was by the said postmaster communicated to the king before it could have been done by his majesty’s secretary for Scotland, and which letter contains several untruths in matter of fact.’ Notwithstanding an abject apology, Mean was sent to the Tolbooth, there to remain during the Council’s pleasure.—P. C. R.
Mr Mean’s office was at this time a somewhat critical one. On the 19th of August 1680, he was imprisoned by a committee of the Privy Council ‘for publishing the news-letter before it was revised by a councillor or their clerk; though he affirmed he had shewn it to the Earl of Linlithgow before he divulged it.’ What offended them was a false piece of intelligence contained in it, to the disparagement of the Duke of Lauderdale. Robert was liberated in a day or two with a rebuke.[265]
1679.
The bringing of the news of the defeat of the rebels at Bothwell Bridge seems to have been looked upon as a matter of a high degree of consequence. The instrument was one James Ker, a barber in the Canongate, who acted as a messenger between the royal army and the capital, under favour of the Chancellor Duke of Rothes, whom he had perhaps attended professionally in Holyroodhouse. The lords of the Privy Council were so over-joyed at the intelligence, that they promised James some signal mark of their gratitude; and he soon after asked them, by way of discharging the obligation, to get him entered as a freeman in the city corporation of chirurgeons. They used influence with the deacon of this important body to get Ker’s wish gratified; but it could not be done—he had not served the proper apprenticeship. He went to London, and petitioned the king on the subject, ‘who, finding that the corporation stuck upon their privilege, was graciously pleased to refer [him] back to the Council, to be rewarded as the Council should judge fit.’ Upwards of three years after (December 14, 1682), he is found petitioning the Council for this suitable reward, representing that by the expense of his journey to London and the loss of his employment, he and his wife and numerous family had been reduced to ‘great straits and necessity.’ They could only refer him to the Bishop of Edinburgh, that he might deal with the magistrates, to see their first recommendation made effectual.—P. C. R.
In 1673, two brothers, probably of English birth, Edward Fountain of Lochhill and Captain James Fountain, had their patent formally proclaimed throughout Scotland, as Masters of the Revels within the kingdom. They thus possessed a privilege of licensing and authorising balls, masks, plays, and such-like entertainments; nor was this quite such an empty or useless privilege as our traditionary notions of the religious objections formerly cherished against public amusements might have led us to suppose.
July 24.
At the date noted, the two Fountains petitioned the Privy Council against sundry dancing-masters who took upon them to make ‘public balls, dances, masks, and other entertainments in their schools, upon mercenary designs, without any licence or authority from the petitioners.’ It was set forth that this practice not only invaded their privileges, but tended to ‘the eminent discouragement of the playhouse,’ which ‘the petitioners had been at great charge in erecting.’ Agreeing with the views of the petitioners, the Council ordered all dancing-masters to desist from the above-described practice, and in particular prohibited ‘Andrew Devoe to keep any ball to morrow, or at any other time,’ without proper licence.—P. C. R.
1679.
This as far as I am aware, is the only notice we possess of a theatre in Edinburgh about 1679. It sounds strange to hear of a dancing-master’s ball in our city little more than a month after the battle of Bothwell Bridge, and while a thousand poor men were lodging on the cold ground in the Greyfriars’ Church-yard.
We find in September 1680 the two Fountains adverting to their playhouse as still kept up—‘at great expenses;’ and they then petition for redress against such as ‘keep public games, plays, and lotteries’ without that licence which they, as masters of the revels, were alone entitled to grant. The Council on that occasion directed letters of horning to be issued against the persons complained of. Soon after, February 10, 1681, Andrew Devoe, who made his bread by teaching the children of noblemen and gentlemen to dance, complained that he was troubled by the two Fountains demanding from him that he should give caution not to have any more balls in his school. It was an unheard-of thing in Europe, in Andrew’s opinion, that a school-ball should be regarded as an infringement of the patent of a master of revels. The Lords, entering into his views, ordered that any former acts they had passed in favour of the Messrs Fountain should be held as restricted to public shows, balls, and lotteries.
The privilege of the Messrs Fountain must have in time become an insupportable grievance to the lieges, or at least such of them as were inclined to embroider a little gaiety on the dull serge of common life. While the parliament sat in August 1681, an act was projected, though not brought forward, to complain of some oppressive monopolies, and ‘particularly of Mr Fountain’s gifts as Master of the Revels, by which he exacts so much off every bowling-green, kyle-alley, &c., through the kingdom, as falling under his gift of lotteries.’[266] In June 1682, Hugh Wallace appeared before the Privy Council as agent for ‘the haill royal burghs of the kingdom,’ shewing that individuals were daily charged by these gentlemen ‘upon pretence of gaming at cards and dice, and other games, or having such plays at their houses,’ acting thus on the pretended powers derived from certain general letters of the Council, and proceeding in due course to hornings and captions where their demands for money were not complied with. The Council ordained letters to be directed to the Masters of the Revels, if the petitioner could ‘condescend upon particular acts of exaction.’
Aug. 26.
1679.
The little village of Corstorphine, three miles from Edinburgh, was disturbed by a frightful occurrence. The title of Lord Forrester was at this time borne by a gentleman of mature years, who had acquired it by his marriage to the heiress, and had subsequently had a family by a second wife. He lived in the Castle of Corstorphine, the ancient seat of the family. It appears that he sided with the Presbyterians, and was zealous enough in their cause to build a meeting-house for their worship. He had nevertheless formed an improper connection with the wife of one Nimmo, a merchant in Edinburgh; and, what made this scandal the greater, the unfortunate woman was niece to his first wife, besides being grand-daughter of a former Lord Forrester. She was a woman of violent character, accustomed, it was alleged, to carry a weapon under her clothes. We are further informed that Mrs Bedford, an adulteress who had murdered her husband a few years back, was her cousin; and that Lady Warriston, who suffered for the same offence in 1600, was of the same family.[267]
It was pretty evident that this was a woman not to be rashly offended. Lord Forrester had nevertheless spoken opprobriously of her in his drink, and the fact came to her knowledge. She proceeded to his house at Corstorphine, and, finding he was at the village tavern, sent for him. The meeting took place in the garden. After a violent altercation, the unhappy woman stabbed her paramour with his own sword. ‘He fell under a tree near the pigeon-house, both of which still remain, and died immediately. The lady took refuge in the garret of the castle, but was discovered by one of her slippers, which fell through a crevice of the floor.’[268] Being seized and brought before the sheriffs of Edinburgh, she made a confession of her crime, though seeking to extenuate it, and, two days after, she was tried, and condemned to die. Taking advantage of a humanity of the law, she contrived by deception to postpone the execution of the sentence for upwards of two months. And in this interval, notwithstanding the great care of her enjoined to John Wan, the keeper of the Tolbooth, she succeeded in making her escape in men’s apparel, but was found next day at Fala Mill, and brought back to prison. On the 12th of November, Mrs Nimmo was beheaded at the Cross of Edinburgh, appearing on the scaffold in mourning, with a large veil, which, before laying down her head, she put aside, baring her shoulders at the same time, ‘with seeming courage enough.’[269]
1679.
Connected with the murder, a circumstance characteristic of the age took place. The deceased nobleman, leaving only heirs of his second marriage, who took the name of Ruthven from their mother, and who were in possession of his house, the family honours and estates, which came by his first wife, by whom he had no surviving progeny, passed, according to a deed of entail, to another branch of the family. In that day, no offence was more common than that of violently seizing and interfering with the legal writings connected with landed properties. Well knowing this, William Baillie of Torwoodhead and his mother dreaded that the young Ruthvens might play foul with the late lord’s charter-chest, and so prejudice their succession. They went with friends to the house, while the murdered nobleman’s body still lay in it, and intruded in a violent manner, by way of taking possession of their inheritance. Their chief aim, as they afterwards alleged, was to see that no documents should be embezzled or made away with. On a complaint from the Ruthvens, the Lords adjudged Baillie and his mother to lie in prison during their pleasure, and fined their assistant, a Mr Gourlay, in a hundred pounds Scots. The court at the same time took measures to secure the charter-chest.
Oct. 26.
1679.
The Duke of York arrived in Scotland, designing to reside in the country till the storm of the Exclusion Bill should blow over. He and his family experienced a favourable reception in Edinburgh. In July 1681, he was joined by his daughter, styled the Lady Anne (subsequently Queen Anne). The royal party occupied the palace of Holyroodhouse, which had recently received such large additions as to give them handsome accommodation. According to the report of Mr William Tytler,[270] who had conversed with many who remembered the duke’s visit, the gaiety and brilliancy of the court of Holyroodhouse on this occasion was a subject of general satisfaction. ‘The princesses were easy and affable, and the duke studied to make himself popular among all ranks of men.’ It was indeed an unpropitious time for the duke to be in his father’s native kingdom—when a large portion of the people were at issue with the government about matters of faith, and men were daily suffering extreme severities on account of their religious practice. Nevertheless, he was far from being unpopular. It is clearly intimated by Fountainhall that his birthday came to be observed with more cordial demonstrations than the king’s.[271] Though the contrary has been insinuated, there are many instances, credibly reported, of his shewing humanity towards the unfortunate ‘phanatiques,’ as they were called, who came under the notice of the local authorities during the period of his visit.[272]
Mr Tytler reports that the duke and the princesses gave balls, plays, and masquerades, much to the enjoyment of the nobility and gentry who attended them, though to the disgust and horror of the more rigid Presbyterians. It will be found that Nat Lee’s play of Mithridates, King of Pontus, was acted privately at the palace (November 15, 1681), with Lady Anne and the maids of honour as the only performers. It was probably afterwards that a portion of the duke’s company of players came down to Edinburgh to give regular performances. Mr Tytler had a dim recollection of seeing one of their playbills, advertising in capital letters The Indian Emperor, as to be played by them at the Queen’s Chocolate House, which, he thought, would be near the palace, though we must regard the High Street as a much more likely situation. This was Dryden’s play on the sad story of Montezuma. The great English poet comes into connection in another way with this histrionic expedition to the north, for, when the remainder of the company appeared at Oxford, he had to write a prologue apologising for the weakness of the corps, and did it ludicrously at the expense of Scotland.
1679.
‘Our brethren are from Thames to Tweed departed,
And of our sisters all the kinder-hearted,
To Edinborough gone, or coached or carted.
With bonny Blue-cap there they act all night,
For Scotch half-crown, in English threepence hight.
One nympth to whom fat Sir John Falstaff’s lean,
There with her single person fills the scene.
Another, with long use and wont decayed,
Dived here old woman, and there rose a maid.
Our trusty doorkeepers of former time,
There strut and swagger in heroic rhyme.
Tack but a copper lace to drugget suit,
And there a hero’s made without dispute,
And that which was a capon’s tail before,
Becomes a plume for Indian emperor.
But all his subjects, to express the care
Of imitation, go like Indian bare:
Laced linen there would be a dangerous thing,
It might perhaps a new rebellion bring—
The Scot who wore it would be chosen king.’
Mr Tytler also states that ‘tea, for the first time heard of in Scotland, was given as a treat by the princesses to the Scottish ladies who visited at the abbey.’ He adds: ‘The duke was frequently seen in a party at golf on the Links of Leith, with some of the nobility and gentry. I remember in my youth to have often conversed with an old man, named Andrew Dickson, a golf-club maker, who said that, when a boy, he used to carry the duke’s golf-clubs, and to run before him and announce where the balls fell.’
In July 1681, hearing that the Duke and Duchess of York were now residing in Scotland, an Irish theatrical company thought it might be a good speculation to visit Edinburgh, ‘to set up a playhouse for the diversion and entertainment of such as shall desire the same.’ They, to the number of thirty persons, landed at Irvine in Ayrshire, bringing with them ‘clothes necessar for their employment, mounted with gold and silver lace,’ when a difficulty was encountered, arising from the late act of parliament regarding laced clothes. The company was obliged to send a petition to the Privy Council in Edinburgh, shewing that ‘trumpeters and stage-players’ were exempted from the said act, and supplicating a pass to be exhibited to the tax-collector at Irvine. His Royal Highness and the Council at once acceded to the prayer of this petition.—P. C. R.
The Duke of York left Edinburgh by sea, on the 6th of March 1682, ‘being desired to see his majesty at Newmarket. There was great solemnity and attendance at his parture.’[273] He returned to Scotland, on the 7th of May, also by sea, on which occasion occurred the disastrous shipwreck of the Gloucester frigate in which he sailed. His purpose at this time was to bring back his family from Scotland, and, accordingly, he and the princesses finally departed on the 15th of the month.
Dec. 19.
1679.
A commission composed of country gentlemen and advocates sat in the Tolbooth of Borrowstounness to try a number of poor people for the crime of witchcraft. There was Annaple Thomson, who had had a meeting with the devil in the time of her widowhood, before she was married to her last husband, on her coming betwixt Linlithgow and Borrowstounness, when he, ‘in the likeness of ane black man, told you, that you was ane poor puddled body, and had an evil life, and difficulty to win through the world, and promised if you would follow him, and go alongst with him, you should never want, but have ane better life; and about five weeks thereafter the devil appeared to ye when you was going to the coal-hill about seven o’clock in the morning. Having renewed his former tentation, you did condescend thereto, and declared yourself content to follow him and become his servant.’ There were also women called Margaret Pringle, Margaret Hamilton (two of the name), and Bessie Vicker, besides a man called William Craw. ‘Ye and each person of you was at several meetings with the devil in the links of Borrowstounness, and in the house of you Bessie Vicker, and ye did eat and drink with the devil, and with one another, and with witches in her house in the night-time; and the devil and the said William Craw brought the ale which ye drank, extending to about seven gallons, from the house of Elizabeth Hamilton, and you, the said Annaple, had ane other meeting about five weeks ago, when you was going to the coal-hill of Grange, and he invited you to go along with him and drink with him in the Grange-pans.’ Two of the other accused women were said to have in like manner sworn themselves into the devil’s service and become his paramours, one eight years, the other thirty years ago. It was charged against Margaret Pringle, that ‘the devil took you by the right hand, whereby it was for eight years grievously pained, but [he] having touched it of new again, it immediately became haill;’ against Margaret Hamilton—‘the devil gave you ane five-merk piece of gold, whilk a little after becam ane sklaitt stane.’ And finally, ‘you and ilk ane of you was at ane meeting with the devil and other witches at the cross of Muirstane, above Kinneil, upon the thretteen of October last, where you all danced, and the devil acted the piper.’[274]
These poor people were solemnly tried by the commissioners before an assize of fifty persons, and, notwithstanding that the indictment charges scarcely any hurtful attempts against individuals, the whole were adjudged to be taken four days after to the west end of the town, and there worried at a stake and burnt.
1679.
Thomas Kirke, a Yorkshire squire, this year published a Modern Account of Scotland, containing an extraordinary effusion of bile against the country, but also preserving a few traits probably not far from the truth. He describes the gentlemen’s houses as generally of a fortified character, ‘with strong iron grates before the windows—the lower part whereof is only a wooden shutter, and the upper part glass—so that they look more like prisons than houses of reception. Some few houses there are of late erection, that are built in a better form, with good walks and gardens about them; but their fruit rarely comes to any perfection. The houses of the commonality are very mean, mud-wall and thatch the best. But the poorer sort live in such miserable huts as never eye beheld; men, women, and children pig together in a poor mouse-hole of mud, heath, and such-like matter.... The Lowland gentry go well enough habited, but the poorer sort almost naked, only an old cloak or part of their bed-clothes thrown over them. The Highlanders wear slashed doublets, commonly without breeches, only a plaid tied about their waists and thrown over one shoulder, with short stockings to the gartering-place, their knees and part of their thighs being naked. Others have breeches and stockings all of a piece of plaid ware, close to their thighs [trews]. In one side of their girdle sticks a durk or skene [knife], about a foot or half a yard long ... on the other side a brace at least of brass pistols: nor is this honour sufficient; if they can purchase more, they must have a long swinging sword.
‘The highways in Scotland are tolerably good, which is the greatest comfort a traveller meets with amongst them. They have not inns, but change-houses [taverns], poor small cottages where you must be content to take what you find.... The Scotch gentry generally travel from one friend’s house to another; so seldom require a change-house. Their way is to hire a horse and a man for twopence a mile;[275] they ride on the horse thirty or forty miles a day, and the man who is his guide foots it beside him and carries his luggage to boot.’
1680. Feb. 26.
1680.
