REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE: 1702–1714.
The death of King William without children (March 8, 1702), opened the succession to the Princess Anne, second daughter of the late King James. Following up the policy of her predecessor, she had not been more than two months upon the throne, when, in conjunction with Germany and Holland, she proclaimed war against the king of France, whose usurpation of the succession to Spain for a member of his family, had renewed a general feeling of hostility against him. This war, distinguished by the victories of the Duke of Marlborough, lasted till the peace of Utrecht in 1713. The queen had been many years married to Prince George of Denmark, and had had several children; but all were now dead.
King William left the people of Scotland in a state of violent discontent, on account chiefly of the usage they had received in the affair of Darien. Ever since the Revolution, there had been a large party, mainly composed of the upper classes, in favour of the exiled dynasty. It was largely reinforced, and its views were generally much promoted, by the odium into which the government of William III. had fallen, and by the feelings of jealousy and wrath which had been kindled against the whole English nation. This was not a natural state of things for Scotland, for the bulk of the people, Presbyterian at heart, could have no confidence in a restored sovereign of the House of Stuart; but anger had temporarily overcome many of the more permanent feelings of the people, and it was hard to say what course they might take in the dynastic difficulties which were impending.
In 1700, the English parliament, viewing the want of children to both William and the Princess Anne, had settled the crown of England upon the Electress Sophia of Hanover, daughter of the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King James I., she being the nearest Protestant heir; thus excluding not only the progeny of James II., but that of several elder children of the Princess Elizabeth, all of whom were of the Roman Catholic religion. It was highly desirable that the Scottish Estates should be induced to settle the crown of Scotland on the same person, in order that peace might be preserved between the two kingdoms; but the discontents of the Scotch stood in the way. Not that there existed in Scotland any insuperable desire for another person, or any special objection to Sophia; the great majority would probably have voted, in ordinary circumstances, for this very course. But Scotland had been wronged and insulted; it was necessary to shew the English that this could not be done with safety to themselves. She had a claim to equality of trading privileges: it was right that she should use all fair means to get this established. Accordingly, in 1703, the Scottish parliament passed two acts calculated to excite no small alarm in the south: one of them, styled the Act of Security, ordaining that the successor of Queen Anne should not be the same person with the individual adopted by the English parliament, unless there should be a free communication of trade between the two countries, and the affairs of Scotland thoroughly secured from English influence; the other, providing that, as a means of enforcing the first, the nation should be put under arms. The queen, after some hesitation, was obliged to ratify the Act of Security. In the debates on these measures, the Scottish parliament exhibited a degree of eloquence which was wholly a novelty, and the memory of which long survived. It was a remarkable crisis, in which a little nation, merely by the moral power which animated it, contrived to inspire fear and respect in one much its superior in numbers and every other material element of strength.
The general sense of danger thus created in England proved sufficient to overcome that mercantile selfishness which had inflicted so much injustice upon Scotland. It came to be seen, that the only way to secure a harmony with the northern kingdom in some matters essential to peace, was to admit it to an incorporating union, in which there should be a provision for an equality of mercantile privileges. To effect this arrangement, accordingly, became the policy of the English Whig ministry of Queen Anne. On the other hand, the proposition did not meet a favourable reception in Scotland, where the ancient national independence was a matter of national pride; nevertheless, there also a parliamentary sanction was obtained for the preliminary steps.
In May 1706, the Commissioners, thirty from each nation, met at Westminster, to deliberate on the terms of the proposed treaty. It was soon agreed upon that the leading features of the act should be—a union of the two countries under one sovereign, who, failing heirs of the queen, should be the Electress of Hanover or her heir; but each country to retain her own church establishment and her own laws—Scotland to send sixteen representative peers and forty-five commoners to the British parliament—Scottish merchants to trade freely with England and her colonies—the taxes to be equalised, except that from land, which was to be arranged in such a way that when England contributed two millions, Scotland should give only a fortieth part of the sum, or forty-eight thousand pounds; and as the English taxes were rendered burdensome by a debt of sixteen millions, Scotland was to be compensated for its share of that burden by receiving, as ‘an Equivalent,’ about four hundred thousand pounds of ready money from England, which was to be applied to the renovation of the coin, the discharge of the public debts, and a restitution of the money lost by the African Company.
When these articles were laid before the Scottish Estates in October, they produced a burst of indignant feeling that seemed to overspread the whole country. The Jacobite party, who saw in the union only the establishment of an alien dynasty, were furious. The clergy felt some alarm at the prelatic element in the British parliament. The mass of the people grieved over the prospect of a termination to the native parliament, and other tokens of an ancient independence. Nevertheless, partly that there were many men in the Estates who had juster views of the true interests of their country, and partly that others were open to various influences brought to bear upon their votes, the act of union was passed in February 1707, as to take effect from the ensuing 1st of May. The opposition was conducted principally by the Duke of Hamilton, a Jacobite, and, but for his infirmity of purpose, it might have been more formidable. The Duke of Queensberry, who acted on this occasion as the queen’s commissioner to parliament, was rewarded for his services with an English dukedom. The Privy Council, the record of whose proceedings has been of so much importance to this work, now came to an end; but a Secretary of State for Scotland continued for the next two reigns to be part of the apparatus of the central government in the English metropolis.
Of the discontent engendered on this occasion, the friends of the exiled Stuarts endeavoured to take advantage in the spring of 1708, by bringing a French expedition to the Scottish coasts, having on board five thousand men, and the son of James II., now a youth of twenty years of age. It reached the mouth of the Firth of Forth, and many of the Jacobite gentry were prepared to join the young prince on landing. But the Chevalier de St George, as he was called, took ill of small-pox; the British fleet under Admiral Byng came in sight; and it was deemed best to return to France, and wait for another opportunity.
The Tory ministry of the last four years of Queen Anne affected Scotland by the passing of an act of Toleration for the relief of the persecuted remnant of Episcopalians, and another act by which the rights of patrons in the nomination of clergy to charges in the Established Church were revived. The Whigs of the Revolution felt both of these measures to be discouraging. During this period, in Scotland, as in England, the Cavalier spirit was in the ascendency, and the earnest Whigs trembled lest, by complicity of the queen or her ministers, the Pretender should be introduced, to the exclusion of the Protestant heir. But the sudden death of Anne on the 1st of August 1714, neutralised all such schemes, and the son of the then deceased Electress Sophia succeeded to the British throne, under the name of George I., with as much apparent quietness as if he had been a resident Prince of Wales.
1702. July.
On the principle that minute matters, which denote a progress in improvement, or even a tendency to it, are worthy of notice, it may be allowable to remark at this time an advertisement of Mr George Robertson, apothecary at Perth, that he had lately set up there ‘a double Hummum, or Bath Stove, the one for men, and the other for women, approven of by physicians to be of great use for the cure of several diseases.’ A hummum is in reality a Turkish or hot-air bath. We find that, within twenty years after this time, the chirurgeons in Edinburgh had a bagnio, or hot bath, and the physicians a cold bath, for medical purposes.
The Edinburgh Gazette which advertises the Perth hummum, also announces the presence, in a lodging at the foot of the West Bow of Edinburgh, of Duncan Campbell of Ashfield, chirurgeon to the city of Glasgow, who had ‘cutted nine score persons [for stone] without the death of any except five.’[[313]] There was also a mysterious person, styled ‘a gentleman in town,’ and ‘to be got notice of at the Caledonian Coffee-house,’ who had ‘had a secret imparted to him by his father, an eminent physician in this kingdom, which, by the blessing of God, certainly and safely cures the phrenzie’—also ‘convulsion-fits, vapours, and megrims—in a few weeks, at reasonable rates, and takes no reward till the cure is perfected.’
In the same sheet, ‘G. Young, against the Court of Guard, Edinburgh,’ bespoke favour for ‘a most precious eye-water, which infallibly cures all distempers in the eyes, whether pearl, web, catracht, blood-shot dimness, &c., and in less than six times dressing has cured some who have been blind seven years.’
The custom of vending quack medicines from a public stage on the street—of which we have seen several notable examples in the |1702.| course of the seventeenth century—continued at this time, and for many years after, to be kept up. Edinburgh was occasionally favoured with a visit from a famous practitioner of this kind, named Anthony Parsons, who, in announcing his arrival in 1710, stated the quality of his medicines, and that he had been in the habit of vending them on stages for thirty years. In October 1711, he advertised in the Scots Postman—‘It being reported that Anthony Parsons is gone from Edinburgh to mount public stages in the country, this is to give notice that he hath left off keeping stages, and still lives in the Hammermen’s Land, at the Magdalen Chapel, near the head of the Cowgate, where may be had the Orvietan, a famous antidote against infectious distempers, and helps barrenness, &c.’ Four years later, Parsons announced his design of bidding adieu to Edinburgh, and, in that prospect, offered his medicines at reduced rates; likewise, by auction, ‘a fine cabinet organ.’[[314]]
In April 1724, one Campbell, commonly called (probably from his ragged appearance) Doctor Duds, was in great notoriety in Edinburgh as a quack mediciner. He does not seem to have been in great favour with the populace, for, being seen by them on the street, he was so vexatiously assaulted, as to be obliged to make his escape in a coach. At this time, a mountebank doctor erected a stage at the foot of the Canongate, in order to compete with Doctor Duds for a share of business; but a boy being killed by a fall from the fabric the day of its erection, threw a damp on his efforts at wit, and the affair appears to have proved a failure.[[315]]
The author just quoted had a recollection of one of the last of this fraternity—an Englishman, named Green—who boasted he was the third generation of a family which had been devoted to the profession. ‘A stage was erected in the most public part of a town, and occupied by the master, with one or two tumblers or rope-dancers, who attracted the multitude. Valuable medicines were promised and distributed by a kind of lottery. Each spectator, willing to obtain a prize, threw a handkerchief, enclosing one or two shillings, on the stage. The handkerchief was returned with a certain quantity of medicines. But along with them, a silver cup was put into one to gratify some successful adventurer.’
‘Doctor Green, younger of Doncaster’—probably the second of the three generations—had occasion, in December 1725, to advertise |1702.| the Scottish community regarding his ‘menial servant and tumbler,’ Henry Lewis, who, he said, had deserted his service with a week’s prepaid wages in his pocket, and, as the doctor understood, ‘has resorted to Fife, or some of the north-country burghs, with design to get himself furnished with a play-fool, and to set himself up for a doctor experienced in the practice of physic and chirurgery.’ Doctor Green deemed himself obliged to warn Fife and the said burghs, whither he himself designed to resort in spring, against ‘the said impostor, and to dismiss him as such.’[[316]]
We have this personage brought before us in an amusing light, in May 1731, in connection with the King’s College, Aberdeen. He had applied to this learned sodality for a diploma as doctor of medicine, ‘upon assurances given under his hand, that he would practise medicine in a regular way, and give over his stage.’ They had granted him the diploma accordingly. Finding, afterwards, that he still continued to use his stage, ‘the college, to vindicate their conduct in the affair, and at the same time, in justice to the public, to expose Mr Green his disingenuity, recorded in the Register of Probative Writs his letter containing these assurances.’ They also certified ‘that, if Mr Green give not over his stage, they will proceed to further resentment against him.’[[317]]
Down to this time there was still an entire faith among the common sort of people in the medical properties of natural crystals, perforated stones, ancient jet ornaments, flint arrow-heads, glass beads, and other articles. The custom was to dip the article into water, and administer the water to the patient. The Stewarts of Ardvorlich still possess a crystal which was once in great esteem throughout Lower Perthshire for the virtues which it could impart to simple water. A flat piece of ivory in the possession of Campbell of Barbreck—commonly called Barbreck’s Bone—was sovereign for the cure of madness. This article is now deposited in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries in Edinburgh. The Lee Penny—a small precious stone, set in an old English coin, still possessed by the Lockharts of Lee—is another and highly noted example of such charms for healing.
It was also still customary to resort to certain wells and other waters, on account of their supposed healing virtues, as we have seen to be the case a century earlier. Either the patient was brought to the water, and dipped into it, or a fragment of his |1702.| clothing was brought and cast into, or left on the side of it, a shackle or tether of a cow serving equally when such an animal was concerned. If such virtues had continued to be attributed only to wells formerly dedicated to saints, it would not have been surprising; but the idea of medicinal virtue was sometimes connected with a lake or other piece of water, which had no such history. There was, for example, on the high ground to the west of Drumlanrig Castle, in Nithsdale, a small tarn called the Dow [i. e. black] Loch, which enjoyed the highest medical repute all over the south of Scotland. People came from immense distances to throw a rag from a sick friend, or a tether from an afflicted cow, into the Dow Loch, when, ‘these being cast in, if they did float, it was taken for a good omen of recovery, and a part of the water carried to the patient, though to remote places, without saluting or speaking to any one they met by the way; but, if they did sink, the recovery of the party was hopeless.’[[318]] The clergy exerted themselves strenuously to put down the superstition. The trouble which the presbytery of Penpont had, first and last, with this same Dow Loch, was past expression. But their efforts were wholly in vain.[[319]]
1702. July 3.
‘It pleased the great and holy God to visit this town [Leith], for their heinous sins against him, with a very terrible and sudden stroke, which was occasioned by the firing of thirty-three barrels of powder; which dreadful blast, as it was heard even at many miles distance with great terror and amazement, so it hath caused great ruin and desolation in this place. It smote seven or eight persons at least with sudden death, and turned the houses next adjacent to ruinous heaps, tirred off the roof, beat out the windows, and broke out the timber partitions of a great many houses and biggings even to a great distance. Few houses in the town did escape some damage, and all this in a moment of time; so that the merciful conduct of Divine Providence hath been very admirable in the preservation of hundreds of people, whose lives were exposed to manifold sudden dangers, seeing they had not so much previous warning as to shift a foot for their own preservation, much less to remove their plenishing.’ So proceeded a petition from ‘the distressed inhabitants of Leith’ to the Privy Council, on the occasion of this sore calamity. ‘Seeing,’ they went on to say, ‘that part of the town is destroyed and damnified to the value of thirty-six thousand nine hundred and thirty-six pounds, Scots money, by and attour several other damages done in several back-closes, and by and attour the household plenishing and merchant goods destroyed in the said houses, and victual destroyed and damnified in lofts, and the losses occasioned by the houses lying waste; and seeing the owners of the said houses are for the most part unable to repair them, so that a great part of the principal seaport of the nation will be desolate and ruinous, if considerable relief be not provided,’ they implored permission to make a charitable collection throughout the kingdom at kirk-doors, and by going from house to house; which prayer was readily granted.[[320]]
July 8.
The Earl of Kintore, who had been made Knight Marischal of Scotland at the Restoration, and afterwards raised to the peerage for his service in saving the regalia from the English in 1651, was still living.[[321]] He petitioned the Privy Council at this date on account of a pamphlet published by Sir William Ogilvie of Barras, in which his concern in the preservation of the regalia was unduly depreciated. His lordship gives a long recital on the subject, from which it after all appears that his share of the business was confined to his discommending obedience to |1702.| be paid to a state order for sending out the regalia from Dunnottar Castle—in which case it was likely they might have been taken—and afterwards doing what he could to put the English on a false scent, by representing the regalia as carried to the king at Paris. He denounces the pamphlet as an endeavour ‘to rob him of his just merit and honour, and likewise to belie his majesty’s patents in his favour,’ and he craved due punishment. Sir William, being laid up with sickness at Montrose, was unable to appear in his own defence, and the Council, accordingly, without hesitation, ordered the offensive brochure to be publicly burnt at the Cross of Edinburgh by the common hangman.
David Ogilvie, younger of Barras, was soon after fined in a hundred pounds for his concern in this so-called libel.[[322]]
There is something unaccountable in the determination evinced at various periods to assign the glory of the preservation of the regalia to the Earl of Kintore, the grand fact of the case being that these sacred relics were saved by the dexterity and courage of the unpretending woman—Mrs Grainger—the minister’s wife of Kineff, who, by means of her servant, got them carried out of Dunnottar Castle through the beleaguering lines of the English, and kept them in secrecy under ground for eight years. See under March 1652.
Aug.
The arrangements of the Post-office, as established by the act of 1695, were found to be not duly observed, in as far as common carriers presumed to carry letters in tracts where post-offices were erected, ‘besides such as relate to goods sent or to be returned to them.’ A very strict proclamation was now issued against this practice, and forbidding all who were not noblemen or gentlemen’s servants to ‘carry, receive, or deliver any letters where post-offices are erected.’
Inviolability of letters at the Post-office was not yet held in respect as a principle. In July 1701, two letters from Brussels, ‘having the cross upon the back of them,’ had come with proper addresses under cover to the Edinburgh postmaster. He ‘was surprised with them,’ and brought them to the Lord Advocate, who, however, on opening them, found they were ‘of no value, being only on private business;’ wherefore he ordered them to be delivered by the postmaster to the persons to whom they were directed.
1702.
Long after this period—in 1738—the Earl of Ilay, writing to Sir Robert Walpole from Edinburgh, said: ‘I am forced to send this letter by a servant twenty miles out of town, where the Duke of Argyle’s attorney cannot handle it.’ It sounds strangely that Lord Hay should thus have had to complain of his own brother; that one who was supreme in Scotland, should have been under such a difficulty from an opposition noble; and that there should have been, at so recent a period, a disregard to so needful a principle. But this is not all. Lord Ilay, in time succeeding his brother as Duke of Argyle, appears to have also taken up his part at the Edinburgh Post-office. In March 1748, General Bland, commander of the forces in Scotland, wrote to the Secretary of State, ‘that his letters were opened at the Edinburgh Post-office; and I think this is done by order of a noble duke, in order to know my secret sentiments of the people and of his Grace. If this practice is not stopped, the ministers cannot hope for any real information.’ Considering the present sound administration of the entire national institution by the now living inheritor of that peerage, one cannot without a smile hear George Chalmers telling[[323]] how the Edinburgh Post-office, in the reign of the second George, was ‘infested by two Dukes of Argyle!’
It will be heard, however, with some surprise, that the Lord Advocate may still be considered as having the power, in cases where the public interests are concerned, to order the examination of letters in the Post-office. So lately as 1789, when the unhappy duellist, Captain Macrae, fled from justice, his letters were seized at the Post-office by order of the Justice-clerk Braxfield.
The sport of cock-fighting had lately been introduced into Scotland, and a cock-pit was now in operation in Leith Links, where the charges for admission were 10d. for the front row, 7d. for the second, and 4d. for the third. Soon after, ‘the passion for cock-fighting was so general among all ranks of the people, that the magistrates [of Edinburgh] discharged its being practised on the streets, on account of the disturbances it occasioned.’[[324]]
1702.
William Machrie, who taught in Edinburgh what he called ‘the severe and serious, but necessary exercise of the sword,’ had also given a share of his attention to cock-fighting—a sport which he deemed ‘as much an art, as the managing of horses for races or for the field of battle.’ It was an art in vogue over all Europe—though ‘kept up only by people of rank, and never sunk down to the hands of the commonalty’—and he, for his part, had studied it carefully: he had read everything on the subject, conversed and corresponded on it with ‘the best cockers in Britain,’ carefully observing their practice, and passing through a long experience of his own.
Thus prepared, Mr Machrie published in Edinburgh, in 1705, a brochure, styled An Essay on the Innocent and Royal Recreation and Art of Cocking, consisting of sixty-three small pages; from which we learn that he had been the means of introducing the sport into Edinburgh. The writer of a prefixed set of verses evidently considered him as one of the great reformers of the age:
‘Long have you taught the art of self-defence,
Improved our safety then, but now our sense,
Teaching us pleasure with a small expense.’
For his own part, considering the hazard and expense which attended horse-racing and hawking, he was eager to proclaim the superior attractions of cocking, as being a sport from which no such inconveniences arose. The very qualities of the bird recommended it—namely, ‘his Spanish gait, his Florentine policy, and his Scottish valour in overcoming and generosity in using his vanquished adversary.’ The ancients called him an astronomer, and he had been ‘an early preacher of repentance, even convincing Peter, the first pope, of his holiness’s fallibility.’ ‘Further,’ says he, ‘if variety and change of fortune be any way prevalent to engage the minds of men, as commonly it is, to prefer one recreation to another, it will beyond all controversy be found in cocking more than any other. Nay, the eloquence of Tully or art of Apelles could never with that life and exactness represent fortune metamorphosed in a battle, as doth cocking; for here you’ll see brave attacks and as brave defiances, bloody strugglings, and cunning and handsome retreats; here you’ll see generous fortitude ignorant of interest,’ &c.
Mr Machrie, therefore, goes con amore into his subject, fully trusting that his treatise on ‘this little but bold animal could not |1702.| be unacceptable to a nation whose martial temper and glorious actions in the field have rendered them famed beyond the limits of the Christian world;’ a sentence from which we should have argued that our author was a native of a sister-island, even if the fact had not been indicated by his name.
Mr Machrie gives many important remarks on the natural history of the animal—tells us many secrets about its breeding; instructs us in the points which imply strength and valour; gives advices about feeding and training; and exhibits the whole policy of the pit. Finally, he says, ‘I am not ashamed to declare to the world that I have a special veneration and esteem for those gentlemen, within and about this city, who have entered in society for propagating and establishing the royal recreation of cocking (in order to which they have already erected a cock-pit in the Links of Leith); and I earnestly wish that their generous and laudable example may be imitated in that degree that, in cock-war, village may be engaged against village, city against city, kingdom against kingdom, nay, the father against the son, until all the wars in Europe, wherein so much Christian blood is spilt, be turned into the innocent pastime of cocking.’
Machrie advertised, in July 1711, that he was not the author of a little pamphlet on Duelling, which had been lately published with his name and style on the title-page—‘William Machrie, Professor of both Swords.’ He denounced this publication as containing ridiculous impossibilities in his art, such as ‘pretending to parry a pistol-ball with his sword.’ Moreover, it contained ‘indiscreet reflections on the learned Mr Bickerstaff [of the Tatler],’ ‘contrary to his [Machrie’s] natural temper and inclination, as well as that civility and good manners which his years, experience, and conversation in the world have taught him.’[[325]]
The amusement of cock-fighting long kept a hold of the Scottish people. It will now be scarcely believed that, through the greater part of the eighteenth century, and till within the recollection of persons still living, the boys attending the parish and burghal schools were encouraged to bring cocks to school at Fasten’s E’en (Shrove-tide), and devote an entire day to this barbarising sport. The slain birds and fugies (so the craven birds were called) became the property of the schoolmaster. The minister of Applecross, in Ross-shire, in his account of the parish, written about 1790, |1702.| coolly tells us that the schoolmaster’s income is composed of two hundred merks, with payments from the scholars of 1s. 6d. for English, and 2s. 6d. for Latin, and ‘the cock-fight dues, which are equal to one quarter’s payment for each scholar.’[[326]]
A Short Account of Scotland, written, it is understood, by an English gentleman named Morer, and published this year, presents a picture of our country as it appeared to an educated stranger before the union. The surface was generally unenclosed; oats and barley the chief grain products; wheat little cultivated; little hay made for winter, the horses then feeding chiefly on straw and oats. The houses of the gentry, heretofore built for strength, were now beginning to be ‘modish, both in fabric and furniture.’ But ‘still their avenues are very indifferent, and they want their gardens, which are the beauty and pride of our English seats.’ Orchards were rare, and ‘their apples, pears, and plums not of the best kind;’ their cherries tolerably good; ‘for gooseberries, currants, strawberries, and the like, they have of each, but growing in gentlemen’s gardens; and yet from thence we sometimes meet them in the markets of their boroughs.’ The people of the Lowlands partly depended on the Highlands for cattle to eat; and the Highlanders, in turn, carried back corn, of which their own country did not grow a sufficiency.
Mr Morer found that the Lowlanders were dressed much like his own countrymen, excepting that the men generally wore bonnets instead of hats, and plaids instead of cloaks; the women, too, wearing plaids when abroad or at church. Women of the humbler class generally went barefoot, ‘especially in summer.’ The children of people of the better sort, ‘lay and clergy,’ were likewise generally without shoes and stockings. Oaten-cakes, baked on a plate of iron over the fire, were the principal bread used. Their flesh he admits to have been ‘good enough,’ but he could not say the same for their cheese or butter. They are ‘fond of tobacco, but more from the snish-box than the pipe.’ Snuff, indeed, had become so necessary to them, that ‘I have heard some of them say, should their bread come in competition with it, they would rather fast than their snish should be taken away. Yet mostly it consists of the coarsest tobacco, dried by the fire, and powdered in a little engine after the form of a tap, which they |1702.| carry in their pockets, and is both a mill to grind and a box to keep it in.’
Dresses of the People of Scotland.—From Speed’s Atlas, 1676.
Stage-coaches did not as yet exist, but there were a few hackneys at Edinburgh, which might be hired into the country upon urgent occasions. ‘The truth is, the roads will hardly allow them those conveniences, which is the reason that the gentry, men and women, choose rather to use their horses. However, their great men often travel with coach-and-six, but with so little 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.’
Another Englishman, who made an excursion into Scotland in 1704, gives additional particulars, but to the same general purport. At Edinburgh, he got good French wine at 20d., and Burgundy at 10d. a quart. The town appeared to him scarcely so large as York or Newcastle, but extremely populous, and containing abundance of beggars. ‘The people here,’ he says, ‘are very proud, and call the ordinary tradesmen merchants.’ ‘At the best houses they dress their victuals after the French method, though perhaps not so cleanly, and a soup is commonly the first dish; and their reckonings are dear enough. The servant-maids attended without shoes or stockings.’
At Lesmahago, a village in Lanarkshire, he found the people living on cakes made of pease and barley mixed. ‘They ate no meat, nor drank anything but water, all the year round; and the common people go without shoes or stockings all the year round. I pitied their poverty, but observed the people were fresh and |1702.| lusty, and did not seem to be under any uneasiness with their way of living.’
In the village inn, ‘I had,’ says he, ‘an enclosed room to myself, with a chimney in it, and dined on a leg of veal, which is not to be had at every place in this country.’ At another village—Crawford-John—‘the houses are either of earth or loose stones, or are raddled, and the roofs are of turf, and the floors the bare ground. They are but one story high, and the chimney is a hole in the roof, and the fireplace is in the middle of the floor. Their seats and beds are of turf earthed over, and raddled up near the fireplace, and serve for both uses. Their ale is pale, small, and thick, but at the most common minsh-houses [taverns], they commonly have good French brandy, and often French wine, so common are these French liquors in this country.’
Our traveller, being at Crawford-John on a Sunday, went to the parish church, which he likens to a barn. He found it ‘mightily crowded, and two gentlemen’s seats in it with deal-tops over them. They begin service here about nine in the morning, and continue it till about noon, and then rise, and the minister goes to the minsh-house, and so many of them as think fit, and refresh themselves. The rest stay in the churchyard for about half an hour, and then service begins again, and continues till about four or five. I suppose the reason of this is, that most of the congregations live too far from the church to go home and return to church in time.’[[327]]
The general conditions described by both of these travellers exhibit little, if any advance upon those presented in the journey of the Yorkshire squire in 1688,[[328]] or even that of Ray the naturalist in 1661.[[329]]
1703. Jan. 24.
George Young, a shopkeeper in the High Street of Edinburgh, was appointed by the magistrates as a constable, along with several other citizens in the like capacity, ‘to oversee the manners and order of the burgh and inhabitants thereof.’ On the evening of the day noted, being Sunday, he went ‘through some parts of the town, to see that the Lord’s Day and laws made for the observance thereof were not violat.’ ‘Coming to the house of Marjory Thom, relict of James Allan, vintner, a little before ten o’clock, and |1703.| finding in the house several companies in different rooms, [he] did soberly and Christianly expostulate with the mistress of the house for keeping persons in her house at such unseasonable hours, and did very justly threaten to delate her to the magistrates, to be rebuked for the same. [He] did not in the least offer to disturb any of her guests, but went away, and as [he was] going up the close to the streets, he and the rest was followed by Mr Archibald Campbell, eldest son to Lord Niel Campbell, who quarrelled him for offering to delate the house to the magistrates, [telling him] he would make him repent it.’ So runs George Young’s own account of the matter. It was rather unlucky for him, in his turn at this duty, to have come into collision with Mr Campbell, for the latter was first-cousin to the Duke of Argyle, and a person of too much consequence to be involved in a law which only works sweetly against the humbler classes, being, indeed, mainly designed for their benefit.
To pursue Young’s narrative. ‘Mr Archibald came next day with some others towards the said George his shop, opposite to the Guard [house], and called at his shop, which was shut by the hatch or half-door: “Sirrah, sirrah!” which George not observing, nor apprehending his discourse was directed to him, Mr Archibald called again to this purpose: “I spoke to you, Young the constable.” Whereupon, George civilly desiring to know his pleasure, he expressed himself thus: “Spark, are you in any better humour to-day than you was last night?” George answered, he was the same to-day he was last night. “I was about my duty last night, and am so to-day. I hope I have not offended you; and pray, sir, do not disturb me.” Mr Archibald, appearing angry, and challenging George for his taking notice of Mrs Allan’s house, again asked him if he was in any better temper, or words to that purpose; [to which] George again replied, He was the same he was, and prayed him to be gone, because he seemed displeased. Whereupon Mr Archibald taking hold of his sword, as [if] he would have drawn it, George, being within the half-door, fearing harm, threw open the door, and came out to Mr Archibald, and endeavoured to catch hold of his sword. Mr Archibald did beat him upon the eye twice or thrice, and again took hold of his sword to draw and run at him; which he certainly had done, if not interrupted by the bystanders, who took hold of his sword and held him, till that the Town-guard seized Mr Archibald, and made him prisoner.’
Mr Campbell, being speedily released upon bail, did not wait to |1702.| be brought before the magistrates, but raised a process against Young before the Privy Council, ‘intending thereby to discourage all laudable endeavours to get extravagancy and disorder [repressed].’ In the charge which he brought forward, Mr Campbell depicts himself as walking peaceably on the High Street, when Young attacked him, seized his sword, and declared him prisoner, without any previous offence on his part. The Guard thereafter dragged him to their house, maltreating him by the way, and kept him a prisoner till his friends assembled and obtained his liberation. The process went through various stages during the next few weeks, and at length, on the 9th of March, the Council found Young guilty of a riot, and fined him in four hundred merks (upwards of £22 sterling), to be paid to Mr Campbell for his expenses; further ordaining the offender to be imprisoned till the money was forthcoming.
To do the Duke of Argyle justice, his name does not appear in the list of the councillors who sat that day.
Mar. 6.
Sir John Bell, a former magistrate of Glasgow, kept up a modest frame of Episcopal worship in that Presbyterian city, having occasionally preachers, who were not always qualified by law, to officiate in his house. On the 30th of January, a boy-mob assailed the house while worship was going on, and some windows were broken. However, the magistrates were quickly on the spot, and the tumult was suppressed.
