The heartless levity with which these scoffers at Presbyterian sanctity, perpetrated the most revolting cruelties, would scarcely be credited, did not their own records furnish the proof. One George Jackson, who had lain in irons during all the winter, was brought before a committee of council on the 13th of May. Being hastily summoned, he happened to enter with his Bible in his hand. “Come away,” said the advocate, “let’s see where the text lies.” George replied, “I was never a seeker out of texts; that is the work of a minister.” Then said the advocate, “put up your Bible, we are for no preaching now.”—“I am not come to preach,” answered the prisoner; “but I charge you, and all of you, as ye shall answer one day before our Lord Jesus Christ, when he shall judge——.”—“You came here to be judged and not to judge,” retorted Mackenzie; “send him to prison.” He was accordingly re-conducted to jail, and executed in December.
Some idea may be formed of the wide range to which the proscription of the best of Scotland’s population now extended, from the rolls printed at this date, May 5th, in order to reach all who could be accused of harbouring any who were proclaimed fugitives—not less than two thousand were declared outlaws; and when it is recollected, that the parent durst not speak to the child, nor the child to the parent; the husband to the wife, nor the wife to the husband—we may form some faint idea of the misery inflicted upon the suffering country. On the 9th of the same month, Captain John Paton of Meadowhead suffered. He had distinguished himself during the civil war; but after the battle of Worcester, settled upon the farm where he had been born, and became a member of Mr William Guthrie’s session, in the parish of Fenwick, till the Restoration. He was at Pentland and Bothwell, and was so marked a character that a large sum was offered for his head; and he experienced several remarkable escapes, till at last, early this year, he was taken in the house of Robert Howie of Floack, in the parish of Mearns. Dalziel, who had known him as a brave soldier, is said to have taken some interest in him, and to have obtained a reprieve from the king; but that falling into the hands of Bishop Paterson, he kept it up till the Captain was executed, which seems the more probable from the short notice in the council record, April 30:—“John Paton, in Meadowhead, sentenced to die for rebellion, and thereafter remaining in mosses and muirs to the high contempt of authority, for which he hath given all satisfaction that law requires, reprieved till Friday come se’enight, and to have a room by himself that he may the more conveniently prepare for death”—a treatment so uncommonly favourable, that it looks very likely that something more had been intended. But he was honoured to suffer on the gibbet for the principles he had so strenuously contended for on the field. He died most cheerfully forgiving all his persecutors all the wrongs they had done to himself, and desiring they might seek forgiveness of God for the wrongs they had done to his cause.
But probably no case sets the iniquity of the then justiciary lords in a stronger point of view, than that of James Howison, maltman in Lanark, accused of being at Bothwell. The case as proved was, he resided in Lanark; and when a party of the west country army came there, he was, as all the inhabitants of the place were, obliged either to converse with them or retire. He could not retire, and was seen in conversation with some of the rebels, but without arms; for this the court sentenced him to be hanged at the Grassmarket, and his lands and goods forfeited to the king!
The partiality of the council was not less conspicuous. Having ordered the Lord Advocate to prosecute all heritors upon whose lands rebels were seen, among others, the Laird of Dundas was charged with this new crime; and his defence was, that he did not know of any persons either going to or coming from a conventicle, nor had he even heard of it till some time after. The lords repelled the defence; yet the very same day, the Earl of Tweeddale, accused of an exactly similar crime, was allowed to state his ignorance as his excuse, and the excuse was sustained.
It may be imagined, but I hardly think even imagination could conjure up a worse species of punishment than what was practised on well educated females—and such were the daughters and wives of the covenanters[[154]]—for no fault but their opinions:—to be sent off the country as common felons, and sold in the colonies as common slaves; and not only was this villany effected, but worse; their companions who came to visit and take farewell of their young friends—some of whom had been prematurely, illegally, and cruelly created widows—were frequently subjected to a similar fate, being seized and sent themselves to the plantations. One girl, Elizabeth Linning, when a prelatical slave-ship was lying in the Clyde, in the month of June this year, ready to sail for Carolina, went on board to condole with an acquaintance, she was immediately detained by the captain’s order, carried to Carolina, and offered to be sold for a slave, when she fortunately made her escape; and having got her case laid before the governor, he ordered her liberation. She returned, I believe, to her native land, but it does not appear that the captain was punished.
[154]. All the young women in Scotland at this time ought to have been taught to read. From every account, traditionary or otherwise, it appears the daughters of the covenanters generally were; and some of their published diaries, which have been held up to scorn, are even in point of elegance equal to many English writers who have been praised as the improvers of the English language; but this is a subject which deserves greater attention than I can afford in a note. I hope at no distant period to discuss it more fully.