In 1647, while the thoughts of men were engrossed by frightful civil broils, one quiet country gentleman, Sir Robert Bruce of Clackmannan, occupied himself in some measure with things of a practically useful nature. It was a most uncommon way of bestowing spare mental energy in those days, and perhaps was owing in a great degree to Sir Robert’s situation in the midst of the fine coal-field still worked so industriously under the skirts of the Ochils. He was then found beseeching the attention of the Committee of Estates—amidst military arrangements, payments of public creditors, punishments of malignants, sharpening of the weapons of persecution against dissidents of all kinds—to a mechanical invention of his own—‘ane water-work, never invented, heard, nor seen heretofore, for drying of all water-heuchs [coal-mines] within the kingdom, how deep soever the sumptis and growth of the water-springs be within the samen, by the supplie of two men allenarly, going by pace,[276] peise, or swey.’[277] The laird, as usual, sought for his reward in an exclusive right to the use of this engine for nineteen years, which was granted.
What, if anything, came of this contrivance we do not learn. Most likely, it was never effectually tried, but fell asleep amongst the troubles of the time. Yet it would appear that the idea was somehow kept alive, for at the date noted in the margin, Peter Bruce[278] made application to the Privy Council for their favour towards an engine for drawing water out of coal-pits and quarries, which promised to do more work with a couple of men than six horses could effect by any other machine now in use; also towards a cutting-mill ‘for ane easy way of cutting all sorts of great goads and bars of iron in small lengths, stanchells, or strings, whereby smiths and other artificers in iron will be able to make nails and other iron works at least £2 Scots cheaper of every hundredweight of iron.’ He had spent much on these projects, and more was yet required, wherefore he thought himself entitled to some public encouragement. The Privy Council granted him an exclusive privilege of making the proposed machines for thirteen years.—P. C. R.
1680.
A curious trait of the simplicity of Scotland in regard to some of the mechanical arts occurs in Fountainhall’s Decisions under 1679, where he tells of plumbers that ‘they cannot subsist in Scotland as a distinct trade, there being so little to do; only our curiosity is daily increasing.’
June 15.
Great efforts were made during this reign for the building of bridges and repairing of roads, but generally with little good effect. As an example of the actual condition of a road near the capital of the country at this time, we find the first four miles of that from Edinburgh to London—namely, from the Clockmill Bridge to Magdalen Bridge—are described as being in so ruinous a state, that passengers were in danger of their lives, ‘either by their coaches overturning, their horse falling, their carts breaking, their loads casting, and horse stumbling, the poor people with the burdens on their backs sorely grieved and discouraged:’ moreover, ‘strangers do often exclaim thereat.’ A toll of a halfpenny for a laden cart, and a sixth of a penny for a laden horse, was authorised in order to get this piece of road kept in repair.—P. C. R.
Oct.
In one week died Lady Kilbirnie and her husband of a pestilential fever. ‘The death of thir spouses was much lamented by all sorts of people.... In the day of the sickening of the laird and lady, his dogs went into the close, and an unco dog coming amongst them, they all set up a barking, with their faces up to heaven, howling, yelling, and youphing; and when the laird called to them, they would not come to him as in former times.’—Law.
The same author relates that, before the death of Colquhoun of Luss, ‘the dogs went up to a chamber in the night-time, and made a hideous lamentable-like noise, and tore down the curtains of the bed, there being none in it.’ At the sickening of Lord Ross, who died in May 1682, ‘his dogs came up the stair towards his chamber, howling lamentably; he caused shoot them all one after another.’
[Nov. ?]
The Duke of York paying a visit to the Castle of Edinburgh, the huge cannon called Mons Meg was fired in his honour. The charge, which was done by an English cannoneer, had probably been too large, for it caused the piece to burst. This ‘some foolishly called a bad omen. The Scots resented it extremely, thinking the Englishman might of malice have done it purposely, they having no cannon in all England so big as she.’—Foun.
1680.
Mons Meg, with a breach in her side, still adorns the ancient battlements of Edinburgh Castle, ‘to the great admiration of people,’ being upwards of thirteen feet long, and of twenty inches bore; formed of longitudinal bars of iron, hooped with rings fused into one mass. It is an example of a colossal kind of artillery which the sovereigns of Europe had a craze for making in the middle and latter half of the fifteenth century—this specimen being probably prepared at the command of James II. of Scotland.
Nov.
An elephant which had been bought for £2000 sterling, and brought to England for exhibition, was shewn in Scotland, being the first of the species ever seen in the country. It was a male, eleven years old, ‘a great beast, with a great body and a great head, small eyes and dull, lugs like two skats (?) lying close to its head; having a large trunk coming down from the nether end of the forehead, of length a yard and a half, in the undermost part small, with a nostril; by which trunk it breathed and drank, casting up its meat and drink in its mouth below it; having two large and long bones or teeth, of a yard length, coming from the upper jaw of it, and at the far end of it inclining one to another, by which it digs the earth for roots ... it was backed like a sow, the tail of it like a cow’s: the legs were big, like pillars or great posts, and broad feet with toes like round lumps of flesh. When it drinks it sucks up the water with its trunk, which holds a great deal of water, and then putting the low end in its mouth, by winding it in, it jaws in the water in its mouth, as from a great spout. It was taught to flourish the colours with the trunk of it, and to shoot a gun, and to bow the knees of it, and to make reverence with its big head. They also rode upon it.... Let this great creature on earth and the whale at sea be compared with a midge or minnow, and behold what great wisdom and power is with the great God, the creator and preserver of both!‘—Law.
It appears that Alexander Deas and others farmed this elephant from its owners for several months at £400, in order to shew it through the country. They refused to pay in full, on the ground of several failures as to the terms of the contract, alleging, for instance, that the owners had not shewn all it might do—namely, its drinking, &c. It was replied, ‘it could not drink every time it was shewn.’ How the litigation ended does not appear.—Foun.
Dec. 10.
1680.
A great comet, which had been observed in Germany a month earlier, was first seen in Scotland this evening, ‘the night being clear and frosty; between five and seven at night, it set in the west, and was seen in the south-east in the morning of the following days.[279] [It] had a great [tail] blazing frae the root of it, was pointed as it came from the star, and then spread itself; was of a broad and large ascent up to the heavens ... the stream of it all the night over is seen.... [It] had its recess from the west every night by degrees, as the moon has from the sun after her change, and being every night more elevate by degrees in its first after daylight was gone, then the stream of it mounted to our zenith, and beyond it, very wonderfully. No history ever made mention of the like comet ... and [it] is certainly prodigious of great alterations and of great judgments on these lands and nations for our sins; for never was the Lord more provoked by a people.... [It] continued till the 16th or 17th day of January, growing smaller and smaller to its end.’—Law.
‘When Mr M‘Ward, who was then a-dying, heard of it, he desired Mr Shields and other friends to carry him out, that he might see it. When he saw it, he blest the Lord that was now about to close his eyes, and was not to see the woful days that were coming upon Britain and Ireland, especially upon sinful Scotland.’—P. Walker.
1680.
Lord Fountainhall, in noting the appearance of a smaller comet for two weeks in August 1682, being the time when ‘semblances of joy’ were presented in Edinburgh for the accouchement of the Duchess of York of a daughter, adds: ‘I have seen a late French book, proving that comets prognosticate nothing that’s fatal or dangerous, but rather prosperous things; yet, at the time it shone, the Duke of Lauderdale, that great minister of state, died.’—Hist. Ob. This ‘yet’ is exceedingly amusing. He elsewhere states the opinions of those who believe in the ominousness of comets. According to them, ‘the effects’ do not always follow immediately: some indeed think a comet ‘takes as many years to operate, as it appears nights.’ He estimates the tail of the comet of 1680 at near [upwards of] 3000 miles in length, because it extends over 60 degrees, ‘and each degree is 60 miles!’ This learned judge, however, was himself of opinion that comets do not hold forth any prognostics of blood and desolation, further than by their natural effects in infecting the air, so as to occasion sterility, pestilential diseases, and famine.
Lord Fountainhall probably deemed 3000 miles a considerable length for a comet’s tail. How must he have been surprised to learn that it was in reality nearly as long as the distance of the earth from the sun, or not much short of a hundred millions of miles. Equally great must have been his wonder to learn (as appears from Enke’s recent calculations) that this illustrious stranger only comes to our part of space once in 8814 years!
Dec.
During this month, the public mind was in a highly excited state, owing to the terrific appearance of the comet overhead, in connection with the presence of the Duke of York in Edinburgh, and the news of the struggles in parliament for his exclusion from the throne. One Gray, a merchant in Edinburgh, gave out that, as he and a country friend called Yule were looking at the comet, ‘he saw a fire descend from the Castle down the city of Edinburgh to the Abbey’ [the duke’s residence], while Yule heard a voice saying: ‘This is the sword of the Lord!’ A man in a soldier’s apparel came up to Sir George Monro at mid-day in the street, and bade him go down and tell the Duke of York, if he did not counsel his brother the king to extirpate the Papists, both he and the king were dead men. Sir George turned about to call witnesses to what the man had said, and when he looked again, the man had mysteriously vanished. To crown all, ‘a hypochondriac fellow’ came out to the street, and proclaimed openly that the Day of Judgment would take place next day, offering himself to be hanged if it should prove otherwise. He was clapped up in the Canongate Tolbooth; rather a prosaic fate for a prophet. The two first circumstances are clearly to be referred to the hallucination which is apt to be engendered on occasions of great public excitement.
Dec. 25.
1680.
The boys at the college in Edinburgh resolved to follow the example of the London apprentices in getting up a demonstration against the pope. What gave piquancy to the design was, that the Duke of York was now living in Edinburgh, under exile from London on account of his adherence to the Romish faith. They were very cunning and dexterous in making their arrangements, having first prepared their effigy of the pope, and then sent a small party with a portrait to the Castle Hill, in order to make the authorities think that they designed to have a procession from that place down the High Street to Holyrood Palace, where the duke lived. While this feint drew off the attention of the military, the youths brought out the true effigy to the High School Yard, and then marched with it up Blackfriars’ Wynd to the High Street. It was a rude statue of timber, with a painted face; on the head, a gray periwig and triple crown; and in the hands a cross, a candle, and a piece of money. The figure was clothed in a calico gown, and sat in a chair. Having set it down on the street, they set fire to it, causing a quantity of powder within the body to explode and burst it all in pieces. Notwithstanding their expedition, they were attacked, while performing the ceremony, by the swords of the Earl of Linlithgow and a few other friends of the Duke of York; but they stood their ground, warning the assailants that they might hurt some they would not like to hurt. When all was over, they dispersed. Many regretted the act, as inhospitable towards the duke, and we may well believe, if General Dalyell had not been led with his troops on a false scent, he would have made the lads repent of their frolic. ‘For a further testimony and bravado, the school-boys, apprentices, and many other people, mounted blue ribbons, inscribed with, “No Pope—no Priest—no Bishop—no Atheist;” which, again, caused the loyal to hoist the rival legend, “I am no fanatic.”’
One George Redpath, tutor to a gentleman’s two sons, was brought before the Privy Council, and examined on the accusation of having drawn up a bond for the execution of this project. But after a few days’ detention, he was set at liberty ‘by the goodness of his royal highness, who was always too compassionate to that generation of vipers,’ says Sir William Paterson.[280] This same Redpath lived to be an active Whig pamphleteer in London after the Revolution, and was the author of the Answer to the Scots Presbyterian Eloquence.
1681. Jan. 11.
1681.
The house of Priestfield, under the south front of Arthur’s Seat, was burnt this evening between seven and eight o’clock. Political circumstances gave importance to what would otherwise have been a trivial occurrence. Sir James Dick, the owner, was provost of Edinburgh, and a friend of the Duke of York. His having adopted energetic measures with some college youths concerned in the Christmas anti-papal demonstration, was supposed to have excited a spirit of retaliation in their companions; and hence a suspicion arose that the fire was designed and executed by them. The Privy Council were so far convinced of this being the case, that they shut up the college, and banished the pupils fifteen miles, unless they could give caution for their good-behaviour. Sir James’s house was rebuilt at the public expense, as it now exists in the possession of his descendant, Sir William Cunningham Keith Dick, Bart.
Jan. 20.
Six women were hanged in Edinburgh. Two of them, Janet Alison from Perth, and Marion Harvey from Borrowstounness, ‘were of Cameron’s faction, bigot and sworn enemies to the king and bishops,’ and, ‘for all the pains taken, would not once acknowledge the king to be their lawful prince, but called him a perjured bloody man.’ ‘Some thought the threatening to drown them privately in the North Loch, without giving them the credit of a public suffering, would have more effectually reclaimed them nor any arguments which were used; and the bringing them to a scaffold but disseminates the infection.’—Foun.
The other four women were hanged for murdering their own children, born out of wedlock. It would be hard to say which of the two cases reflects the most discredit upon the wisdom and humanity of the age.
On the ensuing 13th of April, another woman was hanged in the Grassmarket for murdering her child, declaring that she had committed the deed in order ‘to shun the ignominy of the church pillory.’ The frequency of such cases, and the declaration of this poor woman, attracted the attention of the Duke of York. He was surprised to hear of a custom used in no other Christian country, which ‘rather made scandals than buried them.’ The duke, we are told, ‘was displeased, and thought it would be a more efficacious restraint, if the civil magistrate should punish them, either by a pecuniary mulct, or a corporal punishment.’ Fountainhall, however, thought the practice justifiable, on the text, ‘They who sin openly should be rebuked openly,’ and from the penances imposed in the primitive church.
Feb. 21.
1681.
A company of distracted people was this day brought into Edinburgh, under the guardianship of a troop of dragoons. They were commonly known as the Sweet Singers of Borrowstounness, from their noted habit of frequent chanting of psalms. The religious exasperations of the times, the execution of a Bo’ness man named Stewart, with two others, on the preceding 1st of December, and perhaps in addition to these causes, the terrors diffused by the comet, had now produced in that little town an epidemic mania of a type only too well known. These people felt as if all was wrong in church and state, and professed to deny all kinds of institutions, even the names of the days of the week; nay, the commonest social obligations, as that of working for one’s own bread. They protested against taxes, confessions, and covenants; disowned the king and his government; and called for vengeance on the murderers of the two late martyrs, Stewart and Potter, whose blood they carried on a handkerchief. They ran up and down the town in a furious manner, sometimes uttering prayers which consisted chiefly of curses invoked against individuals, more frequently singing psalms of lamentation (74th, 79th, 80th, 83d, and 137th) for the sins of the land. Such of the females as were married deserted their homes and husbands, and if the husband, in his endeavours to win his wife back to rationality, took hold of any part of her dress, she indignantly washed the place, as to remove an impurity. They followed a gigantic fellow, commonly called Muckle John Gibb, but who passed among them under the name of King Solomon, and at length, ‘leaving their homes and soft warm beds and covered tables,’ six-and-twenty of them went forth from their native town, notwithstanding the entreaties of weeping husbands, fathers, and children, calling on them to stay; ‘some women taking the sucking children in their arms to desert places, to be free of all snares and sins, and communion with all others, and mourn for their own sins, the land’s tyranny and defections, and there to be safe from the land’s utter ruin and desolation by judgments; some of them going to the Pentland Hills, with a resolution to sit there to see the smoke and utter ruin of the sinful, bloody city of Edinburgh.... Immediately after they came to these desert places, they kept a day of fasting and confessing of their sins one to another; yea, some of them confessed sins which the world had not heard of, and so not called to confess them to men.’—Pat. Walker.
1681.
Even the Whig clergymen who had gone to the wilderness rather than own an uncovenanted king, were surprised at the more extreme feelings of the Sweet Singers. Walker tells how he was with the Rev. Mr Cargill at Darmead Muirs, when the Gibbites were ‘lying in the Deer Slunk, in the midst of a great flow-moss betwixt Clydesdale and Lothian about a mile distant.’ Gibb and another man came armed, and held a conference with Mr Cargill in a barn, but it led to no good. After resting a while, the chief of the Sweet Singers rose in haste and went to the muir all night. ‘I well remember,’ says Walker, ‘it was a cold easterly wet fog.’ Cargill was shocked by the state of mind he had found them in. They were afterwards all taken by a troop of dragoons at the Woolhill Craigs, betwixt Lothian and Tweeddale, a very desert place, and carried to Edinburgh, where the men were put into the Canongate Tolbooth, and the women into the Correction-house, where they were soundly scourged. After a little time, these poor people cooled down somewhat, and were one by one set at liberty. Walker says the most of them ultimately returned to their right mind, and he had had some edifying conversations with them since.
Mar. 1.
1681.