A letter from the queen to the Privy Council, dated the 4th February, glanced favourably at the Episcopalian dissenters of Scotland, enjoining that the clergy of that persuasion should live peaceably in relation to the Established Church, and that they should, while doing so, be protected in the exercise of their religion. It was a sour morsel to the more zealous Presbyterians, clergy and laity, who, not from any spirit of revenge, but merely from bigoted religious feelings, would willingly have seen all Episcopalians banished at the least. At Glasgow, where a rumour got up that some Episcopalian places of worship would be immediately opened under sanction of her majesty’s letter, much excitement prevailed. Warned by a letter from the Lord Chancellor, the magistrates of the city took measures for preserving the peace, and they went to church on the 7th of March, under a full belief that there was no immediate likelihood of its being broken. The Episcopalians, however, were in some alarm about the symptoms of popular feeling, and it was deemed |1703.| necessary to plant a guard of gentlemen, armed with swords, in front of the door of Sir John Bell’s house, where they were to enjoy the ministrations of a clergyman named Burgess. Some rude boys gathered about, and soon came to rough words with this volunteer guard, who, chasing them with their swords, and, it is said, violent oaths, along the Saltmarket, roused a general tumult amongst all who were not at church. The alarm soon passed into the churches. The people poured out, and flocked to the house where they knew that the Episcopalians were gathered. The windows were quickly smashed. The worshippers barricaded and defended themselves; but the crowd broke in with fore-hammers, though apparently hardly knowing for what purpose. The magistrates came with some soldiers; reasoned, entreated, threatened; apprehended a few rioters, who were quickly rescued; and finally thought it best to limit themselves to conducting the scared congregation to their respective homes—a task they successfully accomplished. ‘Afterwards,’ say the magistrates, ‘we went and did see Sir John Bell in his house, where Mr Burgess, the minister, was; and, in the meantime, when we were regretting the misfortune that had happened to Sir John and his family, who had merited much from his civil carriage when a magistrate in this place, it was answered to us by one of his sons present, that they had got what they were seeking, and would rather that that had fallen out than if it had been otherways.’
The Privy Council, well aware how distasteful any outrages against the Episcopalians would be at court, took pains to represent this affair in duly severe terms in their letters to the secretaries of state in London. They also took strong measures to prevent any similar tumult in future, and to obtain reparation of damages for Sir John Bell.
Generally, the condition of Episcopal ministers continued to be uncomfortable. In February 1705, Dr Richard Waddell, who had been Archdean of St Andrews before the Revolution, and was banished from that place in 1691, but had lately returned under protection of her majesty’s general indemnity, became the subject of repressive measures on the part of the Established Church. Letters of horning were raised against him by ‘John Blair, agent for the kirk,’ and, notwithstanding strong protestations of loyalty to the queen, he was ordained by the Privy Council once more ‘to remove furth of the town and parochine of St Andrews, and not return thereto.’[[330]]
1703. Apr.
An elderly woman named Marion Lillie, residing at Spott, in East Lothian, was in the hands of the kirk-session, on account of the general repute she lay under as a witch. Amidst the tedious investigations of her case in the parish register, it is impossible to see more than that she occasionally spoke ungently to and of her neighbours, and had frightened a pregnant woman to a rather unpleasant extremity by handling her rudely. The Rigwoodie Witch,[[331]] as a neighbour called her, was now turned over to a magistrate, to be dealt with according to law; but of her final fate we have no account.
Spott is a place of sad fame, its minister having basely murdered his wife in 1570,[[332]] and the estate having belonged to a gentleman named Douglas, whom we have seen concerned in the slaughter of Sir James Home of Eccles, and who on that account became a forfeited outlaw.[[333]] The wife of a subsequent proprietor, a gambler named Murray, was daughter to the Lord Forrester, who was stabbed with his own sword by his mistress at Corstorphine in 1679.[[334]] There is extant a characteristic letter of this lady to Lord Alexander Hay, son of the Earl of Tweeddale, on his bargaining, soon after this time, for the estate, with her husband, without her consent—in which she makes allusion to the witches of Spott:
‘THES TO LORD ALEXANDER HAY.
‘Spott, 19 May.
‘This way of proceeding, my lord, will seem verey abrupte and inconsiderat to you; but I laye my count with the severest censer you or may malicious enemies can or will saye of me. So, not to be tedious, all I have to speak is this: I think you most absurd to [have] bought the lands of Spott from Mr Murray without my consent, which you shall never have now; and I hope to be poseser of Spott hous when you are att the divel; and believe me, my childrin’s curse and mine will be a greater moth in your estate than all your ladey and your misirable wretchedness can make up and pray [pay].
‘This is no letter of my lord Bell Heavins, and tho you saye, in spite of the divell, you’le buy it befor this time twell month, you may come to repent it; but thats non of my bisnes. I shall only saye this, you are basely impertinent to thrust me away in a hurrey from my houss at Whitsunday, when I designed not |1703.| to go till Martinmis: and I wish the ghosts of all the witches that ever was about Spott may haunt you, and make you the unfortountest man that ever lived, that you may see you was in the wrong in makeing aney such bargain without the consent of your mortal enemy,
Clara Murray.’[[335]]
July 1.
The country was at this time in a state of incandescent madness regarding its nationality, and the public feeling found expression through the medium of parliament. By its order, there was this day burned at the Cross of Edinburgh, by the hangman, a book entitled Historia Anglo-Scotica, by James Drake, ‘containing many false and injurious reflections upon the sovereignty and independency of this nation.’ In August 1705, when the passion was even at a greater height, the same fate was awarded by the legislature to a book, entitled The Superiority and Direct Dominion of the Imperial Crown of England over the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland; also to a pamphlet, called The Scots Patriot Unmasked, both being the production of William Atwood. On the same day that the latter order was given, the parliament decreed the extraordinary sum of £4800 (Scots?) to Mr James Anderson, for a book he had published, A Historical Essay shewing that the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland is Imperial and Independent. Nor was this all, for at the same time it was ordered that ‘Mr James Hodges, who hath in his writings served this nation,’ should have a similar reward.[[336]]
Sep. 3.
The Scottish parliament at this time patronised literature to a considerable extent, though a good deal after the manner of the poor gentleman who bequeathed large ideal sums to his friends, and comforted himself with the reflection, that it at least shewed good-will. Alexander Nisbet had prepared a laborious work on heraldry,[[337]] tracing its rise, and describing all its various figures, besides ‘shewing by whom they are carried amongst us, and for what reasons,’ thus instructing the gentlefolk of this country of their ‘genealogical pennons,’ and affording assistance to ‘curious antiquaries’ in understanding ‘seals, medals, historie, and ancient records.’ But Alexander was unable of his own means to publish |1703.| so large a work, for which it would be necessary to get italic types, ‘whereof there are very few in this kingdom,’ and which also required a multitude of copper engravings to display ‘the armorial ensigns of this ancient kingdom.’ Accordingly, on his petition, the parliament (September 3, 1703), recommended the Treasury to grant him £248, 6s. 8d. sterling ‘out of what fund they shall think fit.’[[338]]
Aug. 9.
In 1695, the Scottish parliament forbade the sale of rum, as interfering with the consumpt of ‘strong waters made of malt,’ and because the article itself was ‘rather a drug than a liquor, and highly prejudicial to the health of all who drink it.’ Now, however, Mr William Cochrane of Kilmaronock, John Walkenshaw of Barrowfield, John Forbes of Knaperna, and Robert Douglas, merchant in Leith, designed to set up a sugar-work and ‘stillarie for distilling of rum’ in Leith, believing that such could never be ‘more necessary and beneficial to the country, and for the general use and advantage of the lieges, than in this time of war, when commodities of that nature, how necessary soever, can hardly be got from abroad.’ On their petition, the designed work was endowed by the Privy Council with the privileges of a manufactory.
Sep. 10.
The steeple of the Tolbooth of Tain had lately fallen in the night, to the great hazard of the lives of the prisoners, and some considerable damage to the contiguous parish church. On the petition of the magistrates of this poor little burgh, the Privy Council ordained a collection to be made for the reconstruction of the building; and, meanwhile, creditors were enjoined to transport their prisoners to other jails.
Nearly about the same time, voluntary collections were ordained by the Privy Council, for erecting a bridge over the Dee at the Black Ford; for the construction of a harbour at Cromarty, ‘where a great quantity of the victual that comes to the south is loadened;’ and for making a harbour at Pennan, on the estate of William Baird of Auchmedden, in Aberdeenshire, where such a convenience was eminently required for the shelter of vessels, and where ‘there is likewise a millstone quarry belonging to the petitioner [Baird], from which the greatest part of the mills in the kingdom are served by sea.’
1703. Nov. 11.
Amidst the endless instances of misdirected zeal and talent which mark the time, there is a feeling of relief and gratification even in so small and commonplace a matter as an application to the Privy Council, which now occurs, from Mr William Forbes, advocate, for a copyright in a work he had prepared under the name of A Methodical Treatise of Bills of Exchange. The case is somewhat remarkable in itself, as an application by an author, such applications being generally from stationers and printers.
Dec.
Usually, in our day, the opposing solicitors in a cause do not feel any wrath towards each other. It was different with two agents employed at this time in the Court of Session on different interests, one of them being Patrick Comrie, who acted in the capacity of ‘doer’ for the Laird of Lawers. To him, one day, as he lounged through the Outer House, came up James Leslie, a ‘writer,’ who entered into some conversation with him about Lawers’s business, and so provoked him, that he struck Leslie in the face, in the presence of many witnesses. Leslie appealed to the court, on the strength of an old statute which decreed death to any one guilty of violence in the presence of the Lords, and Comrie was apprehended. There then arose many curious and perplexing questions among the judges as to the various bearings of the case; but all were suddenly solved by Comrie obtaining a remission of his offence from the queen.[[339]]
In this year was published[[340]] the first intelligent topographical book regarding Scotland, being ‘A Description of the Western Isles, by M. Martin, Gentleman.’ It gives accurate information regarding the physical peculiarities of these islands, and their numberless relics of antiquity, besides many sensible hints as to means for improving the industry of the inhabitants. The author, who seems to have been a native of Skye, writes like a well-educated man for his age, and as one who had seen something of life in “busier scenes than those supplied by his own country. He has also thought proper to give an ample account of many superstitious practices of the Hebrideans, and to devote a chapter to the alleged power of second-sight, which was then commonly attributed to special individuals throughout the whole of Celtic Scotland. All this he does in the same sober painstaking manner in which he tells of matters connected with the rural economy of the people, |1703.| fully shewing that he himself reposed entire faith in the alleged phenomena. In the whole article, indeed, he scarcely introduces a single expression of a dogmatic character, either in the way of defending the belief or ridiculing it, but he very calmly furnishes answers, based on what he considered as facts, to sundry objections which had been taken against it. But for his book, we should have been much in the dark regarding a system which certainly made a great mark on the Highland mind in the seventeenth century, and was altogether as remarkable, perhaps, as the witch superstitions of the Lowlands during the same period.
He tells us—‘The second-sight is a singular faculty of seeing an otherwise invisible object, without any previous means used by the person that sees it, for that end. The vision makes such a lively impression upon the seers, that they neither see nor think of anything else, except the vision, as long as it continues, and then they appear pensive or jovial, according to the object which was represented to them.
‘At the sight of a vision, the eyelids of the person are erected, and the eyes continue staring until the object vanish. This is obvious to others who are by, when the persons happen to see a vision, and occurred more than once to my own observation, and to others who were with me.’
The seers were persons of both sexes and of all ages, ‘generally illiterate, well-meaning people;’ not people who desired to make gain by their supposed faculty, or to attract notice to themselves—not drunkards or fools—but simple country people, who were rather more apt to feel uneasy in the possession of a gift so strange, than to use it for any selfish or unworthy purpose. It really appears to have been generally regarded as an uncomfortable peculiarity; and there were many instances of the seers resorting to prayers and other religious observances in order to get quit of it.
The vision came upon the seer unpremonishedly, and in all imaginable circumstances. If early in the morning, which was not frequent, then the prediction was expected to be accomplished within a few hours; the later in the day, the accomplishment was expected at the greater distance of time. The things seen were often of an indifferent nature, as the arrival of a stranger; often of a character no less important than the death of individuals. If a woman was seen standing at a man’s left hand, it was a presage that she would be his wife, even though one of the parties might then be the mate of another. Sometimes several women would be seen standing in a row beside a man, in which case it was expected |1703.| that the one nearest would be his first wife, and so on with the rest in their turns.
When the arrival of a stranger was predicted, his dress, stature, complexion, and general appearance would be described, although he might be previously unknown to the seer. If of the seer’s acquaintance, his name would be told, and the humour he was in would be described from the countenance he bore. ‘I have been seen thus myself,’ says Martin, ‘by seers of both sexes at some hundred miles’ distance; some that saw me in this manner, had never seen me personally, and it happened according to their visions, without any previous design of mine to go to those places, my coming there being purely accidental.’
It will be remembered that, when Dr Johnson and Boswell travelled through the Hebrides in 1773, the latter was told an instance of such prediction by the gentleman who was the subject of the story—namely, M‘Quarrie, the Laird of Ulva. ‘He had gone to Edinburgh, and taken a man-servant along with him. An old woman who was in the house said one day: “M‘Quarrie will be at home to-morrow, and will bring two gentlemen with him;” and she said she saw his servant return in red and green. He did come home next day. He had two gentlemen with him, and his servant had a new red and green livery, which M‘Quarrie had bought for him at Edinburgh, upon a sudden thought, not having the least intention when he left home to put his servant in livery; so that the old woman could not have heard any previous mention of it. This, he assured us, was a true story.’[[341]]
Martin tells a story of the same character, but even more striking in its various features. The seer in this case was Archibald Macdonald, who lived in the isle of Skye about the time of the Revolution. One night before supper, at Knockowe, he told the family he had just then seen the strangest thing he ever saw in his life; to wit, a man with an ugly long cap, always shaking his head; but the strangest thing of all was a little harp he had, with only four strings, and two hart’s horns fixed in the front of it. ‘All that heard this odd vision fell a laughing at Archibald, telling him that he was dreaming, or had not his wits about him, since he pretended to see a thing that had no being, and was not so much as heard of in any part of the world.’ All this had no effect upon Archibald, ‘who told them that they must excuse him if he laughed at them after the accomplishment of the vision.’ Archibald |1703.| returned to his own house, and within three or four days after, a man exactly answering to the description arrived at Knockowe. He was a poor man, who made himself a buffoon for bread, playing on a harp, which was ornamented with a pair of hart’s horns, and wearing a cap and bells, which he shook in playing. He was previously unknown at Knockowe, and was found to have been at the island of Barray, sixty miles off, at the time of the vision. This story was vouched by Mr Daniel Martin and all his family—relatives, we may presume, of the author of the book now quoted.
Martin relates a story of a predicted visit of a singular kind to the island of Egg; and it is an instance more than usually entitled to notice, as he himself heard of it in the interval between the vision and its fulfilment. A seer in that island told his neighbours that he had frequently seen the appearance of a man in a red coat lined with blue, having on his head a strange kind of blue cap, with a very high cock on the forepart of it. The figure always appeared in the act of making rude advances to a young woman who lived in the hamlet, and he predicted that it would be the fate of this girl to be treated in a dishonourable way by some such stranger. The inhabitants considered the affair so extremely unlikely to be realised, that they treated the seer as a fool. Martin tells that he had the story related to him in Edinburgh, in September 1688, by Norman Macleod of Graban, who had just then come from the isle of Skye, there being present at the time the Laird of Macleod, Mr Alexander Macleod, advocate, and some other persons. About a year and a half after, a few government war-vessels were sent into the Western Islands to reduce some of the people who had been out with Lord Dundee. Major Fergusson, who commanded a large military party on board, had no thought of touching at Egg, which is a very sequestered island, but some natives of that isle, being in Skye, encountered a party of his men, and one of the latter was slain. He consequently steered for Egg, to revenge himself on the natives. Among other outrages, the young woman above alluded to was carried on board the vessel, and disgracefully treated, thus completely verifying the vision.
An instance of the second-sight, which fell under the observation of the clever statesman Viscount Tarbat, is related by Martin as having been reported to him by Lord Tarbat himself. While travelling in Ross-shire, his lordship entered a house, and sat down on an arm-chair. One of his retinue, who possessed the faculty of |1703.| a seer, spoke to some of the rest, wishing them to persuade his lordship to leave the house, ‘for,’ said he, ‘a great misfortune will attend somebody in it, and that within a few hours.’ This was told to Lord Tarbat, who did not regard it. The seer soon after renewed his entreaty with much earnestness, begging his master to remove out of that unhappy chair; but he was only snubbed as a fool. Lord Tarbat, at his own pleasure, renewed his journey, and had not been gone many hours when a trooper, riding upon ice, fell and broke his thigh, and being brought into that house, was laid in the arm-chair to have his wound dressed. Thus the vision was accomplished.
It was considered a rule in second-sight, that a vision seen by one seer was not necessarily visible to another in his company, unless the first touched his neighbour. There are, nevertheless, anecdotes of visions seen by more than one at a time, without any such ceremony. In one case, two persons, not accustomed to see visions, saw one together, after which, neither ever enjoyed the privilege again. They were two simple country men, travelling along a road about two miles to the north of Snizort church, in Skye. Suddenly they saw what appeared as a body of men coming from the north, as if bringing a corpse to Snizort to be buried. They advanced to the river, thinking to meet the funeral company at the ford, but when they got there, the visionary scene had vanished. On coming home, they told what they had seen to their neighbours. ‘About three weeks after, a corpse was brought along that road from another parish, from which few or none are brought to Snizort, except persons of distinction.’
A vision of a similar nature is described as occurring to one Daniel Stewart, an inhabitant of Hole, in the North Parish of St Mary’s, in the isle of Skye; and it was likewise the man’s only experience of the kind. One day, at noon, he saw five men riding northward; he ran down to the road to meet them; but when he got there, all had vanished. The vision was repeated next day, when he also heard the men speak. It was concluded that the company he saw was that of Sir Donald Macdonald of Sleat, who was then at Armadale, forty miles distant.
The important place which matrimony occupies in social existence, makes it not surprising that the union of individuals in marriage was frequently the alleged subject of second-sight. As already mentioned, when a woman stood at a man’s left hand, she was expected to be his wife. It was also understood that, when a man was seen at a woman’s left hand, he was to be her |1703.| future husband. ‘Several persons,’ says Martin, ‘living in a certain family, told me that they had frequently seen two men standing at a young gentlewoman’s left hand, who was their master’s daughter. They told the men’s names, and as they were the young lady’s equals, it was not doubted that she would be married to one of them, and perhaps to the other, after the death of the first. Some time after, a third man appeared, and he seemed always to stand nearest to her of the three; but the seers did not know him, though they could describe him exactly. Within some months after, this man, who was last seen, did actually come to the house, and fulfilled the description given of him by those who never saw him but in a vision; and he married the woman shortly after. They live in the isle of Skye; both they and others confirmed the truth of this instance when I saw them.’
The Rev. Daniel Nicolson, minister of the parish of St Mary’s, in Skye, was a widower of forty-four, when a noted seer of his flock, the Archibald Macdonald already spoken of, gave out that he saw a well-dressed lady frequently standing at the minister’s right hand. He described her complexion, stature, and dress particularly, and said he had no doubt such a person would in time become the second Mrs Nicolson. The minister was rather angry at having this story told, and bade his people pay no attention to what ‘that foolish dreamer, Archibald Macdonald,’ had said, ‘for,’ said he, ‘it is twenty to one if ever I marry again.’ Archibald, nevertheless, persisted in his tale. While the matter stood in this position, it was related to Martin.
The minister afterwards attended a synod in Bute—met a Mrs Morison there—fell in love with her, and brought her home to Skye as his wife. It is affirmed that she was instantly and generally recognised as answering to the description of the lady in Archibald’s vision.
About 1652, Captain Alexander Fraser, commonly called the Tutor of Lovat, being guardian of his nephew, Lord Lovat, married Sybilla Mackenzie, sister of the Earl of Seaforth, and widow of John Macleod of Macleod. The Tutor, who had fought gallantly in the preceding year for King Charles II. at Worcester, was thought a very lucky man in this match, as the lady had a jointure of three hundred merks per annum![[342]] The marriage, however, is more remarkable on account of its having |1703.| been seen many years before, during the lifetime of the lady’s first husband. We have the story told with all seriousness, though in very obscure typography, in a letter which Aubrey prints[[343]] as having been sent to him by a ‘learned friend’ of his in the Highlands, about 1694.
Macleod and his wife, while residing, we are to understand, at their house of Dunvegan in Skye, on returning one day from an excursion or brief visit, went into their nursery to see their infant child. To pursue the narration: ‘On their coming in, the nurse falls a-weeping. They asked the cause, dreading the child was sick, or that the nurse was scarce of milk. The nurse replied the child was well, and she had abundance of milk. Yet she still wept. Being pressed to tell what ailed her, she at last said that Macleod would die, and the lady would shortly be married to another man. Being asked how she knew that event, she told them plainly, that, as they came into the room, she saw a man with a scarlet cloak and white hat betwixt them, giving the lady a kiss over the shoulder; and this was the cause of her weeping; all which,’ pursues the narrator, ‘came to pass. After Macleod’s death [which happened in 1649], the Tutor of Lovat married the lady in the same dress in which the woman saw him.’
The Bishop of Caithness, a short while before the Revolution, had five daughters, one of whom spoke grudgingly of the burden of the family housekeeping lying wholly upon her. A man-servant in the house, who had the second-sight, told her that ere long she would be relieved from her task, as he saw a tall gentleman in black walking on the bishop’s right hand, and whom she was to marry. Before a quarter of a year had elapsed, the prediction was realised; and all the man’s vaticinations regarding the marriage-feast and company also proved true.
A curious class of cases, of importance for any theory on the subject, was that in which a visionary figure or spectre intervened for the production of the phenomena. A spirit in great vogue in the Highlands in old times—as, indeed, in the Lowlands also—was known by the name of Browny. From the accounts we have of him, it seems as if he were in a great measure identical with the drudging goblin of Milton, whose shadowy flail by night would thrash the corn
‘That ten day-labourers could not end.’
Among our Highlanders, he presented himself as a tall man. |1703.| The servants of Sir Norman Macleod of Bernera were one night assembled in the hall of the castle in that remote island, while their master was absent on business, without any intimation having been given of the time of his probable return. One of the party, who had the second-sight, saw Browny[[344]] come in several times and make a show of carrying an old woman from the fireside to the door; at last, he seemed to take her by neck and heels, and bundle her out of the house; at which the seer laughed so heartily, that his companions thought him mad. He told them they must remove, for the hall would be required that night for other company. They knew, of course, that he spoke in consequence of having had a vision; but they took it upon themselves to express a doubt that it could be so speedily accomplished. In so dark a night, and the approach to the island being so dangerous on account of the rocks, it was most unlikely that their master would arrive. In less than an hour, a man came in to warn them to get the hall ready for their master, who had just landed. Martin relates this story from Sir Norman Macleod’s own report.
The same Sir Norman Macleod was one day playing with some of his friends at a game called the Tables (in Gaelic, palmermore), which requires three on a side, each throwing the dice by turns. |1703.| A critical difficulty arising as to the placing of one of the table-men, seeing that the issue of the game obviously must depend upon it, the gentleman who was to play hesitated for a considerable time. At length, Sir Norman’s butler whispered a direction as to the best site for the man into his ear; he played in obedience to the suggestion, and won the game. Sir Norman, having heard the whisper, asked who had advised him so skilfully. He answered that it was the butler. ‘That is strange,’ quoth Sir Norman, ‘for the butler is unacquainted with the game.’ On inquiry, the man told that he had not spoken from any skill of his own. He had seen the spirit, Browny, reaching his arm over the player’s head, and touching with his finger the spot where the table-man was to be placed. ‘This,’ says Martin, ‘was told me by Sir Norman and others, who happened to be present at the time.’
Sir Norman Macleod relates another case in which his own knowledge comes in importantly for authentication. A gentleman in the isle of Harris had always been ‘seen’ with an arrow in his thigh, and it was expected that he would not go out of the world without the prediction being fulfilled. Sir Norman heard the matter spoken of for many years before the death of the gentleman. At length the gentleman died, without any such occurrence taking place. Sir Norman was at his funeral, at St Clement’s kirk, in Harris. The custom of that island being to bury men of importance in a stone chest in the church, the body was brought on an open bier. A dispute took place among the friends at the church door as to who should enter first, and from words it came to blows. One who was armed with a bow and arrows, let fly amongst them, and after Sir Norman Macleod had appeased the tumult, one of the arrows was found sticking in the dead man’s thigh!
Martin was informed by John Morison of Bragir, in Lewis, ‘a person of unquestionable sincerity and reputation,’ respecting a girl of twelve years old, living within a mile of his house, who was troubled with the frequent vision of a person exactly resembling herself, who seemed to be always employed just as she herself might be at the moment. At the suggestion of John Morison, prayers were put up in the family, in which he and the girl joined, entreating that God would be pleased to relieve her from this unpleasant visitation; and after that she saw her double no more. Another neighbour of John Morison was haunted by a spirit resembling himself, who never spoke to him within doors, but pestered him constantly out of doors with impertinent questions. |1703.| At the recommendation of a neighbour, the man threw a live coal in the face of the vision; in consequence of which, the spirit assailed him in the fields next day, and beat him so sorely, that he had to keep his bed for fourteen days. Martin adds: ‘Mr Morison, minister of the parish, and several of his friends, came to see the man, and joined in prayer that he might be freed from this trouble; but he was still haunted by that spirit a year after I left Lewis.’
Another case in which the spirit used personal violence, but of an impalpable kind, is related by Martin as happening at Knockowe, in Skye, and as reported to him by the family who were present when the circumstance occurred. A man-servant, who usually enjoyed perfect health, was one evening taken violently ill, fell back upon the floor, and then began to vomit. The family were much concerned, being totally at a loss to account for so sudden an attack; but in a short while the man recovered, and declared himself free of pain. A seer in the family explained the mystery. In a neighbouring village lived an ill-natured female, who had had some hopes of marriage from this man, but was likely to be disappointed. He had seen this woman come in with a furious countenance, and fall a-scolding her lover in the most violent manner, till the man tumbled from his seat, albeit unconscious of the assault made upon him.
Several instances of second-sight are recorded in connection with historical occurrences. Sir John Harrington relates that, at an interview he had with King James in 1607, the conversation having turned upon Queen Mary, the king told him that her death had been seen in Scotland before it happened, ‘being, as he said, “spoken of in secret by those whose power of sight presented to them a bloody head dancing in the air.” He then,’ continues Harrington, ‘did remark much on this gift.’[[345]] It is related in May’s History of England, that when the family of King James was leaving Scotland for England, an old hermit-like seer was brought before them, who took little notice of Prince Henry, but wept over Prince Charles—then three years old—lamenting to think of the misfortunes he was to undergo, and declaring he should be the most miserable of princes. A Scotch nobleman had a Highland seer brought to London, where he asked his judgment on the Duke of Buckingham, then at the height of his fortunes as the king’s favourite. |1703.| ‘Pish!’ said he, ‘he will come to nothing. I see a dagger in his breast!’ In time the duke, as is well known, was stabbed to the heart by Lieutenant Felton.
In one of the letters on second-sight, written to Mr Aubrey from Scotland about 1693–94, reference is made to the seer Archibald Macdonald, who has already been introduced in connection with instances occurring in Skye. According to this writer, who was a divinity student living in Strathspey, Inverness-shire, Archibald announced a prediction regarding the unfortunate Earl of Argyle. He mentioned it at Balloch Castle (now Castle-Grant), in the presence of the Laird of Grant, his lady, and several others, and also in the house of the narrator’s father. He said of Argyle, of whom few or none then knew where he was, that he would within two months come to the West Highlands, and raise a rebellious faction, which would be divided in itself, and disperse, while the earl would be taken and beheaded at Edinburgh, and his head set upon the Tolbooth, where his father’s head was before. All this proved strictly true.
Archibald Macdonald was a friend of Macdonald of Glencoe, and accompanied him in the expedition of Lord Dundee in 1689 for the maintenance of King James’s interest in the Highlands. Mr Aubrey’s correspondent, who was then living in Strathspey, relates that Dundee’s irregular forces followed General Mackay’s party along Speyside till they came to Edinglassie, when he turned and marched up the valley. At the Milltown of Gartenbeg, the Macleans joined, but remained behind to plunder. Glencoe, with Archibald in his company, came to drive them forward; and when this had been to some extent effected, the seer came up and said: ‘Glencoe, if you will take my advice, you will make off with yourself with all possible haste. Ere an hour come and go, you’ll be as hard put to it as ever you were in your life.’ Glencoe took the hint, and, within an hour, Mackay appeared at Culnakyle, in Abernethy, with a party of horse, and chased the Macleans up the Morskaith; in which chase Glencoe was involved, and was hard put to it, as had been foretold. It is added, that Archibald likewise foretold that Glencoe would be murdered in the night-time in his own house, three months before it happened.
A well-vouched instance of the second-sight connected with a historical incident, is related by Drummond of Bohaldy, regarding the celebrated Highland paladin, Sir Ewen Cameron of Locheil, who died at the age of ninety in 1719. ‘Very early that morning |1703.| [December 24, 1715] whereon the Chevalier de St George landed at Peterhead, attended only by Allan Cameron, one of the gentlemen of his bedchamber, Sir Ewen started, as it were, in a surprise, from his sleep, and called out so loud to his lady (who lay by him in another bed) that his king was landed—that his king was arrived—and that his son Allan was with him, that she awaked.’ She then received his orders to summon the clan, and make them drink the king’s (that is, the Chevalier’s) health—a fête they engaged in so heartily, that they spent in it all the next day. ‘His lady was so curious, that she noted down the words upon paper, with the date; which she a few days after found verified in fact, to her great surprise.’ Bohaldy remarks that this case fully approved itself to the whole clan Cameron, as they heard their chief speak of scarcely anything else all that day.[[346]]
Predictions of death formed a large class of cases of second-sight. The event was usually indicated by the subject of the vision appearing in a shroud, and the higher the vestment rose on the figure, the event was the nearer. ‘If it is not seen above the middle,’ says Martin, ‘death is not to be expected for the space of a year, and perhaps some months longer. When it is seen to ascend higher towards the head, death is concluded to be at hand within a few days, if not hours, as daily experience confirms. Examples of this kind were shewn me, when the person of whom the observation was made enjoyed perfect health.’ He adds, that sometimes death was foretold of an individual by hearing a loud cry, as from him, out of doors. ‘Five women were sitting together in the same room, and all of them heard a loud cry passing by the window. They thought it plainly to be the voice of a maid who was one of the number. She blushed at the time, though not sensible of her so doing, contracted a fever next day, and died that week.’
In a pamphlet on the second-sight, written by Mr John Fraser, dean of the Isles, and minister of Tiree and Coll, is an instance of predicted death, which the author reports on his own knowledge. Having occasion to go to Tobermory, in Mull, to assist in some government investigations for the recovery of treasure in the vessel of the Spanish Armada known to have been there sunk, he was accompanied by a handsome servant-lad, besides other attendants.[[347]] A woman came before he sailed, and, through the |1703.| medium of a seaman, endeavoured to dissuade him from taking that youth, as he would never bring him back alive. The seaman declined to communicate her story to Mr Fraser. The company proceeded on their voyage, and met adverse weather; the boy fell sick, and died on the eleventh day. Mr Fraser, on his return, made a point of asking the woman how she had come to know that this lad, apparently so healthy, was near his death. She told Mr Fraser that she had seen the boy, as he walked about, ‘sewed up in his winding-sheets from top to toe;’ this she always found to be speedily followed by the death of the person so seen.
Martin relates that a woman was accustomed for some time to see a female figure, with a shroud up to the waist, and a habit resembling her own; but as the face was turned away, she never could ascertain who it was. To satisfy her curiosity, she tried an experiment. She dressed herself with that part of her clothes behind which usually was before. The vision soon after presented itself with its face towards the seeress, who found it to be herself. She soon after died.
