Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

Some of the minor events which took place in the sheriffdom of Cromarty, on the triumph of Presbyterianism, have been detailed, as recorded by Sir Thomas, in the foregoing chapter. Even on his own testimony, most men of the present day will not feel disposed to censure very severely the churchmen of his district. It must be confessed, however, that the principles of liberty, either civil or ecclesiastical, were but little understood in Scotland in the middle of the seventeenth century; the parties which divided it deeming themselves too exclusively in the right to learn from the persecutions to which they were in turn subjected, that the good old rule of doing as we would be done by, should influence the conduct of politicians as certainly as that of private men. And there is a simple fact which ought to convince us, however zealous for the honour of our church, that the Presbyterian synod of Ross, which Sir Thomas has termed “a promiscuous knot of unjust men,” was by no means a very exemplary body. Five-sixths of its members conformed at the Restoration, and became curates; and as they were notoriously intolerant as Episcopalians, it is not at all probable that they should have been strongly characterized by liberality during the previous period, when they had found it their interest to be Presbyterians.

SIR JOHN URQUHART OF CRAIGFINTRIE.

The restoration of Charles, and the appointment of Middleton as his commissioner for Scotland, were followed by the fatal act which overturned Presbyterianism, and set up Episcopacy in its place. It is stated by Wodrow, that Middleton, previous to the bringing in of this act, had been strengthened in the resolution which led to it, by Mackenzie of Tarbat, and Urquhart of Cromarty; and that the latter, who had lately “counterfeited the Protestor,” ended miserably some time after. In what manner he ended, however, is not stated by the historian, but tradition is more explicit. On the death of Sir Thomas, he was succeeded by his brother Alexander, who survived him only a year, and dying without male issue, the estate passed to Sir John Urquhart of Craigfintrie, the head of a branch of the family which had sprung from the main stock about a century before. This Sir John was the friend and counsellor of Middleton. About eleven years after the passing of the act, he fell into a deep melancholy, and destroyed himself with his own sword in one of the apartments of the old castle. The sword, it is said, was flung into a neighbouring draw-well by one of the domestics, and the stain left by his blood on the walls and floor of the apartment, was distinctly visible at the time the building was pulled down.

THE OUSTED MINISTERS.

So well was the deprecated act received by the time-serving Synod of Ross, that they urged it into effect against one of their own body, more than a year before the ejection of the other nonconforming clergymen. In a meeting of the Synod which took place in 1661, the person chosen as moderator was one Murdoch Mackenzie;—a man so strong in his attachments that he had previously sworn to the National Covenant no fewer than fourteen times, and he had now fallen desperately in love with the Bishopric of Moray. One of his brethren, however, an unmanageable, dangerous person, for he was uncompromisingly honest, and possessed of very considerable talent, stood directly in the way of his preferment. This member, the celebrated Mr. Hogg of Kiltearn, had not sworn to the Covenant half so often as his superior, the Moderator, but then so wrong-headed was he as to regard his few oaths as binding; and he could not bring himself to like Prelacy any the better for its being espoused by the king. And so his expulsion was evidently a matter of necessity. The Moderator had nothing to urge against his practice,—for no one could excel him in the art of living well; but his opinions lay more within his reach; and no sooner had the Synod met, than, singling him out, he demanded what his thoughts were of the Protestors—the party of Presbyterians who, about ten years before, had not taken part with the king against the Republicans. Mr. Hogg declined to answer; and on being removed, that the Synod might deliberate, the Moderator rose and addressed them. Their brother of Kiltearn, he said, was certainly a great man—a very great man—but as certainly were the Protestors opposed to the king; and if any member of Synod took part with them, whatever his character, it was evidently the duty of the other members to have him expelled. Mr. Hogg was then called in, and having refused, as was anticipated, judicially to disown the Protestors, sentence of deposition was passed against him. But the consciences of the men who thus dealt with him, betrayed in a very remarkable manner their real estimate of his conduct. It is stated by Wodrow, on the authority of an eye-witness, that sentence was passed with a peculiar air of veneration, as if they were ordaining him to some higher office; and that the Moderator was so deprived of his self-possession as to remind him, in a consolatory speech, that “our Lord Jesus Christ had suffered great wrong from the Scribes and Pharisees.”