Articles used in clothing in Scotland had hitherto been almost wholly of home manufacture. As in Sweden to this day, the great bulk of the people spun their own wool and flax, each family for itself, and had the yarn woven into cloth by the village webster. There were as yet but the merest attempts at a manufacture of cloths or hosen for general sale and use. We have seen a modest attempt made by certain foreigners in Edinburgh so early as 1609.[281] It is stated that in the reign of Charles I., there were cloth-works on a small scale at Newmills in Haddingtonshire, at Bonnington near Edinburgh, and at Ayr. That at Newmills was in a thriving condition till Dundee was stormed and sacked by Monk in 1651, when a store of its cloth was taken, and the troubles soon after closed the work.[282] Latterly, it could scarcely be said there was any general manufacture of articles of attire except at Aberdeen. There one George Pyper had a number of country-people engaged in working stockings with the needles, paying them at the rate of five groats (equal to 1-2/3d. sterling) a pair for the making; and he raised the working to such a fineness in some instances, ‘that he hath given twenty shillings sterling and upward for the pair.’[283] In this province there was also a manufacture of plaiden stuffs and fingrams, which was the more meritorious as the wool was mostly brought by sea-carriage from the southern parts of the kingdom. It is related that a Mr Barnes, ‘a substantious merchant in Edinburgh,’ thought he might make a saving by getting the same stuffs made in his own neighbourhood, and have an advantage over the Aberdeen merchants in sending out his cloth to the Dutch market. But, on trying an experiment with ‘ten sea-packs of plaiden, which might be worth £20,000,’ he found that he had scarcely produced his cloth at as low a rate as that at which the Aberdeen merchants sold theirs. The explanation, which he obtained from Mr Alexander Farquhar, a merchant in Aberdeen, might be worthy of Mr Babbage’s attention for a new edition of his Economy of Manufactures. It was, that the people who worked these cloths in the north ‘had not by far such entertainment as his [Mr Barnes’s] servants had—they oftener drank clear spring-water than ale.’ When Mr Barnes heard this, he gave up his manufacture. Of late years, even this frugally conducted manufacture, which had in some years brought a hundred thousand rix-dollars into the country, and greatly facilitated the payment of rents, was much decayed—the goods reduced to half their wonted prices, and yet not the half exported that was—and all from a cause also of much significance in the philosophy of business—namely, ‘deceitful mismanagement,’ leading of course to loss of confidence, and a consequent checking of orders.
The faculties for business which the Duke of York possessed in so respectable a degree, seem to have now begun to tell upon the country in which he found a refuge. While joining in the unhappy severities dictated by the Privy Council against the poor Whigs, he gave attention to the solid interests of the nation at large, and had consultations with such men of mercantile spirit as the country then possessed, with a view to the planting of cloth-factories similar to those which had long been realising good results in England. It was pointed out that the making of the better kinds of cloth within the country was becoming a matter of most serious concernment, because, owing to the great drain of money which was occasioned by the importation of such cloths from the south, ‘English money was not to be had under 6 or 7 per cent., scarce at any rate,’ and exchange between Edinburgh and London had risen against the former place as high as 12 or 15 per cent. ‘Our four-merk pieces,’ it was added, ‘the best coin of our kingdom, were almost wholly exported, and above £20,000 sterling in dollars left the country in the year 1680.’
1681.
The result of the duke’s patriotic deliberations was the passing of acts of Council in March and April, and the passing of an act of parliament in September 1681, for the encouragement of trade and manufactories. Through his personal exertions, a body of men, including Mr Robert Blackwood and several other merchants in Edinburgh, was induced to associate for the setting up of a new work at Newmills, the produce of which was to be disposed of by them under peculiar regulations. It was to be under the care of an enterprising Englishman named Sir James Stanfield, who for some time had been settled there. In August, six sheermen and a foreman having been brought down from England, this work commenced with two looms—soon increased to eight—soon after to twenty-five; and in 1683 it was still extending. ‘We began,’ says the pamphleteer formerly quoted, ‘to make the coarsest of white cloths first, wherein we continued till October 1682; then we turned part of our people to coarse mixed cloth, and so on gradually to finer, and now we are upon superfine cloths, and have brought the spinners and rest of the work-people that length, that we hope against May next to have superfine cloths as good as generally are made in England.’ There was also a manufacture of silk-stockings going on at Newmills. The whole work seems to have then been in a hopeful condition, albeit on the unsound footing of a monopoly, all English goods of the same kinds being prohibited under severe penalties.
The act was, indeed, too sweeping in its tendency, for it forbade the importing of a great number of stuffs—as silks, embroideries, gold lace, ribbons, silk fringes, cambrics, and damasks, which it was not in the power of any native manufacturer to supply, and which certain classes of the people were little inclined to dispense with. It was thought necessary by these means to save the money of the country. It led to a strange scene one day on the High Street of Edinburgh. George Fullerton, a merchant of that city, had committed a gross violation of the law, first in smuggling in some packs of English cloth, and afterwards, when they were seized by the authorities, repossessing himself of them by violence. The Privy Council ordered him to be declared fugitive, had the two ‘waiters’ of the West Port scourged for allowing the goods to be introduced, and ordained the cloth itself to be burnt at the Cross by the hand of the hangman. The common people beheld this last spectacle with feelings of their own, for they thought it might have been better to distribute the cloth among the poor: however, says Fountainhall in a whisper, it was only the worst bales that were burned: the best were ‘privily preserved.’
1681.
Absurd as all this procedure may appear, it precisely represents the existing policy of Sweden and some other continental countries in respect of British manufactures.
One natural result of the act very soon appears, in the magistrates of Edinburgh being called before the Privy Council at the suggestion of the Duke of York, and recommended to call up the merchants, in order to discharge them from ‘extortioning the lieges, by taking exorbitant prices for the merchandises now prohibited ... on the pretence that there no more of that kind to be imported within the kingdom.’
In February 1683, General Dalyell, finding ‘that he cannot be provided in this kingdom with as much cloth of one colour as will be clothes to the regiment of dragoons,’ obtained a licence from the Privy Council permitting the cloth-manufacturing company at Newmills ‘to import 2536 ells of stone-gray cloth from England, for clothing the said regiment of dragoons,’ they finding caution under £500 sterling to limit the importation strictly to that quantity. About a month later, the Council made a change in this order, to the effect that the general might appoint a person to import the cloth—not exceeding five shillings sterling the ell—instead of the Newmills company.
In May 1683, Captain John Graham of Claverhouse was permitted by the Privy Council, on petition, to import from England, for the use of his troops, 150 ells of red cloth, 40 ells of white cloth, and 550 dozen of buttons; giving security that no advantage should be taken of this licence to bring in any other cloth.
Of a small cloth-work in Leith it was declared (December 1683) that the partners engaged ‘are excellently skilled in their trade, and can dye and mix wool and cloth, and takes in wool from the merchant or other person, and does dye and mix it; and when they get in yarn, does weave and dress it, and deliver it in broadcloth; and has already made good broadcloth to many of the merchants of Edinburgh.’ ‘Seeing that this is so good a work,’ the Privy Council, on petition, extended to it the privileges proposed in the act for encouraging manufactures.—P. C. R.
1681.
Still the Council itself does not seem to have been a consistent patron of such native works. The dress of the infantry of the royal army having hitherto been of a plain kind, it was reported as necessary to have coats for them ‘of such a dye as shall be thought fit to distinguish sojors from other skulking and vagrant persons, who have hitherto imitated the livery of the king’s sojors.’ The Newmills Cloth Manufacturing Company offered (August 28, 1684) from their own work, to furnish a suitable cloth ‘of what dye should be desired,’ and as cheaply and expeditiously as it could be had from England. They would shew ‘swatches’ [samples] within a fortnight, and give security for the fulfilment of their undertaking. But the lords decided to use English cloth.
Patrick Graham, ‘captain of his majesty’s company of foot within the town of Edinburgh’ (the Town Guard), was empowered (January 8, 1685) to import ‘three hundred ells of English cloth of a scarlet colour, with wrappings and other necessars’ for the clothing of his corps, this being ‘in regard the manufactories are not able to furnish his majesty’s forces with cloth and other necessars.’ Several other commanders of troops got similar licences. The Newmills Company looked on with outraged feelings, and presented a petition desiring that a stop might be put to the importation of English cloth for the soldiery, as the needful article could be furnished as cheaply and of as good quality from the native factory. In order that they might not be ‘utterly ruined and broke,’ they begged that a committee might be appointed to ascertain that such was the case; and a committee was accordingly appointed, but with no result that appears. Meanwhile, we find the Newmills copartnery trying to protect their monopoly against infractions by private parties.
1681.
It made an attack in April 1684 upon five merchants of Edinburgh who continued, in defiance of the law, to deal in English cloth. It was complained of against Robert Cunningham that ‘he sold a suit of clothes of English cloth to Daniel Lockhart; item, a suit to Boghall; item, a suit to Lord Forfar; item, a suit to William Lockhart; which clothes was made by William Cowan, tailor.’ He had likewise ‘sold ane coat of ... ells to the Laird of Blackadder, made by Hugh Galloway, tailor; to the Marquis of Athole, a suit, made by Lachlan M‘Pherson, tailor; item to Mr Thomas Chalmers, two ells and a half English cloth; item to the Bishop of the Isles, two ells and a half English cloth ... item, a suit to the Marquis of Montrose.’ It was alleged that he had imported and sold in all ‘five hundred ells of prohibite cloth, ane thousand ells of prohibite stuffs and serges, and two hundred pair of English worsted and silk stockings less or more.’ James Weir, Andrew Irving, William Fullerton, and Thomas Smith had all committed delinquencies of the same kind, the enumeration of which would only tire the reader; and all this notwithstanding they had been kindly invited by the Newmills Company to join their concern. What made the matter the more insufferable, a complaint made against them in August last had been graciously superseded in their behalf by royal proclamation; and they, as if to shew ‘their incorrigibleness and obstinacy,’ ‘slighting that so great mark of clemency,’ imported more during the few months since elapsed than they did for two whole years before, ‘in open contempt of his majesty’s laws, to the destruction of trade and commerce within the kingdom, to the cheating, abusing, and oppressing of his majesty’s lieges, and manifest endangering of the said manufactory and ruining of the persons therein concerned.’
The offenders, having been oft called before the Privy Council, and having failed to appear, were held as confessing their guilt, and accordingly decerned to deliver up the prohibited cloths and stockings to be burned, and at the same time to recompense his majesty’s cashkeeper for them ‘at twelve shillings sterling for the ell of cloth, two shillings sterling for the ell of stuff, and five pound sterling for ilk dozen of prohibite stockings.’—P. C. R.
While these strenuous measures were taken for preventing the free importation of English woollen cloth into Scotland, a petition came (December 2, 1684) from persons interested in the linen manufacture of Scotland, complaining of the usage which had lately been experienced by Scotsmen selling their linens in England. Hitherto there had been a free trade for Scotch linen-weavers in the south; and, as ten or twelve thousand persons were employed in such weaving, the results were important not merely to the workers, but to landlords, for the payment of their rents, and to the government, as each of a thousand or twelve hundred packs exported to England paid a custom of three pounds sterling. Latterly, however, the men selling Scotch linen in England had been taken up and whipped as malefactors, and many obliged to give bonds that they would discontinue their traffic.
The Council recommended the secretary of state to interpose with his majesty, that merchants and others might have liberty to sell linen in England as formerly; never once adverting to the fact that they had an act of parliament conceived in the same illiberal spirit towards English woollen manufactures.
1681.
Such were the early struggles of an important branch of industry in Scotland. It was not, after all, to be in this age that good woollen cloth was to be produced in our northern clime. A writer in 1697 says: ‘We have tried to make several things, and particularly hats and broadcloth, and yet we cannot make our ware so good as what we can have from abroad.’ He adds, however, as a ground of hope: ‘Those who would propagate any new manufacture must lay their account to labour under several disadvantages at first. When soap-manufactures were first set up in this kingdom, the soap was not so good as what we had from abroad by far. These at Glasgow gave it over, as a thing they could not accomplish; these at Leith continued to work, and now they have acquired so much knowledge in that art, that their soap is better than that we have brought from abroad.’[284]
Mar. 2.
Three men, named Gogar, Miller, and Sangster, were hanged in the Grassmarket ‘for disowning the king’s authority, and adhering to Cargill’s covenant, declaration, and excommunication, and thinking it lawful to kill the king and his judges.’—Foun. It is to make the rulers of that day somewhat worse than they were, to suppose that they ordered these horrible executions in a purely unfeeling manner, and without any hesitation. It is stated by Fountainhall, a Whig, that the Duke of York sent the Earl of Roscommon to see these men on the scaffold, and try to bring them to such a point as would have allowed of their lives being spared. Had they but pronounced the words, ‘God save the king,’ they would not have been executed. But they refused life on such terms—the more surprising, as there was no want of Scripture texts to warrant them in praying for the reigning sovereign, even supposing him a monster of wickedness. ‘Daniel,’ remarks Fountainhall, ‘wishes Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, heathen kings, to live for ever.’ It would be curious to know what the accomplished Roscommon felt regarding these singular examples of Scottish religious pertinacity.
1681.
On the other hand, it is surprising that when the Duke of York went so far as to offer the poor men their lives on what appear such easy terms, he did not go a little further and see the absurdity of treating such tempers as treasonable. ‘It would have been better,’ says Fountainhall, ‘to have kept them in bonds as madmen, or to have employed physicians to use their skill upon them as on hypochondriac persons.’ One would have thought that the manifest and acknowledged maniacal condition of the Borrowstounness saints might have suggested the true theory as to the obduracy of such men as Gogar, Miller, and Sangster.
Mar. 11.
A process stood at law between Alexander Robertson, laird of Struan, and the Marquis of Athole, arising from a service of Struan as heir to an ancestor who lived two hundred and fifty years before; and amongst the points debated was an alleged superiority of the marquis over some lands held by Struan. These were both Highland chiefs of some importance, but, dwelling near the Lowland Border, might be considered as of those who were most likely to exhibit a tinge of Lowland habits. The marquis was indeed a political character of some figure, holding the office of Lord Privy Seal and a place in the Council.
The Highland laird of those days was acquainted with law, and had often enough occasion to resort to it; but there was an element in his nature which placed him more or less above law. Law-giver and law-executor in his own territory and over his own people, almost without control, it was difficult for him to accommodate himself to the idea of submitting to the formal, pedantic rules and awards of the Session or the Council. So much being premised, we must figure to ourselves the doughty Struan walking about in the Council-chamber on the day noted in the margin, not bearing his ordinary arms, pistol and durk, externally—for that was forbidden—but carrying them in his bosom under his clothes, and no doubt very wrathful at the arrogance of his proud neighbour, the marquis, in claiming any superiority over him.
His business being under consideration, he told the clerk that he was no vassal of the Marquis of Athole. One John Fleming, ‘servitor’ to the marquis—a kind of gentleman dependant—quietly contradicted him, saying that not only did his sasine of the lands of Tulloch clearly shew him as a vassal of the marquis, but there was a mutual contract between him and the marquis, obliging him to hold these lands in that manner, and on this a decreet had been obtained from the Court of Session. The blood of the chief of the Clan Donochy could not brook such an opposition. He broke out upon Fleming with passionate violence, calling him rascal, knave, and villain. He would see the Marquis of Athole hanged before he would be his vassal. And as for the Court of Session, he cared not a snuff for its decreet. Then thrusting his hand under the breast of his upper coat, ‘where his durk and pistol are secretly keeped,’ he said he knew not what held his hand from writing his case on Fleming’s skin.
1681.
This conduct was of course sure to turn to the injury of Struan himself. In a very few days, Fleming had him up by petition before the Privy Council, who, finding the charge proved, sentenced Struan to imprisonment during pleasure in the Tolbooth, to crave pardon first of the Council, and then of the Marquis of Athole, ‘on his knees,’ and to give Fleming security for the expenses (limited to £100 Scots) incurred by the action and by the interruption it had given him in his business.—P. C. R.
Apr. 8.
A case before the Privy Council reveals the treatment of the insane in this age. It was a complaint from Mr Alexander Burton against his brother John for putting him into Hopkirk the surgeon’s hands as a madman. It was alleged, on John Burton’s part, that Alexander was really melancholic and furious; so required restraint: also that he was misusing and dilapidating his fortune; hence a bill had been applied for to put his affairs under curators. Alexander answered that ‘he had only craved his annual rents, and to refuse him his own, and treat him as a fool, would raise pepper and passion in any man’s nose, and then they termed the acts fury.’ To settle the matter, the Duke of York, who was present, desired that the alleged fool might be permitted to speak; whereupon he delivered himself so extravagantly, that the Council found it only right that he should be put under restraint, and his affairs placed in charge of his brother. Fountainhall adds: ‘In Scotland, we, having no Bedlam, commit the better sort of mad people to the care and taming of chirurgeons, and the inferior to the scourge [or] the poor.’
May 5.
1681.