Although the second-sight had sunk so much in Martin’s time, that, according to him, there was not one seer for ten that had been twenty years before, it continued to be so much in vogue down to the reign of George III., that a separate treatise on the subject, containing scores of cases, was published in 1763 by an educated man styling himself Theophilus Insulanus, as a means of checking in some degree the materialising tendencies of the age, this author considering the gift as a proof of the immortality of the soul. When Dr Johnson, a few years later, visited the Highlands, he found the practice, so to speak, much declined, and the clergy almost all against it. Proofs could, nevertheless, be adduced that there are even now, in the remoter parts of the Highlands, occasional alleged instances of what is called second-sight, with a full popular belief in their reality.
1704. Jan. 25.
Charles, Earl of Hopetoun,[[348]] set forth in a petition to the Privy Council, that in his minority, many years ago, his tutors had caused a windmill to be built at Leith for grinding and refining the ore from his lead-mines. In consequence of the unsettling of a particular bargain, the mill had been allowed to lie unused till now, when it required some repair in order to be fit for service. |1704.| One John Smith, who had set up a saw-mill in Leith, being the only man seen in this kind of work, had been called into employment by his lordship for the repair of the windmill; but the wright-burgesses of Edinburgh interfered violently with the work, on the ground of their corporation privileges, ‘albeit it is sufficiently known that none of them have been bred to such work or have any skill therein.’ Indeed, some part of the original work done by them had now to be taken down, so ill was it done. It was obviously a public detriment that such a work should thus be brought to a stand-still. The Council, entering into the earl’s views, gave him a protection from the claims of the wright-burgesses.
Feb.
It is notorious that the purity of the Court of Session continued down to this time to be subject to suspicion. It was generally understood that a judge favoured his friends and connections, and could be ‘spoken to’ in behalf of a party in a suit. The time was not yet long past when each lord had a ‘Pate’—that is, a dependent member of the bar (sometimes called Peat), who, being largely fee’d by a party, could on that consideration influence his patron.
A curious case, illustrative of the character of the bench, was now in dependence. The heritors of the parish of Dalry raised an action for the realisation of a legacy of £3000, which had been left to them for the founding of a school by one Dr Johnston. The defender was John Joissy, surgeon, an executor of the testator, who resisted the payment of the money on certain pretexts. With the assistance of Alexander Gibson of Durie, a principal clerk of Session, Joissy gained favour with a portion of the judges, including the president. On the other hand, the heritors, under the patronage of the Earl of Galloway, secured as many on their side. A severe contest was therefore to be expected. According to a report of the case in the sederunt-book of the parish, the Lord President managed to have it judged under circumstances favourable to Joissy. The court having ‘accidentally appointed a peremptor day about the beginning of February 1704 for reporting and deciding in the cause, both parties concluded that the parish would then gain it, since one of Mr Joissy’s lords came to be then absent. For as my Lord Anstruther’s hour in the Outer House was betwixt nine and ten of the clock in the morning, so the Earl of Lauderdale, as Lord Ordinary in the Outer House, behoved to sit from ten to twelve in |1704.| the forenoon: for by the 21st act of the fourth session of the first parliament of King William and Queen Mary, it’s statuted expressly, that if the Lord Ordinary in the Outer Houses sit and vote in any cause in the Inner House after the chap of ten hours in the clock, he may be declined by either party in the cause from ever voting thereafter therintill: yet such was the Lord President’s management, that so soon as my Lord Anstruther returned from the Outer House at ten of the clock, and that my Lord Lauderdale was even desired by some of the lords to take his post in the Outer House in the terms of law: yet his lordship was pleased after ten to sit and vote against the parish, the president at that juncture having put the cause to a vote.’
The heritors, by the advice of some of the lords in their interest, gave in a declinature of Lord Lauderdale, on the ground of the illegality of his sitting in the Inner House after ten o’clock; whereupon, next morning, the Lord President came into the court in a great rage, demanding that all those concerned in the declinature should be punished as criminals. The leading decliner, Mr Ferguson of Cairoch, escaped from town on horseback, an hour before the macer came to summon him. The counsel, John Menzies of Cammo, and the agent, remained to do what they could to still the storm. According to the naïve terms of the report, ‘the speat [flood] was so high against the parish and them all the time, that they behoved to employ all their friends, and solicit a very particular lord that morning before they went to the house; and my Lord President was so high upon’t, that when Cammo told him that my Lord Lauderdale, contrair to the act of parliament, sat after ten o’clock, his lordship unmannerly said to Cammo, as good a gentleman as himself, that it was a damned lie.’
Menzies, though a very eminent counsel, and the agent, found all their efforts end in an order for their going to jail, while a suitable punishment should be deliberated upon. After some discussion, a slight calm ensued, and they were liberated on condition of coming to the bar as malefactors, and there begging the Earl of Lauderdale’s pardon. The parish report states that no remedy could be obtained, for ‘the misery at that time was that the lords were in effect absolute, for they did as they pleased, and when any took courage to protest for remeid of law to the Scots parliament, they seldom or never got any redress there, all the lords being still present, by which the parliament |1704.| was so overawed that not ane decreit among a hundred was reduced.’[[349]]
It is strange to reflect, that among these judges were Lord Fountainhall and Lord Arniston, with several other men who had resisted tyrannous proceedings of the old government, to their own great suffering and loss. Wodrow promises of Halcraig, that, for his conduct regarding the test in 1684, his memory would be ‘savoury.’ The same author, speaking of the set in 1726 as dying out, says he wishes their places may be as well filled. ‘King William,’ he says, ‘brought in a good many substantial, honest country gentlemen, well affected to the government and church, and many of them really religious, though there might be some greater lawyers than some of them have been and are. But, being men of integrity and weight, they have acted a fair and honest part these thirty years, and keep the bench in great respect. May their successors be equally diligent and conscientious!’[[350]] Of course, by fairness and honesty, Wodrow chiefly meant soundness in revolution politics, and steadfast adherence to the established church.
Another instance of the vigorous action of the Lords in the maintenance of their dignity occurred in December 1701. A gentleman, named Cannon of Headmark, having some litigation with the Viscount Stair and Sir James Dalrymple, his brother Alexander, an agent before the court, used some indiscreet expressions regarding the judges in a paper drawn up by him. Being called before the Lords, and having acknowledged the authorship of the paper, he was sent to prison for a month, ordered then to crave pardon of the court on his knees, and thereafter to be for ever debarred from carrying on business as an agent.[[351]]
Some letters regarding a lawsuit of William Foulis of Woodhall in 1735–37, which have been printed,[[352]] shew that it was even then still customary to use influence with the Lords in favour of parties, and the female connections appear as taking a large share in the business. One sentence is sufficient to reveal the whole system. ‘By Lord St Clair’s advice, Mrs Kinloch is to wait on Lady Cairnie to-morrow, to cause her to ask the favour of Lady St Clair to solicit Lady Betty Elphinston and Lady Dun’—the former being the wife of Lord Coupar, and the |1704.| latter of Lord Dun, two of the judges. Lord St Clair’s hint to Mrs Kinloch to get her friend to speak to his own wife—he thus keeping clear of the affair himself—is a significant particular. Lord Dun, who wrote a moral volume, entitled Advices,[[353]] and was distinguished for his piety, is spoken of by tradition as such a lawyer as might well be open to any force that was brought to bear upon him. The present Sir George Sinclair heard Mr Thomas Coutts relate that, when a difficult case came before the court, where Lord Dun acted alone as ‘ordinary,’ he was heard to say: ‘Eh, Lord, what am I to do? Eh, sirs, I wiss ye wad mak it up.’
It will be surprising to many to learn that the idea of having ‘friends’ to a cause on the bench was not entirely extinct in a reign which people in middle life can well recollect. The amiable Charles Duke of Queensberry, who had been the patron of Gay, was also the friend of James Burnett of Monboddo, and had exacted a promise that Burnett should be the next person raised to the bench. ‘On Lord Milton’s death (1767), the duke waited on his majesty, and reminded him of his promise, which was at once admitted, and orders were immediately given to the secretary of state [Conway] to make out the royal letter. The lady of the secretary was nearly allied to the family of Hamilton, and being most naturally solicitous about the vote which Mr Burnett might give in the great cause of which he had taken so much charge as a counsel, she and the Duchess of Hamilton and Argyle were supposed to have induced their brother-in-law, Mr Secretary Conway, to withhold for many weeks the letter of appointment, and is even supposed to have represented Mr Burnett’s character in such unfavourable colours to the Lord Chancellor Henley, that his lordship is reported to have jocosely declared, that if she could prove her allegations against that gentleman, instead of making him a judge, he would hang him. This delay gave rise to much idle conjecture and conversation in Edinburgh, and it was confidently reported that Mr Burnett’s appointment would not take place till after the decision of the Douglas cause. Irritated by these insinuations against his integrity, he wrote to the Duke of Queensberry, declaring that if his integrity as a judge could be questioned in this cause, he should positively refuse to be trusted with any other; and so highly did he resent the opposition made by the secretary to his promotion, that he took measures for |1704.| canvassing his native county, in order to oppose in parliament a ministry who had so grossly affronted him. The Duke of Queensberry, equally indignant at the delay, requested an audience of his majesty, and tendered a surrender of his commission as justice-general of Scotland, if the royal promise was not fulfilled. In a few days the letter was despatched, and Lord Monboddo took his seat in the court.’[[354]]
Feb. 2.
Under the excitement created by the news of a Jacobite plot, the zealous Presbyterians of Dumfriesshire rose to wreak out their long pent-up feelings against the Catholic gentry of their district. Having fallen upon sundry houses, and pillaged them of popish books, images, &c., they marched in warlike manner to Dumfries, under the conduct of James Affleck of Adamghame and John M‘Jore of Kirkland, and there made solemn incremation of their spoil at the Cross.
A number of ‘popish vestments, trinkets, and other articles’ having been found about the same time in and about Edinburgh, the Privy Council (March 14) ordered such of them as were not intrinsically valuable to be burned next day at the Cross; but the chalice, patine, and other articles in silver and gold, to be melted down, and the proceeds given to the kirk-treasurer.[[355]]
Notwithstanding this treatment, we find it reported in 1709, that ‘papists do openly and avowedly practise within the city of Edinburgh and suburbs.’ It was intimated at the same time, that there is ‘now also a profane and deluded crew of enthusiasts, set up in this place, who, under pretence to the spirit of prophecy, do utter most horrid blasphemies against the ever-glorious Trinity, such as ought not to be suffered in any Christian church or nation.’[[356]]
Sir George Maxwell of Orchardton, in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, having gone over to the Church of Rome, and the next heir, who was a Protestant, being empowered by the statute of 1700 to claim his estate, his uncle, Thomas Maxwell of Gelstoun, a man of seventy years of age, came forward on this adventure (June 1704), further demanding that the young baronet should be decerned to pay him six thousand merks as a year’s rent of his estate for employing George Maxwell of Munshes, a known |1704.| papist, to be his factor, and five hundred more from Munshes himself for accepting the trust.
A petition presented by the worthy Protestant uncle to the Privy Council, makes us aware that George Maxwell of Munshes, ‘finding he would be reached for accepting the said factory, out of malice raised a lawburrows,’ in which Orchardton concurred, though out of the kingdom, against Gelstoun and his son, as a mere pretext for stopping proceedings; but he trusted the Lords would see through the trick, and defeat it by accepting the cautioners he offered for its suspension. The Council, doubtless duly indignant that a papist should so try to save his property, complied with Gelstoun’s petition.[[357]]
Apr. 12.
A statute of the Sixth James, anno 1621—said to have been borrowed from one of Louis XIII. of France—had made it unlawful for any tavern-keeper to allow individuals to play in his house at cards and dice, or for any one to play at such games in a private house, unless where the master of the house was himself playing; likewise ordaining, that any sum above a hundred merks gained at horse-racing, or in less than twenty-four hours at other play, should be forfeited to the poor of the district. During the ensuing period of religious strictness, we hear little of gambling in Scotland, but when the spring was relaxed, it began to reappear with other vices of ease and prosperity. A case, reported in the law-books under July 1688, makes us aware, as by a peep through a curtain, that gentlemen were accustomed at that time to win and lose at play sums which appear large in comparison with incomes and means then general. It appears that Captain Straiton, who was well known afterwards as a busy Jacobite partisan, won from Sir Alexander Gilmour of Craigmillar, at cards, in one night, no less than six thousand merks, or £338, 6s. 8d. sterling. The captain first gained four thousand, for which he obtained a bond from Sir Alexander; then he gained two thousand more, and got a new bond for the whole. An effort was made to reduce the bond, but without success.
Francis Charteris, a cadet of an ancient and honourable family in Dumfriesshire, and who had served in Marlborough’s wars, was now figuring in Edinburgh as a member of the beau monde, with the reputation of being a highly successful gambler. There is a story told of him—but I cannot say with what truth—that, being at the Duke of Queensberry’s one evening, and playing with the |1704.| duchess, he was enabled, by means of a mirror, or more probably a couple of mirrors placed opposite each other, to see what cards she had in her hand, through which means he gained from her Grace no less a sum than three thousand pounds. It is added that the duke was provoked by this incident to get a bill passed through the parliament over which he presided, for prohibiting gambling beyond a certain moderate sum; but this must be a mistake, as no such act was then passed by the Scottish Estates; nor was any such statute necessary, while that of 1621 remained in force. We find, however, that the Town Council at this date issued an act of theirs, threatening vigorous action upon the statute of 1621, as concerned playing at cards and dice in public houses, as ‘the occasion of horrid cursing, quarrelling, tippling, loss of time, and neglect of necessary business—the constables to be diligent in detecting offenders, on pain of having to pay the fines themselves.’ Perhaps it was at the instigation of the duke that this step was taken.
From Fountainhall we learn that, about 1707, Sir Andrew Ramsay of Abbotshall lost 28,000 merks, to Sir Scipio Hill, at cards and dice, and granted a bond upon his estate for the amount. This being in contravention of the act of 1621, the kirk-treasurer put in his claim for all above 100 merks on behalf of the poor, but we do not learn with what success.
July 4.
Sir Thomas Dalyell of Binns—grandson of the old bearded persecutor of the times of the Charleses—had for a long time past been ‘troubled with a sore disease which affects his reason, whereby he is continually exposed to great dangers to his own person, by mobs, and others that does trouble him.’ It was also found that ‘by the force of his disease, he is liable to squander away and dilapidate his best and readiest effects, as is too notourly known.’ Such is the statement of Sir Thomas’s nephew, Robert Earl of Carnwath; his sister, Magdalen Dalyell; and her husband, James Monteith of Auldcathie, craving authority, ‘for the preservation of his person and estate, and also for the public peace,’ to take him into custody in his house of Binns, ‘till means be used for his recovery;’ likewise power to employ a factor ‘for uplifting so much of his rents as may be necessar for his subsistence, and the employing doctors and apothecaries, according to the exigence of his present condition.’
The Council not only granted the petition, but ordained that the petitioners might order up a soldier or two at any |1704.| time from Blackness, to assist in restraining the unfortunate gentleman.
This Sir Thomas Dalyell died unmarried, leaving his estates and baronetcy to a son of his sister Magdalen, grandfather of the present baronet. The case is cited as shewing the arrangements for a lunatic man of rank in the days of Queen Anne.
July.
The central authorities were now little inclined to take up cases of sorcery; but it does not appear that on that account witches ceased to be either dreaded or punished. Country magistrates and clergy were always to be found who sympathised with the popular terrors on the subject, and were ready to exert themselves in bringing witches to justice.
At the village of Torryburn, in the western part of Fife, a woman called Jean Neilson experienced a tormenting and not very intelligible ailment, which she chose to attribute to the malpractices of a woman named Lillias Adie. Adie was accordingly taken up by a magistrate, and put in prison. On the 29th July, the minister and his elders met in session, called Lillias before them, and were gratified with an instant confession, to the effect that she had been a witch for several years, having met the devil at the side of a ‘stook’ on the harvest-field, and renounced her baptism to him, not without a tender embrace, on which occasion she found that his skin was cold, and observed his feet cloven like those of a stirk. She had also joined in midnight dances where he was present. Once, at the back of Patrick Sands’s house in Valleyfield, the festivity was lighted by a light that ‘came from darkness,’ not so bright as a candle, but sufficient to let them see each other’s faces, and shew the devil, who wore a cap covering his ears and neck. Several of the women she saw on these occasions she now delated as witches. The session met again and again to hear such recitals, and to examine the newly accused persons. There was little reported but dance-meetings of the alleged witches, and conversations with the devil, the whole bearing very much the character of what we have come to recognise as hallucinations or spectral illusions. Yet the case of Adie was considered sufficient to infer the pains of death, and she was burned within the sea-mark. There were several other solemn meetings of the session to inquire into the cases of the other women accused by Adie; but we do not learn with what result.
The extreme length to which this affair was carried may be partly attributed to the zeal of the minister, the Rev. Allan |1704.| Logan, who is said to have been particularly knowing in the detection of witches. At the administration of the communion, he would cast his eye along, and say: ‘You witch-wife, get up from the table of the Lord,’ when some poor creature, perhaps conscience-struck with a recollection of wicked thoughts, would rise and depart, thus exposing herself to the hazard of a regular accusation afterwards. He used to preach against witchcraft, and we learn that, in 1709, a woman called Helen Key was accused before the Torryburn session of using some disrespectful language about him in consequence. She told a neighbour, it appears, that on hearing him break out against the witches, she thought him ‘daft’ [mad], and took up her stool and left the kirk. For this she was convicted of profanity, and ordained to sit before the congregation and be openly rebuked.[[358]]
Rather earlier in the year, there was a remarkable outbreak of diablerie at the small seaport burgh of Pittenweem, in the eastern part of Fife. Here lived a woman named Beatrix or Beatie Laing, described as ‘spouse to William Brown, tailor, late treasurer of the burgh,’ and who must therefore be inferred to have been not quite amongst the poorer class of people. In a petition from the magistrates (June 13, 1704) to the Privy Council, it was stated that Patrick Morton was a youth of sixteen, ‘free of any known vice,’ and that, being employed by his father to make some nails for a ship belonging to one of the merchants in Pittenweem, he was engaged at that work in his father’s smithy, when Beatrix Laing came and desired him to make some nails for her. He modestly refused, alleging that he was engaged in another job requiring haste, whereupon she went away ‘threatening to be revenged, which did somewhat frighten him, because he knew she was under a bad fame and reputed for a witch.’
Next day, as he passed Beatrix’s door, ‘he observed a timber vessel with some water and a fire-coal in it at the door, which made him apprehend that it was a charm laid for him, and the effects of her threatening; and immediately he was seized with such a weakness in his limbs, that he could hardly stand or walk.’ He continued for many weeks in a languishing condition, in spite of all that physicians could do for him, ‘still growing worse, having no appetite, and his body strangely emaciated. About the beginning of May, his case altered to the worse by his having |1704.| such strange and unusual fits as did astonish all onlookers. His belly at times was distended to a great height; at other times, the bones of his back and breast did rise to a prodigious height, and suddenly fell,’ while his breathing ‘was like to the blowing of a bellows.’ At other times, ‘his body became rigid and inflexible, insomuch that neither his arms nor legs could be bowed or moved by any strength, though frequently tried.’ His senses were ‘benumbed, and yet his pulse [continued] in good order.’ His head sometimes turned half about, and no force could turn it back again. He suffered grievous agonies. His tongue was occasionally drawn back in his throat, ‘especially when he was telling who were his tormentors.’ Sometimes the magistrates or minister brought these people to his house, and before he saw them, he would cry out they were coming, and name them. The bystanders would cover his face, bring in the women he had accused of tormenting him, besides others, and cause them to touch him in succession; when he expressed pain as the alleged tormentors laid their hands upon him, and in the other instances ‘no effect followed.’ It seemed to the magistrates that the young man was in much the same condition with ‘that of Bargarran’s daughter in the west.’
Beatrix, and the other accused persons, were thrown into the jail of the burgh by the minister and magistrates, with a guard of drunken fellows to watch over them. Beatrix steadily refused to confess being a witch, and was subjected to pricking, and kept awake for five days and nights, in order to bring her to a different frame of mind. Sorely wounded, and her life a burden to her, she at length was forced, in order to be rid of the torment, to admit what was imputed to her. It will thus be observed that the humane practice maintained during the whole of the late cavalier reigns, of only accepting voluntary confessions from persons taxed with witchcraft, was no longer in force. The poor woman afterwards avowing that what she had told them of her seeing the devil and so forth was false, ‘they put her in the stocks, and then carried her to the Thieves’ Hole, and from that transported her to a dark dungeon, where she was allowed no manner of light, or human converse, and in this condition she lay for five months.’ During this interval, the sapient magistrates, with their parish minister, were dealing with the Privy Council to get the alleged witches brought to trial. At first, the design was entertained of taking them to Edinburgh for that purpose; but ultimately, through the humane interference of the Earl of |1704.| Balcarres and Lord Anstruther,[[359]] two members of council connected with the district, the poor women were set at liberty on bail (August 12). This, however, was so much in opposition to the will of the rabble, that Beatrix Laing was obliged to decamp from her native town. ‘She wandered about in strange places, in the extremity of hunger and cold, though she had a competency at home, but dared not come near her own house for fear of the fury and rage of the people.’
It was indeed well for this apparently respectable woman that she, for the meantime, remained at a distance from home. While she was wandering about, another woman, named Janet Cornfoot, was put in confinement at Pittenweem, under a specific charge from Alexander Macgregor, a fisherman, to the effect that he had been beset by her and two others one night, along with the devil, while sleeping in his bed. By torture, Cornfoot was forced into acknowledging this fact, which she afterwards denied privately, under equal terror for the confession and the retractation. However, her case beginning to attract attention from some persons of rank and education in the neighbourhood, the minister seems to have become somewhat doubtful of it, and by his connivance she escaped. Almost immediately, an officious clergyman of the neighbourhood apprehended her again, and sent her back to Pittenweem in the custody of two men.
Falling there into the hands of the populace, the wretched woman was tied hard up in a rope, beaten unmercifully, and then dragged by the heels through the streets and along the shore. The appearance of a bailie for a brief space dispersed the crowd, but only to shew how easily the authorities might have protected the victim, if they had chosen. Resuming their horrible work, the rabble tied Janet to a rope stretching between a vessel in the harbour and the shore, swinging her to and fro, and amusing themselves by pelting her with stones. Tiring at length of this sport, they let her down with a sharp fall upon the beach, beat her again unmercifully, and finally, covering her with a door, pressed her to death (January 30, 1705). A daughter of the |1704.| unhappy woman was in the town, aware of what was going on, but prevented by terror from interceding. This barbarity lasted altogether three hours, without any adequate interruption from either minister or magistrates. Nearly about the same time, Thomas Brown, one of those accused by the blacksmith, died in prison, ‘after a great deal of hunger and hardship;’ and the bodies of both of these victims of superstition were denied Christian burial.
The matter attracted the attention of the Privy Council, who appointed a committee to inquire into it, but the ringleaders of the mob had fled; so nothing could be immediately done. After some time, they were allowed to return to the town free of molestation on account of the murder. Well, then, might Beatrix Laing dread returning to her husband’s comfortable house in this benighted burgh. After a few months, beginning to gather courage, she did return, yet not without being threatened by the rabble with the fate of Janet Cornfoot; wherefore it became necessary for her to apply to the Privy Council for a protection. By that court an order was accordingly issued to the Pittenweem magistrates, commanding them to defend her from any tumults, insults, or violence that might be offered to her.
At the close of this year, George and Lachlan Rattray were in durance at Inverness, ‘alleged guilty of the horrid crimes of mischievous charms, by witchcraft and malefice, sorcery or necromancy.’ It being inconvenient to bring them to Edinburgh for trial, the Lords of Privy Council issued a commission to Forbes of Culloden, Rose of Kilravock, ... Baillie, commissary of Inverness, and some other gentlemen, to try the offenders. The judges, however, were enjoined to transmit their judgment for consideration, and not allow it to be put in execution without warrant from the Council.
On the 16th July 1706, a committee of Council took into consideration the verdict in the case of the two Rattrays, and finding it ‘agreeable to the probation,’ ordained the men to be executed, under the care of the magistrates of Inverness, on the last Wednesday of September next to come. This order is subscribed by Montrose, Buchan, Northesk, Forfar, Torphichen, Elibank, James Stewart, Gilbert Elliot, and Alexander Douglas.
Aug. 25.
The functions of the five Lords Commissioners of Justiciary being of the utmost importance, ‘concerning both the lives and fortunes of her majesty’s lieges,’ the parliament settled on these |1704.| officers a salary of twelve hundred pounds Scots each, being about one hundred pounds sterling.[[360]] They had previously had the same income nominally, but being payable by precept of the commissioners of the treasury, or the cash-keeper, it was, like most such dues, difficult to realise, and, perhaps, could scarcely be said to exist.
At this time, the fifteen judges of the Court of Session had each two hundred pounds sterling per annum, the money being derived from a grant of £20,000 Scots out of the customs and interest on certain sums belonging to the court.[[361]] Five of them, who were lords of the criminal court also, were, as we here see, endowed with a further salary, making three hundred in all. The situation of president—‘ane imployment of great weight, requiring are assiduous and close application,’ says the second President Dalrymple[[362]]—had usually, in addition to the common salary, a pension, and a present of wines from the Treasury, making up his income to about a thousand a year. By the grace of Queen Anne, after the Union, the puisne judges of the Court of Session got £300 a year additional, making five hundred in all;[[363]] and this was their income for many years thereafter, the president continuing to have one thousand per annum. In the salaries of the same officers at the present day—£3000 to a puisne civil judge, with expenses when he goes on circuit; £4800 to the President; and to the Lord Justice-clerk, £4500—we see, as powerfully as in anything, the contrast between the Scotland of a hundred and fifty years ago, and the Scotland of our own time.
Aug. 30.
Patrick Smith professed to have found out a secret ‘whereby malt may be dried by all sorts of fuel, whether coals, wood, or turf, so as to receive no impression from the smoke thereof, and that in a more short and less expensive manner than hath been known in the kingdom.’ He averred that ‘the drink brewn of the said malt will be as clear as white wine, free of all bad tincture, more relishing and pleasant to the taste, and altogether more agreeable to human health than the ale hath been heretofore known in the kingdom.’ Seeing how ‘ale is the ordinary drink of the inhabitants thereof,’ the public utility of the discovery was obvious. Patrick announced himself to the Privy Council as |1704.| willing to communicate his secret for the benefit of the country, if allowed during a certain term to use it in an exclusive manner, and sell the same right to others.
Their Lordships granted the desired privilege for nine years.
Aug. 30.
Ever since the year 1691, there had been a garrison of government soldiers in Invergarry House, in Inverness-shire, the residence of Macdonald of Glengarry. The proprietor esteemed himself a sufferer to the extent of a hundred and fifty pounds a year, by damages to his lands and woods, besides the want of the use of his house, which had been reduced to a ruinous condition; and he now petitioned the government for some redress, as well as for a removal of the garrison, the ‘apparent cause’ of planting which had long ago ceased, ‘all that country being still peaceable and quiet in due obedience to authority, without the least apprehension of disturbance or commotion.’
The Council ordered Macdonald to be heard in his own cause before the Lords of the Treasury, in presence of Brigadier Maitland, governor of Fort-William, that a statement might be drawn up and laid before the queen. ‘His circumstances,’ however, ‘being such, that he cannot safely appear before their Lordships without ane personal protection,’ the Council had to grant a writ discharging all macers and messengers from putting any captions to execution against him up to the 20th of September.
Before the time for the conference arrived, the Duke of Argyle put in a representation making a claim upon Glengarry’s estate, so that it became necessary to call in the aid of the Lord Advocate to make up the statement for the royal consideration.
Sep. 16.
The family of the Gordons of Gicht have already attracted our attention by their troubles as Catholics under Protestant persecution, and their tendency to wild and lawless habits. After two generations of silence, the family comes up again in antagonism to the law, but in the person of the husband of an heiress. It appears that the Miss Gordon of Gicht who gave birth to George Lord Byron, was not the first heiress who married unfortunately.
The heretrix of this period had taken as her husband Alexander Davidson, younger of Newton, who, on the event, became with his father (a rich man) bound to relieve the mother of his bride—‘the old Lady Gicht’—of the debts of the family, in requital for certain advantages conferred upon him. The mother had married as a |1704.| second husband Major-general Buchan, who commanded the Cavalier army after the death of Lord Dundee, till he was defeated by Sir Thomas Livingstone at Cromdale. By and by, Alexander Davidson, under fair pretences, through James Hamilton of Cowbairdie, borrowed from his mother-in-law her copy of the marriage-contract, which had not yet been registered; and when the family creditors applied for payment of their debts, he did not scruple to send them, or allow them to go to the old Lady Gicht and her husband for payment. They, beginning to feel distressed by the creditors, sought back the copy of the contract for their protection; but as no entreaty could induce Davidson to return it to Cowbairdie, they were obliged at last to prosecute the latter gentleman for its restitution.
Cowbairdie, being at length, at the instance of old Lady Gicht and her husband, taken upon a legal caption, was, with the messenger, John Duff, at the Milton of Fyvie, at the date noted, on his way to prison, when Davidson came to him with many civil speeches, expressive of his regret for what had taken place. He entreated Duff to leave Cowbairdie there on his parole of honour, and go and intercede with General Buchan and his wife for a short respite to his prisoner, on the faith that the contract should be registered within a fortnight, which he pledged himself should be done. Duff executed this commission successfully; but when he came back, Davidson revoked his promise. It chanced that another gentleman had meanwhile arrived at the Milton, one Patrick Gordon, who had in his possession a caption against Davidson for a common debt of a hundred pounds due to himself. Seeing of what stuff Davidson was made, he resolved no longer to delay putting this in execution; so he took Duff aside, and put the caption into his hand, desiring him to take Gicht, as he was called, into custody, which was of course immediately done.
In the midst of these complicated proceedings, a message came from the young Lady Gicht, entreating them to come to the family mansion, a few miles off, where she thought all difficulties might be accommodated. The whole party accordingly went there, and were entertained very hospitably till about two o’clock in the morning (Sunday), when the strangers rose to depart, and Davidson came out to see them to horse, as a host was bound to do in that age, but with apparently no design of going along with them. Duff was not so far blinded by the Gicht hospitality, as to forget that he would be under a very heavy responsibility if he should allow Davidson to slip through his fingers. Accordingly, |1704.| he reminded the laird that he was a prisoner, and must come along with them; whereupon Davidson drew his sword, and called his servants to the rescue, but was speedily overpowered by the messenger and his assistant, and by the other gentlemen present. He and Cowbairdie were, in short, carried back as prisoners that night to the Milton of Fyvie.
This place being on the estate of Gicht, Duff bethought him next day that, as the tenants were going to church, they might gather about their captive laird, and make an unpleasant disturbance; so he took forward his prisoners to the next inn, where they rested till the Sabbath was over. Even then, at Davidson’s entreaty, he did not immediately conduct them to prison, but waited over Monday and Tuesday, while friends were endeavouring to bring about an accommodation. This was happily so far effected, the Earl of Aberdeen, and his son Lord Haddo, paying off Mr Gordon’s claim on Davidson, and certain relatives becoming bound for the registration of the marriage-contract.