Mackenzie received the reward of his zeal shortly after in an appointment to the Bishopric of Moray; and one Paterson, a man of similar character, was ordained Bishop of Ross. On the order of council, issued in the autumn of 1662, for all ministers of parishes to attend the diocesan meetings, and take the newly-framed oaths, while in some of the southern districts of the kingdom only a few ministers attended, in the diocese of Ross there were but four absent, exclusive of Mr. Hogg. These four were, Mr. Hugh Anderson of Cromarty, Mr. John Mackilligen of Alness, Mr. Andrew Ross of Tain, and a Mr. Thomas Ross, whose parish is not named in the list. And they were all in consequence ejected from their charges. Mr. Anderson, a nephew of Sir Thomas’s opponent, Mr. Gilbert, who was now dead, retired to Moray, accompanied by his bedral, who had resolved on sharing the fortunes of his pastor; and they returned together a few years after to a small estate, the property of Mr. Anderson, situated in the western extremity of the parish. Mr. Mackilligen remained at Alness, despite of the council and the bishops, who had enacted that no nonconforming minister should take up his abode within twenty miles of his former church. Mr. Ross of Tain resided within the bounds of the same Presbytery; and Mr. Fraser of Brea, a young gentleman of Cromartyshire, who was ordained to the ministry about ten years after the expulsion of the others, had his seat in the parish of Resolis. In short, as remarked by Wodrow, there was more genuine Presbyterianism to be found on the shores of the Bay of Cromarty, notwithstanding the general defection, than in any other part of the kingdom north of the Tay.

And the current of popular feeling seems to have set in strongly in its favour about the year 1666. Towards the close of this year, Paterson the bishop, in a letter to his son, describes the temper of the country about him as very cloudy; and complains of a change in the sentiments of many who had previously professed an attachment to Prelacy. Mr. Mackilligen, a faithful and active preacher of the forbidden doctrines, seems to have given him so much trouble, that he even threatened to excommunicate him, but the minister regarding his threat in the proper light, replied to it by comparing him to Balaam the wicked prophet, who went forth to curse Israel, and to Shimei the son of Gera, who cursed David. The joke spread, for as such was it regarded, and Paterson, who had only the sanctity of his office to oppose to the personal sanctity of his opponent, deemed it prudent to urge the threat no further: he had the mortification of being laughed at for having urged it so far. There is a little hollow among the hills, about three miles from the house of Fowlis, and not much farther from Alness, in the gorge of which the eye commands a wide prospect of the lower lands, and the whole Firth of Cromarty. It lies, too, on the extreme edge of the cultivated part of the country, for beyond there stretches only a brown uninhabited desert; and in this hollow the neighbouring Presbyterians used to meet for the purpose of religious worship. On some occasions they were even bold enough to assemble in the villages. In the summer of 1675, Mr. Mackilligen, assisted by his brethren of Tain and Cromarty, and the Laird of Brea, celebrated the Communion at Obsdale, in the house of the Lady Dowager of Fowlis. There was an immense concourse of people; and “so plentiful was the effusion of the Spirit,” says the historian whom I have so often had occasion to quote, “that the oldest Christians present never witnessed the like.” Indisputably, even from natural causes, the time must have been one of much excitement; and who that believes the Bible, will dare affirm that God cannot comfort his people by extraordinary manifestations, when deprived of the common comforts of earth for their adherence to him? One poor man, who had gone to Obsdale merely out of curiosity, was so affected by what he heard, that when some of his neighbours blamed him for his temerity, and told him that the bishop would punish him for it by taking away his horse and cow, he assured them that in such a cause he was content to lose not merely all his worldly goods, but his head also. A party had been despatched, at the instance of the bishop, to take Mackilligen prisoner; but, misinformed regarding the place where the meeting was held, they proceeded to his house at Alness, and spent so much time in pillaging his garden, that before they reached Obsdale he had got out of their way. But he fell into the hands of his enemy, the bishop, in the following year, and during his long imprisonment on the Bass Rock—for to such punishment was he subjected—he contracted a disease of which he died. Mr. Ross of Tain, and Mr. Fraser of Brea, were apprehended shortly after, and disposed of in the same manner.