M‘Gill of Rankeillour gave in a petition to the Privy Council, craving
permission for his son, Sir James M‘Gill, to come to see him, as he was about to depart from this life. The son had about eight years before been so unfortunate as to kill Sir Robert Balfour of Denmill, and the king had granted him a remission, on the condition that, in order to prevent further bloodshed,
he should never again be seen in Fife
. The father, being eighty years of age, anxious to take farewell of his son, begged the Council to relax this condition for a few days. The Council doubted if they had power to grant the petition; but the Duke of York ‘affirming that he believed the king would not refuse this desire of an old dying gentleman, they granted it in thir terms, that he should go with a guard like a prisoner, and
stay but twenty-four hours, and then depart out of Fife, where the friends of him that was killed live.’—
Foun.
Sir Robert Balfour was the only surviving son and successor of Sir James Balfour of Denmill, the well-known antiquary. He fell in a duel with Sir James M‘Gill, at a spot closely adjacent to the M‘Duff Cross in the parish of Newburgh in Fife. A cairn of stones raised in commemoration of the sad event, and called Sir Robert’s Prap, was in existence a few years ago. This unfortunate gentleman must have fallen in the very morning of life, as he was born in 1652.
Dec. 8.
1681.
Encouraged by the liberality of the Council, Sir James M‘Gill petitioned them anew in December for a removal of all restriction upon his remission, alleging that it was required on account of the decayed and infirm condition of his parents (he being their only son), and the ruin into which his affairs had fallen in consequence of his long exile. Against this petition, however, the friends of Sir Robert Balfour gave in answers, shewing how green such a family wound could then be kept for eight years. They urged that the slaughter of their kinsman, so far from being done as alleged by Sir James in self-defence, was in forethought felony, and it was only owing to an undeserved clemency on his majesty’s part that he had not been brought to condign punishment. The pretexts regarding his parents and estate were frivolous, when the nature of his offence was considered. ‘Though it is insinuate that the said Sir James desires only to live in the parish of Monimail, and not in the parish of Ebdie, where Sir Robert’s nearest relations are, this is a very silly pretence, for this is the very next parish, and Sir Robert’s nearest relations have their interests in this parish itself, and it may be easily considered that, if this be allowed, Sir Robert’s friends will be punished for Sir James’s crime, since they must, to shun his company, neither go to meetings of the shire, baptisms, nor marriages, burials or churches, nay, nor to see their friends nor neighbours, lest they should fall in inconveniences with him, which was the ground upon which the restriction was granted at first.’ To prove how unworthy Sir James was even of the favour extended to him in May last, it was set forth that on that occasion ‘he must ride insolently by the very gate of the gentleman whom he had murdered, with a great train of his friends, and in passing the road they did also very insolently boast and upbraid the poor people with whom they met.’ If this, it was added, ‘was done in the very first time, what may be expected when his confidence is increased by renewed favours, and when Denmill’s friends see that the only satisfaction they got (which was not to see him at all) is taken from them.’
The pleading of Denmill’s friends was too reasonable to be resisted, and M‘Gill’s petition was refused.—P. C. R.
June 2.
On a complaint from the master of the High School of Edinburgh to the Privy Council, two or three private teachers were imprisoned till they should give caution, not to teach Latin without a licence from the bishop, and even then to carry the boys no further than ‘the rudiments and vocables;’ after which it was thought they might be of sufficient strength to go to the High School. What disposed the Council to support the complaint was that there were several private teachers now in Edinburgh, who were ‘outed ministers,’ and accordingly were suspected of poisoning their pupils with disloyal principles.—P. C. R.
June 24.
From March up to this date, there was a cold drought, which at length inspired so much dread of famine and consequent pestilence, that a fast was proclaimed throughout the kingdom ‘for deprecating God’s wrath and obtaining rain.’ The evil was generally regarded as an effect of the great comet of the past winter; ‘and certainly,’ says Fountainhall, ‘it may drain the moisture from the earth, and influence the weather; but there is a higher hand of Providence above all these signs, pointing out to us our luxury, abuse of plenty, and other crying sins.’ He adds: ‘God thought fit to prevent our applications and addresses, and on the 24th of June and following days, sent plentiful showers.’
July 20.
1681.
Died this evening in his lodgings in Holyrood Palace, the Duke of Rothes, Chancellor of the kingdom, an able and magnificent man, who, by his licentious life, was believed to have set a bad example to the Scottish nobility of his day. The cumbrous grandeur of his funeral excited much attention. The body was carried from St Giles’s Church to Holyrood Chapel, amidst a procession of soldiery, state officials, personal retinue, noblemen and gentlemen mourners, and heraldic personages, which fills six quarto pages in Arnot’s History of Edininburgh. It was next day conducted in a hearse to Leith, thence conveyed across the Forth to Burntisland, and ‘the next day after, it was met by the gentlemen of Fife, of which his grace was high-sheriff, and by them accompanied to the family burying-place at Leslie, being laid in the grave with sound of trumpets, and the honours placed above the grave.’
Sep. 1.
Leather stamped and gilded—believed to be originally a Spanish fashion—was a favourite cover for the walls of rooms in the better class of houses in Scotland as well as in England. Some examples of the style still survive, and speak so strongly in its favour, that we might justly wonder at its going out of fashion. Hitherto such ornamental leather was introduced from abroad; but now Alexander Brand, merchant in Edinburgh, by a considerable outlay, had brought workmen and materials into the kingdom, and for the first time was about to set up a work, in which he expected to produce the article ‘at as easy rates as it could be imported.’ On a favourable report from ‘the Committee of Trade,’ the Privy Council gave Brand a privilege of exclusive manufacture for nineteen years.—P. C. R.
Thomas Kennedy and John Trotter, merchants, were at the same time proposing to set up a manufacture of linen and woollen cloth stuffs and stockings in the place called Paul’s Work in Edinburgh, where, so long ago as 1609, there had been an attempt at a woollen work. And as an encouragement, the Council ordained them to have all the privileges offered to manufactories in Scotland by the twelfth act of the present parliament regarding manufactures.
Oct. 1.
The ‘whole settled revenue’ of the king in Scotland was this day leased to Bailie Baird, Charles Murray, and Robert Milne, for seven years, at £90,000 per annum, they advancing £16,000 to pay the army. It appears that the pensions then paid out of the Scottish exchequer amounted to £25,000 a year. It is a curious consideration that at present the Times newspaper pays considerably more revenue than the whole taxation of Scotland in the latter part of the seventeenth century.
Oct. 1.
1681. Oct. 10.
Colonel Gage, commander of a regiment in the service of the King of Spain, proposed to the Duke of York to take a few of the phanatiques now in custody into his regiment, and so relieve the authorities of all further charge of them. The duke caused six, named Forman, Garnock, Lapsley, Stewart, Fairie, and Russell, ‘most of them young fellows,’ to be brought before the Council, with the design of sentencing them to be delivered to Colonel Gage. The men, however, ‘did so misbehave, in declining the king, duke, and Council, and speaking such notorious treason,’ that it was thought necessary to send them instead to the criminal court. There it was only too easy to prove the treasonable nature of their language. Forman had a knife, with a posy, ‘This is to cut the throat of tyrants.’ It appeared that Garnock had at the Council so railed at General Dalyell, calling him ‘a Muscovy beast who used to roast men,’ that the old soldier struck him with the pommel of his sword on the face till the blood sprung. One alone obtained mercy; the other five were doomed to death, Forman having the special sentence to lose his hand before hanging, on account of his knife. These men all died ‘obdurately,’ as their enemies called it, ‘heroically,’ according to their friends, ‘reviling and condemning their judges and all who differed from them,’ says Fountainhall. Patrick Walker adds some curious particulars. ‘The never-to-be forgotten Mr James Renwick told me that he was witness to this public murder at the Gallow-lee, betwixt Leith and Edinburgh, where he saw the hangman hash and hag off their five heads, with Patrick Forman’s right hand. Their bodies were all buried at the gallow’s foot; their heads, with Patrick’s hand, were brought and put on five pikes on the Pleasance Port.... Mr Renwick told me also, that it was the first public action that his hand was at, to convene friends and lift their murdered bodies, and carry them to the West Churchyard, and bury them there. Then they came about the city to the Nether-Bow Port, with a design to retake the heads, hands, and other parts of our martyrs down; but a woman, holding over a candle to let some people see the street, marred them. Then they took down these five heads and that hand, and the day being come, they went quickly up the Pleasance, and when they came to Lauriston yards, upon the south side of the city, they durst not venture, being so light, to go and bury their heads with their bodies, which they designed, it being present death if any of them had been found. Alexander Tweedie, a friend, being with them, who at that time was gardener in these yards, concluded to bury them in his yard, being in a box (wrapped in linen), where they lay forty-five years....’ These relics were exhumed in 1726, with all manifestations of rejoicing.
1681.
The day after the five men had suffered at the Gallow-lee, the duke had other four called before the Council, with a view to their being sent away with Colonel Gage. ‘When they were brought in, they began in the very same strain with their neighbours who were hanged the day before; but the duke caused hastily remove them, that they might not also hang themselves with their own tongue.’—Foun.
Nov. 15.
Amongst the gaieties of this day at Holyroodhouse, in celebration of the queen’s birthday, was ‘the acting a comedy called Mithridates, King of Pontus, wherein Lady Anne, the duke’s daughter, and the ladies of honour, were the only actors.’ Fountainhall, who states this occurrence, only adds the remark: ‘Not only the canonists, both Protestant and Popish, but the very heathen Roman lawyers, declared all scenic and stage players infamous, and will scarce admit them to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.’ On this occasion, there was a prologue by the Earl of Roscommon, addressed specially to the duke, and conceived in a strain of extravagant flattery ludicrously in contrast with the feelings of a large body of the people:
‘When wealthy neighbours strove with us for power,
Let the sea tell how, in their fatal hour,
Swift as an eagle our victorious prince,
Great Britain’s genius, flew to her defence.
His name struck fear, his conduct won the day....
O happy islands, if you knew your bliss!
Strong by the sea’s protection, safe by his!
Express your gratitude the only way,
And humbly own a debt too vast to pay,’ &c.
Nov. 24.
1681.
The test being a puzzle and a bewilderment to some of the sagest statesmen of the day, it is not surprising that it should have somewhat confounded the magistrates of a simple Scotch burgh. At this date, there was a petition to the Privy Council from William Plenderleith, provost; John Hope, bailie; and John Givan, treasurer of Peebles, in name of the council of that burgh, setting forth that, ‘being desired to take the test, they were always willing;’ yet, ‘the town being very inconsiderable, and the petitioners very illiterate and ignorant, and living in a remote place where they could get no person to inform them of the difference betwixt the act of parliament and the act of Council, and not having the act of parliament in all the country, nor yet the confession of faith, to which it related, the petitioners humbly desired a time to advise as concerning the test.’ At their late election, they had contented themselves with taking the Declaration, ‘thinking that the first of January was sufficient to take the test.’ But now, understanding what was required of them, they protested their eager willingness to take the test, ‘having always been very loyal,’ as they had shewn by their conduct on the occasion of the Bothwell Bridge rebellion, for which they had received the thanks of the Council. The Lords seem to have looked leniently on the omission of this innocent little municipality, and now accepted their signatures in good part.
The magistrates of Peebles were, not long after, involved in a trouble of a different complexion, in consequence of an unpopular movement for the letting of a piece of commonty near the walls of the town, which they had found to be ‘a pretext for incomers to the said burgh, and the poor people, to eat up their neighbours’ corns.’ While they were engaged in their Tolbooth or court-house (March 1, 1682) in the administration of justice, a mob of irate burgesses, of whom thirty-seven are named, came to express their disapprobation of a late act of Council on that subject, and, if possible, frighten them from proceeding with it; ‘menacing the provost that if he did so, he should be sticked as Provost Dickison was.’[285] The magistrates put two of their assailants in jail; but these were soon liberated by force. Then the magistrates got the two burgesses and five of their liberators clapped up in prison; but, behold, next day, taking a leaf out of the history of the troubles of 1637, a mob of women assembled—namely, Marion Bennett, Marion Grieve, Margaret Wilson, Isobel Wilson, Isobel Robertson, Janet Ewmond, Isobel Ewmond, and Helen Steel—the names of such heroines are worth preserving—and ‘did in a tumultuous and irregular way take out of prison the persons of William Porteous, Andrew Halden [the original prisoners], Thomas Stoddart, Alexander Jonkieson, John Tweedie, Thomas King, James Waldie, and William Leggat, and went to the Cross of Peebles with them, and there drank their good healths as protectors of the liberties of the poor, and the confusion of the said magistrates and council, and took up with them stones to stone to death such as should oppose them; and thereafter, they being about three hundred persons, divided themselves in several companies, and every company convoyed home a prisoner, and drank their good health, to the great astonishment of all honest and well-meaning people.’
1681.
This affair being brought as a gross riot before the Privy Council, five of the men liberated, including the two who had first been in prison, were deprived of their burgess privileges, and committed to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh during pleasure, while the magistrates were enjoined to ‘convene before them the haill rest of the inhabitants that were accessory to the tumult and riot libelled, and to proceed against them therefor, in fining, imprisonment, or ryving their burgess-tickets, as they shall find cause.’
On the same day in which this case was judged, a petition was presented from the five ex-burgesses, representing themselves as ‘poor and ignorant persons,’ who had not meant any harm—as most of them valetudinary and unable to bear confinement in jail—and, moreover, as required to be now engaged in the labours of the season; wherefore their liberation was craved. This was soon after acceded to, on their giving security to reappear if called upon, and that they would go and confess their fault, and crave pardon of the Peebles magistrates.—P. C. R.
Dec. 22.
As an example of the benevolence of the Privy Council of this time, in cases where the reigning political prepossessions were not offended—we find, on the very same day with some strong proceedings against Presbyterian recusants, a representation from John Riddell, merchant in Edinburgh, setting forth some recent heavy losses of merchandise at sea, and certain obligations he was under in the way of cautionry, whereby he had been reduced for eleven months past to the sad condition of a prisoner in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, with ‘nothing left to maintain himself and three motherless children, unless that that the charitable supply of tender-hearted Christians doth support and help him.’ Though he had no claim on public benevolence beyond some sufferings long ago for the king at and before Worcester, the Council gave warrant to the Archbishop of St Andrews and the Bishop of Edinburgh for a voluntary contribution on Riddell’s behalf throughout these two dioceses, enjoining them to cause the ministers to ‘make due and lawful intimation thereof.’—P. C. R.
Dec.
1681.
Poor as Scotland was universally reputed to be, foreign adventurers in search of fortune would occasionally resort to it. Peter Bruce or de Bruis was one of these—a native of Flanders, and a Catholic. We have already (February 1680) seen him asking public favour for a water-pumping engine and an iron-cutting mill which he had invented. We hear of him in Fountainhall, about that time, as building a harbour at Cockenzie for the Earl of Winton, and having a long litigation about the payment. He seems to have been an active spirit. In December 1681, he succeeded in obtaining from the Privy Council a patent for the exclusive manufacture and sale of playing-cards, under the usual pretence that money would thus be retained within the country. Within a very few months, he had erected a work near Leith for this manufacture, and brought home from Holland and Flanders ‘expert masters’ for making the cards, and ‘carvers for making the patterns,’ all of whom he took bound to instruct native workmen. In a very short time, we find him at war with two merchants who were accustomed to import playing-cards, and not disposed to brook his monopoly. Perhaps Peter was too vehement in his proceedings for the Scotch people among whom he cast his lot; perhaps they were unduly jealous of this keen-witted stranger. How it came we cannot tell; but before the work had been long erected, the tacksman of Canonmills set upon it and did somewhat to demolish it, and, horrid to relate, threw Madame de Bruis into the dam, besides using opprobrious words; for which he was fined in £50, and imprisoned. Not long after, Peter gained a triumph over the two importers of cards, for they were ordered by the Council to compound with him at so much a pack before they could be allowed to sell them.[286]
1682. Feb. 16.
In the ensuing February, Peter was again in trouble. Alexander Daes, owner of the paper-manufactory at Dalry Mills, complained that his privilege of making paper and playing-cards had been infringed by Peter Bruce and James Lithgow, who had clandestinely obtained a licence for a playing-card manufactory. They had likewise enticed away a workman named Nicolas de Champ, whom he had brought from France, and caused the abstraction from his work of some of his haircloths. The Council freed Peter and his associate from everything but the charge of taking away the haircloths, which they left to be dealt with by the ordinary judge.—P. C. R.
1681.
