Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

CHAPTER VIII.

“——Times

Whose echo rings through Scotland to this hour.”

—Wordsworth.

THE REFORMATION.

Prior to the Reformation there were no fewer than six chapels in the parish of Cromarty. The site of one of these, though it still retains the name of the Old Kirk, is now a sand-bank, the haunt of the crab and the sea-urchin, which is covered every larger tide by about ten feet of water; the plough has passed over the foundations of two of the others; of two more the only vestiges are a heap of loose stones, and a low grassy mound; and a few broken fragments of wall form the sole remains of the sixth and most entire. The very names of the first three have shared the fate of the buildings themselves; two of the others were dedicated to St. Duthac and St. Bennet; and two fine springs, on which time himself has been unable to effect any change, come bubbling out in the vicinity of the ruins, and bear the names of their respective saints. It is not yet twenty years since a thorn-bush, which formed a little canopy over the spring of St. Bennet, used to be covered anew every season with little pieces of rag, left on it as offerings to the saint, by sick people who came to drink of the water; and near the chapel itself, which was perched like an eyry on a steep solitary ridge that overlooks the Moray Firth, there was a stone trough, famous, about eighty years before, for virtues derived also from the saint, like those of the well. For if a child was carried away by the fairies, and some mischievous unthriving imp left in its place, the parents had only to lay the changeling in this trough, and, by some invisible process, their child would be immediately restored to them. It was termed the fairies’ cradle; and was destroyed shortly before the rebellion of 1745, by Mr. Gordon, the minister of the parish, and two of his elders. The last, and least dilapidated of the chapels, was dedicated to St Regulus; and there is a tradition, that at the Reformation a valuable historical record, which had belonged to it—the work probably of some literary monk or hermit—was carried away to France by the priest. I remember a very old woman who used to relate, that when a little girl, she chanced, when playing one day among the ruins with a boy a few years older than herself, to discover a small square recess in the wall, in which there was a book; but that she had only time to remark that the volume was a very tattered one, and apparently very old, and that there were beautiful red letters in it, when the boy, laying claim to it, forced it from her. What became of it afterwards she did not know, and, unconscious of the interest which might have attached to it, never thought of making any inquiry.

There does not survive a single tradition of the circumstances which, in this part of the country, accompanied the great event that consigned the six chapels to solitude and decay. One may amuse one’s-self, however, in conceiving of the more interesting of these, and, with history and a little knowledge of human nature for one’s guide, run no great risk of conceiving amiss. The port of Cromarty was one of considerable trade for the age and country, and the people of the town were Lowland Scots. A more inquisitive race live nowhere. First there would come to them wild vague reports, by means of the seamen and merchants, of the strange doctrines which had begun to disturb the Continent and the sister kingdom. Shreds of heretic sermons would be whispered over their ale; and stories brought from abroad, of the impositions of the priests, would be eked out, in some instances with little corroborative anecdotes, the fruit of an experience acquired at home. For there were Liberals even then, though under another name;—a certain proportion of the people of Scotland being born such in every age of its independence. Then would come the story of the burning of good Patrick Hamilton, pensionary of the neighbouring abbey of Fearn; and everybody would be exceedingly anxious to learn the particular nature of his crime. Statements of new doctrines, and objections urged against some of the old, would in consequence be eagerly listened to, and as eagerly repeated. Then there would come among them two or three serious, grave people, natives of the place, who would have acquired, when pursuing their occupations in the south, as merchants or mechanics, a knowledge, not merely speculative, of the new religion. A traveller of a different cast would describe with much glee to groups of the younger inhabitants, the rare shows he had seen acted on the Castle-hill of Cupar; and producing a black-letter copy of “The Thrie Estaites” of Davy Lindsay, he would set all his auditors a-laughing at the expense of the Church. One of the graver individuals, though less openly, and to a more staid audience, would also produce a book, done into plain English, out of a very old tongue, by one Tyndale, and still more severe on the poor priests than even “The Thrie Estaites.” They would learn from this book that what they were beginning to deem a rational, but at the same time new religion, was in reality the old one; and that Popery, with all its boasted antiquity, was by far the more modern of the two. In the meantime, the priests of the chapels would be the angriest men in the parish;—denouncing against all and sundry the fire and fagots of this world, and the fire without fagots of the next; but one of them, a good honest man, neither the son of a churchman himself, nor yet burdened with a family of his own, would set himself, before excommunicating any one, to study the old, newly-translated book, that he might be better able to cope with the maligners of his Church. Before half completing his studies, however, his discourses would begin to assume a very questionable aspect. Little would they contain regarding the Pope, and little concerning the saints; and more and more would he press upon his hearers the doctrines taught by the Apostles. Anon, however, he would assume a bolder style of language; and sometimes conclude, after saying a great deal about the spiritual Babylon, and the Man of sin, by praying for godly John Knox, and all the other ministers of the Evangel. In short, the honest priest would prove the rankest heretic in the whole parish. And thus would matters go on from bad to worse. A few grey heads would be shaken at the general defection, but these would be gradually dropping away; and the young themselves would be growing old without changing their newly-acquired opinions. They would not all be good Christians;—for every one should know it is quite a possible thing to be a Protestant, sound enough for all the purposes of party, without being a Christian at all;—but they would almost all be reformers; and when the state should at length set itself to annihilate root and branch of the old establishment, and to build up a new one on the broad basis of the kingdom, not a parish in the whole of it would enter more cordially into the scheme than the parish of Cromarty.