From whatever motive—whether, as alleged, to cover a vitiation in the contract, or merely out of revenge—Davidson soon after raised a process before the Privy Council against Cowbairdie, Gordon, and Duff, for assault and private imprisonment, concluding for three thousand pounds of damages; but after a long series of proceedings, in the course of which many witnesses were examined on both sides, the case was ignominiously dismissed, and Davidson decerned to pay a thousand merks as expenses.[[364]]
Dec.
Cash being scarce in the country, a rumour arose—believed to be promoted by malicious persons—that the Privy Council intended by proclamation to raise the value of the several coins then current. The unavoidable consequence was a run upon the Bank of Scotland, which lasted twenty days, and with such severity, that at last the money in its coffers was exhausted, and payments at the bank were suspended; being the only stoppage or suspension, properly so called, which has ever taken place in this venerable institution since its starting in 1695, down to the present day, besides one of an unimportant character, to be afterwards adverted to. ‘That no person possessed of bank-notes should be a loser, by having their money lie dead and useless, the proprietors of the bank, in a general meeting, declared all bank-notes then current to bear interest from the day that payments |1704.| were stopped, until they should be called in by the directors in order to payment.’[[365]]
Dec. 19.
The Court of Directors (December 19) petitioned the Privy Council to send a committee to inspect their books, and ‘therein see the sufficiency of the security to the nation for the bank-notes that are running, and to take such course as in their wisdom they might think fit, for the satisfaction of those who might have bank-notes in their hands.’
Accordingly, a committee of Council, which included Lord Belhaven, the President of the Court of Session, the Lord Advocate, and the Treasurer-depute, met in the bank-office at two o’clock next day; and having examined the accounts both in charge and discharge, found that ‘the bank hath sufficient provisions to satisfy and pay all their outstanding bills and debts, and that with a considerable overplus, exceeding by a fourth part at least the whole foresaid bills and debts, conform to ane abstract of the said account left in the clerk of Council’s hands for the greater satisfaction of all concerned.’[[366]]
This report being, by permission of the Privy Council, printed, ‘gave such universal satisfaction, that payments thereafter were as current as ever, and no stop in business, everybody taking bank-notes, as if no stop had been for want of specie, knowing that they would at last get their money with interest.
‘At this time, the Company thought fit to call in a tenth of stock [£10,000] from the adventurers, which was punctually paid by each adventurer [being exactly a duplication of the acting capital, which was only £10,000 before]; and in less than five months thereafter, the Company being possessed of a good cash, the directors called in the notes that were charged with interest, and issued new notes, or made payments in money, in the option of the possessors of the old notes. And very soon the affairs and negotiations of the bank went on as formerly, and all things continued easy until the year 1708.’[[367]]
Dec.
Notwithstanding the extreme poverty now universally complained of, whenever a man of any figure or importance died, there was enormous expense incurred in burying him. On the death, at this time, of Lachlan Mackintosh of Mackintosh—that is, the chief of the clan Mackintosh—there were funeral |1704.| entertainments at his mansion in Inverness-shire for a whole month. Cooks and confectioners were brought from Edinburgh, at great expense, to provide viands for the guests, and liquors were set aflowing in the greatest profusion. On the day of the interment, the friends and dependants of the deceased made a procession, reaching all the way from Dalcross Castle to the kirk of Petty, a distance of four miles! ‘It has been said that the expense incurred on this occasion proved the source of pecuniary embarrassments to the Mackintosh family to a recent period.’[[368]]
In the same month died Sir William Hamilton, who had for several years held the office of a judge under the designation of Lord Whitelaw, and who, for the last two months of his life, was Lord Justice-clerk, and consequently, in the arrangements of that period, an officer of state. It had pleased his lordship to assign the great bulk of his fortune, being £7000 sterling, to his widow, the remainder going to his heir, Hamilton of Bangour, of which family he was a younger son. Lord Whitelaw was buried in the most pompous style, chiefly under direction of the widow, but, to all appearance, with the concurrence of the heir, who took some concern in the arrangements, or at least was held as sanctioning the whole affair by his presence as chief mourner. The entire expenses were £5189 Scots, equal to £432, 8s. 4d. sterling, being more than two years’ salary of a judge of the Court of Session at that time. The lady paid the tradesmen’s bills out of her ‘donative,’ which was thought a singularly large one; but, by and by, marrying again, she raised an action against Bangour, craving allowance for Lord Whitelaw’s funeral charges ‘out of her intromission with the executry’—that is, out of the proceeds of the estate, apart from her jointure. The heir represented that the charges were inordinate, while his inheritance was small; but this view of the matter does not appear to have been conclusive, for the Lords, by a plurality, decided that the funeral expenses of a deceased person ‘must be allowed to the utmost of what his character and quality will admit, without regard to what small part of his fortune may come to his heir.’[[369]] They did, indeed, afterwards modify this decision, allowing only just and necessary expenses; but, what is to our present purpose, they do not appear to have been startled at the idea of spending as much as two years of a man’s income in laying him under the soil.
1704.
The account of expenses at the funeral of a northern laird—Sir Hugh Campbell of Calder, who died in March 1716—gives us, as it were, the anatomy of one of these ruinous ceremonials. There was a charge of £55, 15s. ‘to buy ane cow, ane ox, five kids, two wedders, eggs, geese, turkeys, pigs, and moorfowl,’ the substantials of the entertainment. Besides £40 for brandy to John Finlay in Forres, £25, 4s. for claret to John Roy in Forres, £82, 6s. to Bailie Cattenach at Aberdeen for claret, and £35 to John Fraser in Clunas for ‘waters’—that is, whisky—there was a charge by James Cuthbert, merchant, of £407, 8s. 4d. for ‘22 pints brandy at 48s. per pint, 18 wine-glasses, 6 dozen pipes, and 3 lb. cut tobacco, 2 pecks of apples, 2 gross corks, one large pewter flagon at £6, and one small at £3, currants, raisins, cinnamon, nutmegs, mace, ginger, confected carvy, orange and citron peel, two pair black shambo gloves for women,’ and two or three other small articles. There was also £40 for flour, £39, 12s. to the cooks and baxters, and ‘to malt brewn from the said Sir Hugh’s death to the interment, sixteen bolls and ane half,’ £88. [Sir Hugh’s body lay from the 11th to the 29th March, and during these eighteen days there had been ale for all comers.] The outlay for ‘oils, cerecloth, and frankincense,’ used for the body, was £60; for ‘two coffins, tables, and other work,’ £110, 13s. 4d.; for the hearse and adornments connected with it (inclusive of ‘two mortheads at 40s. the piece’), £358. With the expenses for the medical attendant, a suit of clothes to the minister, and some few other matters, the whole amounted to £1647, 16s. 4d., Scots money.[[370]] This sum, it will be observed, indicates a comparatively moderate funeral for a man of such eminence; and we must multiply everything by three, in order to attain a probable notion of the eating, the drinking, and the pomp and grandeur which attended Lord Whitelaw’s obsequies.
The quantity of liquor consumed at the Laird of Calder’s funeral suggests that the house of the deceased must have been, on such occasions, the scene of no small amount of conviviality. It was indeed expected that the guests should plentifully regale themselves with both meat and drink, and in the Highlands especially the chief mourner would have been considered a shabby person if he did not press them to do so. At the funeral of Mrs Forbes of Culloden, or, to use the phrase of the day, Lady Culloden, her son Duncan, who afterwards became Lord President |1704.| of the Court of Session, conducted the festivities. The company sat long and drank largely, but at length the word being given for what was called the lifting, they rose to proceed to the burialground. The gentlemen mounted their horses, the commonalty walked, and all duly arrived at the churchyard, when, behold, no one could give any account of the corpse! They quickly became aware that they had left the house without thinking of that important part of the ceremonial; and Lady Culloden still reposed in the chamber of death. A small party was sent back to the house to ‘bring on’ the corpse, which was then deposited in the grave with all the decorum which could be mustered in such anti-funereal circumstances.[[371]]
Strange as this tale may read, there is reason to believe that the occurrence was not unique. It is alleged to have been repeated at the funeral of Mrs Home of Billie, in Berwickshire, in the middle of the eighteenth century.
In our own age, we continually hear of the vice of living for appearances, as if it were something quite unknown heretofore; but the truth is, that one of the strongest points of contrast between the past and the present times, is the comparative slavery of our ancestors to irrational practices which were deemed necessary to please the eye of society, while hurtful to the individual. This slavery was shewn very strikingly in the customs attending funerals, and not merely among people of rank, but in the humblest grades of the community. It was also to be seen very remarkably in the custom of pressing hospitality on all occasions beyond the convenience of guests, in drinking beyond one’s own convenience to encourage them, and in the customs of the table generally; not less so in the dresses and decorations of the human figure, in all of which infinitely more personal inconvenience was submitted to, under a sense of what was required by fashion, than there is at the present day.
1705. Jan.
Roderick Mackenzie, secretary to the African Company, advertised what was called An Adventure for the Curious—namely, a raffle for the possession of ‘a pair of extraordinary fine Indian screens,’ by a hundred tickets at a guinea each. The screens were described as being on sight at his office in Mylne’s Square, but only by ticket (price 5d.), in order to prevent that pressure of the |1705.| mob which might otherwise be apprehended. In these articles, the public was assured, ‘the excellence of art vied with the wonderfulness of nature,’ for they represented a ‘variety of several kinds of living creatures, intermixed with curious trees, plants, and flowers, all done in raised, embossed, loose, and coloured work, so admirably to the life, that, at any reasonable distance, the most discerning eye can scarcely distinguish those images from the real things they represent,’ Nothing of the kind, it was averred, had ever been seen in Scotland before, ‘excepting one screen of six leaves only, that is now in the palace at Hamilton.’[[372]]
Jan. 5.
A general arming being now contemplated under the Act of Security, it became important that arms should be obtained cheaply within the country, instead of being brought, as was customary, from abroad. James Donaldson, describing himself as ‘merchant in Edinburgh,’ but identical with the Captain Donaldson who had established the Edinburgh Gazette in 1699, came forward as an enterpriser who could help the country in this crisis. He professed to have, ‘after great pains, found out ane effectual way to make machines, whereby several parts of the art and calling of smith-craft, particularly with relation to the making of arms, may be performed without the strength and labour of men, such as blowing with bellows, boring with run spindles, beating with hammers, [and] striking of files.’ He craved permission of the Privy Council to set up a work for the making of arms in this economical way, with exclusive privileges for a definite period, as a remuneration.
The Council remitted the matter to the deacon of the smiths, for his judgment, which was very much putting the lamb’s case to the wolf’s decision. The worshipful deacon by and by reported that James Donaldson was well known to possess no mechanic skill, particularly in smith-work, so that his proposal could only be looked upon as ‘ane engine to inhaunce a little money to supply his necessity.’ The ordinary smiths were far more fit to supply the required arms, and had indeed a right to do so, a right which Donaldson evidently meant to infringe upon. In short, Donaldson was an insufferable interloper in a business he had nothing to do with. The Council gave force to this report by refusing Donaldson’s petition.
Not satisfied with this decision, Donaldson, a few days later, |1705.| presented a new petition, in which he more clearly explained the kinds of smith-work which he meant to facilitate—namely, ‘forging, boring, and beating of gun-barrels, cutting of files, [and] grinding and polishing of firearms,’ He exhibited ‘the model of the engine for boring and polishing of gun-barrels, and demonstrated the same, so that their lordships commended the same as ingenious and very practicable.’ He further disclaimed all idea of interfering with the privileges of the hammermen of Edinburgh, his ‘motive being nothing else than the public good and honour of his country,’ and his intention being to set up his work in a different place from the capital. What he claimed was no more than what had been granted to other ‘inventors of engines and mechanical improvements, as the manufactures for wool and tow cards, that for gilded leather, the gunpowder manufacture, &c.’
The Lords, learning that much of the opposition of the hammermen was withdrawn, granted the privileges claimed, on the condition that the work should not be set up in any royal burgh, and should not interfere with the rights of the Edinburgh corporation.
Feb. 2.
Under strong external professions of religious conviction, rigorous Sabbath observance, and a general severity of manners, there prevailed great debauchery, which would now and then come to the surface. On this evening there had assembled a party in Edinburgh, who carried drink and excitement to such a pitch, that nothing less than a dance in the streets would satisfy them. There was Ensign Fleming of a Scots regiment in the Dutch service (son of Sir James Fleming, late provost of Edinburgh); there were Thomas Burnet, one of the guards; and John, son of the late George Galbraith, merchant. The ten o’clock bell had rung, to warn all good citizens home. The three bacchanals were enjoying their frolic in the decent Lawnmarket, where there was no light but what might come from the windows of the neighbouring houses; when suddenly there approaches a sedan-chair, attended by one or two footmen, one of them carrying a lantern. It was the Earl of Leven, governor of the Castle, and a member of the Privy Council, passing home to his aërial lodging. Most perilous was it to meddle with such a person; but the merry youths were too far gone in their madness to inquire who it was or think of consequences; so, when Galbraith came against one of the footmen, and was warned off, he answered with an imprecation, and, turning to Fleming and Burnet, told them what |1705.| had passed. Fleming said it would be brave sport for them to go after the chair and overturn it in the mud; whereupon the three assailed Lord Leven’s servants, and broke the lantern. His lordship spoke indignantly from his chair, and Fleming, drawing his sword, wounded one of the servants, but was quickly overpowered along with his companions.
The young delinquents speedily became aware of the quality of the man they had insulted, and were of course in great alarm, Fleming in particular being apprehensive of losing his commission. After a month’s imprisonment, they were glad to come and make public profession of penitence on their knees before the Council, in order to obtain their liberty.[[373]]
On a Sunday, early in the same month, four free-living gentlemen, including Lord Blantyre—then a hot youth of two-and-twenty—drove in a hackney-coach to Leith, and sat in the tavern of a Mrs Innes all the time of the afternoon-service. Thereafter they went out to take a ramble on the sands, but by and by returned to drinking at the tavern of a Captain Kendal, where they carried on the debauch till eight o’clock in the evening. Let an Edinburgh correspondent of Mr Wodrow tell the remainder of the story. Being all drunk—‘when they were coming back to Edinburgh, in the very street of Leith, they called furiously to the coachman and post-boy to drive. The fellows, I think, were drunk, too, and ran in on the side of the causey, dung down [knocked over] a woman, and both the fore and hind wheel went over her. The poor woman cried; however, the coach went on; the woman died in half an hour. Word came to the Advocate to-morrow morning, who caused seize the two fellows, and hath been taking a precognition of the witnesses ... it will be a great pity that the gentlemen that were in the coach be not soundly fined for breach of Sabbath. One of them had once too great a profession to [make it proper that he should] be guilty now of such a crime.’[[374]]
The desire to see these scapegraces punished for what was called breach of Sabbath, without any regard to that dangerous rashness of conduct which had led to the loss of an innocent life, is very characteristic of Mr Wodrow’s style of correspondents.
Feb. 19.
Donaldson’s paper, The Edinburgh Gazette, which had been established in 1699, continued in existence; and in the intermediate |1705.| time there had also been many flying broadsides printed and sold on the streets, containing accounts of extraordinary occurrences of a remarkable nature, often scandalous. The growing inclination of the public for intelligence of contemporary events was now shewn by the commencement of a second paper in Edinburgh, under the title of The Edinburgh Courant. The enterpriser, Adam Boig, announced that it would appear on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, ‘containing most of the remarkable foreign news from their prints, and also the home news from the ports within this kingdom, when ships comes and goes, and from whence, which it is hoped will prove a great advantage to merchants and others within this nation (it being now altogether neglected).’ Having obtained the sanction of the Privy Council, he, at the date noted, issued the first number, consisting of a small folio in double columns, bearing to be ‘printed by James Watson in Craig’s Close,’ and containing about as much literary matter as a single column of a modern newspaper of moderate size. There are two small paragraphs regarding criminal cases then pending, and the following sole piece of mercantile intelligence: ‘Leith, Feb. 16.—This day came in to our Port the Mary Galley, David Preshu, commander, laden with wine and brandy.’ There are also three small advertisements, one intimating the setting up of post-offices at Wigton and New Galloway, another the sale of lozenges for the kinkhost [chincough] at 8s. the box.
The superior enterprise shewn in the conducting of the Courant, aided, perhaps, by some dexterous commercial management, seems to have quickly told upon the circulation of the Gazette; and we must regret, for the sake of an old soldier, that the proprietor of the latter was unwise enough to complain of this result to the Privy Council, instead of trying to keep his ground by an improvement of his paper. He insinuated that Boig, having first undersold him by ‘giving his paper to the ballad-singers four shillings [4d. sterling] a quire below the common price, as he did likewise to the postmaster,’ did still ‘so practise the paper-criers,’ as to induce them to neglect the selling of the Gazette, and set forth the Courant as ‘preferable both in respect of foreign and domestic news.’ By these methods, ‘the Courant gained credit with some,’ though all its foreign news was ‘taken verbatim out of some of the London papers, and most part out of Dyer’s Letter and the London Courant, which are not of the best reputation.’ He, on the other hand, ‘did never omit any domestic news that he judged pertinent, though he never meddled |1705.| with matters that he had cause to believe would not be acceptable [flattery to the Privy Council], nor every story and trifling matter he heard.’
A triumphant answer to such a complaint was but too easy. ‘The petitioner,’ says Boig, ‘complains that I undersold him; that my Courant bore nothing but what was collected from foreign newspapers; and that it gained greater reputation than his Gazette. As to the first, it was his fault if he kept the Gazette too dear; and I must say that his profit cannot but be considerable when he sells at my price, for all my news comes by the common post, and I pay the postage; whereas John Bisset, his conjunct [that is, partner], gets his news all by the secretary’s packet free of postage, which is at least eight shillings sterling a week free gain to them. As to the second, I own that the foreign news was collected from other newspapers, and I suppose Mr Donaldson has not his news from first hands more than I did. But the truth is, the Courant bore more, for it always bore the home news, especially anent our shipping, which I humbly suppose was one of the reasons for its having a good report; and Mr Donaldson, though he had a yearly allowance from the royal burghs, never touched anything of that nature, nor settled a correspondent at any port in the kingdom, no, not so much as at Leith. As to the third, it’s left to your Grace and Lordships to judge if it be a crime in me that the Courant had a greater reputation than the Gazette.’
Connected, however, with this controversy, was an unlucky misadventure into which Boig had fallen, in printing in his paper a petition to the Privy Council from Evander M‘Iver, tacksman of the Scots Manufactory Paper-mills, and James Watson, printer, for permission to complete the reprinting of an English book, entitled War betwixt the British Kingdoms Considered. While these petitioners thought only of their right to reprint English books ‘for the encouragement of the paper-manufactory and the art of printing at home, and for the keeping of money as much as may be in the kingdom,’ the Council saw political inconvenience and danger in the book, and every reference to it, and at once stopped both the Courant, in which the advertisement appeared, and the Gazette, which piteously as well as justly pleaded that it had in no such sort offended. It was in the course of this affair that Donaldson complained of Boig’s successful rivalry, and likewise of an invasion by another person of his monopoly of burial-letters.
After an interruption of three months, Adam Boig was allowed to resume his publication, upon giving strong assurance of more |1705.| cautious conduct in future. His paper continued to flourish for several years. (See under March 6, 1706.)
Mar. 5.
In the early part of 1704, the sense of indignity and wrong which had been inspired into the national mind by the Darien disasters and other circumstances, was deepened into a wrathful hatred by the seizure of a vessel named the Annandale, which the African Company was preparing for a trading voyage to India. This proceeding, and the subsequent forfeiture of the vessel before the Court of Exchequer, were defensive acts of the East India Company, and there can be little doubt that they were grossly unjust. In the subsequent autumn, an English vessel, named the Worcester, belonging to what was called the Two Million Company (a rival to the East India Company), was driven by foul weather into the Firth of Forth. It was looked upon by the African Company as fair game for a reprisal. On the 12th August, the secretary, Mr Roderick Mackenzie, with a few associates, made an apparently friendly visit to the ship, and was entertained with a bowl of punch. Another party followed, and were received with equal hospitality. With only eleven half-armed friends, he that evening overpowered the officers and crew, and took the vessel into his possession. In the present temper of the nation, the act, questionable as it was in every respect, was sure to meet with general approbation.
Before Captain Green and the others had been many days in custody, strange hints were heard amongst them of a piratical attack they had committed in the preceding year upon a vessel off the coast of Malabar. The African Company had three years ago sent out a vessel, called the Speedy Return, to India, with one Drummond as its master, and it had never since been heard of. It was concluded that the people of the Worcester had captured the Speedy Return, and murdered its crew, and that Providence had arranged for their punishment, by sending them for shelter from a storm to the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. Vainly might it have been pointed out that there was no right evidence for even the fact of the piracy, still less for the Speedy Return being the subject of the offence. Truth and justice were wholly lost sight of in the universal thirst for vengeance against England and its selfish mercantile companies.
Green, the captain of the Worcester, Mather, the chief-mate, Reynolds, the second-mate, and fifteen others, were tried at this date before the Court of Admiralty, for the alleged crime of |1705.| attacking a ship, having English or Scotch aboard, off the coast of Malabar, and subsequently murdering the crew—no specific vessel or person being mentioned as the subjects of the crime, and no nearer date being cited than the months of February, March, April, or May 1703. The jury had no difficulty in bringing them in guilty, and they were all condemned to be hanged on the sands of Leith, the usual place for the execution of pirates.
The English government was thrown into great anxiety by this violent proceeding, but they could make no effectual resistance to the current of public feeling in Scotland. There the general belief in the guilt of Green and his associates was corroborated after the trial by three several confessions, admitting the piratical seizing of Drummond’s vessel, and the subsequent murder of himself and his crew—confessions which can now only be accounted for, like those of witches, on the theory of a desire to conciliate favour, and perhaps win pardon, by conceding so far to the popular prejudices. The queen sent down affidavits shewing that Drummond’s ship had in reality been taken by pirates at Madagascar, while himself was on shore—a view of the fact which there is now ample reason to believe to have been true. She also sent to the Privy Council the expression of her desire that the men should be respited for a time. But, beyond postponement for a week, all was in vain. The royal will was treated respectfully, but set aside on some technical irregularity. When the day approached for the execution of the first batch of the condemned, it became evident that there was no power in Scotland which could have saved these innocent men. The Council, we may well believe, would have gladly conceded to the royal will, but, placed as it was amidst an infuriated people, it had no freedom to act. On the fatal morning (11th April), its movements were jealously watched by a vast multitude, composed of something more than the ordinary citizens of Edinburgh, for on the previous day all the more ardent and determined persons living within many miles round had poured into the city to see that justice was done. No doubt can now be entertained that, if the authorities had attempted to save the condemned from punishment, the mob would have torn them from the Tolbooth, and hung every one of them up in the street. What actually took place is described in a letter from Mr Alexander Wodrow to his father, the minister of Eastwood: ‘I wrote last night,’ he says, ‘of the uncertainty anent the condemned persons, and this morning things were yet at a greater uncertainty, for the current report was that ane express was come for a reprieve. |1705.| How this was, I have not yet learned; but the councillors went down to the Abbey [Palace of Holyrood] about eight, and came up to the Council-house about nine, against which time there was a strange gathering in the streets. The town continued in great confusion for two hours, while the Council was sitting, and a great rabble at the Netherbow port. All the guards in the Canongate were in readiness if any mob had arisen. About eleven, word came out of the Council [sitting in the Parliament Square] that three were to be hanged—namely, Captain Green, Mather, and Simson. This appeased the mob, and made many post away to Leith, where many thousands had been [assembled], and were on the point of coming up in a great rage. When the chancellor came out, he got many huzzas at first; but at the Tron Kirk, some surmised to the mob that all this was but a sham; upon which they assaulted his coach, and broke the glasses, and forced him to come out and go into Mylne’s Square, and stay for a considerable time.
‘The three prisoners were brought with the Town-guards, accompanied with a vast mob. They went through all the Canongate, and out at the Water-port to Leith. There was a battalion of foot-guards, and also some of the horse-guards, drawn up at some distance from the place of execution. There was the greatest confluence of people there that ever I saw in my life, for they cared not how far they were off, so be it they saw. Green was first execute, then Simson, and last of all Mather. They every one of them, when the rope was about their necks, denied they were guilty of that for which they were to die. This indeed put all people to a strange demur. There’s only this to alleviate it, that they confessed no other particular sins more than that, even though they were posed anent their swearing and drunkenness, which was weel known.’[[375]]
Sep. 11.
The Scottish parliament was not much given to the patronising of literature. We have, indeed, seen it giving encouragement to Adair’s maps of the coasts, and Slezer’s views of the king’s and other mansions; but it was in a languid and ineffective way, by reason of the lack of funds. At this time, the assembled wisdom of the nation was pleased to pass an act enabling the town-council of Glasgow to impose two pennies (⅕th of a penny sterling) upon the pint of ale brewn and vended in that town; and out of this |1705.| ‘gift in favours of the town of Glasgow,’ as it was quite sincerely called, there was granted three thousand six hundred pounds (£300 sterling) to Mr James Anderson, writer to her majesty’s signet, ‘for enabling him to carry on an account of the ancient and original charters and seals of our kings in copper-plates.’ Why the ale-drinkers of Glasgow should have been called upon to furnish the country with engraved copies of its ancient charters, was a question which probably no one dreamed of asking.
In February 1707, the parliament, then about to close its existence, ordered to Mr Anderson the further sum of £590 sterling, to repay him for his outlay on the work, with a further sum of £1050 to enable him to go on and complete it. This was done after due examination by a committee, which reported favourably of the curious and valuable character of his collections. Soon after, the parliament, in consideration of the great sufferings of the town of Dundee in the time of the troubles and at the Revolution, and of ‘the universal decay of trade, especially in that burgh,’ granted it an imposition of two pennies Scots on every pint of ale or beer made or sold in the town for twenty-four years; but this gift was burdened with a hundred pounds sterling per annum for six years to Mr James Anderson, as part of the sum the parliament had agreed to confer upon him for the encouragement of his labours.[[376]]
Nov.
Died Alexander third Earl of Kincardine, unmarried, a nobleman of eccentric character. His father, the second earl, is spoken of by Burnet in the highest terms; his mother was a Dutch lady, Veronica, daughter of Corneille, Lord of Sommelsdyk and Spycke. [Readers of Boswell will remember his infant daughter Veronica, with whom Johnson was pleased, so named from the biographer’s great-grandmother, Veronica, Countess of Kincardine.] The earl now deceased, probably through his parental connection with the Low Countries, had contracted the religious principles of the Flemish saint or seeress, Antonia Bourignon, which, like every other departure from pure Presbyterianism and the Westminster Confession, were detested in Scotland. Wodrow tells us: ‘I have it from very good hands, Lieutenant-colonel Erskine[[377]] and Mr Allan Logan, |1705.| who were frequently with him, that the late Earl of Kincardine did fast forty days and nights after he turned Burrignianist, [and] lived several years after. He was very loose before he turned to these errors; and after a while being in them, he turned loose again, and died in a very odd manner. Many thought him possessed. He would have uttered the most dreadful blasphemies that can be conceived, and he told some things done at a distance, and repeated Mr Allan Logan’s words, which he had in secret, and told things it was impossible for anybody to know.’[[378]]
The more active minds of the country continued constantly seething with schemes for the promotion of industry, and the remedy of the standing evil of poverty. In this year there was published an Essay on the New Project of a Land Mint, which might be considered a type of the more visionary plans. It rested on what would now be called one of the commonplaces of false political economy. The proposed Land Mint was a kind of bank for the issue of notes, to be given only on landed security. Any one intending to borrow, say a thousand pounds of these notes, pledged unentailed land-property to that amount, plus interest and possible expenses, undertaking to pay back a fifth part each year, with interest on the outstanding amount, till all was discharged. It was thought that, by these means, money would be, as it were, created; the country would be spirited up to hopeful industrial undertakings; and—everything requiring a religious aspect in those days—the people would be enabled to resist the designs of a well-known sovereign, ‘aiming now at a Catholic monarchy;’ for, while Louis XIV. might become sole master of the plate (that is, silver) of the world, what would it matter ‘if we and other nations should substitute another money, equal in all cases to plate?’ The only fear the author could bring himself to entertain, was as to possible counterfeiting of the notes. This being provided against by an ingenious expedient suggested by himself, there remained no difficulty and no fear whatever.[[379]]
1706. Mar.
Although the incessant violences which we have seen mark an early period embraced by our Annals were no more, it cannot be |1705.| said that the crimes of violent passion had become infrequent. On the contrary, it appeared as if the increasing licence of manners since the Revolution, and particularly the increasing drunkenness of the upper classes, were now giving occasion for a considerable number of homicides and murders. We have seen a notable example of reckless violence in the case of the Master of Rollo in 1695. There was about the same time a Laird of Kininmont, who—partly under the influence of a diseased brain—was allowed to commit a considerable number of manslaughters before it was thought necessary to arrest him in his course.
Archibald Houston, writer to the signet in Edinburgh, acted as factor for the estate of Braid, the property of his nephew, and in this capacity he had incurred the diligence of the law on account of some portion of Bishops’ rents which he had failed to pay. Robert Kennedy of Auchtyfardel, in Lanarkshire, receiving a commission to uplift these arrears, found it to be his duty to give Houston a charge of horning for his debt.
Mar. 20.
One day, Kennedy and his two sons left their house in the Castle Hill of Edinburgh, to go to the usual place of rendezvous at the Cross, when, passing along the Luckenbooths, he was accosted by Mr Houston with violent language, referring to the late legal proceedings. Kennedy, if his own account is to be trusted, gave no hard language in return, but made an effort to disengage himself from the unseemly scene, and moved on towards the Cross. Houston, however, followed and renewed the brawl, when it would appear that Gilbert Kennedy, Auchtyfardel’s eldest son, was provoked to strike his father’s assailant on the face. The people now began to flock about the party—Kennedy again moved on; but before he had got many paces away, he heard the sounds of a violent collision, and turned back with his cane uplifted to defend his son. It is alleged that Kennedy fell upon Houston with his cane—he had no weapon on his person—and while he did so, young Gilbert Kennedy drew his sword, and, rushing forward, wounded Houston mortally in the belly. The unfortunate man died a few days afterwards.[[380]]
Auchtyfardel’s share in this transaction was held to infer his liability to an arbitrary punishment. Gilbert fled, and was outlawed, but afterwards was permitted to return home, and in time he succeeded to his father’s estate. We hear of him in |1705.| 1730, as having been brought by that sad act of his youth into a very serious and religious frame of life. He was an elder of the church, and took great care of the morals of his servants. A maid, whom he on one occasion reproved severely, was led, by a diabolic spite, to mix some arsenic with the bread and milk which she prepared for the family breakfast, and the death of Houston had very nearly been avenged at the distance of twenty-four years from its occurrence. Happily, through the aid of a physician, the laird and his family escaped destruction.[[381]]
A case more characteristic of the age than that of young Auchtyfardel occurred in the ensuing year. David Ogilvie of Cluny, having first thrust himself upon a funeral-party at the village of Meigle, and there done his best to promote hard drinking, insisted on accompanying two or three of the gentlemen on their way home, though his own lay another way. While proceeding along, he gave extreme annoyance to Andrew Cowpar, younger of Lochblair, by practical jokes of a gross kind, founded on the variance of sex in their respective horses. At length, Cowpar giving the other’s horse a switch across the face, to make it keep off, Ogilvie took violent offence at the act, demanded Cowpar’s whip under a threat of being otherwise pistolled, and, on a refusal, actually took out a pistol and shot his companion dead. The wretched murderer escaped abroad.