Altogether, Peter seems to have found great difficulty in preventing a sale of foreign cards. It was difficult to detect the importation of such articles. A package containing a quantity of them had lately been brought by the ship of one Adam Watt; and even the custom-house officer winked at its being smuggled ashore. Peter craved the Council (June 7, 1682) for general letters against the contraveners of his privilege; but the Council, apparently warned by the complaints about the Messrs Fountain, would only, on that occasion, agree to give warrant for particular cases. Afterwards (July 5), they gave a more general warrant, but still declaring that Bruce, in the event of making a wrong charge, should be liable to a fine.
Finally, persecuted out of Edinburgh, Peter betook himself to Glasgow, and tried to set up a paper-mill at Woodside, near that city; but here, too, he encountered a variety of troubles and oppressions, designed for the purpose of neutralising his monopoly of the manufacture of playing-cards, his builders failing in their engagements, his men being seduced away from him, his mill-course defrauded of water, and so forth. He complained to the Privy Council (January 6, 1685), and got a decree against his two chief persecutors, John Campbell and James Peddie, for a thousand merks as compensation for the injuries he had suffered. When everything else failed, Peter seems to have turned his religious professions to some account, as he is last seen acting as printer to the Catholic chapel and college at Holyrood—where, doubtless, the Revolution gave him a disagreeable surprise.
Dec. 26.
The college youths renewed the demonstration of last year. ‘Their preparations were so quiet, that none suspected it this year. They brought [the pope] to the Cross, and fixed his chair in that place where the gallows stands. He was tricked up in a red gown and a mitre, with two keys over his arm, a crucifix in one hand, and the oath of the Test in the other. Then they put fire to him, and it burnt lengthy till it came to the powder, at which he blew up in the air.
‘At this time, many things were done in mockery of the Test: one I shall tell. The children of Heriot’s Hospital, finding that the dog which kept the yards of that hospital had a public charge and office, ordained him to take the Test, and offered him a paper. But he, loving a bone better than it, absolutely refused it. They then rubbed it over with butter, which they called an Explication of the Test, in imitation of Argyle, and he licked off the butter, but did spit out the paper; for which they held a jury upon him, and, in derision of the sentence on Argyle, they found the dog guilty of treason, and actually hanged him.’—Foun.
1682. Jan. 16.
1682.
Alexander Cockburn, the hangman of Edinburgh, was tried before the magistrates as sheriffs, for the murder, in his own house, of one Adamson or Mackenzie, a blue-gown beggar. The proof was slender, and chiefly of the nature of presumption—as, that he had denied Adamson’s being in his house on the alleged day, the contrary being proved, groans having been heard, and bloody clothes found in the house; and this evidence, too, was chiefly from women. Yet he was condemned to be hanged within three suns. One Mackenzie, whom Cockburn had caused to lose his place of hangman at Stirling, performed the office.—Foun.
Feb. 11.
Three men were drowned this day, by falling through the ice on the North Loch. ‘We have a proverb that the fox will not set his foot on the ice after Candlemas, especially in the heat of the sun, as this was at two o’clock; and at any time the fox is so sagacious as to lay his ear to the ice, to see if it be frozen to the bottom, or if he hear the murmuring and current of the water.’—Foun.
Feb.
1682.
A strange story was circulated regarding a servant lass in the burgh of Irvine. Her mistress, the wife of the Honourable Major Montgomery, having had some silver articles stolen, blamed the lass, who, taking the accusation much amiss, and protesting her innocence, said she would learn who took those things, though she should raise the devil for it. The master and mistress let this pass as a rash speech; but the girl, being resolute, on a certain day ‘goes down to a laigh cellar, takes a Bible with her, and draws a circle about her, and turns a riddle on end twice from south to north, or from the right hand to the left hand, having in her hand nine feathers, which she pulled out of the tail of a black cock, and having read the 21st [psalm] forward, she reads backward chap. ix., verse 19, of the book of Revelation; he appears in a seaman’s clothing, with a blue cap, and asks what she would. She puts one question to him, and he answers it; and she casts three of the feathers at him, charging him to his place again; then he disappears. He seemed to her to rise out of the earth to the middle of his body. She reads the same verse backward the second time, and he appears the second time, rising out of the ground, with one leg above the ground; she asks him a second question, and she casts other three feathers at him, charging him to his place; he again disappears. She reads again the third time the verse backward, and he appears the third time with his body above ground (the last two times in the shape of a black grim man in black clothing, and the last time with a long tail); she asks a third question at him, and casts the three last feathers at him, charging him to his place; and he disappears. The major-general and his lady, being above stairs, though not knowing what was a-working, were sore afraid, and could give no reason of it; the dogs in the city making a hideous barking round about. This done, the woman, aghast, and pale as death, comes and tells her lady who had stolen the things she missed, and they were in such a chest in her house, belonging to some of the servants; which being searched, was found accordingly. Some of the servants, suspecting her to be about this work, tells the major of it, and tells him they saw her go down to the cellar; he lays her up in prison, and she confesses as is before related, telling them that she learned it in Dr Colvin’s house in Ireland, who used to practise this.’—Law.
Fountainhall relates this story more briefly as ‘a strange accident,’ and remarks that the divination per cribrum (by the sieve) is very ancient, having been practised among the Greeks. He is puzzled about her confession, as it may be from frenzy and hatred of life; but if the fact of the consultation can be proved, he is clear that it infers death.
Divination by a sieve was performed in this manner: ‘The sieve being suspended, after repeating a certain form of words, it is taken between the two fingers only, and the names of the parties suspected, repeated: he at whose name the sieve turns, trembles, or shakes, is reputed guilty of the evil in question.... It was sometimes practised by suspending the sieve by a thread, or fixing it to the points of a pair of scissors, giving it room to turn, and naming as before the parties suspected: in this manner Coscinomancy is still practised in some parts of England.’—Demonologia. By J. S. F. London, 1827; p. 146.
Feb.
‘Strange apparitions were seen in and about Glasgow, and strange voices and wild cries [were heard], particularly one night about the Deanside well, was heard a cry, Help, help!‘—Law. Many such occurrences are noted about this time and for four or five years before. In March 1679, for instance, a voice was heard at Paisley Abbey, crying: ‘Wo, wo, wo—pray, pray, pray!’ Such reports reveal the excited state of the public mind and a general sense of anxiety under the religious variances of the time.
1682. Mar.
Major Learmont, an old soldier of the Covenant, though only a tailor to his trade, was taken in his own house near Lanark, or rather in a vault connected with it which he had contrived for hiding. ‘It had its entry in his house, upon the side of a wall, and closed up with a whole stone, so close that none could have judged it but to be a stone of the building. It descended below the foundation of the house, and was in length about forty yards, and in the far end, the other mouth of it, was closed with feal [turf], having a feal dyke built upon it; so that with ease, when he went out, he shot out the feal and closed it again. Here he sheltered for the space of sixteen years, taking to it at every alarm, and many times hath his house been searched for him by the soldiers; but where he sheltered none was privy to it but his own domestics, and at length it is discovered by his own herdsman.’—Law.
Mar. 9.
Thomas Barclay of Collerine in Fife was a youth of eighteen, in possession of ‘an opulent estate,’ and likewise of a considerable jurisdiction in his county. His predecessors were loyalists; but Thomas himself, by the remarriage of his mother to Mure of Rowallan in Ayrshire, was, according to the allegation of his uncle John Barclay, in the way of being ‘bred up in a family of fanatical and disloyal principles, not being permitted to visit or be acquainted with his nearest relations and friends, and denied all manner of education suitable to his quality ... not being sent to college’—he had, moreover, been influenced to choose ‘curators altogether strangers to his family, of known disaffected and disloyal principles.’ It seemed, in John Barclay’s judgment, unavoidable in these circumstances that a supporter would be lost to his majesty’s interests, unless a remedy were provided.
It seems so far creditable to a government which has a good many sins at its charge, that, when this case came before the Duke of York and the Privy Council, on John Barclay’s petition, and both sides had been heard—namely, the uncle on one side, and the Lady Rowallan, with the three curators, Montgomery younger of Skelmorley, the Laird of Dunlop, and Mr John Stirling, minister of Irvine, on the other—they decided that the young Barclay was of age to act and choose curators for himself, and that the defenders were not bound to produce him in court; thus frankly consenting that the young man should rest in the danger of being perverted from the loyalty of his family.— P. C. R.
1682. Apr.
A severe murrain commenced amongst the cattle, thought to be owing to the deficient herbage of the preceding year, and the heavy rains of the intermediate season.[287] The support of cattle during winter was at all times a trying difficulty in those days of no turnip-husbandry; but on an occasion like this it was scarcely possible. It was remarked that the farmers had to cut heather for their beasts to lie upon, and pull the old straw out of the coverings of their houses to feed them with. The murrain lasted till May, when some tenants in the Highlands lost as many as forty cows by it.
Apr. 18.
A complaint presented to the Privy Council by Janet Stewart, servant to Mr William Dundas, advocate, set forth that James Aikenhead, apothecary in Edinburgh, took upon him ‘to compose and vent poisonous tablets,’ and ‘Mistress Elizabeth Edmonstoun, having got notice of these tablets, and that they would work strange wanton affections and humours in the bodies of women,’ sent James Chalmers for some of them, which she caused to be administered to the complainer, in presence of several persons, ‘as a sweetmeat tablet.’ Janet having innocently accepted of the tablet, ate of it, and in consequence ‘fell into a great fever, wherein she continued for twenty days, before anybody knew what was the cause of it; so that the poison has crept into her bones, and she is like never to recover.’
Fountainhall tells us that Janet would not have recovered, ‘had not Doctor Irvine given her an antidote.’ The Council remitted the case to the College of Physicians, as being skilled in such matters (periti in arte), ‘who,’ says Fountainhall, ‘thought such medicaments not safe to be given without first taking their own advice.’[288]
May 3.
1682.
A riot took place in the streets of Edinburgh, in consequence of an attempt to carry away, as soldiers to serve the Prince of Orange, some young men who had been imprisoned for a trivial offence. As the lads were marched down the street under a guard, to be put on board a ship in Leith Road, some women called out to them: ‘Pressed or not pressed?’ They answered: ‘Pressed,’ and so caused an excitement in the multitude. A woman who sat on the street selling pottery, threw a few sherds at the guard, and some other people, finding a supply of missiles at a house which was building, followed her example. ‘The king’s forces,’ says Fountainhall, ‘were exceedingly assaulted and abused.’ Under the order of their commander, Major Keith, they turned and fired upon the crowd, when, as usual, only innocent bystanders were injured. Seven men and two women were killed, and twenty-five wounded—a greater bloodshed than ‘has been at once these sixty years done in the streets of Edinburgh.’ One of the women being pregnant, the child was cut from her and baptised in the streets. Three of the most active individuals in this mob were seized and tried, but the assize would not find them guilty. The magistrates were severely blamed for their negligence and cowardice in this affair.
It gave origin to the well-known Town-guard of Edinburgh, for, under the recommendation of the Privy Council, and with the sanction of the king, it was agreed to raise a body of a hundred and eight men, to serve as a protection to the city in all emergencies. The inhabitants were taxed to pay for it, ‘some a groat, some fivepence, and the highest at sixpence a week;’ but this being found oppressive, the support of the corps, which cost 22,000 merks a year, was soon after put upon the town’s common good.[289] Patrick Graham, a younger son of Graham of Inchbrakie, was appointed captain, at the dictation of the Duke of York, who, says Fountainhall, ‘would give a vast sum to have such a breach in London’s walls.’
Many who remember the Town-guard, with their rusty brown uniform, their Lochaber axes, and fierce Highland faces, as a curiosity of the streets of Edinburgh in their young days, will be perhaps unpleasingly surprised to learn that the corps was originally an engine of the government of the last Stuarts. Captain Graham, who was a sincere loyalist by blood, being descended from the Inchbrakie who sheltered Montrose on his commencing the insurrection of 1644, figured with his guards on various occasions during the remainder of the Stuart reigns, particularly at the bringing in of the Earl of Argyle to be executed in 1685, when he and the hangman received the unhappy Maccallummore at the Watergate, and conducted him along the street to prison.
1682.
The Town-guard was disbanded in November 1817, by which time it had been reduced to twenty-five privates, two sergeants, two corporals, and two drummers.
May 6.
The Gloucester frigate, on her voyage from London to Edinburgh with the Duke of York and his friends, and attended by some smaller vessels, was by a blunder wrecked on Yarmouth Sands. A signal-gun brought boats from the other vessels to the rescue of the distressed party, and the duke and several other men of importance were taken from the vessel, just before she went to pieces. A hundred and fifty persons, of whom eighty were men of quality, including the Earl of Roxburgh, the Laird of Hopetoun, Sir Joseph Douglas of Pumpherston, and Lord O’Brian of the Irish peerage, were drowned. Sir George Gordon of Haddo, president of the Court of Session, and who had just received the high appointment of Chancellor of Scotland, escaped by leaping into the water, whence he was drawn by the hair of the head into a boat. The Earl of Roxburgh had been heard crying for a boat, and offering twenty thousand guineas for one. His servant in the water took him on his back, and was swimming with him to a boat, when a drowning person clutched at them, and the unfortunate earl fell off and perished, his servant barely escaping for the moment, and dying an hour after. The duke and the rest of the survivors arrived in Leith next day, without further accident.
‘The pilot, one Aird, of Borrowstounness, was threatened with hanging for going to sleep and giving wrong directions ... he was condemned to perpetual imprisonment.’—Foun.
It is remarkable that the widow of the Earl of Roxburgh survived him in widowhood for seventy-one years, dying in 1753.
June 13.
1682.
Sir Alexander Lindsay of Evelick—an ancient castle on the high grounds overlooking the Carse of Gowrie—had married as a second wife the widow of Mr William Douglas, ‘the advocate and poet.’[290] Both had children approaching maturity, and William Douglas, the lady’s son, became very naturally the playfellow of Sir Alexander’s heir Thomas. Whether jealousy on account of the superior prospects of Thomas Lindsay had entered William Douglas’s heart, we cannot tell; but the two boys being out one day in the Den of Pitrodie, a romantic broomy dell near Evelick, Douglas was tempted to stab Lindsay with a clasp-knife, and so murder him.
The wretched boy gave a confession next day, fully admitting his guilt. It commences thus: ‘I have been over proud and rash all my life. I was never yet firmly convinced there was a God or a devil, a heaven or a hell, till now. To tell the way how I did the deed my heart doth quake [and] head ryves. As I was playing and kittling at the head of the brae, I stabbed him with the only knife which I have, and I tumbled down the brae with him to the burn; all the way he was struggling with me, while I fell upon him in the burn, and there he uttered one or two pitiful words. The Lord Omnipotent and all-seeing God learn my heart to repent.’ On this occasion, ‘he also produced the little knife called Jock the leig, with ane iron haft.’
Being on the ensuing day brought before the sheriff-court of Perth, it was there alleged against him that ‘he did conceive ane deadly hatred and evil [will] against Thomas Lindsay, son to Sir Alexander Lindsay of Evelick, with a settled resolution to bereave him of life; he did upon the thretteen day of this instant month, being Tuesday last, about seven hours in the afternoon or thereby, as he was coming along the Den of Pitrodie in company with the said Thomas Lindsay, fall upon the said Thomas, and with his knife did give him five several stabs and wounds in his body, whereof one about the mouth of his stomach, and thereafter dragged him down the brae of the den to the burn, and there with his feet did trample upon the said Thomas lying in the water, and as yet he not being satisfied with all that cruelty which he did to the said Thomas, he did with a stone dash him upon the head, so that immediately the said Thomas died.’
1682.
To the great concern of his friends, the boy now retracted his confession, alleging that he found Thomas Lindsay lying in the burn, and in trying to help him up had fallen upon him. The trial was consequently postponed to a future day. Meanwhile his friends exerted themselves to bring back the culprit to a sense of his guilt, and after a few days, they seem to have succeeded. On the 25th of June, his mother is found writing to the Laird of Balhaivie, a cousin of the murdered youth, relating how she had been witness to the power of God in changing the heart of the obstinate. ‘In a very little,’ says she, ‘after you went to the door, he rose up in such a passion of grief and sorrow, crying out in such bitterness, rapping on the table, and cursing the hour it entered into his head to recant, and promised through the Lord’s strength, nothing should persuade him to do it again, but that he should constantly affirm the truth of his first declaration. He took out the declaration the devil had belied him to write, and cried to cast it in the fire, with so much sorrow and tears, as he took his head in his hand and said he feared to distract [become distracted], and prayed that the Lord would help him in his right judgment, that he might still adhere to truth. This,’ continues the wretched mother, ‘was some consolation to my poor confounded mind; but when I consider that deceitful bow the heart, and his frequent distemper, my spirit fails.... I desire you and the rest of your worthy friends no to pit yourself to needless charges in the affair, for I, his nearest relation, being not only convinced justice should be satisfied, but am desirous nothing may occur to hinder. And as I know, though both he and I hath creditable friends, they will be ashamed to own me in this. The good God that best knows my pitiful case bear [me] up under this dismal lot, and give you and all Christians a heart to pray for him, and your poor afflicked servant, Rachel Kirkwood.’