Nor was it only a few clergymen that suffered in this part of the country for their adherence to the church. Among the names of the individuals who, in the shires of Ross and Cromarty, were subjected to the iniquitous fine imposed by Middleton on the more rigid Presbyterians, I find the name of Sir Robert Munro of Fowlis, the head of a family which ranks among the most ancient and honourable in the kingdom. Sir John Munro, son of Sir Robert, succeeded to the barony in 1668. His virtues, and the persecutions to which he was subjected, are recorded by the pen of Doddridge:—“The eminent piety of this excellent person exposed him,” says this writer, “to great sufferings in the cause of religion in those unhappy and infamous days, when the best friends to their country were treated as the worst friends to the government. His person was doomed to long imprisonment for no pretended cause but what was found against him in the matters of his God; and his estate, which was before considerable, was harassed by severe fines and confiscations, which reduced it to a diminution much more honourable, indeed, than any augmentation could have been, but from which it has not recovered to this day.”

MR. FRASER OF BREA.

But, perhaps, a brief narrative of the sufferings of a single individual may make a stronger impression on the reader than any general detail of those of the party. Mr. James Fraser of Brea was born in the western part of the shire of Cromarty, in the year 1639. On the death of his father, whom he lost while in his infancy, he succeeded to the little property of about £100 per annum, of which the name, according to the fashion of Scotland, is attached to his own. His childhood was passed much like the childhood of most other people; but with this difference, that those little attempts at crime which serve to identify the moral nature of children with that of men, and which, in our riper years, are commonly either forgotten altogether, or regarded with an interest which owes nought of its intensity to remorse, were considered by him as the acts of a creature accountable to the Great Judge for even its earliest derelictions from virtue. But this trait belongs properly to his subsequent character. In his seventeenth year, after a youth spent unhappily, in a series of conflicts with himself, for he was imbued with a love of forbidden pleasures, and possessed of a conscience exquisitely tender, a change came over him, and he became one of the excellent few who live less for the present world than for the future. As he was not wedded by the prejudices of education to any set of religious opinions, he had, with only the Scriptures for his guide, to frame a creed for himself; and having come in contact, in Edinburgh, with some Quakers, he was well-nigh induced to join with them. But on more serious consideration, he deemed some of their tenets not quite in unison with those of the Bible. He attended, for some time after the Restoration, the preaching of the curates; but, profiting little by their doctrines, he deliberated whether he did right in hearing them, and concluded in the negative, in the very year in which all such conclusions were declared treason by act of Parliament. In short, by dint of reasoning and reading, he landed full in Presbyterianism, at a time when there was nothing to be gained by it, and a great deal to be lost. And not merely did he embrace it for himself, but deeming it the cause of God, he came forward in this season of wrong and suffering, when the bad opposed it, and the timid shrunk from it, to preach it to the people. He believed himself called to the ministerial office in a peculiar manner, by the Great Being who had fitted him for it; and the simple fact that he did not, in Scotland at least, gain a single sixpence by all his preaching until after the Revolution, ought surely to convince the most sceptical that he did not mistake on this occasion the suggestions of interest for those of duty. He began to preach the forbidden doctrines in the year 1672; and he was married shortly after to a lady to whom he had been long attached.