In January 1708, Robert Baird, son of Sir James Baird of Sauchtonhall, had a drinking-match in a tavern at Leith, where he particularly insisted on his friend, Mr Robert Oswald, being filled drunk. On Oswald resisting repeated bumpers, Baird demanded an apology from him, as if he had committed some breach of good-manners. He refused, and thus a drunken sense of resentment was engendered in the mind of Baird. At a late hour, they came up to Edinburgh in a coach, and leaving the vehicle at the Nether Bow, were no sooner on the street, than Baird drew his sword, and began to push at Oswald, upon whom he speedily inflicted two mortal wounds. He fled from the scene, leaving a bloody and broken sword beside his expiring victim.
On the ground of its not being ‘forethought felony,’ Baird was some years afterwards allowed by the Court of Justiciary to have the benefit of Queen Anne’s act of indemnity.
1706. Oct.
Early in this month, Scotland was honoured with a visit from |1705.| the celebrated Daniel Defoe. His noted power and probity as a Whig pamphleteer suggested to the English ministry the propriety of sending him down for a time to Edinburgh, to help on the cause of the Union. He came with sympathies for the people of Scotland, founded on what they had suffered under the last Stuart reigns. Instead of believing all to be barren and hopeless north of the Tweed, he viewed the country as one of great capabilities, requiring only peace and industry to become a scene of prosperity equal to what prevailed in England. To this end he deemed an incorporating union of the two countries necessary, and it was therefore with no small amount of good-will that he undertook the mission assigned to him.
Even, however, from one regarding it so fraternally as Defoe, Scotland was little disposed to accept a recommendation of that measure. It was in vain that he published a complaisant poem about the people, under the name of Caledonia, in which he commended their bravery, their learning, and abilities. Vainly did he declare himself their friend, anxious to promote their prosperity by pointing to improved agriculture, to fisheries, to commerce, and to manufactures. The Edinburgh people saw him daily closeted with the leaders of the party for the hated union, and that was enough. His pen displayed its wonted activity in answers to the objectors, and his natural good-humour seems never to have failed him, even when he was assailed with the most virulent abuse. But his enemies did not confine themselves to words: threats of assassination reached him. His lodgings were marked, and his footsteps were tracked; yet he held serenely on in his course. He even entered upon some little enterprises in the manufacture of linen, for the purpose of shewing the people what they might do for themselves, if they would adopt right methods. It appears that, during the tumults which took place in Edinburgh while the measure was passing through parliament, he was in real danger. One evening, when the mob was raging in the street, he looked out of his window to behold their proceedings, and was nearly hit by a large stone which some one threw at him, the populace making a point that no one should look over windows at them, lest he might recognise faces, and become a witness against individual culprits.
Defoe spent sixteen months in Scotland on this occasion, rendering much modest good service to the country, and receiving for it little remuneration besides abuse. Amongst other fruits of his industry during the period is his laborious work, |1706.| The History of the Union of Great Britain. One could have wished a record tracing the daily life of this remarkable man in Scotland. “We only get an obscure idea of some of his public transactions. One of the few private particulars we have learned, is that he paid a visit to the Duke of Queensberry at Drumlanrig, and by his Grace’s desire, took a view of his estates, with a view to the suggestion of improvements.
Defoe revisited Scotland in the summer of 1708, on a mission the purpose of which has not been ascertained; and again in the summer of 1709. His stay on the last occasion extended to nearly two years, during part of which time, in addition to constant supplies of articles for his Review in London, he acted as editor of the Edinburgh Courant newspaper.[[382]] (See the next article).
1707. Mar. 6.
In a folio published this day by Captain James Donaldson, under the title of the Edinburgh Courant Reviewed, we learn that the Edinburgh Gazette, which, as we have seen, was commenced in 1699, had now succumbed to fate: damaged by the persevering policy of Adam Boig of the Courant, the Gazette ‘of late has been laid aside, as a thing that cannot be profitably carried on.’
Donaldson here reviews the charges made against his paper, as to partiality and staleness of news, defends it to some extent, but practically admits the latter fault, by stating that he was about to remedy it. He was going to recommence the Edinburgh Gazette in a new series, in which he would ‘take a little more liberty, and give stories as they come,’ without waiting, as before, for their authentication, though taking care where they were doubtful to intimate as much. The Gazette did, accordingly, resume its existence on the 25th of the same month, as a twice-a-week paper. The first number contains three advertisements, one of a sale of house-property, another of the wares of the Leith glass-work, and a third as follows: ‘There is a gentleman in town, who has an secret which was imparted to him by his father, an eminent physician in this kingdom, which by the blessing of God cures the Phrensie and Convulsion Fits. He takes no reward for his pains till the cure be perfyted. He will be found at the Caledonian Coffee-house.’
In a series of the Gazette extending from the commencement to the 140th number, published on the 2d September 1708, there is a remarkable sterility of home-news, and anything that is |1707.| told is told, in a dry and sententious way. The following alone seem worthy of transcription:
‘Leith, May 19 [1707].—Last Saturday, about 50 merchant-ships, bound for Holland, sailed from our Road, under convoy of two Dutch men-of-war.’
‘Edinburgh, August 5.—This day the Equivalent Money came in here from South Britain, in thirteen waggons drawn by six horses.’
Sep. 30.—‘Dyer’s Letter says: Daniel de Foe is believed by this time in the hands of justice at the complaint of the Swedish minister, and now a certain man of law may have an opportunity to reckon with him for a crime which made him trip to Scotland, and make him oblige the world with another Hymn to the Pillory.’
Strange to say, less than three years after this date, namely, in February 1710, the ‘unabashed Defoe’ was conducting the rival newspaper in Edinburgh—the Courant—succeeding in this office Adam Boig, who had died in the preceding month. The authority of Defoe for his editorship appears in the following decree of the Town Council:
‘Att Edinburgh the first day of February
jm. vijc. and ten years:
‘The same day The Councill authorized Mr Daniel Defoe to print the Edinburgh Currant in place of the deceast Adam Bog Discharging hereby any other person to print News under the name of the Edinburgh Currant.’
The advertisements are also very scanty, seldom above three or four, and most of these repeated frequently, as if they were reprinted gratuitously, in order to make an appearance of business in this line. The following are selected as curious:
May 13, 1707.—‘This is to give notice to all who have occasion for a black hersse, murning-coach, and other coaches, just new, and in good order, with good horses well accoutred, that James Mouat, coachmaster in Lawrence Ord’s Land at the foot of the Canongate, will serve them thankfully at reasonable rates.’
‘Ralph Agutter of London, lately come to Edinburgh, Musical Instrument-maker, is to be found at Widow Pool’s, perfumer of gloves, at her house in Stonelaw’s Close, a little below the Steps; makes the Violin, Bass Violin, Tenor Violin, the Viol de Gambo, the Lute Quiver, the Trumpet Marine, the Harp; and mendeth and putteth in order and stringeth all those instruments as fine as any man whatsoever in the three kingdoms, or elsewhere, and |1707.| mendeth the Virginal, Spinnat, and Harpsichord, all at reasonable rates.’
Oct. 16.—‘There is just now come to town the Excellent Scarburray Water, good for all diseases whatsomever except consumption; and this being the time of year for drinking the same, especially at the fall of the leaf and the bud, the price of each chopin bottle is fivepence, the bottle never required, or three shilling without the bottle. Any person who has a mind for the same may come to the Fountain Close within the Netherbow of Edinburgh, at William Mudie’s, where the Scarsburray woman sells the same.’
August 12, 1708.—‘George Williamson, translator [alias cobbler] in Edinburgh, commonly known by the name of Bowed Geordie, who swims on face, back, or any posture, forwards or backwards; plums, dowks, and performs all the antics that any swimmer can do, is willing to attend any gentleman, and to teach them to swim, or perform his antics for their divertisement: is to be found in Luckie Reid’s at the foot of Gray’s Close, on the south side of the street, Edinburgh.’
In September 1707, it is advertised that at the Meal Girnel of Primrose, oatmeal, the produce of the place, was sold at four pounds Scots the boll for the crop of 1706, while the crop of the preceding year was £3, 13s. 4d.; in the one case, 6s. 8d.; in the other, 6s. 4d. sterling.
Apr. 9.
The Master of Burleigh—eldest son of Lord Balfour of Burleigh, a peer possessed of considerable estates in Fife—had fallen in love with a girl of humble rank, and was sent abroad by his friends, in the hope that time and change of scene would save him from making a low marriage. He was heard to declare before going, that if she married in his absence, he would take the life of her husband. The girl was, nevertheless, married to Henry Stenhouse, schoolmaster of Inverkeithing. The Master was one of those hot-headed persons whom it is scarcely safe to leave at large, and who yet do not in general manifest the symptoms that justify restraint. Learning that his mistress was married, and to whom, he came at this date with two or three mounted servants to the door of the poor schoolmaster, who, at his request, came forth from amongst his pupils to speak to the young gentleman.
‘Do you know me?’ said Balfour.
‘No.’
1707.
‘I am the Master of Burleigh. You have spoken to my disadvantage, and I am come to fight you,’
‘I never saw you before,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘and I am sure I never said anything against you.’
‘I must nevertheless fight with you, and if you won’t, I will at once shoot you.’
‘It would be hard,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘to force a man who never injured you into a fight. I have neither horse nor arms, and it is against my principles to fight duels.’
‘You must nevertheless fight,’ said the Master, ‘or be shot instantly;’ and so saying, he held a pistol to Stenhouse’s breast.
The young man continuing to excuse himself, Balfour at length fired, and gave the schoolmaster a mortal wound in the shoulder, saying with savage cruelty: ‘Take that to be doing with.’ Then, seeing that an alarm had arisen among the neighbours, he rode off, brandishing a drawn sword, and calling out: ‘Hold the deserter!’ in order to divert the attention of the populace. The unfortunate schoolmaster died in a few days of his wound.
The Master for a time escaped pursuit, but at length he was brought to trial, July 28, 1709, and adjudged to be beheaded at the Cross of Edinburgh, on the ensuing 6th of January. During this unusually long interval, he escaped from the Tolbooth by changing clothes with his sister. He was not again heard of till May 1714, when he appeared amongst a number of Jacobite gentlemen at the Cross of Lochmaben, to drink the health of James VIII. The family title had by this time devolved on him by the death of his father; but his property had all been escheat by sentence of the Court of Justiciary. His appearance in the rebellion of 1715, completed by attainder the ruin of his family, and he died unmarried and in obscurity in 1757.[[383]]
Apr. 25.
A great flock of the Delphinus Deductor, or Ca’ing Whale—a cete about twenty-five feet long—came into the Firth of Forth, ‘roaring, plunging, and threshing upon one another, to the great terror of all who heard the same.’ It is not uncommon for this denizen of the arctic seas to appear in considerable numbers on the coasts of Zetland; and occasionally they present themselves on the shores of Caithness and Sutherlandshire; but to come so far south as the Firth of Forth is very rare: hence the astonishment which the incident seems to have created. The contemporary |1707.| chronicler goes on to state: ‘Thirty-five of them were run ashore upon the sands of Kirkcaldy, where they made yet a more dreadful roaring and tossing when they found themselves aground, insomuch that the earth trembled.’ ‘What the unusual appearance of so great a number of them at this juncture [the union of the kingdoms] may portend shall not be our business to inquire.’[[384]]
Aug.
The fifteenth article of the treaty of Union provided that England should pay to Scotland the sum of £398,085, 10s., because of the arrangement for the equality of trade between the two countries having necessitated that Scotland should henceforth pay equal taxes with England—a rule which would otherwise have been inequitable towards Scotland, considering that a part of the English revenue was required for payment of the interest on her seventeen millions of national debt. It was likewise provided by the act of Union, that out of this Equivalent Money, as it was called, the commissioners to be appointed for managing it should, in the first place, pay for any loss to be incurred by the renovation of the coin; in the second, should discharge the losses of the African Company, which thereupon was to cease; the overplus to be applied for payment of the comparatively trifling state-debts of Scotland, and to furnish premiums to the extent of £2000 a year for the improvement of the growth of wool for seven years—afterwards for the improvement of fisheries and other branches of the national industry.
Defoe, who was now living in Scotland, tells how those who hated the Union spoke and acted about the Equivalent. The money not being paid in Scotland on the very day of the incorporation of the two countries, the first talk was—the English have cheated us, and will never pay; they intended it all along. Then an idea got abroad, that by the non-payment the Union was dissolved; ‘and there was a discourse of some gentlemen who came up to the Cross of Edinburgh, and protested, in the name of the whole Scots nation, That, the conditions of the treaty not being complied with, and the terms performed, the whole was void.’ At length, in August, the money came in twelve wagons, guarded by a party of Scots dragoons, and was carried directly to the Castle. Then those who had formerly been loudest in denouncing the English for not forwarding the money, became furious because |1707.| it was come. They hooted at the train as it moved along the street, cursing the soldiers who guarded it, and even the horses which drew it. One person of high station called out that those who brought that money deserved to be cut to pieces. The excitement increased so much before the money was secured in the Castle, that the mob pelted the carters and horses on their return into the streets, and several of the former were much hurt.
It was soon discovered that, after all, only £100,000 of the money was in specie, the rest being in Exchequer bills, which the Bank of England had ignorantly supposed to be welcome in all parts of her majesty’s dominions. This gave rise to new clamours. It was said the English had tricked them by sending paper instead of money. Bills, only payable four hundred miles off, and which, if lost or burned, would be irrecoverable, were a pretty price for the obligation Scotland had come under to pay English taxes. The impossibility of satisfying or pleasing a defeated party was never better exemplified.
The commissioners of the Equivalent soon settled themselves in one of Mr Robert Mylne’s houses in Mylne’s Court, and proceeded to apply the money in terms of the act. One of their first proceedings was to send to London for £50,000 in gold, in substitution for so much of paper-money, that they might, as far as possible, do away with the last clamour. ‘Nor had this been able to carry them through the payment, had they not very prudently taken all the Exchequer bills that any one brought them, and given bills of exchange for them payable in London.’[[385]] Defoe adverts to a noble individual—doubtless the Duke of Hamilton—who came for payment of his share of the African Company’s stock (£3000), with the interest, and who refused to take any of the Exchequer bills, probably thinking thus to create some embarrassment; but the commissioners instantly ordered the claim to be liquidated in gold.
Notwithstanding all the ravings and revilings about the Equivalent, Defoe assures us that, amongst the most malcontent persons he never found any who, having African stock, refused to take their share of the unhallowed money in exchange for it. Even the despised Exchequer bills were all despatched so quickly, that, in six months, not one was to be seen in the country.
Out of the Equivalent, the larger portion—namely, £229,611, 4s. 8d.—went to replace the lost capital of the African Company, |1707.| and so could not be considered as rendered to the nation at large. For ‘recoining the Scots and foreign money, and reducing it to the standard of the coin of England,’ £49,888, 14s. 11⅙d. was expended. There was likewise spent out of this fund, for the expenses of the commissioners and secretaries who had been engaged in carrying through the Union, £30,498, 12s. 2d. After making sundry other payments for public objects, there remained in 1713 but £16,575, 14s. 0½d. unexpended.[[386]]
We shall afterwards see further proceedings in the matter of the Equivalent.
Oct. 3.
Walter Scott of Raeburn, grandson of the Quaker Raeburn who suffered so long an imprisonment for his opinions in the reign of Charles II.,[[387]] fought a duel with Mark Pringle, youngest son of Andrew Pringle of Clifton. It arose from a quarrel the two gentlemen had the day before at the head-court of Selkirk. They were both of them young men, Scott being only twenty-four years of age, although already four years married, and a father. The contest was fought with swords in a field near the town, and Raeburn was killed. The scene of this melancholy tragedy has ever since been known as Raeburn’s Meadow-spot.
Pringle escaped abroad; became a merchant in Spain; and falling, on one occasion, into the hands of the Moors, underwent such a series of hardships, as, with the Scottish religious views of that age, he might well regard as a Heaven-directed retribution for his rash act. Eventually, however, realising a fortune, he returned with honour and credit to his native country, and purchased the estate of Crichton in Edinburghshire. He died in 1751, having survived the unhappy affair of Raeburn’s Meadow-spot for forty-four years; and his grandson, succeeding to the principal estate of the family, became Pringle of Clifton.
The sixteenth article of the act of Union, while decreeing that a separate mint should be kept up in Scotland ‘under the same rules as the mint in England’—an arrangement afterwards broken through—concluded that the money thereafter used should be of the same standard and fineness throughout the United Kingdom. It thus became necessary to call in all the existing coin of Scotland, and substitute for it money uniform with that of England. It was at the same time provided by the act of Union, that any |1707.| loss incurred by the renewal of the coin of Scotland should be compensated out of the fund called the Equivalent.[[388]]
The business of the change of coinage being taken into consideration by the Privy Council of Scotland, several plans for effecting it were laid before that august body; but none seemed so suitable or expedient as one proposed by the Bank of Scotland, which was to this effect: ‘The Directors undertook to receive in all the species that were to be recoined, at such times as should be determined by the Privy Council, and to issue bank-notes or current money for the same, in the option of the ingiver of the old species, and the Privy Council allowing a half per cent. to the Bank for defraying charges;’[[389]] the old money to be taken to the mint and coined into new money, which should afterwards replace the notes.
Mr David Drummond, treasurer of the Bank, ‘a gentleman of primitive virtue and singular probity,’ according to Thomas Ruddiman—a hearty Jacobite, too, if his enemies did not belie him—had a chief hand in the business of the renovation of the coin, about which he communicated to Ruddiman some memoranda he had taken at the time.
‘There was brought into the Bank of Scotland in the year 1707:
| Value in Sterling Money. | |
|---|---|
| Of foreign silver money, | £132,080 : 17 : 00 |
| Milled Scottish coins [improved coinage subsequent to 1673], | 96,856 : 13 : 00 |
| Coins struck by hammer [the older Scottish coin], | 142,180 : 00 : 00 |
| English milled coin, | 40,000 : 00 : 00 |
| Total, | £411,117 : 10 : 00 |
‘This sum, no doubt, made up by far the greatest part of the silver coined money current in Scotland at that time; but it was not to be expected that the whole money of that kind could be brought into the bank; for the folly of a few misers, or the fear that people might have of losing their money, or various other dangers and accidents, prevented very many of the old Scots coins from being brought in. A great part of these the goldsmiths, in aftertimes, consumed by melting them down; some of them have been exported to foreign countries; a few are yet [1738] in private hands.’[[390]]
1707.
Ruddiman, finding that, during the time between December 1602 and April 1613, there was rather more estimated value of gold than of silver coined in the Scottish mint, arrived at the conclusion (though not without great hesitation), that there was more value of gold coin in Scotland in 1707 than of silver, and that the sum-total of gold and silver money together, at the time of the Union, was consequently ‘not less than nine hundred thousand pounds sterling.’ We are told, however, in the History of the Bank of Scotland, under 1699, that ‘nothing answers among the common people but silver-money, even gold being little known amongst them;’ and Defoe more explicitly says, ‘there was at this time no Scots gold coin current, or to be seen, except a few preserved for antiquity.’[[391]] It therefore seems quite inadmissible that the Scottish gold coin in 1707 amounted to nearly so much as Ruddiman conjectures. More probably, it was not £30,000.
It would appear that the Scottish copper-money was not called in at the Union, and Ruddiman speaks of it in 1738 as nearly worn out of existence, ‘so that the scarcity of copper-money does now occasion frequent complaints.’
If the outstanding silver-money be reckoned at £60,000, the gold at £30,000, and the copper at £60,000, the entire metallic money in use in Scotland in 1707 would be under six hundred thousand pounds sterling in value. It is not unworthy of observation, as an illustration of the advance of wealth in the country since that time, that a private gentlewoman died in 1841, with a nearly equal sum at her account in the banks, besides other property to at least an equal amount.
In March 1708, while the renovation of the coinage was going on, the French fleet, with the Chevalier de St George on board, appeared at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, designing to invade the country. The Bank got a great alarm, for it ‘had a very large sum lying in the mint in ingots,’ and a considerable sum of the old coin in its own coffers, ‘besides a large sum in current species; all of which could not have easily been carried off and concealed.’[[392]] The danger, however, soon blew over. ‘Those in power at the time, fearing lest, all our silver-money having been brought into our treasury, or into the Bank, a little before, there should be a want of money for the expenses of the war, ordered the |1707.| forty-shilling pieces to be again issued out of the banks; of which sort of coin there was great plenty at that time in Scotland, and commanded these to be distributed for pay to the soldiers and other exigencies of the public; but when that disturbance was settled, they ordered that kind of money also to be brought into the bank; and on a computation being made, it was found that the quantity of that kind, brought in the second time, exceeded that which was brought in the first time [by] at least four thousand pounds sterling.’[[393]]
We are told by the historian of the Bank, that ‘the whole nation was most sensible of the great benefit that did redound from the Bank’s undertaking and effectuating the recoinage, and in the meantime keeping up an uninterrupted circulation of money.’ Its good service was represented to the queen, considered by the Lords of the Treasury and Barons of Exchequer, and reported on favourably. ‘But her majesty’s death intervening, and a variety of public affairs on that occasion and since occurring, the directors have not found a convenient opportunity for prosecuting their just claim on the government’s favour and reward for that seasonable and very useful service.’
Nov. 3.
Mr John Strahan, Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, was at this time owner of Craigcrook, a romantically situated old manor-house under the lee of Corstorphine Hill—afterwards for many years the residence of Lord Jeffrey. Strahan had also a house in the High Street of Edinburgh. He was the owner of considerable wealth, the bulk of which he ultimately ‘mortified’ for the support of poor old men, women, and orphans; a charity which still flourishes.
Strahan had a servant named Helen Bell to keep his town mansion, and probably she was left a good deal by herself. As other young women in her situation will do, she admitted young men to see her in her master’s house. On Hallowe’en night this year, she received a visit from two young artisans, William Thomson and John Robertson, whom she happened to inform that on Monday morning—that is, the second morning thereafter—she was to go out to Craigcrook, leaving the town-house of course empty.
About five o’clock on Monday morning, accordingly, this innocent young woman locked up her master’s house, and set forth on |1707.| her brief journey, little recking that it was the last she would ever undertake in this world. As she was proceeding through the silent streets, her two male friends joined her, telling her they were going part of her way; and she gave them a couple of bottles and the key of the house to carry, in order to lighten her burden. On coming to a difficult part of the way, called the Three Steps, at the foot of the Castle Rock, the two men threw her down and killed her with a hammer. They then returned to town, with the design of searching Mr Strahan’s house for money.
According to the subsequent confession of Thomson, as they returned through the Grassmarket, they swore to each other to give their souls and bodies to the devil, if ever either of them should inform against the other, even in the event of their being captured. In the empty streets, in the dull gray of the morning, agitated by the horrid reflections arising from their barbarous act and its probable consequences, it is not very wonderful that almost any sort of hallucination should have taken possession of these miserable men. It was stated by them that, on Robertson proposing that their engagement should be engrossed in a bond, a man started up between them in the middle of the West Bow, and offered to write the bond, which they had agreed to subscribe with their blood; but, on Thomson’s demurring, this stranger immediately disappeared. No contemporary of course could be at any loss to surmise who this stranger was.[[394]]
The two murderers having made their way into Mr Strahan’s house, broke open his study, and the chest where his cash was kept. They found there a thousand pounds sterling, in bags of fifty pounds each, ‘all milled money,’ except one hundred pounds, which was in gold; all of which they carried off. Robertson proposed to set the house on fire before their departure; but Thomson said he had done wickedness enough already, and was resolved not to commit more, even though Robertson should attempt to murder him for his refusal.
Mr Strahan advertised a reward of five hundred merks for the detection of the perpetrator or perpetrators of these atrocities;[[395]] but for some weeks no trace of the guilty men was discovered. At length, some suspicion lighting upon Thomson, he was taken up, and, having made a voluntary |1707.| confession of the murder and robbery, he expiated his offence in the Grassmarket.[[396]]
Dec. 9.
A poor man named Hunter, a shoemaker in the Potterrow, Edinburgh, had become possessed of a ‘factory’ for the uplifting of ten or eleven pounds of wages due to one Guine, a seaman, for services in a ship of the African Company. The money was now payable out of the Equivalent, but certain signatures were required which it was not possible to obtain. With the aid of a couple of low notaries and two other persons, these signatures were forged, and the money was then drawn.
Detection having followed, the case came before the Court of Session, who viewed it in a light more grave than seems now reasonable, and remitted it to the Lords of Justiciary. The result reminds us of the doings of Justice, when she did act, in the reign of James VI. Hunter and Strachan, a notary, were hanged on the 18th of February, ‘as an example to the terror of others,’ says Fountainhall. Three other persons, including a notary, were glad to save themselves from a trial, by voluntary banishment. ‘Some moved that they might be delivered to a captain of the recruits, to serve as soldiers in Flanders; but the other method was judged more legal.’[[397]]
Dec. 30.
The parish of Spott, in East Lothian, having no communion-cups of its own, was accustomed to borrow those of the neighbouring parish of Stenton, when required. The Stenton kirk-session latterly tired of this benevolence, and resolved to charge half-a-crown each time their cups were borrowed by Spott. Spott then felt a little ashamed of its deficiency of communion-cups, and resolved to provide itself with a pair. Towards the sum required, the minister was directed to take all the foreign coin now in the box, as it was to be no longer current, and such further sum as might be necessary.
The parish is soon after found sanctioning the account of Thomas Kerr, an Edinburgh goldsmith, for ‘ane pair of |1707.| communion-cups, weighing 33 oz. 6 drops, at £3, 16s. per oz.,’ being £126, 12s. in all, Scots money, besides ‘two shillings sterling of drink-money given to the goldsmith’s men.’[[398]]
1708.
The Union produced some immediate effects of a remarkable nature on the industry and traffic of Scotland—not all of them good, it must be owned, but this solely by reason of the erroneous laws in respect of trade which existed in England, and to which Scotland was obliged to conform.
Scotland had immediately to cease importing wines, brandy, and all things produced by France; with no remeed but what was supplied by the smuggler. This was one branch of her public or ostensible commerce now entirely destroyed. She had also, in conformity with England, to cease exporting her wool. This, however, was an evil not wholly unalleviated, as will presently be seen.
Before this time, as admitted by Defoe, the Scotch people had ‘begun to come to some perfection in making broad cloths, druggets, and [woollen] stuffs of all sorts.’ Now that there was no longer a prohibition of English goods of the same kinds, these began to come in in such great quantity, and at such prices, as at once extinguished the superior woollen manufacture in Scotland. There remained the manufacture of coarse cloths, as Stirling serges, Musselburgh stuffs, and the like; and this now rather flourished, partly because the wool, being forbidden to be sent abroad, could be had at a lower price, and partly because these goods came into demand in England. Of course, the people at large were injured by not getting the best price for their wool, and benefited by getting the finer English woollen goods at a cheaper rate than they had formerly paid for their own manufactures of the same kinds; but no one saw such matters in such a light at that time. The object everywhere held in view was to benefit trade—that is, everybody’s peculium, as distinguished from the general good. The general good was left to see after itself, after everybody’s peculium had been served; and small enough were the crumbs usually left to it.
On the other hand, duties being taken off Scottish linen introduced into England, there was immediately a large increase to that branch of the national industry. Englishmen came down and established works for sail-cloth, for damasks, and other linen |1708.| articles heretofore hardly known in the north; and thus it was remarked there was as much employment for the poor as in the best days of the woollen manufacture.
The colonial trade being now, moreover, open to Scottish enterprise, there was an immediate stimulus to the building of ships for that market. Cargoes of Scottish goods went out in great quantity, in exchange for colonial products brought in. According to Defoe, ‘several ships were laden for Virginia and Barbadoes the very first year after the Union.’[[399]]
We get a striking idea of the small scale on which the earlier commercial efforts were conducted, from a fact noted by Wodrow, as to a loss made by the Glasgow merchants in the autumn of 1709. ‘In the beginning of this month [November],’ says he, ‘Borrowstounness and Glasgow have suffered very much by the fleet going to Holland, its being taken by the French. It’s said that in all there is about eighty thousand pounds sterling lost there, whereof Glasgow has lost ten thousand pounds. I wish trading persons may see the language of such a providence. I am sure the Lord is remarkably frowning upon our trade, in more respects than one, since it was put in the room of religion, in the late alteration of our constitution.’[[400]]
When one thinks of the present superb wealth and commercial distinction of the Queen of the West, it is impossible to withhold a smile at Wodrow’s remarks on its loss of ten thousand pounds. Yet the fact is, that up to this time Glasgow had but a petty trade, chiefly in sugar, herrings, and coarse woollen wares. Its tobacco-trade, the origin of its grandeur, is understood to date only from 1707, and it was not till 1718 that Glasgow sent any vessel belonging to itself across the Atlantic. Sir John Dalrymple, writing shortly before 1788, says: ‘I once asked the late Provost Cochrane of Glasgow, who was eminently wise, and who has been a merchant there for seventy years, to what causes he imputed the sudden rise of Glasgow. He said it was all owing to four young men of talents and spirit, who started at one time in business, and whose success gave example to the rest. The four had not ten thousand pounds amongst them when they began.’[[401]]
1708.
Defoe tells us that, within little more than a year after the Union, Scotland felt the benefit of the liberation of her commerce in one article to a most remarkable extent. In that time, she sent 170,000 bolls of grain into England, besides a large quantity which English merchants bought up and shipped directly off for Portugal. The hardy little cattle of her pastures, which before the Union had been sent in large droves into England, being doubtless the principal article represented in the two hundred thousand pounds which Scotland was ascertained to obtain annually from her English customers, were now transmitted in still larger numbers, insomuch that men of birth and figure went into the trade. Even a Highland gentleman would think it not beneath him to engage in so lucrative a traffic, however much in his soul he might despise the Saxons whose gluttony he considered himself as gratifying. It has often been told that the Honourable Patrick Ogilvie, whom the reader has already seen engaged in a different career of activity, took up the cattle-trade, and was soon after remonstrated with by his brother, the Earl of Seafield, who, as Chancellor of Scotland, had been deeply concerned in bringing about the Union. The worthy scion of nobility drily remarked in answer: ‘Better sell nowte than sell nations.’[[402]]
A sketch given of a cattle-fair at Crieff in 1723 by an intelligent traveller, shews that the trade continued to prosper. ‘There were,’ says he, ‘at least thirty thousand cattle sold there, most of them to English drovers, who paid down above thirty thousand guineas in ready money to the Highlanders; a sum they had never before seen. The Highland gentlemen were mighty civil, dressed in their slashed waistcoats, a trousing (which is, breeches and stockings of one piece of striped stuff), with a plaid for a cloak, and a blue bonnet. They have a poniard knife and fork in one sheath, hanging at one side of their belt, their pistol at the other, and their snuff-mill before; with a great broadsword by their side. Their attendance was very numerous, all in belted plaids, girt like women’s petticoats down to the knee; their thighs and half of the leg all bare. They had also each their broadsword and poniard, and spake all Irish, an unintelligible language to the English. However, these poor creatures hired themselves out for a shilling a day, to drive the cattle to England, and to return home at their own charge.’[[403]]
1708. May 1.
Previous to the Union, the Customs and Excise of Scotland were farmed respectively at £30,000 and £35,000 per annum,[[404]] which, after every allowance is made for smuggling, must be admitted as indicative of a very restricted commercial system, and a simple and meagre style of living on the part of the people. At the Union, the British government took the Customs and Excise of Scotland into its own hands, placing them severally under commissions, partly composed of Englishmen, and also sending English officers of experience down to Scotland, to assist in establishing proper arrangements for collection. We learn from Defoe that all these new fiscal arrangements were unpopular. The anti-union spirit delighted in proclaiming them as the outward symptoms of that English tyranny to which poor Scotland had been sold. Smuggling naturally flourished, for it became patriotic to cheat the English revenue-officers. The people not only assisted and screened the contrabandist, but if his goods chanced to be captured, they rose in arms to rescue them. Owing to the close of the French trade, the receiving of brandy became a favourite and flourishing business. It was alleged that, when a Dutch fleet approached the Scottish shores some months after the Union, several thousands of small casks of that liquor were put ashore, with hardly any effort at concealment.