The Laird of Balhaivie seems to have entered kindly into the lady’s feelings. His answer contains a few traits highly characteristic of the time. ‘Much honoured madam, as soon as Sir Pat[rick Threipland] gave me account yesternight of your son’s second confession, I went alongs with Sir Patrick and saw him, and I swear to outward appearance he seemed very serious, and I pray God Almighty continue him so.... My cousin, young Evelick, and all his relations are very sensible of your ladyship’s extraordinary and wonderful good carriage in ane affair so astounding as this has been, and ye renew it in your letter, wherein ye desire they should not be put to needless trouble and charges in the affair. The truth is, madam, there is none of us but are grieved to the bottom of our hearts that we should be obliged to pursue your son to death; but we keep evil consciences if we suffer the murder of so near a relation to go unpunished; and his life for the taking away of the other’s is the least atonement that credit and conscience can allow.... His dying by the hand of justice will be the only way to expiate so great a crime, and likewise be a means to take away all occasion of grudge which otherwise could not but continue in the family....’[291]
1682.
The youth was brought to trial in Edinburgh, and condemned to suffer death on the 4th of August. After the trial, he confessed that it was he who in the January preceding ‘put fire in Henry Graham’s writing-chamber, out of revenge, and that he had first stolen some books there.’ He was subjected to a new trial for this crime, because, being treason, it would have inferred a forfeiture of his estate, worth upwards of £2000; but on this occasion he retracted his confession, nor could any thing prevail with him to renew it judicially. The jury, who were honest Edinburgh citizens, seeing that the design was to enrich certain courtiers at the expense of the sisters of the young homicide, acquitted him of the new charge, to the great irritation of the king’s advocate, who ‘swore that the next assizers he should choose should be Linlithgow’s soldiers, to curb the phanaticks.’[292]
July 5.
The magistrates of Dumfries had a man called Richard Storie in their jail, on a charge of murder, and were put to great charges in keeping and guarding him, because several of his friends from the Borders daily threatened to force the prison and permit him to make his escape ‘if he shall remain any longer there.’[293] It was therefore found necessary to order that Storie should be transferred by the sheriff under a sufficient guard to the next sheriff upon the road to Edinburgh, and so on to Edinburgh itself, where he should be placed in firmance in the Tolbooth.
1682.
There was the more reason for the magistrates of Dumfries being anxious about the detention of Richard Storie, that George Storie, an associate in his crime, had already escaped. These two men were accused of having basely and cruelly murdered Francis Armstrong in Alisonbank, in the preceding month of June. The witnesses being Englishmen, it was necessary (December 7, 1682) to recommend to the sheriff of Cumberland to take measures for insuring their appearance before the Court of Justiciary at the approaching trial. This proving ineffectual, the widow and six children of Francis Armstrong petitioned in March for further and more effectual efforts; and the lords agreed to address the English secretary of state on the subject.
Not long after (April 30, 1684), the Council was informed that, ‘by the throng of prisoners in the Tolbooth of Dumfries, the same has been already broken, and is yet in the same hazard.’ Being at the same time made aware ‘that, within the castle of Dumfries, there are some strong vaults fit for the keeping of prisoners,’ they gave orders to have these prepared for the
July 7.
A poor Quaker, named Thomas Dunlop, had taken a house in Musselburgh, and was endeavouring by humble industry to support himself and his family, without being burdensome to any. But other Quakers came occasionally about him, to the annoyance of the magistrates of the town; and finding he broke a local law, in having no certificate of character from the minister of the parish in which he had last resided, they took advantage of the circumstance to get quit of him. Poor Thomas and his wife and little children were thrust out of their home into the fields, notwithstanding his entreaties for delay till he should get letters certifying his respectability from persons they knew. He had now been lodging for thirteen days and nights in the fields, the magistrates resisting all pleadings in his favour from charitable persons, and disregarding the misery which he was manifestly enduring. On his petition to that body which almost every week was sending recusant Whigs to the scaffold, they lent him a patient hearing, and summoned the Musselburgh magistrates before them; but all that the laws permitted them to do in the case, was to ordain that Thomas might have recourse to a legal action if the magistrates had not ‘removed him in ane orderly manner.’—P. C. R.
July 8.
1682.
James Somerville, younger of Drum, riding home to that place from Edinburgh, found on the way two friends fighting with swords—namely, Thomas Learmont, son of Mr Thomas Learmont, an advocate, and Hew Paterson, younger of Bannockburn. These two young men had quarrelled over their cups. Young Somerville dismounted, and tried to separate them, but received a mortal wound from Paterson’s sword, though inflicted by the hand of Learmont, the two combatants having perhaps, like Hamlet and Laertes, exchanged weapons. The wounded man lived two days, and expressed his forgiveness of Learmont, who, by his advice, fled. ‘Some alleged his wounds were not mortal, but misguided.’ Somerville was the progeny of the marriage described as having taken place at Corehouse in November 1650. He left an infant son, who carried on the line of the family.—Foun.
Aug. 17.
A comet began to appear in the north-west. ‘The star was big, and the tail broad and long, at the appearance of four yards.’ It continued visible for twenty days.—Law.
This was the celebrated Halley’s Comet, so called in honour of the illustrious astronomer who first ascertained, by his calculations regarding it, the periodicity of comets. The same object had been observed by Kepler in 1607, and by Apian in 1531. ‘The identity of these meteors seeming to Halley unquestionable, he ventured to predict that the same comet would reappear in 1758, and that it would be found to revolve in a very elongated ellipse in about seventy-six years. As the critical period approached, which was to decide so momentous a question regarding the system of the world, the greatest mathematicians endeavoured to track the comet’s course with a minuteness which Halley’s opportunities did not permit him to reach. The illustrious Clairhaut, feeling that a general prediction was not enough, undertook the most complex problem as to the disturbing effects of the planets through whose orbits it must pass.... He succeeded in predicting one of the positions for the comet for the middle of April; stating, however, that he might be in error by thirty days. The comet occupied the position referred to on the 12th of March.’—Nichol’s Contemplations on the Solar System.
1682.
It is humiliating to have to remark, that the notices of comets which we derive from Scotch writers down to this time, contain nothing but accounts of the popular fancies regarding them. Practical astronomy seems to have then been unknown in our country; and hence, while in other lands men were carefully observing, computing, and approaching to just conclusions regarding these illustrious strangers of the sky, our diarists could only tell us how many yards long they seemed to be, what effects were apprehended from them in the way of war and pestilence, and how certain pious divines ‘improved’ them for spiritual edification. Early in this century, Scotland had produced one great philosopher—who had supplied his craft with the mathematical instrument by which complex problems, such as the movement of comets, were alone to be solved. It might have been expected that the country of Napier, seventy years after his time, would have had many sons capable of applying his key to such mysteries of nature. But not one had arisen—nor did any rise for fifty years onward, when at length Colin Maclaurin unfolded in the Edinburgh University the sublime philosophy of Newton. There could not be a more expressive signification of the character of the seventeenth century in Scotland. Our unhappy contentions about external religious matters had absorbed the whole genius of the people, rendering to us the age of Cowley, of Waller, and of Milton, as barren of elegant literature, as that of Horrocks, of Halley, and of Newton, was of science.
Nov. 23.
John Corse, Andrew Armour, and Robert Burne, merchants in Glasgow, were now arranging for the setting up of a manufactory ‘for making of damaties, fustines, and stripped vermiliones,’ expecting it would be ‘a great advantage to the country, and keep in much money therein which is sent out thereof for import of the same.’ Seeing ‘it undoubtedly will require a great stock and many servants, strangers, which are come and are to be sent for,’ the enterprisers deemed themselves entitled to have their work declared a manufactory, so that it might enjoy the privileges accorded to such by act of parliament. This favour was granted by the Council for nine years, ‘but prejudice to any other persons to set up and work in the said work.’—P. C. R.
Dec.
1682.
Daniel Mure of Gledstanes,[294] out of health and mental vigour, and believed to be on his death-bed, was induced to make a disposition of his estate to Thomas Carmichael of Eastend. Such a disposition, however, could not be valid by the law of Scotland, unless the testator appeared afterwards ‘at kirk and market’—an arrangement designed to insure that natural heirs should not be cheated. By ‘a most devilish contrivance’ of William Chiesley, writer in Edinburgh, Thomas Bell, Carmichael’s servant, was dressed up to personate the sick man, and taken with all due form to the public places appointed by the law. The notary before whom the man presented himself was so doubtful of his being Daniel Mure, that he caused him to take his oath that he was truly that person. When Carmichael and his man afterwards retired to a tavern with the notary, the latter once more expressed his doubt, saying: ‘This person is certainly not like Daniel Mure;’ to which Carmichael answered, that he was really the man, but much altered by sickness. On the death of Daniel Mure soon after, Carmichael accordingly appeared as the inheritor of the estate of Gledstanes, to the exclusion of Francis Mure, merchant in Edinburgh, the brother of the deceased. The affair was the more wicked, as the estate was one which had been long in Mure’s family.
Dec. 21.
On the whole matter being brought before the Privy Council by Francis Mure, the truth became clear, and Carmichael was punished by a fine of five thousand merks, whereof two thousand were assigned to Francis, as a compensation for the damage he had sustained; while Chiesley, the writer, was mulcted in three thousand merks for being accessory to the cheat. An obligation which Francis Mure had been induced to give to Carmichael, binding himself never to expose or pursue the forgery, was at the same time discharged. It is not unworthy of remark, that Chiesley, who had devised this forgery and drawn up the iniquitous obligation aforesaid, was one of those members of the legal profession who had refused, from scruples of conscience, to take the Test.—P. C. R.
Dec. 23.
Alexander Nisbet of Craigentinny and Macdougall of Makerston had gone abroad to fight a duel, attended by Sir William Scott of Harden and —— Douglas, ‘ensign to Colonel Douglas,’ as seconds. The Privy Council hearing of it, ordered the four gentlemen to be confined in the Tolbooth in different rooms, until it should be inquired into. The principals were, on petition, set at liberty in a few days, after giving caution for reappearance.—P. C. R.
1683. Jan. 5.
1683.
The widow of Andrew Anderson at this time carried on business in Edinburgh as the king’s printer, by virtue of a royal gift debarring others from exercising the like art. The bibles produced by her are said by Fountainhall to have been wretchedly executed. One David Lindsay having now got a similar gift, Mrs Anderson endeavoured to keep him out of the trade, setting forth that she had been previously invested with the privilege, and ‘one press is sufficiently able to serve all Scotland, our printing being but inconsiderable.’[295] The Lords ordained that Mrs Anderson’s monopoly should be held as only including the printing of such things as had been specified in the gift to her husband’s predecessor Tyler.
There were at this time printers in Glasgow and Aberdeen, but probably no other part of Scotland—though St Andrews had had a press before the Reformation. The business of the printer has been of slow growth in our country. Edinburgh contained in 1763 only six printing-offices; in 1790, sixteen;[296] there are, in 1858, sixty-two printing firms, besides several publishing offices, in which special printing work is executed.
Feb. 1.
It was represented to the Privy Council by the Bishop of Aberdeen that the Quakers in his diocese were now proceeding to such insolency, as to erect meeting-houses for their worship and ‘schools for training up their children in their godless and heretical opinions;’ providing funds for the support of these establishments, and in some instances adding burial-grounds for their own special use. The Council issued orders to have proper investigations made amongst the leading Quakers concerned and the proprietors of the ground on which the said meeting-houses and schools had been built.—P. C. R.
Apr. 5.
At the funeral of the Duke of Lauderdale at Haddington, while the usual dole of money was distributing among the beggars, one, named Bell, stabbed another. ‘He was apprehended, and several stolen things found on him; and, he being made to touch the corpse, the wound bled afresh. The town of Haddington, who it seems have a sheriff’s power, judged him presently, and hanged him over the bridge next day.’—Foun.
Apr. 19.
1683.
Alexander Robertson of Struan, whom we saw two years back breaking out with mortal fury against an agent of the Marquis of Athole in the chamber of the Privy Council, now comes before us in a more agreeable light—namely, as one seeking to cultivate an industrial economy in the midst of the vicious idleness and barbarism of the Highlands. Far up among the Perthshire alps, on the dreary shores of Loch Rannoch, there was then ‘a considerable wood,’ the property of Struan. This would have been useless to him and the country—being in so remote a wilderness—‘if he had not, with great expenses and trouble, caused erect saw-mills, in which, these divers years past, there has been made the number of 176,000 deals.’ This had redounded ‘to the great benefit and conveniency of the country adjacent, besides the keeping of many persons at work’ who would otherwise have been idle and in wretchedness. Struan, however, could not obtain a market for the great bulk of his timber, without sending it in floats along Loch Rannoch, and down the water of Tummel into the Tay; and in this long and tedious passage, it was sometimes driven by storms and spates [floods] on shore, or on the banks of the rivers, where it was made prey of by the country people, ‘thinking they would be no further liable than to a dead spulyie.’ Occasionally, ‘louss and broken men’ attacked his mills in the night-time, and helped themselves to such timber as they wanted. ‘So that his work was likely to be broken and ruined.’ The Privy Council, on Struan’s petition, issued a strong edict for the prevention of these spoliations, and further gave him power to make roads between his saw-mills in Carrie and Apnadull, and to take a charge of those from Rannoch to Perth, so that he might have the alternative of land-carriage for his timber.—P. C. R.
The chance of getting the spoliations put down must have been very small, for thieving raged like a very pestilence in the Highlands. The Earl of Perth, writing from Drummond in July 1682, says expressively: ‘We are so plagued with thieving here, it would pity any heart to see the condition the poor people are in.’[297]
Apr.
Sir Thomas Stewart of Coltness[298] was obliged to fly to Holland, in consequence of a vague threat held out by Sir George Mackenzie, supposed to have been designed to frighten the unfortunate gentleman away, that his estate might be seized. The subsequent circumstances, as related by his son, give a striking view of the troubles in which a Presbyterian family of rank might then be involved, even while making no active demonstrations against the government.
1683.
‘The day after he was gone, came one of the Lord Advocate’s emissaries, Irvine of Bonshaw, with a party of dragoons heated with fury and with liquor.... They demanded the family horses, though their warrant bore no more than to apprehend the person of Thomas Stewart of Coltness; and when Irvine was told by Mr James Stewart, Coltness’s second son, that he was acting beyond orders in offering to seize horses or goods, he swore and blasphemed against rebels and assassins, and that any treatment was warrantable against such. The child Robert made some childish noise, and he threw down the boy of eight years old from a high leaping-on stone. The lady, seven months gone with child, came down to reason with him, but he was so much the more enraged. He offered to shoot the groom [who] stood behind, for denying the keys of the stable, and at length carried off the young gentlemen David and James’s horses.... There was a complaint given in at Edinburgh, and the horses were returned, jaded and abused by ramblers. This Mr Irvine, some months after, in a drunken quarrel at Lanark, was stabbed to death on a dunghill by one of his own gang: a proper exit for such a blood-hound.’
The lady immediately displenished her house, and, notwithstanding the delicate state in which she was, prepared to follow her husband to Holland. Taking with her her step-son David, and a niece of three years, the child of Mr James Stewart, also an exile in Holland, she set sail from Borrowstounness in the beginning of June. The ship encountered a severe storm. ‘The sea was so boisterous, the lady was in danger of being tossed from her bed, and her step-son was alarmed, and got up staggering in the hold, and bewailing; but she composedly said: “David, go to your cabin-bed, and be more quiet, for there is no back-door here to fly out by.” In some days after, they got safe to harbour. They took the treck-scuit from Rotterdam to Utrecht, and a surprising accident happened by the way, and in the scuit close by her: a Dutch minister’s wife, a fellow-traveller and with child, miscarried and died instantly. The husband was as one distracted, and would not be persuaded she was dead, but in a swoon. He made lamentable outcries, but all to no effect. This was alarming to the lady, and made her reflect and acknowledge the kind Providence had preserved her and the fruit of her womb, when in danger both in the journey and the stormy voyage. Coltness has a remark of thanksgiving on this in his diary, and concludes with this, “God makes our hymn sound both of mercy and judgment.”
1683.