But however readily the people might have closed with the doctrines of the Reformation, they continued to retain a good deal of the spirit of the old religion. Having made choice of a piece of land on the edge of the ridge which rises behind the houses as a proper site for their church, they began to collect the materials. It so chanced, however, that the first few stones gathered for the purpose, being thrown down too near the edge of the declivity, rolled to the bottom; the circumstance was deemed supernaturally admonitory; and the church, after due deliberation, was built at the base instead of the top of the ridge, on exactly the spot where the stones had rested. The first Protestant minister of the parish was a Mr. Robert Williamson. His name occurs oftener than once in Calderwood’s Church History; and his initials, with those of his wife, are still to be seen on a flat triangular stone in the eastern part of the town, which bears date 1593. It is stated by Calderwood, that “Jesuits having libertie to passe thorough the countrey in 1583, during the time of the Earle of Huntlie’s lieutenantrie, great coldness of religion entered in Ross;” and by an act of council passed five years after, this Robert Williamson, and “John Urquhart, tutor of Cromartie,” were among the number empowered to urge matters to an extremity against them.

OUTBREAKING AT ROSEMARKIE.

There awaited Scotland a series of no light evils in the short-sighted policy which attempted to force upon her a religion which she abhorred. The surplice and the service-book were introduced into her churches; and the people, who would scarcely have bestirred themselves had merely their civil rights been invaded, began to dread that they could not, without being unhappy in more than the present world, conform to the religion of the state. And so they set themselves seriously to inquire whether the power of kings be not restricted to the present world only. They learned, in consequence, that not merely is such the case, but that it has yet other limitations; and the more they sought to determine these, the more questionable did its grounds become. The spirit manifested on this occasion by the people of this part of the country, is happily exemplified by Spalding’s narrative of a riot which took place at the neighbouring Chanonry of Ross, in the spring of 1638. The service-book had been quietly established by the bishop two years before; but the more thoroughly the people grew acquainted with it, the more unpopular it became. At length, on the second Sunday of March, just as the first bell had rung for sermon, but before the ringing of the second, a numerous party of schoolboys broke into the cathedral, and stripped it in a twinkling of all the service books. Out they rushed in triumph, and, procuring a lighted coal and some brushwood, they marched off in a body to the low sandy promontory beneath the town, to make a bonfire of the whole set. But a sudden shower extinguishing the coal, instead of burning they tore the books into shreds, and flung the fragments into the sea. The bishop went on with his sermon; but it was more than usually brief; and such were the feelings exhibited at its close by the people, that, taking hastily to his horse, he quitted the kingdom. “A very busy man was he esteemed,” says the annalist, “in the bringing in of the service-book, and therefore durst he not, for fear of his life, return again to Scotland.” In short, the country was fully awakened; and before the close of the following month, the National Covenant was subscribed in the shires of Ross, Cromarty, and Nairn.