Assuming the Excise as a tolerably fair index to the power of a people to indulge in what they feel as comforts and luxuries, the progress of this branch of the public revenue may be esteemed as a history of wealth in Scotland during the remarkable period following upon the Union. The summations it gives us are certainly of a kind such as no Scotsman of the reign of Queen Anne, adverse or friendly to the incorporation of the two countries, could have dreamed of. The items in the account of the first year ending at May 1, 1708, are limited to four—namely, for beer, ale, and vinegar, £43,653; spirits, £901; mum,[[405]] £50; fines and forfeitures, £58; giving—when £6350 for salaries, and some other deductions, were allowed for—a net total of £34,898, as a contribution to the revenue of the country.
The totals, during the next eleven years, go on thus: £41,096, £37,998, £46,795, £51,609, £61,747, £46,979, £44,488, £45,285—this |1708.| refers to the year of the Rebellion—£48,813, £46,649, £50,377. On this last sum the charges of management amounted to £15,400. After this, the total net produce of the Excise, exclusive of malt, never again came up to fifty thousand pounds, till the year 1749. The malt tax, which was first imposed in 1725, then amounted to £22,627, making the entire Excise revenue of Scotland in the middle of the eighteenth century no more than £75,987. It is to be feared that increase of dexterity and activity in the smuggler had some concern in keeping down these returns at so low an amount;[[406]] yet when large allowance is made on that score, we are still left to conclude that the means of purchasing luxuries remained amongst our people at a very humble point.
I am informed by a gentleman long connected with the Excise Board in Scotland, that the books exhibited many curious indications of the simplicity, as well as restrictedness, of all monetary affairs as relating to our country in the reigns of Anne and the first George. According to a recital which he has been kind enough to communicate in writing, ‘The remittances were for the most part made in coin, and various entries in the Excise accounts shew that what were called broad pieces frequently formed a part of the moneys sent. The commissioners were in the habit of availing themselves of the opportunity of persons of rank travelling to London, to make them the bearers of the money; and it is a curious historical fact, that the first remittance out of the Excise duties, amounting to £20,000, was sent by the Earl of Leven, who delivered £19,000 of the amount at the proper office in London, retaining the other thousand pounds for his trouble and risk in the service. As the Board in Scotland could only produce to their comptroller a voucher for the sum actually delivered in London, he could not allow them credit for more. The £1000 was therefore placed “insuper” upon the accounts, and so remained for several years; until at last a warrant was issued by the Treasury, authorising the sum to be passed to the credit of the commissioners.’
After the middle of the century, the progress is such as to shew that, whether by the removal of repressive influences, or the imparting of some fresh spring of energy, the means of the people were at length undergoing a rapid increase. In 1761, |1708.| including part of the first year of George III., the net total Excise revenue had sprung up to £100,985. It included taxes on glass (£1151), candles (£6107), leather (£8245), soap and paper (£2992), and wheel-carriages (£2308). The total had, however, receded fully fourteen thousand pounds by 1775. After that time, war increased the rate of taxation, and we therefore need not be surprised to find the Scottish Excise producing £200,432 in 1781. In 1790, when Robert Burns honoured this branch of the revenue by taking an office in it, it had reached but to the comparatively insignificant sum of £331,117. In 1808, being the hundredth year of its existence, it yielded £1,793,430, being rather more than fifty-one times its produce during the first year.[[407]]
June 1.
The Duke of Argyle resigning his place as an extraordinary Lord of Session, in order to follow his charge in the army, his younger brother, the Earl of Ilay, succeeded him, though under twenty-five years of age; not apparently that he might take part in the decisions of the bench, but rather that he might be a learner there, it ‘being,’ says Fountainhall, ‘the best school for the nobility to learn that is in Europe.’
June 26.
The election of a knight to represent Ross-shire in the British parliament took place at Fortrose, under the presidency of the sheriff, Hugh Rose, of Kilravock. There was much dissension in the county, and the sheriff, whose son was elected, had probably reasons of his own for appointing the last day of the week for the ceremony. This, however, having led to travelling on Sunday, was taken into consideration by the synod some months later, as a breach of decorum on the part of the sheriff, who consequently received a letter from one of their number who had been appointed to administer their censure. It set forth how, even if the meeting had been dissolved on the Saturday evening, many could not have got home without breaking the fourth commandment; but Kilravock had caused worse than this, for, by making the meeting late in the day, he had ‘occasioned the affair to be protracted till the Sabbath began more than to dawn [two o’clock],’ and there had been ‘gross disorders,’ in consequence of late drinking in taverns. ‘Some,’ says the document, ‘who were in your own |1708.| company, are said to have sung, shott, and danced in their progress to the ferry, without any check or restraint, as if they meant to spit in the face of all sacred and civil laws,’ The synod had found it impossible to keep silence and allow such miscarriages to remain unreproved.
It is to be feared that Kilravock was little benefited by their censure, as he left the paper docketed in his repositories as ‘a comical synodical rebuke.’[[408]]
Aug. 18.
That remarkable property of human nature—the anxiety everybody is under that all other people should be virtuous—had worked itself out in sundry famous acts of parliament, general assembly, and town-council, throughout our history subsequent to the Reformation. There was an act of Queen Mary against adultery, and several of Charles II. against profaneness, drunkenness, and other impurities of life. There was not one of William and Mary for the enforcement of the fifth commandment; but the general principle operated in their reign very conspicuously nevertheless, particularly in regard to profaneness and profanation of the Lord’s Day. King William had also taken care in 1698 to issue a proclamation containing an abbreviate of all the acts against immorality, and in which that of Charles II. against cursing and beating of parents was certainly not overlooked, as neither were those against adultery. So far had the anxiety for respectable conduct in others gone in the present reign, that sheriffs and magistrates were now enjoined by proclamation to hold courts, once a month at least, for taking notice of vice and immorality, fining the guilty, and rewarding informers; moreover, all naval and military officers were ordered to exemplify the virtues for the sake of those under them, and, above all, see that the latter duly submitted themselves to kirk discipline.
An act of the town-council of Edinburgh ‘anent prophaneness,’ in August 1693, threatened a rigorous execution of all the public statutes regarding immoral conduct, such as swearing, sitting late in taverns, and desecration of the Lord’s Day. It strictly prohibited all persons within the city and suburbs ‘to brew, or to work any other handiwork, on the Lord’s Day, or to be found on the streets, standing or walking idly, or to go in company or vague to the Castlehill [the only open space then within the city |1708.| walls], public yards, or fields.’ It discharged all going to taverns on that day, unseasonably or unnecessarily, and forbade ‘all persons to bring in water from the wells to houses in greater quantities than single pints.’ By another act in 1699, tavern-keepers were forbidden to have women for servants who had not heretofore been of perfectly correct conduct. All these denunciations were renewed in an act of February 1701, in which, moreover, there was a severe threat against barbers who should shave or trim any one on Sunday, and against all who should be found on that day carrying periwigs, clothes, or other apparel through the streets.
Not long after this, the Edinburgh council took into their consideration three great recent calamities—namely, the fire in the Kirk-heugh in February 1700; another fire ‘which happened on the north side of the Land market, about mid-day upon the 28th of October 1701, wherein several men, and women, and children were consumed in the flames, and lost by the fall of ruinous walls;’ and finally, ‘that most tremendous and terrible blowing up of gunpowder in Leith, upon the 3d of July last;’ and, reflecting on these things as tokens of God’s wrath, came to the resolution, ‘to be more watchful over our hearts and ways than formerly, and each of us in our several capacities to reprove vice with zeal and prudence, and promote the execution of the laws for punishing the vicious.’
All originality is taken from a notorious parliamentary enactment of our time by a council act of April 1704, wherein, after reference to the great decay of virtue and piety, and an acknowledgment that ‘all manner of scandals and immoralities do daily abound,’ it is ordered that taverners, under strong penalties, shall shut at ten o’clock at night, all persons harbouring there at a later hour to be likewise punished.
Inordinate playing at cards and dice in taverns is instanced in a council act of about the same period, as one of the most flagrant vices of the time.
It is to be understood that the discipline of the church over the morals of congregations was at the same time in full vigour, although not now fortified by a power of excommunication, inferring loss of civil rights, as had been the case before the Revolution. Much was done in this department by fines, proportioned to the quality of offenders, and for the application of these to charitable uses there was a lay-officer, styled the Kirk-treasurer, who naturally became a very formidable person. The |1708.| poems of Ramsay and others during the earlier half of the eighteenth century are full of waggish allusions to the terrible powers of even the ‘man’ or servant of the Kirk-treasurer; and in a parody of the younger Ramsay on the Integer Vitæ of Horace, this personage is set forth as the analogue of the Sabine wolf:
‘For but last Monday, walking at noon-day,
Conning a ditty, to divert my Betty,
By me that sour Turk (I not frighted) our Kirk-
Treasurer’s man passed.
And sure more horrid monster in the Torrid
Zone cannot be found, sir, though for snakes renowned, sir;
Nor does Czar Peter’s empire boast such creatures,
Of bears the wet-nurse.’[[409]]
Burt, who, as an English stranger, viewed the moral police of Scotland with a curious surprise, broadly asserts that the Kirk-treasurer employed spies to track out and report upon private individuals; so that ‘people lie at the mercy of villains who would perhaps forswear themselves for sixpence.’ Sometimes, a brother and sister, or a man and his wife, walking quietly together, would find themselves under the observation of emissaries of the Kirk-treasurer. Burt says he had known the town-guard in Edinburgh under arms for a night besetting a house into which two persons had been seen to enter. He at the same time remarks the extreme anxiety about Sabbath observance. It seemed as if the Scotch recognised no other virtue. ‘People would startle more at the humming or whistling of a tune on a Sunday, than if anybody should tell them you had ruined a family.’[[410]]
It must have been a great rejoicement to the gay people, when a Kirk-treasurer—as we are told by Burt[[411]]—‘having a round sum of money in his keeping, the property of the kirk, marched off with the cash, and took his neighbour’s wife along with him to bear him company and partake of the spoil.’
The very imperfect success of acts and statutes for improving the habits of the people, is strongly hinted at by their frequent repetition or renewal. We find it acknowledged by the Town Council of Edinburgh, in June 1709, that the Lord’s Day is still ‘profaned by people standing on the streets, and vaguing to fields and gardens, and to the Castlehill; also by standing idle gazing |1708.| out at windows, and children, apprentices, and other servants playing on the streets.’[[412]]
Nov. 22.
James Stirling of Keir, Archibald Seton of Touch, Archibald Stirling of Carden, Charles Stirling of Kippendavie, and Patrick Edmondstone of Newton, were tried for high treason in Edinburgh, on the ground of their having risen in arms in March last, in connection with the French plan of invasion, and marched about for several days, encouraging others to rise in like manner, and openly drinking the health of the Pretender. Considering the openness of this treason, the charges against the five gentlemen were remarkably ill supported by evidence, the only witnesses being David Fenton, a tavern-keeper at Dunkeld; John Macleran, ‘change-keeper’ at Bridge of Turk; and Daniel Morison and Peter Wilson, two servants of the Laird of Keir. These persons were all free to testify that the gentlemen carried swords and pistols, which few people travelled without in that age; but as for treasonable talk, or drinking of treasonable healths, their memories were entirely blank. Wilson knew of no reason for Keir leaving his own house but dread of being taken up on suspicion by the soldiers in Stirling Castle. A verdict of Not Proven unavoidably followed.[[413]]
It has been constantly remembered since in Keir’s family, that as he was riding home after the trial, with his servant behind him—probably Wilson—he turned about, and asked from mere curiosity, how it came to pass that his friend had forgotten so much of what passed at their parade for the Chevalier in March last, when the man responded: ‘I ken very weel what you mean, laird; but my mind was clear to trust my saul to the mercy o’ Heaven, rather than your honour’s body to the mercy o’ the Whigs.’
Nov.
Sir James Hall of Dunglass was proprietor of a barony called Old Cambus. Within it was a ‘room’ or small piece of land belonging to Sir Patrick Home of Renton, a member of a family of whose hotness of blood we have already seen some evidences. To save a long roundabout, it had been the custom for the tenants of the ‘room’ to drive peats from Coldingham Muir through the Old Cambus grounds, but only on sufferance, and when the corn |1708.| was off the fields, nor even then without a quart of ale to make matters pleasant with Sir James’s tenants. Some dispute having now arisen between the parties, the tenant of Headchester forbade Sir Patrick Home’s people to pass through his farm any more with their peats; and they, on the other hand, determined that they should go by that short passage as usual. The winter stock of fuel being now required, the time had come for making good their assumed right. Mr John Home, eldest son of Sir Patrick, accompanied the carts, with a few servants to assist in making way. A collision took place, attended with much violence on both sides, but with no exhibition of weapons that we hear of, excepting Mr John’s sword, which, he alleged, he did not offer to draw till his horse had been ‘beat in the face with a great rung [stick].’ The affair was nevertheless productive of serious consequences, for a blacksmith was trod to death, and several persons were hurt. Had it happened eighty years earlier, there would have been both swords and pistols used, and probably a dozen people would have been killed.
The justices of the peace for Berwickshire took up the matter, and imposed a fine of fifty pounds upon Mr John Home, as the person chiefly guilty of the riot. He appealed to the Court of Session, setting forth several objections to the sentence. The Earl of Marchmont, whose daughter had married Sir James Hall, and two other members of the justice-court, ought to be held as disqualified by affinity to sit in judgment in the case. To this it was answered, that Sir James was not the complainer, and his lady was dead. Home then alleged a right to the passage. It was shewn, on the other hand, that there never had been a passage save by tolerance and on consideration of the quart of ale; and though it had been otherwise, he ought to have applied to the magistrates, and not taken the law into his own hands: ‘however one enters into possession, though cast in with a sling-stone, yet he must be turned out by order of law. The Lords would not hear of reversing the award of the justices; but they reduced the fine to thirty pounds.’[[414]]
1709. Mar.
The family of the antiquary, Sir James Balfour, to whom we owe the preservation of so many historical manuscripts, appears to have been a very unfortunate one. We have seen that his youngest son and successor, Sir Robert, was slaughtered in the |1709.| reign of Charles II. by M‘Gill of Rankeillour.[[415]] The head of a succeeding generation of the family, Sir Michael Balfour, was a quiet country gentleman, with a wife and seven children, residing at the semi-castellated old manor-house, which we now see standing a melancholy ruin, in a pass through the Fife hills near Newburgh. He appears to have had debts; but we do not anywhere learn that they were of serious extent, and we hear of nothing else to his disadvantage. One day in this month, Sir Michael rode forth at an early hour ‘to visit some friends and for other business,’ attended by a servant, whom, on his return home, he despatched on an errand to Cupar, telling him he would be home before him. From that hour, Denmill was never again seen. He was searched for in the neighbourhood. Inquiries were made for him in the towns at a distance. There were even advertisements inserted in London and continental newspapers, offering rewards for any information that might enable his friends to ascertain his fate. All in vain. ‘There were many conjectures about him,’ says a contemporary judge of the Court of Session, ‘for some have been known to retire and go abroad upon melancholy and discontent; others have been said to be transported and carried away by spirits; a third set have given out they were lost, to cause their creditors compound, as the old Lord Belhaven was said to be drowned in Solway Sands, and so of Kirkton, yet both of them afterwards appeared. The most probable opinion was, that Denmill and his horse had fallen under night into some deep coal-pit, though these were also searched which lay in his way home.’ At the distance of ten months from his disappearance, his wife applied to the Court of Session, setting forth that her husband’s creditors were ‘falling upon his estate, and beginning to use diligence,’ and she could not but apprehend serious injury to the means of the family, though these far exceeded the debts, unless a factor were appointed. We learn that the court could better have interposed if the application had come from the creditors; but, seeing ‘the case craved some pity and compassion,’ they appointed a factor for a year, to manage the estate for both creditors and relict, hoping that, before that time elapsed, it would be ascertained whether Denmill were dead or alive.[[416]]
The year passed, and many more years after it, without clearing up the mystery. We find no trace of further legal proceedings regarding the missing gentleman, his family, or property. The |1709.| fact itself remained green in the popular remembrance, particularly in the district to which Sir Michael belonged. In November 1724, the public curiosity was tantalised by a story published on a broadside, entitled Murder will Out, and professing to explain how the lost gentleman had met his death. The narrative was said to proceed on the death-bed confession of a woman who had, in her infancy, seen Sir Michael murdered by her parents, his tenants, in order to evade a debt which they owed him, and of which he had called to crave payment on the day of his disappearance. Stabbing him with his own sword as he sat at their fireside, they were said to have buried his body and that of his horse, and effectually concealed their guilt while their own lives lasted. Now, it was said, their daughter, who had involuntarily witnessed a deed she could not prevent, had been wrought upon to disclose all the particulars, and these had been verified by the finding of the bones of Sir Michael, which were now transferred to the sepulchre of his family. But this story was merely a fiction trafficking on the public curiosity. On its being alluded to in the Edinburgh Evening Courant as an actual occurrence, ‘the son and heir of the defunct Sir Michael’ informed the editor of its falsity, which was also acknowledged by the printer of the statement himself; and pardon was craved of the honourable family and their tenants for putting it into circulation. On making inquiry in the district, I have become satisfied that the disappearance of this gentleman from the field of visible life was never explained, as it now probably never will be. In time, the property was bought by a neighbouring gentleman, who did not require to use the mansion as his residence. Denmill Castle accordingly fell out of order, and became a ruin. The fathers of people still living thereabouts remembered seeing the papers of the family—amongst which were probably some that had belonged to the antiquarian Sir James—scattered in confusion about a garret pervious to the elements, under which circumstances they were allowed to perish.
May.
There was at this time a dearth of victual in Scotland, and it was considered to be upon the increase. The magistrates and justices of Edinburgh arranged means for selling meal in open market, though in quantities not exceeding a firlot, at twelve shillings Scots per peck. They also ordered all possessors of grain to have it thrashed out and brought to market before the 20th of May, reserving none to themselves, and forbade, |1709.| on high penalties, any one to buy up grain upon the road to market.[[417]]
A well-disposed person offered in print an expedient for preventing the dearth of victual. He discommended the fixing of a price at market, for when this plan was tried in the last dearth, farmers brought only some inferior kind of grain to market, ‘so that the remedy was worse than the disease.’ Neither could he speak in favour of the plan of the French king—namely, the confiscating of all grain remaining after harvest—for it had not succeeded in France, and would still less suit a country where the people were accustomed to more liberty. He suggested the prohibition of exportation; the recommending possessors of grain to sell it direct to the people, instead of victual-mongers; and the use of strict means for fining all who keep more than a certain quantity in reserve. This writer thought that the corn was in reality not scarce; all that was needed was, to induce possessors of the article to believe it to be best for their interest to sell immediately.[[418]]
July 21.
There is an ancient and well-known privilege, still kept up, in connection with the palace and park of Holyroodhouse, insuring that a debtor otherwise than fraudulent, and who has not the crown for his creditor, cannot have diligence executed against him there; consequently, may live there in safety from his creditors. At this time, the privilege was taken advantage of by Patrick Haliburton, who was in debt to the extraordinary amount of nearly £3000 sterling, and who was believed to have secretly conveyed away his goods.
It being also part of the law of Scotland that diligence cannot be proceeded with on Sunday, the Abbey Lairds, as they were jocularly called, were enabled to come forth on that day and mingle in their wonted society.
It pleased Patrick Haliburton to come to town one Sunday, and call upon one of his creditors named Stewart, in order to treat with him regarding some proposed accommodation of the matters that stood between them. Mr Stewart received Patrick with apparent kindness, asked him to take supper, and so plied his hospitality as to detain him till past twelve o’clock, when, as he was leaving the house, a messenger appeared with a writ of caption, and conducted him to prison. Patrick considered himself as |1709.| trepanned, and presented a complaint to the Court of Session, endeavouring to shew that a caption, of which all the preparatory steps had been executed on the Sunday, was the same as if it had been executed on the Sunday itself; that he had been treacherously dealt with; and that he was entitled to protection under the queen’s late indemnity. The Lords repelled the latter plea, but ‘allowed trial to be taken of the time of his being apprehended, and the manner how he was detained, or if he offered to go back to the Abbey, and was enticed to stay and hindered to go out.’[[419]] The termination of the affair does not appear.
A case with somewhat similar features occurred in 1724. Mrs Dilks being a booked inmate of the Abbey sanctuary, one of her creditors formed a design of getting possession of her person. He sent a messenger-at-law, who, planting himself in a tavern within the privileged ground, but close upon its verge, sent for the lady to come and speak with him. She, obeying, could not reach the house without treading for a few paces beyond ‘the girth,’ and the messenger’s concurrents took the opportunity to lay hold of her. This, however, was too much to be borne by a fairplay-loving populace. The very female residents of the Abbey rose at the news, and, attacking the party, rescued Mrs Dilks, and bore her back in triumph within the charmed circle.[[420]]
The Rev. James Greenshields, an Irish curate, but of Scottish birth and ordination—having received this rite at the hands of the deposed Bishop of Ross in 1694—set up a meeting-house in a court near the Cross of Edinburgh, where he introduced the English liturgy, being the first time a prayer-book had been publicly presented in Scotland since the Jenny Geddes riot of July 1637. Greenshields was to be distinguished from the nonjurant Scottish Episcopalian clergy, for he had taken the oath of abjuration (disclaiming the ‘Pretender’), and he prayed formally for the queen; but he was perhaps felt to be, on this account, only the more dangerous to the Established Church. It was necessary that something should be done to save serious people from the outrage of having a modified idolatry practised so near them. The first effort consisted of a process raised by the landlord of the house against Mr Greenshields, in the Dean |1709.| of Guild’s court, on account of his having used part of the house, which he took for a dwelling, as a chapel, and for that purpose broken down certain partitions. The Dean readily ordained that the house should be restored to its former condition. Mr Greenshields having easily procured accommodation elsewhere, it became necessary to try some other method for extinguishing the nuisance. A petition to the presbytery of Edinburgh, craving their interference, was got up and signed by two or three hundred persons in a few hours. The presbytery, in obedience to their call, cited Mr Greenshields to appear before them. He declined their jurisdiction, and they discharged him from continuing to officiate, under high pains and penalties.
Sep.
Mr Greenshields having persisted, next Sunday, in reading prayers to his congregation, the magistrates, on the requirement of the presbytery, called him before them, and formally demanded that he should discontinue his functions in their city. Daniel Defoe, who could so cleverly expose the intolerance of the Church of England to the dissenters, viewed an Episcopalian martyrdom with different feelings. He tells us that Greenshields conducted himself with ‘haughtiness’ before the civic dignitaries—what his own people of course regarded as a heroic courage. He told them positively that he would not obey them; and accordingly, next Sunday, he read the service as usual in his obscure chapel. Even now, if we are to believe Defoe, the magistrates would not have committed him, if he had been modest in his recusancy; but, to their inconceivable disgust, this insolent upstart actually appeared next day at the Cross, among the gentlemen who were accustomed to assemble there as in an Exchange, and thus seemed to brave their authority! For its vindication, they were, says Defoe, ‘brought to an absolute necessity to commit him;’ and they committed him accordingly to the Tolbooth.
Here he lay till the beginning of November, when, the Court of Session sitting down, he presented a petition, setting forth the hardship of his case, seeing that there was no law forbidding any one to read the English liturgy, and he had fully qualified to the civil government by taking the necessary oaths. It was answered for the magistrates, that ‘there needs no law condemning the English service, for the introducing the Presbyterian worship explodes it as inconsistent,’ and the statute had only promised that the oath-taking should protect ministers who had been in possession of charges. ‘The generality of the |1709.| Lords,’ says Fountainhall, ‘regretted the man’s case;’[[421]] but they refused to set him at liberty, unless he would engage to ‘forbear the English service.’ Amongst his congregation there was a considerable number of English people, who had come to Edinburgh as officers of Customs and Excise. It must have bewildered them to find what was so much venerated in their own part of the island, a subject of such wrathful hatred and dread in this.
Greenshields, continuing a prisoner in the Tolbooth, determined, with the aid of friends, to appeal to the House of Lords against the decision of the Court of Session. Such appeals had become possible only two years ago by the Union, and they were as yet a novelty in Scotland. The local authorities had never calculated on such a step being taken, and they were not a little annoyed by it. They persisted, nevertheless, in keeping the clergyman in his loathsome prison, till, after a full year, an order of the House of Lords came for his release. Meanwhile, other troubles befell the church, for a Tory ministry came into power, who, like the queen herself, did not relish seeing the Episcopalian clergy and liturgy treated contumeliously in Scotland. The General Assembly desired to have a fast on account of ‘the crying sins of the land, irreligion, popery, many errors and delusions;’ and they chafed at having to send for authority to Westminster, where it was very grudgingly bestowed. It seemed as if they had no longer a barrier for the protection of that pure faith which it was the happy privilege of Scotland, solely of all nations on the face of the earth, to enjoy. Their enemies, too, well saw the advantage that had been gained over them, and eagerly supported Greenshields in his tedious and expensive process, which ended (March 1711) in the reversal of the Session’s decision. ‘It is a tacit rescinding,’ says Wodrow, ‘of all our laws for the security of our worship, and that unhappy man [an Irish curate of fifteen pounds a year, invited to Edinburgh on a promise of eighty] has been able to do more for the setting up of the English service in Scotland than King Charles the First was able to do.’
Nov. 9.
The Lords of Session decided this day on a critical question, involving the use of a word notedly of uncertain meaning. John Purdie having committed an act of immorality on which a parliamentary act of 1661 imposed a penalty of a hundred pounds in |1709.| the case of ‘a gentleman,’ the justices of peace fined him accordingly, considering him a gentleman within the construction of the act, as being the son of ‘a heritor,’ or land-proprietor. ‘When charged for payment by Thomas Sandilands, collector of these fines, he suspended, upon this ground that the fine was exorbitant, in so far as he was but a small heritor, and, as all heritors are not gentlemen, so he denied that he had the least pretence to the title of a gentleman. The Lords sustained the reason of suspension to restrict the fine to ten pounds Scots, because the suspender had not the face or air of a gentleman: albeit it was alleged by the charger [Sandilands] that the suspender’s profligateness and debauchery, the place of the country where he lives, and the company haunted by him, had influenced his mien.’[[422]]
An anonymous gentleman of Scotland, writing to the Earl of Seafield, on the improvement of the salmon-fishing in Scotland, informs us how the fish were then, as now, massacred in their pregnant state, by country people. ‘I have known,’ he says, ‘a fellow not worth a groat kill with a spear in one night’s time a hundred black fish or kipper, for the most part full of rawns unspawned.’ He adds: ‘Even a great many gentlemen, inhabitants by the rivers, are guilty of the same crimes,’ little reflecting on ‘the prodigious treasure thus miserably dilapidated.’
Notwithstanding these butcheries, he tells us that no mean profit was then derived from the salmon-fishing in Scotland; he had known from two to three thousand barrels, worth about six pounds sterling each, exported in a single year. ‘Nay, I know Sir James Calder of Muirton alone sold to one English merchant a thousand barrels in one year’s fishing.’ He consequently deems himself justified in estimating the possible product of the salmon-fishing, if rightly protected and cultivated, at forty thousand barrels, yielding £240,000 sterling, per annum.[[423]]
1710. Feb.
At Inchinnan, in Renfrewshire, there fell out a ‘pretty peculiar accident.’ One Robert Hall, an elder, and reputed as an estimable man, falling into debt with his landlord, the Laird of Blackston, was deprived of all he had, and left the place. Two months before this date, he returned secretly, and being unable to live |1710.| contentedly without going to church, he disguised himself for that purpose in women’s clothes. It was his custom to go to Eastwood church, but curiosity one day led him to his own old parish-church of Inchinnan. As he crossed a ferry, he was suspected by the boatman and a beadle of being a man in women’s clothes, and traced on to the church. The minister, apprised of the suspicion, desired them not to meddle with him; but on a justice of peace coming up, he was brought forward for examination. He readily owned the fact, and desired to be taken to the minister, who, he said, would know him. The minister protected him for the remainder of the day, that he might escape the rudeness of the mob; and on the ensuing day, he was taken to Renfrew, and liberated, at the intercession of his wife’s father.[[424]]
May.
The General Assembly passed an act, declaring the marriage of Robert Hunter, in the bounds of the presbytery of Biggar, with one John [Joan] Dickson to be incestuous, the woman having formerly been the mother of a child, the father of which was grand-uncle to her present husband. The act discharged the parties from remaining united under pain of highest censure.
The church kept up long after this period a strict discipline regarding unions which involved real or apparent relationship. In May 1730, we find John Baxter, elder in Tealing parish, appealing against a finding of the synod, that his marriage with his deceased wife’s brother’s daughter’s daughter, was incestuous. Two years later, the General Assembly had under its attention a case, which, while capable of being stated in words, is calculated to rack the very brain of whoever would try to realise it in his conceptions. A Carrick man, named John M‘Taggart, had unluckily united himself to a woman named Janet Kennedy, whose former husband, Anthony M‘Harg, ‘was a brother to John M‘Taggart’s grandmother, which grandmother was said to be natural daughter of the said Anthony M‘Harg’s father!’ The presbytery of Ayr took up the case, and M‘Taggart was defended by a solicitor, in a paper full of derision and mockery at the law held to have been offended; ‘a new instance,’ says Wodrow,’ of the unbounded liberty that lawyers take.’[[425]] The presbytery having condemned the marriage as incestuous, M‘Taggart appealed in wonted form to the synod, which affirmed the former decision, and ordered a retractation of the offensive paper on pain of |1710.| excommunication. The case then came before the General Assembly, who left it to be dealt with by its commission. It hung here for six years, during which it may be presumed that M‘Taggart and his wife were either separated or only lived together under the load of presbyterial censure; and at length, in March 1738, it was sent back, along with the still older case of Baxter, by the commission to the Assembly itself.[[426]] How it was ultimately disposed of, I have not learned.
What would these church authorities have thought of a recent act of the state of Indiana, which permits marriages with any of the relations of a deceased partner, and forbids the union of cousins!
June.
‘Some ill-disposed persons, said to be of the suppressed parish of Barnweil [Ayrshire], set fire to the new church of Stair in the night-time; but it was quickly smothered. The occasion was thought to be the bringing the bell from Barnweil to Stair. I have scarce heard of such are instance of fire being wilfully set to a church.’—Wodrow.[[427]] The parish of Barnweil having been suppressed, and half the temporalities assigned to the new parish of Stair, the inhabitants appear to have been exasperated beyond all bounds, and hence this offence.
Aug. 19.