‘Her husband, with Mr Pringle of Torwoodlee, came half-way on to Leyden, and met these recent fugitives, and conducted them to Utrecht, where trouble was in part forgot, and sorrow in some measure fled, upon the first transports of being safe and together. Here was the ingenuous, upright Archibald Earl of Argyle, too virtuous for so licentious a court as that of King Charles. Here was the Earl of Loudon, who died anno 1684, and lies buried in the English church at Leyden. There was here the Lord Viscount Stair, and with him for education his son, Sir David Dalrymple, in better times Lord Advocate, and his grandson John, that great general under Queen Anne, and the ambassador of elegant figure in France, and a field-marshal under King George. Here was also Lord Melville, [who became] High Commissioner to the Restitution Parliament under King William, and secretary of state, and with him his son the Earl of Leven, who went to the king of Prussia’s service, and after this was commander-in-chief in Scotland, and governor of Edinburgh Castle in Queen Anne’s reign. But it were endless to name all the honest party of gentry and ministers, outlawed, banished, and forfaulted, for the cause of religion and civil liberty.’
In July, Lady Coltness brought into the world the person who relates the above particulars. ‘The occasion was joyful to the parents; but the mother had not the blessing of the breasts, and there was hard procuring a nurse for a stranger. This gave a damp; but a Dutch lady was so kind as wean her daughter a little sooner, and so a careful and experienced nurse was procured.’
1683.
‘... Coltness fell in straits ... for he soon spent the little he brought with him, and remittances were uncertain and but small. His friends at home were under a cloud. Alertoun, his brother-in-law, was imprisoned and fined; Sir John Maxwell, his other brother-in-law, was fined £10,000 and imprisoned; and his younger children had none to care for them, but their grandmother, Sir James Stewart’s widow. She had a large jointure [that] was not affected, and acted the part of a kind parent.... In this present situation, the old widow lady could give little relief to those banished. It was chargeable supporting the expenses of a family in Holland, and all visible sources were stopped or withdrawn; yet a kind Providence raised up friends in a strange land. Of these the most sympathising was Mr Andrew Russell, merchant-factor at Rotterdam; he generously proffered money, and genteelly, as it were, forced it upon Coltness (and so he did to Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth, Mr James Stewart, advocate, and others), though he could have no probable prospect of recovering it; and yet all was thankfully repaid after the Revolution.’
‘In the end of 1684, Coltness removed to Rotterdam, and there he received many civilities and friendships from his countrymen, merchants, and others, and had some remittances, and in part provisions, transmitted in Scotch ships. Here he had much society of fellow-sufferers, and they had select meetings for conference and intelligence. The badge of such select club was a seal in wax, upon a bit of rounded card, with a blue ribbon and a knot, all in a small spale-box. I have seen Coltness’s ticket; the device was handsome, the motto Omne tulit punctum, the seal was upon a single spot of the heart suite card.’[299]
1683.
1683.
These severities against the Coltness family form a striking example of those now practised every day upon the known adherents of the more extreme Presbyterian views, and the whole would be quite unintelligible to a candid mind in our times, if we were not aware that, thirty years before, the party in which Sir Thomas Stewart’s father was a leader, were subjecting their dissidents to precisely similar treatment:[300] see, for example, the case of the family of Menzies of Pitfoddels, fined, confiscated, driven from their native land and means of living, and the lady and one of her sons lost in a storm at sea;[301] see the case of Dr Forbes of Corse, thrust from his college and country because he scrupled to subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant; his very bones refused burial in his own ground! It happened that, in the very same month which saw Sir Thomas Stewart’s family subjected to the harsh treatment above described, there was an application to the Privy Council regarding the sufferings of an Episcopalian family through two generations, in consequence of the rigours exercised partly under the dictation of Sir Thomas’s father. It is in the form of a petition from Mr John Ross, minister of Foveran in Aberdeenshire, and Mr Alexander Ross, parson of Perth. Their grandfather, Mr John Ross, parson of Birse in Aberdeenshire, had been turned out of his ministry in 1647, merely for his ‘opposition to the rebellious and seditious principles and practices which at that time had overspread the land.’ He was likewise ‘fined at several times in five thousand merks, and imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh for the space of nine months together, and forced to lend the sum of four thousand merks on the public bands, as they were called, for carrying on that unnatural war.’ He had ‘his house frequently plundered by the rebellious armies then on foot, so that [he] was prejudged in at least the sum of twenty thousand pounds Scots.’ Thus pillaged, and kept out of his ministry for thirteen years, he had been reduced to great straits, and left his family in poverty. The claim of the sufferer and his family was acknowledged at the Restoration by an order of two hundred pounds out of the vacant stipends; but it had never been paid. His eldest son, parson of Monymusk, the father of the petitioners, and who had likewise suffered for his loyalty, was kept poor all his days through the losses of his father, and had lately died, leaving a widow and eight children alive, besides the petitioners, with no means of support but what the petitioners could contribute.[302] Here, in short, was a clerical family originally of some substance, reduced to poverty through the oppressions which had been exercised upon it by those now in their turn suffering, or their predecessors.[303] In such facts there is certainly no valid excuse for the severities of the present time; but they tell us how these severities came to be practised. The reaction, however, from the Presbyterian reign of terror in the middle of the century was now beginning to strain and crack, and a settlement of the political pendulum was not far distant.
June 5.
At the circuit court at Stirling, a man was tried for reviling a parson, ‘in causing the piper play The Deil stick the Minister. Sundry pipers were there present as witnesses, to declare it was the name of ane spring.’[304]—Foun.
July 12.
Captain Thomas Hamilton, merchant in Edinburgh, who had for some years carried on a considerable trade with the American plantations in the importation of beaver and racoon skins, craved and obtained privileges for a manufactory of beaver hats which he proposed to set up, being the first ever attempted in Scotland. He set forth his design as one which ‘will do no prejudice to any felt-makers,’ while it would benefit the kingdom by furnishing a particular class of articles ‘at easy rates.’ He expected also to be able to export his hats.—P. C. R.
Sep.
Alexander Young, Bishop of Ross, ‘a moderate and learned man,’ being afflicted with stone, was obliged, like his predecessor in the like circumstances above a hundred years before,[305] to travel to Paris for the purpose of having a surgical operation performed for his relief. Like his predecessor, also, he sank under the consequences of the operation.—Foun.
Sep. 10.
1683.
It was believed that much native copper existed in Scotland; yet all attempts at realising it by mining had failed. A German named Joachim Gonel, highly skilled in copper-mining, now proposed to the Privy Council to work a copper-mine in the parish of Currie with proper workmen brought from abroad, all at his own expense, provided only he got a present of the mine from the state. The Council, deeming such a work calculated to be useful to the public interest, recommended the government to comply with the request.—P. C. R.
Nov.
At this time began a frost which lasted with great severity till March, ‘with some storms and snow now and then.’ ‘The rivers at Dundee, Borrowstounness, and other places where the sea ebbs and flows, did freeze, which hath not been observed in the memory of man before; and thereby the cattle, especially the sheep, were reduced to great want ... the like not seen since the winter 1674.’—Foun.
This frost prevailed equally in England and Ireland, producing ice on the Thames below Gravesend. One remarkable circumstance arising from it is noted by a gentleman residing in London, that printing was hindered for a quarter of a year (by the hardening of the ink).[306]
Patrick Walker speaks emphatically of this frost, and says: ‘Even before the snow fell, when the earth was as iron, how many graves were in the west of Scotland in desert places, in ones, twos, threes, fours, fives together, which was no imaginary thing! Many yet alive, who measured them with their staves, [found them] exactly the deepness, breadth, and length of other graves, and the lump of earth lying whole together at their sides, which they set their feet upon and handled with their hands. Which many concluded afterwards did presage the two bloody slaughter years that followed, when eighty-two of the Lord’s people were suddenly and cruelly murdered in desert places.’
‘An old minister, Mr Bennet, records in his manuscripts, that, before our late troubles [the Civil War], there were a number of graves cast open in a moor in the south.’—Law.
Dec.
A scandal broke forth against Mr John M‘Queen, one of the ministers of Edinburgh. It was alleged that, having fallen besottedly in love with Mrs Euphame Scott, who despised him, he contrived by a trick to obtain possession of one of her under-garments, out of which he made a waistcoat and pair of drawers, by wearing which he believed the lady would infallibly be induced to give him her affections. ‘He was suspended for thir fooleries; but in the beginning of February 1684, the bishop reponed him.’—Foun.
1683.
If the Presbyterian satirists are not altogether fable-mongers, the bishop (Paterson) must have had a strong fellow-feeling for M‘Queen. ‘He is said to have kissed his band-strings in the pulpit, in the midst of an eloquent discourse, which was the signal agreed upon betwixt him and a lady to whom he was suitor, to shew he could think upon her charms even while engaged in the most solemn duties of his profession. Hence he was nicknamed Bishop Band-strings.’[307]
It appears there were now two sugar-works in the kingdom, and only two—being placed at Glasgow[308]—and one of them was in danger of being stopped in consequence of the death of Peter Gemble, one of the four partners, his widow refusing to advance her share of what was necessary for carrying on of the work. Materials, utensils, and men, to the extent of £16 sterling of wages monthly, were thus thrown idle—a general calamity. The Privy Council (December 20) enjoined the magistrates of Glasgow to use their endeavours to get the difference composed and the work kept up.—P. C. R.
Dec. 26.
1683.
A dismally tragical incident occurred at the Hirsel, the seat of the Earl of Home near Coldstream. The earl having been long detained in London, the countess, to beguile the time during the Christmas holidays, had a party of the neighbouring gentlemen invited to the house. Amongst these were Johnston of Hilton, Home of Ninewells, and the Hon. William Home, brother of the earl, and the sheriff of Berwickshire—three gentlemen who, like the countess, have all been before us lately in connection with the abduction of the young Lady Ayton. Cards and dice being resorted to, and William having lost a considerable sum, a quarrel took place among the gentlemen, and Johnston, who was of a haughty and hot temper, gave William a slap in the face. The affair seemed to have been amicably composed, and all had gone to bed, when William Home rose and went to Johnston’s chamber, to call him to account for the affront he conceived himself to have suffered. What passed in the way of conversation between the two is not known; but certain it is that Home stabbed Johnston in his bed with nine severe wounds. Home of Ninewells, who slept near by, came to see what caused the disturbance, and, as he entered the room, received a sword-thrust from the sheriff, who was now retiring, and who immediately fled into England upon Johnston’s horse.
The unfortunate Hilton died in a few days. Ninewells recovered. The sheriff—of whom it was shudderingly remarked that this bloody fact happened exactly a twelvemonth after the execution of a Presbyterian rebel whom he had apprehended—was never caught. He was supposed to have entered some foreign service, and died in battle. In advanced life, he is said to have made an experiment to ascertain if he could be allowed to spend the remainder of his days in his native country. A son of the slaughtered Johnston, while at a public assembly, ‘was called out to speak with a person, who, it was said, brought him some particular news from abroad. The stranger met him at the head of the staircase, in a sort of lobby which led into the apartment where the company were dancing. He told young Johnston of Hilton, that the man who had slain his father was on his death-bed, and had sent him to request his forgiveness before he died. Before granting his request, Johnston asked the stranger one or two questions; and observing that he faltered in his answers, he suddenly exclaimed: “You yourself are my father’s murderer,” and drew his sword to stab him. Home—for it was the homicide himself—threw himself over the balustrade of the staircase, and made his escape.’[309]
1683.
This year a great alarm was excited by a conjunction of the planets Saturn and Jupiter in the constellation of Leo. It was announced as an extraordinary conjunction, which had only happened twice before since the creation of the world; and ‘our prognosticators all spoke of it as very ominous,’ ‘portending great alterations in Europe.’ Mr George Sinclair, Professor of Natural Philosophy in Glasgow, considered it as nothing less than ‘terrible.’ To add to the general uneasiness, some one brought out a treatise on comets, promising a further one under the title of Catastrophe Mundi. Fountainhall was evidently puzzled, for from November 1682 to March 1683, the season had been ‘like a spring for mildness,’ and he really could not say whether such an event as this could be ascribed to the conjunction. Had he waited a little, he might have seen the matter in a clearer light, for in April there took place pestilential fevers, with other terrible and uncommon disorders. ‘In Montrose, several families were taken with an unco disease, like unto convulsion fits, their face thrawing about to their neck, their hands griping close together, so as the very nails of their fingers make holes in their looves; lose their senses, and have a devouring appetite, eat much, yet not satisfied.’—Law.
1684. Apr. 8.
We have already seen several instances of a considerable town burnt down by accidental fire, with the inevitable consequence to the inhabitants, of their being driven into the shelterless fields, in a state of utter desolation; all reminding us of a time when as yet no mechanical arrangements had been made for checking such conflagrations, and no process of assurance had been instituted for providing against the loss and penury following. We have now another and highly characteristic example, in the almost entire destruction of the town of Kelso. It will be observed that the town, being probably composed of thatched houses, in few instances exceeding two stories in height, was extremely inflammable, and therefore the fire was rapid.
1684.
The fire began, between three and four in the afternoon, in a malt-kiln, and quickly caused the destruction of several stacks of corn. Thence, under the influence of a violent wind, it spread over the whole town, and so quickly, ‘that these[310] who were helping their neighbours did not know when their own houses were burning. Before nine o’clock at night, not only all the houses, but the most part of all the goods therein, and several merchants’ shops of considerable value, and above four thousand bolls of victual lying in girnels, and all the corn-stacks in the town, were laid in ashes. The fury of the flame and rage of the smoke were so great in all places of the town, that with great difficulty sick and infirm persons and infant children could be carried away from the danger to the open fields. Three hundred and six families had their houses utterly burnt down, and of these not twenty will ever be able to rebuild upon their own means. The loss of merchants is so great that it cannot weel be known, the particular loss of some of them being valued above twenty thousand pounds Scots, and of others, above ane thousand pounds sterling. The more indigent sort of people have lost the whole sustenance of their livelihood.’ If we are to understand that the three hundred and six burnt-out families composed the whole population, we may estimate that this town, now so remarkable for its beauty, and which contains a population of 5000, was then a comparatively poor village of about 1400 inhabitants. It is remarkable, however, to find that it contained merchants’ shops so well stocked with goods.
The usual and only resource of that age for such cases of public calamity was taken advantage of by the Privy Council, to whom the inhabitants appealed for succour; namely, a collection at the parish churches on one Sunday throughout the kingdom. And till this collection could take place, it was ordered that some of the money now in the course of being raised for the relief of prisoners in the hands of the Turks, should be given to the distressed people of Kelso, to be afterwards replaced from the money collected on account of the fire. Some time afterwards, we find a petition from the magistrates of Glasgow, setting forth that a sum of money had been collected there for the unfortunate people at Kelso, but in the meantime Glasgow had had a conflagration of its own, resulting in the destitution of a number of people; so they had thought proper to ask for permission to apply the money for the relief of the distress in their own community—which was granted.
Apr.
Cornelius a-Tilbourne, a German mountebank, craved from the Privy Council licence to erect a stage in Edinburgh. It was granted, notwithstanding opposition from the College of Physicians. He had made a successful experiment on himself, in London, in presence of the king, for counteracting some poisons which the physicians there had prescribed to him, the secret consisting in drinking a considerable quantity of oil. But it appears that he expressly excluded mercury, aqua-fortis, and other corrosives from the trial. The king, who had a curiosity about chemical experiments, had granted Cornelius a medal and chain. He repeated the experiment in Edinburgh, on his man or servant, who died under it.
Men of this class appear to have also practised surgery. In March 1683, the Town Council of Glasgow disbursed five pounds to John Maxwell, to replace a like sum ‘whilk he payit to the mountebank for cutting off umwhile Archibald Bishop’s leg.’—M. of G.
Apr. 22.
1684.
A petition from the Earl of Errol to the Privy Council set forth that it was the custom of the north country for ‘the seamen of fish-boats’ to be ‘tied and obliged to the same servitude and service that coal-hewers and salters are here in the south,’ and ‘it is not lawful for any man whatsomever to resett, harbour, or entertein the fishers and boatmen who belong to another.’ His lordship complained of Alexander Brodie and Andrew Buchlay, who were fishermen in his service, having ‘fled away from him without leave, to his damage and prejudice;’ and he demanded warrants for reclaiming them. The petition was complied with.—P. C. R.
Apr. 24.
A proclamation proceeding upon the recent sumptuary act, makes us aware that it had comparatively failed to accomplish its object. ‘Several women, even [!] in our capital city of Edinburgh and elsewhere, have presumed to go abroad with clothes made of the prohibited stuffs, upon pretext that they are only night-gowns, undresses, or manteaux, whereas all manner of wearing of the said stuffs was discharged.’ In like manner, to elude that part of the law forbidding mourning cloaks, or ‘in downright mockery’ of the same, ‘several persons have presumed to wear mantle-cloaks (albeit more expensive than the cloaks formerly worn) at burials and other occasions upon the death of their relations.’ ‘Also several persons have lately run to that height of extravagancy, as to cause cover the coffins of persons to be buried with fine black cloth and fringes.’ Others, since the passing of the act, ‘have presumed to make penny-weddings, where great confluence of our subjects have resorted, which is a most extravagant expense to our lieges.’