David Bruce, a youth of fifteen, accompanied by five companions of about the same age, all of the city of St Andrews, went out in a boat to amuse themselves, but, losing one of their oars, and being carried out to sea, they were unable to return. It was late in the evening before their friends missed them. A boat was sent in the morning in quest of them, but in vain. Meanwhile, the boys were tossed up and down along the waters, without being able to make any shore, although they were daily in sight of land. At length, after they had been six days at sea without food or drink, an easterly wind brought them ashore at a place called Hernheuch, four miles south of Aberdeen, and fifty north of St Andrews. They were all of them in an exhausted condition, and two of them near death. By the direction of an honest countryman, John Shepherd, two of the boys were able to climb up the steep cliff beneath which their skiff had touched shore. Shepherd received them into his house, and lost no time in sending for help to Aberdeen. Presently, the Dean of Guild, |1710.| Dr Gregory a physician, and Mr Gordon a surgeon, were on the spot, exerting themselves by all judicious means to preserve the lives of the six boys, five of whom entirely recovered.
Robert Bruce, goldsmith in Edinburgh, father of David Bruce, ‘in thankful commemoration of the preservation of his son,’ had a copperplate engraved by Virtue, with a full-length portrait of the lad, and a view of the six boys coming ashore in the boat. David Bruce was for many years head cashier of Drummond’s bank at Charing Cross, and lived till 1771.[[428]]
Sep.
‘One Robert Fleming, a very poor man, who taught an English school at Hamilton, was taken up for cheating some poor people with twenty-shilling notes, all wrote with his own hand, and a dark impression made like the seal of the Bank [of Scotland]. He was prosecuted for the forgery; and, on his own confession, found guilty, and condemned to death; but having been reprieved by her majesty several times, and at last during pleasure, he, after her majesty’s death, obtained a remission.’[[429]]
This poor man, in his confession before the Lords who examined him, said he had forged fifty, but only passed four notes, the first being given for a shawl to his wife. ‘He declared that he intended to have coined crown-pieces; and the stamp he had taken in clay, which he shewed; but, which is most remarkable of all, [he] confessed that he made use of one of the Psalms, that he might counterfeit the print of the notes the better by practice, in writing over those letters that were in the Psalm, and which he had occasion to write in the bank-notes. My Lord Forglen had forgot what Psalm it was; but the man said the first words of the Psalm which appeared to him was to this purpose: “The eyes of the Lord behold the children of men;” which was truly remarkable.’[[430]]
Nov. 30.
Died at Paisley Abbey, of small-pox, the Countess of Dundonald, celebrated for her beauty, and not less remarkable for her amiable and virtuous character. She left three infant daughters, all of whom grew in time to be noted ‘beauties,’ and of whom one became Duchess of Hamilton, and the other two the Countesses of Strathmore and Galloway. The death of the lovely young Lady Dundonald of a disease so loathsome and |1710.| distressing, was deeply deplored by a circle of noble kindred, and lamented by the public in general, notwithstanding the drawback of her ladyship being an adherent of the Episcopal communion. Wodrow, who condemns the lady as ‘highly prelatical in her principles,’ but admits she was ‘very devote and charitable,’ tells us how, at the suggestion of Dr Pitcairn, Bishop Rose waited on the dying lady, while the parish minister came to the house, but was never admitted to her chamber. Wodrow also states, that for several Sundays after her death, the earl had sermon preached in his house every Sunday by Mr Fullarton, an Episcopalian, ‘or some others of that gang;’ and on Christmas Day there was an administration of the communion, ‘for anything I can hear, distributed after the English way.’ ‘This,’ adds Wodrow, ‘is the first instance of the communion at Yule so openly celebrate in this country’ since the Revolution.[[431]]
The last time we had the Post-office under our attention (1695), it was scarcely able to pay its own expenses. Not long after that time, in accordance with the improved resources of the country, it had begun to be a source of revenue, though to a very small amount. It was conducted for three years before the Union by George Main, jeweller in Edinburgh, with an average yearly return to the Exchequer of £1194, 8s. 10d., subject to a deduction for government expresses and the expense (£60) of the packet-boat at Portpatrick. Immediately after that time, the business of the central office in Edinburgh was conducted in a place no better than a common shop, by seven officials, the manager George Main having £200 a year, while his accountant, clerk, and clerk’s assistant had respectively £56, £50, and £25, and three runners or letter-carriers had each 5s. per week.
An act of the British parliament[[432]] now placed the Scottish Post-office under that of England, but with ‘a chief letter-office’ to be kept up in Edinburgh. The charge for a letter from London to Edinburgh was established at sixpence, and that for other letters at twopence for distances within fifty English miles, greater distances being in proportion. For the five years following the Union, there was an annual average gain of £6000—a striking improvement upon 1698, when Sir Robert Sinclair found he could not make it pay expenses, even with the benefit of a pension of £300 a year.
1711. Sep.
The light-thoughted part of the public was at this time regaled by the appearance of a cluster of small brochures printed in blurred type on dingy paper, being the production of William Mitchell, tin-plate worker in the Bow-head of Edinburgh, but who was pleased on his title-pages to style himself the Tinklarian Doctor. Mitchell had, for twelve years, been employed by the magistrates of the city as manager of the lighting of the streets, at the moderate salary of five pounds. He represented that his predecessor in the office had ten pounds; but ‘I took but five, for the town was in debt.’ The magistrates, doubtless for reasons satisfactory to themselves, and which it is not difficult to divine, had deprived him of his post. ‘Them that does them a good turn,’ says he, ‘they forget; but they do not forget them that does them an ill turn; as, for example, they keep on a captain [of the town-guard, probably] for love of Queensberry, for making the Union—I believe he never did them a good turn, but much evil to me, [as] he would not let me break up my shop-door the time of the fire, before my goods was burnt.’ The poor man here alludes to a calamity which perhaps had some share in driving his excitable brain out of bounds. Being now in comparative indigence, and full of religious enthusiasm, he took up at his own hands an office of which he boasted that no magistrate could deprive him, no less than that of giving ‘light’ to the ministers of the Church of Scotland, who, he argued, needed this service at his hands—‘otherwise God would not have raised me up to write to them.’ The ministers, he candidly informs us, did not relish his taking such a duty upon him, since he had never received any proper call to become a preacher: some of them called him a fool, and the principal of a college at St Andrews went the length of telling him to burn his books. But he acted under an inward call which would not listen to any such objections. He thought the spirit of God ‘as free to David and Amos the herds, and to James, John, and Simon the fishers, and Matthew and Levi the customers, as to any that will bide seven years at college.’ And, if to shepherds and fishermen, why not to a tin-plate worker or tinkler? ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ &c.
The Tinkler’s Testament, which was the great work of Mitchell, was heralded by an Introduction, dedicating his labours to Queen Anne. He claimed her majesty’s protection in his efforts to illuminate the clergy, and hinted that a little money to help in printing his books would also be useful. He would willingly go to converse with her majesty; but he was without the means of travelling, |1711.| and his ‘loving wife and some small children’ hindered him. This brings him to remark that, while he lived upon faith, ‘my wife lives much upon sense,’ as the wives of men of genius are very apt to do. After all, ‘although I should come, I am nothing but a little black man, dull-like, with two scores upon my brow and a mole on my right cheek;’ which marks ‘I give to your majesty, in case any person come up in a counterfeit manner;’ nevertheless, ‘if I had clothes, I would look as big as some gentlemen.’[[433]]
In this pamphlet, Mitchell abuses the ministers roundly for neglect of their flocks, telling that for six years the pastor of his parish had never once inquired for him. They would go and play at bowls, alleging it was for their health, and allow suffering souls to perish. It was as if he were employed by a gentleman to make lanterns—took the money—but never made the articles required, for want of which the gentleman’s servants were hindered in their work, and perished in pits. ‘Now whether think ye an immortal soul or my lanterns of most value? I will sell a good lantern at ten shillings [Scots], though it be made of brass; but the whole world cannot balance one soul.’
The Tinkler’s Testament he dedicated to the Presbyterian ministers of Scotland, telling them ‘not to be offended, although I be set over you by providence,’ nor ‘think that I shall be like the bishops that were before me—necessity gives me a right to be your overseer—necessity that hath neither law nor manners.’ ‘I know you will not hear of a bishop over you, and therefore I shall be over you, as a coachman to drive you to your duty.’ He saw their deficiencies in what had happened in his own case. In his evil days, they never told him sufficiently of his sins. He might almost have supposed he was on the way to heaven for anything they said to him. It was affliction, not their ministrations, which had loosed him from the bonds of sin. Their own preachings were cold and worthless, and so were those of the young licentiates whom they so often engaged to hold forth in their stead. Here he applied another professional parable. ‘You employ me to make a tobacco-box. I spoil it in the making. Whether is you |1711.| or I obliged to pay the loss? I think ye are not obliged to pay it. Neither am I obliged to take these sermons off your hand.’ ‘Perhaps,’ he adds, ‘you trust in your elders.’ But ‘I may keep strange women in my house for them; I may stay out till twelve o’clock at night and be drunk for them: a cart-horse, when he comes up the Bow, may teach them their duty, for it will do its duty to the outmost of its power; and before it will disobey, it will fall to the ground.’ In short, the Tinkler had been used by these clergy with a lenity which he felt to be utterly inexcusable.
It is to be feared that the Tinkler was one of those censors whom no kind of conduct in persons of authority will please, for we find him in this brochure equally furious at the ministers for not preaching evangelical discourses, and for being so slack in telling their flocks of the weighty matters of the law. He threatens to tell very sad things of them at the great day, and yet he protests that it is not from hatred to them. If such were his feelings, he would not be at the pains to reprove them; still less would he have ever given Dean of Guild Neilson a speaking-trumpet for a seat in the kirk, not worth twenty shillings sterling, seeing it is but a back-seat, where he may fall asleep, and the minister never once call on him to sit up. ‘This,’ however, ‘is only a word by the by.’
One great charge which the Tinkler has to make against the clergy is, that they are afraid to preach freely to the consciences of men, for fear of angering the great. ‘If ye be feared to anger them, God will not be feared to anger you. “Cry aloud and spare not; tell the poor their transgressions, and the great folk their sins.”’ Then he proposes to relate something of the justice he had himself experienced. ‘The Laird of Cramond hath laid down a great cairn of stones before my shop-door, which takes away my light. They have lain near these two years (because he is rich). If I lay down but two carts-full, I believe they would not lie twenty-four hours. I pursued a man at court; I could both have sworn and proved that he was owing me; yet, because he had a blue cloak and a campaign wig, the judge would not take his oath, and would not take my word. I had a mind to buy a blue cloak, that I might get justice; but I was disappointed by the dreadful fire. I bought some wool from a man. He would not give it out of his house till I gave my bill. The goods was not weighed, and I feared they came not to so much money; yet the man persuaded me if it was not so, he would |1711.| restore me the money back. I believed his word, because I am a simple man. So I pursued the man, thinking to get my money. The judge told me I would get no money, although there were a hundred pounds of it; so I went home with less money than I came out.... Ye will say, what is the reason there is so little justice; I shall tell you my opinion of it. I have a vote for choosing our deacon. A man comes to me and offers me a pint to vote for such a man. I take it because he never did me no ill, and because I am a fool-body. I vote for the man. So fool-tradesmen make fool-deacons, and fool-deacons make fool-magistrates, and fool-magistrates make fool-ministers. That is the reason there is so little justice in the city.’ The crazy whitesmith has here touched a point of failure in democratic institutions which wiser men have overlooked.
This singular genius afterwards published a brochure, entitled The Great Tinklarian Doctor Mitchell his Fearful Book, to the Condemnation of all Swearers, at the end of which he announced another ‘concerning convictions;’ ‘the like of it ye have not heard since Cromwell’s days.’ But probably the reader has now heard enough of the effusions of the white-ironsmith of the Bow-head.[[434]]
1711. Nov. 6.
Notwithstanding the severity of the laws against Catholic priests, and particularly that of 1701, which a proclamation two years back put into fresh vigour, there was at least one minister of the hated faith of Rome sheltered in Edinburgh. It would be curious to learn under what disguise he contrived to live in a city where all, except a handful of people, were disposed to tear him in pieces. From its being mentioned that his paraphernalia for worship belonged to Lady Seaforth, it may be surmised that he lived under her protection. Thomas Mackie, being now at last apprehended by the magistrates, and ordained to remove immediately out of Britain, was so bold as to call for a suspension of their act in the Court of Session, setting forth that he had lived for many years inoffensively in Edinburgh—the vestments, altar, crucifixes, &c., found in his house belonged to the Countess of Seaforth—he had not been taken in the act of saying mass, and it had not been proved that he was a priest—finally, and above all, the magistrates of Edinburgh were going beyond their powers in banishing any one forth of the island. The magistrates having answered these objections, the Lords ‘ordained him to enact himself to remove betwixt and a day out of the kingdom; and in case of refusal, to be imprisoned till a ship was ready to transport him.’[[435]]
1712. Jan. 14.
Immemorial custom gave a right to the steward-depute of the stewartry of Kirkcudbright to get a mart cow out of every parish in his jurisdiction, being twenty-nine in number. He was not required to observe any particular form or ceremony in raising this mail, beyond sending an officer to the parish to pitch upon and seize the cow, and offer the owner five shillings Scots, called the Queen’s Money, which entitled him to relief from his fellow-parishioners, according to the value of their respective estates. In October 1711, William Lindsay of Mains, steward-depute under the Marquis of Annandale, principal steward, sent his officer, William Hislop, to take a cow from the parish of Southwick, and the man pitched upon a beast belonging to John Costein of Glensoane. John, however, ‘did violently oppose the officer in the execution of his office to uplift the cow; and making a convocation of his tenants and others, his complices, by force of arms resisted the officer, whom he beat and bruised with many strokes, and rescued his cow.’
1712.
For this offence, Costein and his associates were now brought before the Court of Justiciary. They pleaded several objections to the custom, as a defence of their conduct; but all these were overruled by the Lords, and their offence was declared to be liable to an arbitrary punishment.[[436]]
Feb.
‘About the beginning of this month, Whiston’s Primitive Christianity came down to Edinburgh, and was seized in the booksellers’ shops by the magistrates.’[[437]]
Mar.
‘The end of this last and the beginning of this month, we have some accounts of a sickness in Fife, from some of the crew of a ship that came out before their quarantine was performed; but it seems the Lord hath hitherto prevented it. It’s, indeed, a wonder we are not visited with some heavy rod.’[[438]]
The art of printing had fallen sadly off in Scotland during the latter half of the seventeenth century. James Watson[[439]] points out truly that Bassandyne’s folio Bible of 1576, Arbuthnot’s first edition of Buchanan’s History in 1582, Andro Hart’s Bible of 1610, and the Muses’ Welcome to King James in 1618, were well printed books; the last of these Bibles so much so, that ‘many after-impressions of the Bible in folio, had, as the greatest commendation that could be made of them, at the foot of their title-pages, that they were “conform to the edition printed by Andro Hart.”’ Watson adds: ‘The folio Common Prayer-book, printed before the Troubles by Robert Young, then printer for this kingdom to the Royal Martyr, is a pregnant instance of this. I have with great pleasure viewed and compared that book with the English one in the same volume, printed about the same time by the king’s printer in England; and Mr Young’s book so far exceeded the other, that there could be no comparison made between them. You’ll see by that printed here, the master furnished with a very large fount, four sheets being inset together; a vast variety of curiously cut head-pieces, finis’s, blooming letters, fac-totums, flowers, &c. You’ll see the compositor’s part done with the greatest regularity and niceness in the Kalendar, and throughout the rest of the book; the pressman’s part done to a wonder in the red and black, and the whole printed in so |1712.| beautiful and equal a colour, that there is not any appearance of variation. But this good and great master was ruined by the Covenanters for doing this piece of work, and forced to fly the kingdom.’
After the Restoration, one Archibald Hislop, a bookseller, with William Carron as his workman, produced a neat edition of Thomas à Kempis and some other small books. Some Dutchmen, who had been brought over to assist Hislop’s successor, John Cairns, also printed a few respectable volumes, including the acts of parliament, and Sir Robert Sibbald’s Prodromus; but all tendency to attain or maintain the level formerly attained, was checked by a monopoly which was granted to one Andrew Anderson in 1671. This Anderson, who seems to have come from Glasgow, was early in that year condemned by the Privy Council for a very faulty edition of the New Testament; yet, for ‘payment of a composition in exchequer and other weighty reasons,’ they immediately after granted him, as king’s printer, an exclusive right to print all kinds of lawful books in Edinburgh, with a right of supervision over all other typographers within the kingdom. He died in 1679; but his widow succeeded to the monopoly, and exercised it for some years with the greatest rigour, persecuting all who attempted to interfere with the business of printing. As might be expected, the productions of her own press were miserable beyond all example; she both produced bad and erroneous editions of the Bible, and much fewer of them than were required to satisfy the demands of the public. A restriction was at length put upon her privilege, so as to allow general printing to be executed by others; but she continued through the whole term of her patent to be the sole printer of the Scriptures in Scotland. Fac-similes of a few pages from her Bibles—in poor blurred type, almost unintelligible with errors, with italic letters employed wherever the Roman fount fell short, and some lines wholly without spaces between the words—would appal the reader. It plainly appears that no such functionary as a corrector was at any time kept by Mrs Anderson; nor was she herself able to supply the deficiency. The Bible being then almost the only school-book in use, we may imagine what unrequired difficulties were added to the task of gaining a knowledge of the elements of the English language. What, for example, was a poor child to make of the following passage in her duodecimo Bible of 1705: ‘Whyshoulditbethoug tathingincredi ble wtyou, yt God should raise the dead?’ Mrs Anderson’s Bibles being of such |1712.| a character, there was a great importation of English and foreign copies, but only in despite of strenuous efforts on her part to keep them out. Strange to say, when now her government patent expired, she contrived to obtain the appointment of printer to the Church of Scotland. Her ability to buy up a heavy stock of acts of the General Assembly was what secured her this piece of otherwise most unmerited patronage.
Had the government patent expired a few years earlier, she might, for anything that appears, have obtained a renewal of it also. But, now that a Tory ministry was in power, this lucrative privilege was conferred on two zealous Jacobites—Mr Robert Freebairn, publisher, and Mr James Watson, printer. These gentlemen were better typographers than Mrs Anderson; and the Bibles they issued were much superior. But their Tory principles prevented them from long enjoying the privilege. Probably acting in the spirit of their patrons, they ‘seem to have exercised a discretionary power of declining to publish royal proclamations when they were not consonant with their own views; otherwise it is difficult to discover why the queen’s proclamation against unlawful intruders into churches and manses was printed, not by either of her majesty’s printers, but by John Reid in Bell’s Wynd.’[[440]] This zeal led Freebairn, on the breaking out of the rebellion in 1715, to go to Perth with printing apparatus and materials, to act as printer for the person whom he called James the Eighth; and he consequently forfeited his patent.[[441]] Politics now favoured Mrs Anderson. In partnership with an Englishman named Baskett, the king’s printer for England, she once more became the exclusive printer of the Scriptures in Scotland, and for forty-one years more! The Bibles produced during the greater part of that time were indeed a little better than those under the former patent—the general progress of the country necessitated some little improvement—but they were still far inferior to the unprivileged productions of the Scottish press during the same epoch.
There is a reflection which must, or ought somewhat to modify |1712.| our feeling regarding this monstrous absurdity; namely, that the printing of the Scriptures was kept upon the footing of a monopoly, with the effect of poor work and high prices, till our own age, and that so lately as 1823 the patentees, in a legal document, set forth their expenses in erecting a printing-office and ‘other charges of various descriptions,’ as entitling them ‘to enjoy the relative profits and emoluments without interference from any quarter.’
Mar.
Encouraged by the triumph of Mr Greenshields, and the popularity of the Tory administration, the Scottish Episcopalians began in many places to introduce the liturgy of the Church of England. The old Scottish horror for that form of devotion was excited in a high degree; church-courts were full of terror and grief; in some parts, the mob was ready to make a new reformation. In the course of 1711, a good deal of pretty effectual work was done for the appeasing of the popular anxiety. According to a contemporary narration—‘Mr Honeyman, for using the Church of England liturgy at Crail, was prosecuted and deposed by the presbytery, and if the magistrates and people were not Episcopal, he had fallen under very severe punishments. It is but few months since Mr Dunbreck was libelled by the presbytery, prosecuted by the magistrates, and threatened by the Lord Advocate, for using the English liturgy in the Earl Marischal’s own house at Aberdeen, to whom he was chaplain. The Earl of Carnwath this summer was threatened to have his house burned over his head, if he continued the English service in it, and his chaplain thereafter forced to leave his family.’ In November 1711, the presbytery of Perth deposed Henry Murray, a pre-Revolution incumbent of Perth hitherto undisturbed, because he used the English service at baptisms and burials, and the liturgy in worship.[[442]]
At the date of the present article, the two parties had what Wodrow calls ‘a little ruffle’ at Auchterarder—a bleak parish in Strathearn, which has at various times contrived to make a prominent appearance in ecclesiastical politics. The trouble arose in consequence of an attempt to use the funeral-service of the English Church at a funeral. ‘The common people,’ says Wodrow, ‘though not very Presbyterian in their principles, yet they reckoned the service popery, and could not away with it. When the corpse came to |1712.| the churchyard, the women and country-people began and made a great mutiny. The Lord Rollo, a justice of the peace, interposed, but to no purpose. The Duke of Montrose’s bailie, Graham of Orchil, was there; and writes it was not Presbyterians, but the whole of the common people there; and they chased off the liturgy-man, and they behoved to bury in their wonted manner.’
Just at this crisis, the Tory administration of the Church-of-England-loving Anne interposed with an act of toleration for the distressed Episcopalians of Scotland, enabling clergymen, who had orders from Protestant bishops, and took the oaths of allegiance, assurance, and abjuration, to celebrate divine service—using, if they chose, the English liturgy—and to perform baptisms and marriages, without molestation; only further enjoining such clergymen to pray for the queen, the Princess Sophia, and the rest of the royal family, under a penalty of twenty pounds. The church commission had fasts, and prayers, and addresses against the measure—even spoke of reviving the Solemn League and Covenant—but their resistance was in vain.
Hitherto, the western section of the country had been clear of this abomination; but, in November, to the great distress of the serious people of Glasgow, an attempt was made there to set up the Episcopal form of worship. The minister officiating was one Cockburn, ‘an immoral profane wretch, and very silly,’ according to Mr Wodrow, ‘a tool fit enough for beginning such a work;’ who, however, had prepared well his ground by qualifying to the government. A number of persons of social importance joined the congregation. ‘The Earl of Marr, and [the Laird of] Bannockburn were there lately with two coaches, and many go out of curiosity to see it.’[[443]] The boys took the matter up in their usual decisive manner; but the Toleration Act compelled protection from the magistrates, and three town-officers stood guard at the chapel door. On the 27th of December, an English soldier having died, his officers wished to have him buried according to the solemn ritual of his church, and Mr Cockburn performed the ceremony in canonicals in the cathedral cemetery, the company all uncovered, and a rabble looking on with suppressed rage. The clergy took a look into the statute-book, to see if they should be obliged to endure this kind of insolence as well as the liturgy. Wodrow had hopes that Cockburn’s congregation would tire of |1712.| supporting him, though his ‘encouragement’ did not exceed twenty-two pounds a year, or that his free conversation and minced oaths would make them put him away. A foolish shoemaker who attended his chapel having lost his wife, Cockburn wished to have a second exhibition of the funeral-service; but the magistrates would not allow it. One day, he was baptising a soldier’s child at a house in the Gorbals, and great was the commotion which it occasioned among the multitude. On coming out, he was beset by a host of boys calling to him ‘Amen, Amen!’ the use of this word in the service being so odious to the public, that it had stuck to Cockburn as a nickname. For nearly two years were the religious feelings of the people outraged by the open and avowed practice of the ‘modified idolatry’ in the midst of them, when at length a relief came with the Hanover succession. As soon as it was known that Queen Anne was no more, occidental human nature could no longer be restrained. On the evening of the 6th of August 1714, the little chapel was fairly pulled down, and the minister and his wife were glad to flee for their lives. So ended Episcopalian worship in Glasgow for a time.[[444]] A few verses from a popular ballad will assist in giving us some idea of the local feelings of the hour:
‘We have not yet forgot, sir,
How Cockburn’s kirk was broke, sir,
The pulpit-gown was pulled down,
And turned into nought, sir.
· · · · ·
Long-neckèd Peggie H[ome], sir,
Did weep and stay at home, sir,
Because poor Cockburn and his wife
Were forced to flee the town, sir.
· · · · ·
The chess-window did reel, sir,
Like to a spinning-wheel, sir,
For Dagon he is fallen now;
I hope he’ll never rise, sir.’[[445]]
Mar.
A Dumfriesshire minister communicated to Wodrow an account he had got from the Laird of Waterside, a factor of the Duke of Queensberry, of a spectacle which the laird and many others had |1712.| seen about sunset one evening in this month, about a mile from Penpont. ‘There appeared to them, towards the sea, two large fleets of ships, near a hundred upon every side, and they met together and fairly engaged. They very clearly saw their masts, tackling, guns, and their firing one at another. They saw several of them sunk; and after a considerable time’s engagement they sundered, and one part of them went to the west and another to the south.’
Wodrow goes on to relate what Mr James Boyes told him of shootings heard one morning about the same time in Kintyre. ‘The people thought it had been thunder, and went out to see what sort of day it was like to be. All appears clear, and nothing like thunder. There were several judicious people that saw, at some distance from them, several very great companies of soldiers marching with their colours flying and their drums beating, which they heard distinctly, and saw the men walking on the ground in good order; and yet there were no soldiers at all in that country, nor has been a long time. They heard likewise a very great shooting of cannon: ... so distinct and terrible, that many of the beasts broke the harrow and came running home.’
May.
Wodrow notes, at this time, a piece of bad taste on the part of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, whose family had in recent times acquired by purchase that ancient possession of the Home family. The old burial-place of the Earls of Home had been turned by Sir James into a stable, and he resisted both the clamour of the public and the private remonstrance of the aggrieved family on the subject. ‘Because the minister shewed some dislike at this unnatural thing, he is very uneasy to him.’
This act of Sir James Hall necessarily shocked Episcopalians; and to such an extent was the feeling carried, that a distinct pamphlet on the subject was published in London. The writer of this tells us, that, having made an excursion into Scotland in the summer of 1711, he tarried for a while at the post-house of Cockburnspath, and thus had an opportunity of seeing the ‘pretty little church’ near Dunglass House. He found that Sir James had gathered off all the grave-stones from the churchyard, to give scope for the growing of grass. He had ‘made the nave of the church a stable for his coach-mares, and dug up the graves of the dead, throwing away their bones, to make way for a pavement for his horses.... He has made the choir a coach-house, and |1712.| broken down the great east end wall, to make a great gate to let his coaches in, that they may stand where the altar of God did stand. The turret is a pigeon-house, and over this new stable he has made a granary. There is also a building called an aile, adjoining the north side of the church, which is still a burying-place (still belonging to the Earl of Home), in which Sir James keeps hay for his horses, though his own first lady, who was daughter to Sir Patrick Home of Polwarth (now Earl of Marchmont), and his own only son, lie buried there.’
The writer states that Sir James’s father, though ‘of no family,’ but only a lord mayor of Edinburgh, had kept this church in good repair all his lifetime, and bestowed upon it a new pulpit. The neighbouring gentlemen had remonstrated against the desecration, and one had offered to build for him separate conveniences such as he wanted, provided he would spare the church; but all in vain. He adds: ‘Sir James is still as well esteemed by the whole party as ever he was, and in full communion with their kirk; nor could I learn of any reproof he ever had from his spiritual guides, the Mass Johns, upon this account; though ’tis most apparent that, had his Presbyterian holders-forth interposed, as they might and ought to have done, and as in other cases they are very apt to do when religion or even morality are not near so much concerned as here, Sir James durst not have attempted the doing this wicked thing.’
The writer goes on to remark what he calls the inconsistency of the Presbyterians in insisting that baptism shall always be performed in a church. ‘There are instances to be given, if need were, of their letting infants die without their baptism, rather than sprinkle them out of a church.’ ‘I shall mention but one other of their inconsistencies; ’tis that of their Judaical, if not Pharisaical observation of the Lord’s Day, which they call the Sabbath. This they set up most rigidly as their characteristic, though they pretend to admit of nothing as a principle, nor allow of any stated practice ecclesiastic, for which they have not a positive command in the Holy Scriptures. They despise the decrees and canons of the church, even in the early ages of it; nor does the unanimous consent of the primitive fathers of the first three centuries weigh with them; and yet I humbly think they must either take the observation of the first day of the week as the Lord’s Day or weekly Easter from the authority of the church; else it would puzzle them to get clear of the observation of the seventh day or |1712.| Jewish Sabbath from the morality of the fourth commandment by any positive gospel precept.’[[446]]
May 29.
An ingenious piece of masked Jacobitism is described in a newspaper as taking place in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. ‘Thursday last’—so runs the paragraph—‘being the anniversary of the birth and happy restoration of King Charles II., of ever-blessed memory, was solemnly observed by Charles Jackson, merchant in Edinburgh, who had the honour to have his majesty stand godfather to him in the church of Keith at his baptism; and his majesty, by assuming the name of Jackson, was happily preserved from his enemies’ hands, after his escape out of the Royal Oak. In consideration of these honours conferred upon him by his sacred majesty, and being lineally descended from a stock of the loyalists, he invited all such, by public advertisement, to solemnise that memorable day, at an enclosure called Charles’s Field, lying a mile south from this city (where he hath erected a very useful bleaching-field), and there entertained them with diversity of liquors, fine music, &c. He had likewise a splendid bonfire, and a spacious standard erected, with a banner displayed upon it, whereon was very artfully drawn his sacred majesty in the Royal Oak, the bark wherein he made his escape, and the colonel who conducted him on board, taking leave of his majesty. The company round the bonfire drank her majesty, Queen Anne’s [health], and the memory of the happy Restoration, with great joy and demonstrations of loyalty. The night concluded with mirth; and the standard being brought back to Mr Jackson’s lodgings, carried by a loyal gentleman bareheaded, and followed by several others with trumpets, hautboys, and bagpipes playing before them, where they were kindly entertained.’[[447]]
June 10.
Whatever might be the personal delinquencies and shortcomings of the judges, they never could be charged with a disposition to let other people off too easily. On the contrary, one is always struck by the appearances of severity in their treatment of those who fell into their hands. Two men of a humble order, named Rutherford and Gray, had been induced by a low agent, |1712.| named Alexander Pitblado, to adhibit their names as witnesses to a paper bearing to be a guarantee by Dean of Guild Warrender for the rent of a house occupied by one Isabel Guild, being the insignificant sum of £25 Scots. It became Pitblado’s fortune—doubtless, not undeservedly—to be carried away as a recruit to Flanders. The guarantee was detected to be a forgery. Rutherford and Gray were taken into custody, and carried before the magistrates, where they readily admitted that Pitblado had induced them to give their signatures, on the assurance that Warrender had signed the paper.
The Lord Advocate thought the case worthy of the notice of the judges; so the two men were brought up to the court, with a statement of their offence against the 5th act 1681. It was determined that the matter was proper to be decided summarily, and the culprits made no objection to this course, for, as they said, they had not means of living in jail to wait for a more deliberate trial. It was also determined that the Lords could decide in the case with shut doors. Rutherford, now fearing that his fault inferred death, withdrew his former confession, but was at length prevailed on to confess once more, telling, what we can well believe to have been the truth, that he had been ensnared by Gray to do what he did in pure simplicity. ‘The Lords considered that, though it was a very small sum, yet it was a dangerous case to let witnesses escape on pretence of simplicity, where they neither see the party sign nor own the subscription; therefore resolved to impose some stigma and censure to terrify others; and so ordained them to be brought on Wednesday, being the market-day, to the great door of the Parliament House, by the hand of the hangman, with a paper on their breasts bearing their crime, and there to stand betwixt ten and eleven in the forenoon, and from that to be conducted to the pillory at the Tron, and there to stand the other hour between eleven and twelve, with papers on their breast: and in regard Gray had seduced Rutherford to sign, they ordained his lug to be nailed to the Tron; and being informed that Rutherford was a notar, they deprived him, and declared them both infamous.’
Four days later, having in the interval undergone their sentence, they petitioned for liberation from jail, which was granted. Then, however, came in George Drummond, the Goodman of the Tolbooth, with a claim for his dues, which they were totally unable to pay. Before the Union, the Lords in such a case could throw the expense upon the Treasury; but now they were |1712.| without any such resource, and neither could they force the jailer to pass from his demand. In this dilemma, they after all acted a humane part, and made up the necessary sum out of their own pockets.[[448]]
June 21.
The Edinburgh Courant intimated, in an advertisement, that ‘Robert Campbell, commonly known by the name of Rob Roy Macgregor, being lately intrusted by several noblemen and gentlemen with considerable sums for buying cows for them in the Highlands, has treacherously gone off with the money, to the value of £1000 sterling, which he carries along with him.’ This is the first public reference to a person who has become the theme of popular legend in Scotland to an extent little short of Robin Hood in England, and finally has had the fortune to be embalmed in a prose fiction by one of the greatest masters in modern literature.
It is generally admitted that Rob Roy was a man of good birth and connections, though belonging to a family or clan which for upwards of a century had been under proscription, and obliged to live a rather skulking kind of life. He had become possessed in an honourable manner of certain lands on the skirts of Ben Lomond, in the county of Stirling, composed wholly of mountain-ground, and of little annual value, yet sufficient to maintain him, the principal place being Inversnaid, on the isthmus between the Lochs Lomond and Katrine, where hundreds of tourists now pass every summer-day, but which was considered a very outlandish situation in the time of Queen Anne. His family name being illegal by act of parliament, he had adopted that of Campbell, in compliment to the Argyle family, which patronised him. The business of purchasing Highland cattle at the Crieff and other markets, and getting them transferred to England, where they were to be fattened and consumed, was for some years after the Union a favourite one amongst gentlemen of good rank, and it attracted the sagacious and active mind of Robert Macgregor Campbell. With some funds supplied by his neighbours, and part of which, at least, is said to have come primarily from the Duke of Montrose, on an understanding that the lenders were to share in the profits, he entered on the traffic with spirit, and conducted it for a time with success; but the defalcations of a subordinate agent or partner, named Macdonald, cut short his |1712.| career in trade, and left him in serious pecuniary difficulties. The aspect which the affair took at the Court of Session in Edinburgh was, that Robert Macgregor Campbell drew bills on Graham of Gorthie and other gentlemen for cattle he was to buy for them, realised the money, and then ‘did most fraudulently withdraw, and fled, without performing anything on his part, and thereby became unquestionably a notour and fraudulent bankrupt;’[[449]] while in reality he was probably only the victim of a fraud, and obliged to keep out of the way in consequence of the unreasonable severities of the law towards men in his situation. It was a sufficiently barbarous measure to advertise an unfortunate man as a fraudulent bankrupt seeking to screen himself from justice; but the Duke of Montrose—in some other respects but a poor representative of his illustrious great-grandfather—went further: he caused his factor, Mr Graham of Killearn, to fall upon Macgregor’s poor little holding of Craigrostan and Inversnaid, and thrust out from it the wife and family of the late owner.
This treatment turned the milk of Macgregor’s nature to bitterness, and it is not surprising, when the general condition of the country, and the ordinary strain of men’s ideas in that age are considered, that he sought in a wild and lawless way to right himself with his oppressors—above all with the Duke of Montrose. From the rough country round Ben Lomond, he could any night stoop upon his Grace’s Lowland farms, and make booty of meal and cattle. Strange to say, while thus setting the law at defiance, he obtained a certain steady amount of countenance and protection from both of the great Campbell chiefs, Argyle and Breadalbane. The government made an effort to impose a check upon his career by planting a little fort at Inversnaid;[[450]] but Rob Roy, nevertheless, continued in his lawless course of |1712.| life. On the side of Loch Lomond, near Inversnaid, there is a cave formed by a flexure in the stratification of the mountain: here Rob occasionally took refuge when hard pressed. It is curious to reflect that this strange exemplification of predatory life was realised in a not very remote part of our island, in the days when Addison and Pope were regaling the refined people of London with the productions of their genius. Rob is described as a short, robust man, with bushy hair and beard, and legs covered so thickly with red hair as to resemble those of a Highland bull. His cognomen ‘Roy’ expresses his ruddy complexion. It is admitted that, amidst his wild life, he was not without humanity or feeling for the unfortunate, and, what is perhaps more strange, that he was a sagacious and politic sort of person, who never would go into any quarrel or contention which was not likely to result in some practical benefit or advantage. It was probably owing to this cool temperament, that, though he mustered a body of clansmen for the Stuart cause in 1715, he yet stood neutral at the battle of Sheriffmuir, alike afraid to offend King James, on the one hand, and his patron, the Duke of Argyle, on the other.
June.
A singular and not very decent lawsuit took place at this time between the Earl of Bute and his stepmother, the Dowager Countess, widow of the first earl, by whom this family was first raised to any considerable distinction. When the deceased peer went to Bath in the spring of 1710, a few months before his death, he granted a liferent of 3300 merks (£183, 6s. 8d. sterling) to his lady. The present peer—father, by the way, of George III.’s celebrated minister—refused to pay this annuity, and the countess raised an action against him for it, and also for the annual rents of her own son’s patrimony. The only objection presented by the earl in his defence was, that the lady had profited unduly already out of her husband’s property, having at his death appropriated large sums of ‘lying money.’ The matter being referred to her oath, she acknowledged having had in hand at her lord’s death forty pounds, with a purse containing ‘sundry medals and purse-pennies given by the earl and others to her and her son, in which number there were some guineas; and the whole might be about £60 sterling.’ She averred that ‘she had nothing as the product of any trade she drove, except two or three ells of alamode;’[[451]] |1712.| she had made nothing in her husband’s lifetime by lending money; there had been presents from the tenants in kind and in money, and her husband had given them to her. The peer seems to have gained nothing by challenging the claims of his stepmother beyond the forty pounds of ‘lying money.’[[452]]
July 23.
The stricter Presbyterians, commonly called Cameronians—the people chiefly involved in the persecutions of the Stuart reigns—had been left unsatisfied by the Revolution, and were now as antagonistic to the presbyterian church as they had ever been to the late episcopacy. For years they held together, without ministers, or the means of getting any trained in their peculiar walk of doctrine; but at length one or two schismatics cast off by the church put themselves at their head, the chief being Mr John Macmillan, formerly minister of Balmaghie in Galloway. Oaths to the state, neglect of the Covenant, and general compliances with the spirit of the times, were the stumbling-blocks which these people regarded as disqualifying the national establishment for their allegiance.
The Cameronians chiefly abounded in the counties of Lanark, Dumfries, and Kirkcudbright, and their Canterbury was the small burgh of Sanquhar in Nithsdale. Whenever any remarkable political movement was going on in the country, these peculiar people were pretty sure to come to the cross of Sanquhar and utter a testimony on the subject. The last occasion when this was done was at the Union, a measure which it pleased ‘the Antipopish, Antiprelatic, Antierastian, Antisectarian, True Presbyterian Church of Scotland’ (for so they styled themselves), to regard as ‘sinful,’ because it involved a sanction to that English prelatic system which the Solemn League and Covenant had bound the Scottish nation to extirpate.
While still brooding over the ‘land-ruining, God-provoking, soul-destroying, and posterity-ensnaring-and-enslaving Union,’ the act of toleration, so manifestly designed for a relief to the prelatists, came like a bellows to blow up the fire. Sundry meetings were held, and at length a general one at the upland village of Crawford-John (26th of May 1712), where it was finally decided on that the faithful and true church should renew the Solemn League and Covenant.
It was at a place called Auchensaugh, on the top of a broad |1712.| mountain behind the village of Douglas, that the meeting was held for this purpose. The transaction occupied several days. On the first, there was a prayer for a proper frame of spirit, followed by a sermon, as this was again by an engagement to duties, amongst which the uprooting of all opinions different from their own was the most conspicuous. The people were dismissed with an exhortation from Mr Macmillan upon their ‘unconcerned carriage and behaviour.’ On the second day, it was reckoned that about seventeen hundred were present, including, however, many onlookers brought by curiosity. There was now read an acknowledgment of sins, and the people were invited to clear their consciences by declaring any of which they had been guilty. One confessed having made a rash oath; another that he had attended the Established Church; several that they had been married by the Erastian clergy. One, hearing of the sinfulness of tests and oaths, rather unluckily confessed his having sworn the Covenant at Lesmahago. A number had to deplore their having owned William and Mary as their lawful sovereigns. Mr Macmillan seems to have been a little perplexed by the innocent nature of their sins. After all this was at an end, the Solemn League was read and sworn to, article by article, with uplifted hands. A day of interval being allowed, there was a third of devotion. On the fourth, a Sunday, there was an administration of the communion, which must have been a striking sight, as eight tables were set out upon the moor, each capable of accommodating sixty persons. ‘It was a very extraordinary rain the whole time of the action.’
Even Wodrow, who has taken such pains to commemorate the sufferings of these people under prelacy, seems to have been unable to look with patience on their making such demonstrations against the church now established.[[453]] Such earnestness in intolerance, such self-confidence in opinion, cannot be read of in our age without strange feelings. After all, the Covenanters of Auchensaugh were good enough to invite the rest of the community to join them, ‘being anxious to get the divisions which have long wrecked this church removed and remedied;’ nay, they were ‘willing, for peace and unity, to acknowledge and forsake whatever we can rationally be convinced to be bad in our conduct and management,’[[454]] though it would have probably been a serious |1712.| task for a General Assembly of angels to produce such a conviction.
About this time, and for long after, there flourished an enthusiast named John Halden, who considered himself, and a friend of his named James Leslie, as above all and peculiarly the proper representatives of the martyrs Cameron, Cargill, Hackston, Hall, Skeen, Balfour, &c., according to the tenor of the Rutherglen, Sanquhar, and Lanark Declarations. John, like his predecessors, declared not merely spiritual but temporal war against all the existing powers, seeing they had declined from the Covenant, exercised an Erastian power in the church, and were tyrants over the state. Nay, he declared war against ‘the enemies of Christ’ all over the world, denouncing the curse of Meroz against all who would not join him. Halden and Leslie, since there was no government they could submit to, professed their desire and endeavour to ‘set up a godly magistracy, and form a civil state’ themselves; and it is to be feared that the community remained grievously insensible to the offered blessing. The Lord Advocate did not even do them the honour to consider them dangerous. The only active step we hear of John Halden taking was to burn the Abjuration Oath at the Cross of Edinburgh, on the point of a dagger (October 28, 1712), proclaiming with a loud voice, as he went off up the High Street: ‘Let King Jesus reign, and let his enemies be scattered!’
July.
Dr Pitcairn, the prince of wits and physicians in his day, being an Episcopalian and a Jacobite, moreover a man of gay and convivial habits, did not stand in good repute among the severer of the Presbyterian clergy. Regarding many things connected with religion from a peculiar point of view, which was not theirs, he sometimes appeared to them, by the freedom of speech he assumed on such points, and by the cast of comicality which he gave them, to be little better than an unbeliever. Wodrow in his Renfrewshire parish heard of him and his associates with serious concern. It was reported, he tells us, that ‘Dr Pitcairn and others do meet very regularly every Lord’s Day, and read the Scriptures, in order to lampoon and ridicule it. It’s such wickedness that, though we had no outward evidences, might make us apprehensive of some heavy rod.’[[455]]
The Rev. James Webster, one of the Edinburgh clergy of that |1712.| day, was distinguished by the highest graces as an evangelical preacher. He had been a sufferer under the ante-Revolution government, and hated a Jacobite with a perfect hatred. To the Jacobites, on the other hand, his high Calvinism and general severity of style were a subject of continual sarcasm and epigram; and it is not unlikely that Pitcairn had launched at him a few jokes which he did not feel over meekly. In a poem of Pitcairn’s, Ad Adenas, there is, indeed, a passage in which Mr Webster, as minister of the Tolbooth kirk, a part of St Giles’s, is certainly glanced at:
‘Protinus Ægidii triplicem te confer in ædem,
Tres ubi Cyclopes fanda nefanda boant.’
Perhaps this very remark gave rise to all that followed.
One day, in a company where the magistrates of Edinburgh were present, Mr Webster fell into conversation with Mr Robert Freebairn, the bookseller. The minister complained that, in his auctions, Freebairn sold wicked and prohibited books; in particular, he had lately sold a copy of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius Tyanæus, which deists and atheists were eager to purchase, because it set forth the doings of that impostor as on a level with the miracles of Jesus. It being insinuated that these auctions ministered to an infamous taste, Mr Freebairn asked Mr Webster to ‘condescend upon persons;’ whereupon the latter unguardedly said: ‘Such persons, for example, as Dr Pitcairn, who is known to be a professed deist. As a proof of what I say, at that very sale where you found so many eager to purchase the Life of Apollonius, when some one remarked that a copy of the Bible hung heavy in comparison on your hands, Pitcairn remarked: “No wonder, for, you know, Verbum Dei manet in æternum,” which was a direct scoffing at the sacred volume.’
Pitcairn, having this conversation reported to him by Freebairn, took it with lamentable thin-skinnedness, and immediately raised an action against Webster before the sheriffs for defamation. Webster advocated the case to the Lords, on the ground that the sheriffs were not the proper judges in such a matter; and, after a good deal of debating, the Lords, considering that the pursuer shewed too much keenness, while the defender appeared willing to give reasonable satisfaction, recommended the Lord-justice Clerk ‘to endeavour to settle the parties amicably;’ and so the affair seems to have ended.[[456]]
1712. Sep.
In the early part of this month, the Rev. Mr Wodrow made an excursion into Galloway, and noted on the way several characteristic circumstances. ‘I find,’ he says, ‘they have no great quantity of straw, and necessity has learned them to make thrift of fern or breckans, which grow there very throng [close]. They thatch their houses with them ... stript of the leaves ... and say it lasts six or eight years in their great storms.’ He adverts to the moat-hills near some of the parish churches, and great cairns of stones scattered over the moors. Of a loch near Partan, he says: ‘There seem to be tracks of roads into it upon all hands;’ a description reminding us of the glacial grooves and scratches seen on rocks dipping into several of the Scottish lakes. ‘I notice,’ he says, ‘all through the stewartry [of Kirkcudbright] the houses very little and low, and but a foot or two of them of stone, and the rest earth and thatch. I observe all the country moorish. I noticed the stones through many places of far more regular shapes than in this country [Renfrewshire]. On the water of Ken they are generally spherical [boulders]. Through much of the moorish road to Crogo, they are square and long. The strata that with us lie generally horizontally, there in many places lie vertical.’
The worthy martyrologist received from a Galloway minister, on this tour, an account of the witches who were rife in the parish of Balmaclellan immediately after the Revolution. ‘One of them he got discovered and very clear probation of persons that saw her in the shape of a hare; and when taken she started up in her own shape. When before the judge, he observed her inclinable to confess, when of a sudden, her eyes being fixed upon a particular part of the room, she sank down in the place. He lifted her up and challenged her, whether her master had not appeared in that place. She owned it was so, confessed, and was execute. All this process is in the records of the presbytery, of which I am promised ane abstract.’[[457]]
Wodrow seems to have had a taste for geology, though the word did not then exist. He thus wrote to Edward Lluyd, August 26, 1709: ‘My house [is] within a quarter of a mile of the Aldhouse Burn, where you and I were lithoscoping. My pastoral charge does not allow me that time I once had, to follow out these subterranean studies, but my inclination is just the same as when I saw you, or rather greater, and I take it to be one of |1712.| the best diversions from more serious work, and in itself a great duty, to view and admire my Maker in his works, as well as his word. I have got together some stone of our fossils hereabout, from our marl, our limestone, &c.’[[458]]
Sep. 24.
The Edinburgh Courant newspaper contains several notices of a flood which happened this day in the west of Scotland, generally admitted to be the greatest in memory. Wodrow, who calls it ‘the greatest for ane age,’ says it prevented all travelling for the time between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The lower parts of the western city were, as usual on such occasions, deep in water, to the ruin of much merchandise, and the imprisonment of (it is said) twelve hundred families in the upper parts of the houses. A boat sailed about in the Briggate. The house of Sir Donald Macdonald—a gentleman regarded with great jealousy in Glasgow on account of his unpopular religion—is described in one account as immersed to the depth of three fathoms; which is probably an exaggeration. But we may believe Wodrow when he tells us that ‘the water came up to the well in the Saltmarket.’
Great anxiety was felt at Glasgow for the safety of the fine old bridge, which had its arches ‘filled to the bree.’ Vast quantities of country produce and of domestic articles of all descriptions were brought down on the surface of the Clyde and other rivers of the province involved by the flood. Several lives were lost. At Irvine and other parts of Ayrshire, as well as in Renfrewshire, bridges were carried away, and great general damage inflicted. ‘A man and a woman were lost upon the water of Kelvin, and if the Laird of Bardowie had not sent his boat from his loch, to the said water of Kelvin, there had been a great many more people lost therein.’
If we are to believe the observant minister of Eastwood, the whole air at this season seemed ‘infected.’ He notes the frequency of madness in dogs, and that, owing to various epidemics, as ‘the galloping fever,’ sore throat, and measles, scarce a third of the people of Glasgow were able to appear in church.
‘I am told,’ he adds, ‘the Blantyre Doctor did presage this evil harvest and the floods; and they talk, but whether true or false I know not, that there is to be another and greater flood, wherein the Clyde shall be three steps up the Tolbooth stair in Glasgow.’
1712. Dec.
Mr Robert Monteath was at this time preparing his celebrated Theater of Mortality, a collection of the sepulchral inscriptions existing throughout Scotland. It had already cost him ‘eight years sore travel, and vast charges and expenses.’ He now advertised for assistance in his task, ‘desiring all persons who have any valuable epitaphs, Latin, prose or verse, English verse only, or any historical, chronological, or moral inscriptions,’ to send just and authentic copies of them to him ‘at his house in the College Wynd, Edinburgh.’ He took that opportunity of stating his hope that ‘all generous persons will cheerfully subscribe his proposals in a matter so pious, pleasant, profitable, and national.’[[459]]
1713. May 1.
Died, Sir James Steuart, Lord Advocate for Scotland, aged about seventy-eight, greatly lamented by the Presbyterians, to whom he had ever been a steadfast friend. The General Assembly, in session at the time, came in a body to his funeral, which was the most numerously attended ever known in Edinburgh, the company reaching from the head of the close in which his lordship lived, in the Luckenbooths, to the Greyfriars’ Churchyard. For several years, bodily infirmity confined him to a chair; but his mind continued clear to the last. Sir James had shewn some unsteadiness to his principles in the reign of James II., but nevertheless was forced to fly his country, and he only returned along with King William, whose manifesto for Scotland he is understood to have written.
Great general learning, legal skill, and worldly policy, marked Sir James Steuart; but the most remarkable characteristic of the man, considering his position, was his deep piety. Wodrow, who speaks of him from personal knowledge, says: ‘His death was truly Christian, and a great instance of the reality of religion.... He had a great value for religion and persons of piety. He was mighty in the Scriptures; perfectly master of [them]; wonderful in prayer. That winter, 1706–7, when he was so long ill, he was in strange raptures in his prayers sometimes in his family. He used to speak much of his sense of the advantage of the prayers of the church, and in a very dangerous sickness he had about thirteen years ago, he alleged he found a sensible turn of his body in the time of Mr George Meldrum’s prayer for him. He never fell into any trouble but he gave up his name to be |1713.| prayed for in all the churches of the city of Edinburgh. His temper was most sweet and easy, and very pleasant. He was a kind and fast friend, very compassionate and charitable.’[[460]]
May 11.
The Lord Drummond, eldest son of the exiled Earl of Perth, and his wife, Jean Gordon, daughter of the Duke of Gordon, had a son and heir born to them, the same who afterwards took a conspicuous part in the rebellion of 1745, which he did not long outlive. Politics, long adverse to the house of Drummond, smiled on the birth of this infant heir, for never since the Revolution did the Whig interest seem more depressed. Lord Drummond was encouraged by these circumstances to take a step which would have been dangerous a few years before. It is related as follows by Wodrow: ‘The baptism of my Lord Drummond’s son [was performed in October] at his own house by a popish bishop with great solemnity. The whole gentlemen and several noblemen about, were gathered together; and when the mass was said, there were very few of them went out. Several justices of peace and others were there. This is a fearful reproach upon the lenity of our government, to suffer such open insults from papists.’[[461]]
Two months later, Wodrow notes: ‘The papists are turning very open at Edinburgh, and all over Scotland there is a terrible openness in the popish party.’ It is alleged in a popular contemporary publication, that there were fully forty Catholic priests living with little effort at concealment in Scotland; some of them very successful in winning over ignorant people to their ‘damnable errors;’ while ‘one Mr Bruce, a popish bishop, had his ordinary residence in Perthshire, where he had his gardens, cooks, and other domestic servants, and thither the priests and emissaries of inferior rank resorted for their directions and orders.... Their peats and other fuel were regularly furnished them ... [they had] also their mass-houses, to which their blind votaries resorted almost as publicly as the Protestants did to their parish churches.’[[462]]
Oct. 20.
Died Dr Archibald Pitcairn, a man in most respects so strongly contrasted with his recently deceased countryman, Sir James Steuart, as to impress very strongly the absurdity of trying to ascribe any particular line of character to a nation or any other |1713.| large group of people. To nearly every idea associated with the word Scotsman, Pitcairn, like Burns and many other notable Caledonians, stands in direct antagonism: he was gay, impulsive, unworldly, full of wit and geniality, a dissenter from Calvinism, and a lover of the exiled house of Stuart. Conviviality shortened his life down to the same measure which a worn-out brain gave to Sir Walter Scott—sixty-one years. But he parted with the world in great serenity and good-humour, studying to make his last year useful for the future by writing out some of his best professional observations, and penning cheerful verses to his friends on his death-bed. In these, to the refutation of vulgar calumnies, he failed not to express his trust in a future and brighter existence:
‘Animas morte carere cano:
Has ego, corporibus profugas, ad Sidera mitto,
Sideraque ingressis otia blanda dico.’
Adding, in the Horatian spirit which marked him all through life:
‘Sed fuerint nulli, forsan, quos spondeo, coeli,
Nullaque sint Ditis numina, nulla Jovis;
· · · · ·
Attamen esse hilares, et inanes mittere curas
Proderit, ac vitæ commoditate frui,
Et festos agitâsse dies, ævique fugacis
Tempora perpetuis detinuisse jocis.’[[463]]
A few months before his death, Pitcairn had completed a volume of his medical essays, to which he prefixed a page strongly significant of his political predilections: it contained the following words in large characters: ‘To God and his Prince this Work is humbly Dedicated by Archibald Pitcairn,’ with the date, ‘June |1713.| 10, 1713,’ being the well-known birthday of the said prince—namely, the Chevalier St George. Where practical matters are concerned, one sees in this volume the acuteness and good sense which gave the author his professional eminence. In theoretical matters, we find the absurdities which may be said to have been inseparable from medical science before either physiology or organic chemistry was understood. The phenomena of digestion are described by Pitcairn as wholly physical and mechanical. It is also rather startling to find him patronising poultices of ovine and bovine excreta, and powders made of the human skull.
The volume was published posthumously, and in the friendly biography prefixed to it, we find a charming professional portrait—‘always ready to serve every one to the utmost of his power, and even at the risk of his own life—never sacrificing the health of his patients for any humour or caprice’—‘not concerned about fees’—‘went with greater cheerfulness to those from whom he could expect nothing but good-will, than to persons of the highest condition’—often, where needful, left marks of his charity, as well as his art, with the sick. ‘This virtue of charity was indeed quite his own in its manner, for he usually conducted it in such a way that those benefiting by it remained ignorant of his being their benefactor.’ It is also stated of him that he was of ‘a pleasant engaging humour; that life sat easy upon him in all circumstances; that he despised many, but hated none.’
In a country journey, Pitcairn discovered the learning and genius of Thomas Ruddiman, and he succeeded in bringing this remarkable man into a position which enabled him to exercise his talents. Ruddiman afterwards repaid the favour by gathering the many clever Latin poems of his patron, which he gave to the world in 1727. They are chiefly complimentary to the famous men on the cavalier side, or directly expressive of his political feelings; but some are general, and include such happy turns of thought as make us regret their not being in English. One of the most noted of his pieces was a brief elegy on the death of Dundee, which was translated into English by Dryden; and it must be acknowledged as something for a Scottish writer of Latin verses in that age, to have had men like Dryden and Prior for translators.
One cannot but reflect with pleasure on such connections amongst men of genius as that between Pitcairn and Ruddiman; and the association of ideas leads us to another anecdote connected with Pitcairn and to a similar purport. When the learned |1713.| physician acted as professor at Leyden, he had amongst his pupils two men of great eventual eminence, Herman Boerhaave and Richard Mead, both of whom entertained a high sense of the value of his instructions. A son of Pitcairn having forfeited his life by appearing in the rebellion of 1715, Mead, then in great favour in high places, went to Sir Robert Walpole to plead for the young man’s pardon. ‘If I have been able,’ he said, ‘to save your or any other man’s life, I owe the power to this young man’s father.’ The claim was too strong, and put in too antithetic terms, to be resisted.
My old friend Alexander Campbell, editor of Albyn’s Anthology, was intimately acquainted with a maiden daughter of Pitcairn, who lived till the closing decade of the eighteenth century. He spoke of having once asked her to accompany him to the theatre, to see Mrs Siddons, when the old lady said gaily: ‘Aih, na, laddie; I have not been at ony playhouse since I gaed to ane in the Canongate wi’ papa, in the year ten.’
Nov.
‘This month there was an incident at Glasgow which made a very great noise in the country. Mr Gray [one of the clergy] was visiting [his flock], and in some house meets with one Andrew Watson, a journeyman shoemaker, lately come into the town from Greenock.’ On inquiry, he learned that this man did not attend his ministrations, and, asking the reason, he was told it was because he, the minister, had taken the oath of abjuration. He seemed a stiff, pragmatical fellow, and in the course of an altercation which ensued, he called Mr Gray perjured. A lay elder, accompanying Mr Gray, resented this expression of the shoemaker, and reported it to Bailie Bowman, who, sending for Watson, demanded if he called Mr Gray perjured. ‘Yes, and I will so call every one who takes the oath of abjuration.’ ‘Do you own Mr Gray as your minister?’ ‘I will own no one who took that oath.’ ‘Do you own the magistrates?’ ‘No, if they have taken that oath.’ Here was a rebel for the worthy magistrates and ministers of Glasgow to be cherishing in their community. It was not to be borne. Bailie Bowman clapped the man up in jail, till it should be determined what was to be his ultimate fate. After a day or two, the magistrates sent for him, and questioned him as he had been questioned before, when he not only gave the same answers, but subscribed a paper disowning both ministers and magistrates, on the ground of their having taken the aforesaid oath. ‘They kept him in prison ten or twelve |1713.| days, but could make nothing of him. They offered to let him out if he would confess he had given offence to the magistrates; but that he would not do.’ There were some who cried out against this procedure as ‘persecution,’ and they took care that the man did not want for maintenance. The last we hear of the matter is, that the magistrates ‘resolve to banish him the town.’ Wodrow, who relates this occurrence,[[464]] soon after makes the observation, that ‘the Presbyterians are ill termed bigot and narrow-spirited:’ that character ‘does best agree to papists and prelatists.’
Dec.
It was remarked that an unwholesome air prevailed at this time, causing many hasty deaths, and favouring small-pox, of which eighty children died within a little time in Eglesham parish. ‘I hear it observed,’ says Wodrow, ‘that in the summer-time never was known such a quantity of flees [flies.]’
1714. Jan. 10.
Campbell of Lochnell having died about this day, his son, a Jacobite, kept the corpse unburied till the 28th, in order that the burial might be turned to account, or made use of, for political purposes. It was customary for the obsequies of a Highland chief or gentleman to be attended by a vast multitude of people, who usually received some entertainment on the occasion. It seems to have been understood that those who came to Lochnell’s funeral were making a masked demonstration in favour of the exiled Stuart. Those of the opposite inclination deemed it necessary to attend also, in order to be a check upon the Jacobites. Hence it came to pass, that the inhumation of Lochnell was attended by two thousand five hundred men, well armed and appointed, five hundred being of Lochnell’s own lands, commanded by the famous Rob Roy, carrying with them a pair of colours belonging to the Earl of Breadalbane, and accompanied by the screams of thirteen bagpipes. Such a subject for a picture![[465]]
Feb.
Keeping in view the article under September 1690, regarding the marriage of Walter Scott of Kelso with Mary Campbell of Silvercraigs, we may read with additional interest a letter by that person, written from Glasgow to his wife in February 1714, |1714.| giving an account of the peculiar arrangements regarding her father’s funeral:
‘Glasgow, Feb. 2, 1714.
‘My Dear—I left Edinr upon fryday the 29th of the last. Dean of [Guild] Allane nor your sister either durst venture to travell to Glasgow with [me], on account of the season, but said that Mr Bell, Lisis younge husband, was there, whom Dean of Guild Allane had trusted with any business that could bee done for him. I called at Lithkow and saw Lissie, who was very kinde, was at Kilsyth all that night, came to Glasgow the next day, beeing Saturday, at twelve of the clock, and at two of the clock that day went down to the chesting of your father. He was buried yesterday att four a clock afternoon, beeing Monday the first instant, very devoutlie and honourablie, for Blythswood had ordered all things proper and suitable to a nicety. All the gentlemen in the place, the magistrates, and the citiezens of best esteem and substance, accompanied the funerall in very good order. I carried his head, Blythswood on my right, and Alex. Bell, Lissies husband, on my left hand; other nerest relations and Sr James Campbell of Auchinbrook carried all the way. After the funerall, there was prepared in the large room of the Coffee-house a very handsome and genteele treat, to wh the Magistrates and Gentlemen and friends were invited. The treat consisted of confections, sweet breads, and bisket of divers sorts, very fine and well done, and wines. There were at it upwards of thirtie. Wee are this day to look to his papers in presence of Bailie Bowman and town-clark, wherof you shall have account of after this. I have sent a letter to Sir Robert Pollock just now, whose answer I will wait. I am like to stay five days after this here, and the time I may stay in Edir depends on my success from Sir Rot Pollock. In the mean time let Robie[[466]] be making himself ready, for his master told Dean of Guild that he thought he would bee readie to saill about the middle of this instant. When I come to Edr I shall know whither it will be needfull to send for him before I come home myselfe or not. I recommend you all to the protection of God, and am,
‘My dear, your
‘W. Scott.