The public was now therefore forbidden by regular proclamation to wear the prohibited stuffs in any manner of way. Tailors were discharged from making or setting out, and gentlemen from wearing, the long black mantle-coats. All were prohibited from ‘making use of any coffin covered with silk cloth or fringes,’ or which bore any ornamental metal-work. Penny-weddings were denounced in the strongest terms. And all these prohibitions were enforced by the threat of a full exaction of the fines specified in the act.—P. C. R..
July 22.
1684.
A strong representation was made to the Privy Council against the Messrs Fountain, who have ‘gone almost through all Scotland and charged every person both in town and country who keeps a change, who has in their house a pair of tables, cards, or kylles, and others of that nature for gentlemen’s divertisement, upon pretence that they ought not to have any such plays in their house without licence from them as Masters of the Revels.’ It was reckoned that they had forced six thousand people to compound with them, and had thus realised about £16,000 sterling, ‘which is a most gross and manifest oppression.’ The lords forbade the Fountains to take any further legal steps. P. C. R.
Aug.
An instrument of torture, called the Thumbikens, was introduced into practice by the Privy Council, as a means of extorting confessions. This was done at the recommendation of Generals Dalyell and Drummond, who had seen the thumbikens used in Russia. One of the first persons, if not the first, subjected to this torture, was Mr William Spence, a servant of the Earl of Argyle, who for some weeks had been tortured in various less compulsory ways to make him confess what he knew of the rebellious designs of his master. He had maintained firmness under the boots, and contrived to endure without flinching the torture of being kept awake for five nights, though driven by it ‘half distracted.’ But after his thumbs had been crushed by the thumbikens, on the boots being again presented to him, his firmness gave way.[311]
The thumbikens consists of a bar of iron, moving loose upon a vertical screw, and under which, by the use of a nut moving on the screw, provided with a handle, the thumbs of the victim can be squeezed so as to produce the most exquisite pain.
In September of this year, Mr William Carstairs, who had been concerned in some of the plots of the day, was tortured by the thumbikens before the Privy Council. He bore the pain with firmness, though not without giving vent to his agony by cries, until the Dukes of Hamilton and Queensberry left the room, unable any longer to witness the revolting spectacle. He was at length induced by these means, to give some information regarding Baillie of Jerviswood and others.
1684.
After the Revolution, this remarkable man became, as is well known, Principal of the University of Edinburgh, and the confidential adviser of King William regarding the affairs of Scotland; he was familiarly recognised as Cardinal Carstairs. The identical thumbikens by which he had been tortured, was presented to him by the Privy Council, and it was long preserved by his family. An anecdote was handed down by his descendants respecting the horrible little instrument. ‘I have heard, Principal,’ said King William to him, ‘that you were tortured with something they call thumbikens; pray, what sort of instrument of torture is it?’ ‘I will shew it you,’ answered Carstairs, ‘the next time I have the honour to wait upon your majesty.’ Soon after, accordingly, the Principal brought the thumbikens to be shewn to the king. ‘I must try it,’ said the king; ‘I must put in my thumbs here—now, Principal, turn the screw. O not so gently—another turn—another. Stop, stop! no more! Another turn, I am afraid, would make me confess anything.’[312]
Aug. 15.
Monro, the Edinburgh executioner, having beaten a beggar with undue severity, was deprived of his post, and moreover punished by being thrown into the Thieves’ Hole. One hears with surprise of such an interference for humanity, amidst the atrocious cruelties to which political and religious exasperations were provoking the government. The vacant post was conferred on one George Ormiston, whom Fountainhall describes as ‘a well-favoured discreet fellow.’ If we are to believe Milne’s Account of the Parish of Melrose, 1743, this man was a member, if not the representative, of the Ormistons of Westhouse, a family once of some account, possessing a tower on the Tweed, near Melrose, and having the custom of a bridge across the river at that place; ‘a memorandum to old families not to be puffed up with pride, on account of their antiquity, for they know not what mean offices they or theirs may be obliged to stoop to.’
Sep. 10.
Colonel Graham of Claverhouse, as constable of Dundee, represented to the Privy Council that he found several persons in prison there for petty thefts, ‘which will be fitter to be punished arbitrarily than by death.’ In compliance with his humane suggestion, he was empowered to restrict the treatment of these persons and any others that might hereafter commit the like offences, ‘to ane arbitrary punishment, such as whipping or banishment, as he shall find cause.’—P. C. R.
1684.
It will excite surprise to find the Bloody Claverse interposing for a gentler justice in behalf of ordinary criminals—he who coolly ordered the summary death of so many people in Clydesdale and Galloway, for merely sentimental offences. But, while the nil admirari is nowhere more applicable than in matters concerning human inconsistency, it were perhaps no more than justice to one who was at least a gallant soldier and a steadfast friend in adversity to the sovereign who had employed him, if we remembered how amiable in private life have been many modern statesmen noted for severity in public action. Claverhouse was a political enthusiast, who had made up his mind to the particular course—rather a rough one—by which the interests of his country were to be protected and advanced; and with the help of a strong will, and under the call of what came to him as duty, he scrupled not to walk in that path, though by no means inhumane or harsh in the matters of ordinary life. In a letter to the Earl of Aberdeen, written in June 1683, he reveals to us his principle of action in a sentence: ‘I am,’ says he, ‘as sorry to see a man die, even a Whig, as any of themselves; but when one dies justly for his own faults, and may save a hundred to fall in the like, I have no scruple.’[313]
Oct.
One Marion Purdie, dwelling at the West Port of Edinburgh, once a milk-wife, and now a beggar, was apprehended and imprisoned as a witch. She was accused of laying diseases and frenzies upon her neighbours. The king’s advocate was now giving little heed to such cases, and so poor Marion ‘dies of cold and poverty in prison about the Christmas.’—Foun.
Oct.
It is remarked at this time that Colonel Douglas was training and exercising his regiment with extreme diligence. He studied to get his men all of one height, and would allow none to keep their beards long or have bad cravats or cravat-strings, being anxious that they should all look young and brisk. When they were deficient in these articles, he bought them new ones with their pay. He also ‘caused them all tie their hair back with a ribbon, so it cannot blow in their eyes when they visy at their firing.’ (Can this have been the origin of tied hair?) A more important regulation still of this commander—‘He discharges any of their officers to keep cellars, whereby they made their soldiers waste their pay in drinking.’—Foun.
Oct.
1684.
A tempest which took place at the end of this month, accompanied both by snow and thunder, caused the throwing ashore of ‘a new kind of fish like a mackerel or herring, but with a long snout like a snipe’s beak. Dr Sibbald says it is the Acus marinus, the Sea Needle, described by him in his Naturalis Historia. They have been seen before, but are not frequent, and therefore are looked upon by the vulgar as ominous.’—Foun.
When Charles II. died three months after, Fountainhall remarked there having been few or no prognostics of the event, ‘unless we recur to the comet, which is remote, or to the strange fishes mentioned above, or the vision of blue bonnets ... in none of which is there anything for a rational man to fix his belief upon.’
By an act of the second parliament of Charles II., fines were appointed for all who withdrew themselves from the regular parish churches; but as, because of the law which gives the husband exclusive power over the goods held by him and his wife in communion, it was impossible to exact any fine for the delinquency of a married woman, it had become necessary to make the husband answerable when his wife offended. Under this arrangement, some ladies of rank, addicted to attending conventicles, had brought no small trouble upon their partners. The Council, at length feeling it was a hard law where the husband was a conformist, requested power from the king to remit the fines in such cases. Soon after the following case occurred.
Dec. 4.
1684.
David Balcanquel of that Ilk, having been, in virtue of the act, amerced in three years of his valued rent or fifteen hundred pounds, ‘upon the account of his wife not keeping the church,’ represented the matter very pathetically to the Privy Council, setting forth how he himself had always kept his parish church, and, ‘notwithstanding the distractions and disorders that have been in the country where he lives [Fife], has always demeaned himself as ane dutiful and loyal subject.’ The Council took the case into favourable consideration, and, ‘seeing it never was the intention of his majesty that his weel-affected subjects should be ruined by the mad and wilful opinions of phanatick wives, without any fault of their own’—seeing, moreover, that Balcanquel protested ‘it is not in his power to persuade his wife to go to church, notwithstanding of all the endeavours he has used for that effect, and he is willing to deliver her up to the Council to be disposed of at their pleasure‘—they agreed to discharge his fine, taking him only bound ‘to deliver up his wife to justice whenever required.’—P. C. R.
It was not always as in this case in regard to conventicle troubles. Wodrow had heard the following converse case ‘very weel attested:‘[314] About the time of the Circuit Court in 1685, there was an honest man in the parish of Baldernock, who was sore bested with a graceless and imperious wife, a hater of all seriousness. When he performed family worship, she interrupted him; when he went to a conventicle, she cursed him; and when he came home, she threw stools at him. Scarce durst the poor man return from these meetings without a few neighbours to protect him from his wife’s violence. Being denounced and cited to the court at Glasgow, he failed to appear; but she came forward, and, on his name being called, cried out: ‘My lords, it’s all true—he is a rebel; there is not a conventicle in all the country but he is at it. He deserves to be hanged. Hang him, my lords!’ The lords asked who she was, and on being told, and hearing her go on further in the same strain, they ordered the man to be scored out of the roll, saying: ‘That poor fellow suffers enough already from such a wife!’
Dec.
Amongst those now suffering under the severities of government, there was no one more remarkable than Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth, a Berwickshire gentleman of large fortune, of vigorous character, and great zeal as a Presbyterian and Whig. Though only recognised by the government as ‘a factious person,’ he had been several times rather severely handled. Being now under suspicion of a concern in the Rye-house plot, he was denounced on the 13th of November as guilty of treason, and obliged to go out of the way. The harshness with which his friend Robert Baillie of Jerviswood was treated, was sufficient to shew that the more closely he concealed himself the better.
1684.
Polwarth, who was a man of forty-three years of age, had a wife and ten children, all young, residing at his house of Redbraes in the Merse. Patrick, the eldest son, was taken up and put in prison; and on the 26th of December, there was a petition from him to the Privy Council, setting forth the piteous condition of the family now deprived of their father and threatened with the loss of their estate. He was but ‘a poor afflicted young boy,’ he said, who could do no harm to the state; he, moreover, cherished loyal principles and a hatred of plots. All he craved was liberty, that he might ‘see to some livelihood for himself,’ and ‘be in some condition to help and serve his disconsolate mother and the rest of his father’s ten starving children.’ The boon was granted grudgingly, the young man being obliged first to obtain security for his good-behaviour to the extent of two thousand pounds sterling.—P. C. R.
1684.
1684.
The first concealment of Sir Patrick was the family burial vault, under the east end of the parish church of Polwarth, a place where he had no fire, and only during the day light from an open slit in the wall. With the comfort of a bed and bed-clothes, he endured life in this singular Patmos for a whole winter month, supplied nightly with food by his daughter Grizzel, and having no sort of entertainment to beguile the tedium of the day but his own reflections, and the repetition of Buchanan’s Psalms, which had long been charged on his memory. Each night, the young Grizzel came with a packet of provisions, and stayed with him as long as she could, so as to get home before day. According to an interesting family memoir, written by her daughter, Lady Murray of Stanhope: ‘In all this time, my grandfather shewed the same constant composure and cheerfulness of mind, that he continued to possess to his death, which was at the age of eighty-four; all which good qualities she inherited from him in a high degree. Often did they laugh heartily in that doleful habitation, at different accidents that happened. She at that time had a terror for a church-yard, especially in the dark, as is not uncommon at her age, by idle nursery stories; but when engaged by concern for her father, she stumbled over the graves every night alone, without fear of any kind entering her thoughts, but for soldiers and parties in search of him, which the least noise or motion of a leaf put her in terror for. The minister’s house was near the church; the first night she went, his dogs kept such a barking, as put her in the utmost fear of a discovery; my grandmother sent for the minister the next day, and, under pretence of a mad dog, got him to hang all his dogs. There was also difficulty of getting victuals to carry him without the servants suspecting; the only way it was done, was by stealing it off her plate at dinner into her lap. Many a diverting story she has told about this, and other things of a like nature. Her father liked sheep’s head, and while the children were eating their broth, she had conveyed most of one into her lap; when her brother Sandy (the late Lord Marchmont) had done, he looked up with astonishment, and said: “Mother, will ye look at Grizzel; while we have been eating our broth, she has ate up the whole sheep’s head.” This occasioned so much mirth among them, that her father at night was greatly entertained by it, and desired Sandy might have a share in the next.... As the gloomy habitation my grandfather was in, was not to be long endured but from necessity, they were contriving other places of safety for him; amongst others, particularly one under a bed which drew out, in a ground-floor, in a room of which my mother kept the key. She and the same man worked in the night, making a hole in the earth, after lifting the boards, which they did by scratching it up with their hands, not to make any noise, till she had left not a nail upon her fingers; she helping the man to carry the earth as they dug it, in a sheet on his back out at the window into the garden; he then made a box at his own house, large enough for her father to lie in, with bed and bed-clothes, and bored holes in the boards for air. When all this was finished, for it was long about, she thought herself the most secure happy creature alive. When it had stood the trial for a month of no water coming into it, which was feared from being so low, and every day examined by my mother, and the holes for air made clear, and kept clean picked, her father ventured home, having that to trust to. After being at home a week or two, the bed daily examined as usual, one day, in lifting the boards, the bed bounced to the top, the box being full of water; in her life she was never so struck, and had near dropt down, it being at that time their only refuge. Her father, with great composure, said to his wife and her, he saw they must tempt providence no longer, and that it was now fit and necessary for him to go off, and leave them; in which he was confirmed, by the carrier telling for news he had brought from Edinburgh, that the day before, Mr Baillie of Jerviswood had his life taken from him at the Cross, and that everybody was sorry, though they durst not shew it. As all intercourse by letters was dangerous, it was the first notice they had of it, and the more shocking, that it was not expected. They immediately set about preparing for my grandfather’s going away. My mother worked night and day in making some alterations in his clothes for disguise; they were then obliged to trust John Allan, their grieve, who fainted away when he was told his master was in the house, and that he was to set out with him on horseback before day, and pretend to the rest of the servants that he had orders to sell some horses at Morpeth fair. Accordingly, my grandfather getting out at a window to the stables, they set out in the dark. Though, with good reason, it was a sorrowful parting, yet after he was fairly gone, they rejoiced, and thought themselves happy that he was in a way of being safe, though they were deprived of him, and little knew what was to be either his fate or their own.
‘My grandfather, whose thoughts were much employed, and went on as his horse carried him, without thinking of his way, found himself at Tweedside, out of his road, and at a place not fordable, and no servant. After pausing, and stopping a good while, he found means to get over, and get into the road on the other side, where, after some time, he met his servant, who shewed inexpressible joy at meeting him, and told him, as he rode first, he thought he was always following him, till upon a great noise of the galloping of horses, he looked about and missed him; this was a party sent to his house to take him up, where they searched very narrowly, and possibly hearing horses were gone from the house, suspected the truth and followed. They examined this man, who, to his great joy and astonishment, missed his master, and was too cunning for them, that they were gone back before my grandfather came up with him. He immediately quitted the high road, after a warning by so miraculous an escape, and in two days sent back his servant, which was the first notice they had at home of his not having fallen into their hands.’[315]
Sir Patrick escaped to Holland, whence he returned with the Prince of Orange to take a high place in the councils of his country under a happier régime.
Dec. 2.
We have seen many instances of Catholics deprived, under acts of parliament, of the privilege of educating their own children. This statutory power was now applied by the government to gentlefolk of what were called fanatical principles. The Lady Colville was imprisoned in the Edinburgh Tolbooth for her irregularities of religious practice, and particularly for ‘breeding up her son Lord Colville in fanaticism and other disloyal principles.’—Foun. Dec.
1685. Jan.
1685.
‘One James Cathcart, a pretended mathematician and astrologer, emitted a printed paper at Edinburgh, inviting any to come to him, and get resolutions of any difficult questions they had to ask, such as anent their death, their marriage, what husbands or wives they would get, and if they would prosper and succeed in such projects of love, or journeys, &c.; as also professed skill to cure diseases. This was a great impudence in a Christian commonwealth to avow such an art; for if he had it by magic, then he was a sorcerer; if not, he was an impostor and abuser of the people, which even is death.... In his paper, he cited some texts of Scripture, allowing an influence to the stars.’—Foun.
Mons Meg.