The manner in which these victims of clerical oppression were used on their passage, does not admit of transcription. The indelicacy they were exposed to, bad as it was, was not equal to the filth that was perpetrated upon them. That so many of them died was less wonder than that any survived. The African middle passage might be a purgatory—the passage of the covenanters across the Atlantic would have been a stage below, had not the divine comforts that supported them in such a situation assuaged all the miseries their persecutors could inflict; and even amid the suffocation of the crowded mid-ships, enabled many triumphantly to wing their way to heaven.
Nothing steels the heart against every feeling of humanity equally with a false religion; and it is no less remarkable that its two principal ingredients ever have been a love of money and a love of power. Argyle’s proceedings touched both these main-springs in the bosom of the Scottish rulers, and they were determined by every means they possessed to elicit information respecting them. His correspondence had been obtained, but the characters required three keys to decipher them. They had the Earl’s secretary in their possession, Mr William Spence; and he was ordered to undergo the boot. He did so without communicating any thing of importance. They therefore had recourse to a diabolical expedient. On the 26th July, they passed an act “ordaining General Dalziel to receive Mr William Spence from the magistrates of Edinburgh, and to appoint a sufficient number of officers and soldiers to watch him by turns, night and day, and not to suffer him to sleep; and to take down in writing every thing he should say.”[[155]] Yet nature sustaining even this, a new instrument of torture, imported from Russia by General Dalziel, was employed—the thumbkins—iron screws for compressing the thumbs, productive of the most exquisite pain. These had been first tried upon Arthur Tacket, a tailor in Hamilton, whose legs being too slender for the boots, the attendant surgeons recommended the squeezing of his thumbs, which was accordingly done previously to his execution, to extort from him a declaration of who preached at a field-meeting he had been apprehended on leaving. They were now applied to Spence. He had only one key, and they of course obtained but very partial information, and even that he had the resolution to stipulate should not be used judicially against himself or any of the persons mentioned. He had said, however, that Mr Carstairs possessed another key; and they, in violation of all good faith, not long after subjected him to similar torture. Previously, they had tried to obtain by insidious kindnesses the information they wanted; but Carstairs resisting all their advances, the chancellor, Perth, was so enraged, that he told him as he had refused so many singular favours that had been offered him beyond any prisoner, before God he should be tortured, and never a joint of him left whole. Against this he protested, as torture was prohibited by the civil law, and was unknown in the country where the crimes were said to be committed; but the Lord Advocate replied, he was now in Scotland, and though the crimes had been committed at Constantinople, he might be tried for them. Carstairs answered, that the crimes of which he was accused being said to be committed in England, his majesty’s laws were there equally in force for the security of his government as they were in Scotland, which they were not at Constantinople. The king’s smith was called in to settle the point. “I do acknowledge,” says Carstairs, who has himself left an account of the process, “I was much afraid I should not have been able to go through with that scene of torture: and if I had not, I was miserable; for I should have been brought to speak against every man they mentioned, but God kindly ordered it otherwise.” It is unnecessary to repeat an examination which was totally unsatisfactory to the persecutors, but it is impossible to dismiss it without awarding a meed of praise to the sufferer for a constancy, which we of these days are not perhaps fully able to appreciate.
[155]. He was, after the torture, put into General Dalziel’s hands; and it was reported that, by a hair-shirt and pricking (as the witches are used), he was five nights kept from sleep, till he was half distracted.—Fountainhall, vol. i. p. 299.
In the course of these various examinations, nothing decisive respecting the English plot could be obtained against Baillie of Jarvieswood; he was therefore ordered to be prosecuted before the privy council for corresponding with the rebels; and refusing to criminate himself by answering their ensnaring questions, he was fined six thousand pounds sterling, and turned over to the justiciary. Within a few days, he was brought to trial, though in the last stage of a decay, produced by the cruel treatment he had met with. Upon the most defective proof, he was condemned to die for a crime which he declared he abhorred, and of which the public accuser had declared to himself in prison that he did not believe him guilty. After receiving sentence, a friend asked him how he felt. “Never better,” was the reply; “and in a few hours I’ll be well beyond all conception.” Shortly after, he added, “they are going to send my quarters through the country. They may hag and hew me as they will, I know assuredly nothing shall be lost, but all these my members shall be wonderfully gathered and fashioned like Christ’s glorious body.” He was that same day sent to the scaffold, lest a natural death should have disappointed the malice of his enemies, who unintentionally were eager to encircle his brow with a brighter crown than that which monarchs wear. He died with Christian magnanimity and resignation; and his last moments were soothed by the heroic tenderness of his sister-in-law, a daughter of Warriston, who had watched over him in prison and waited upon him on the scaffold. His speech, declaring his attachment to the constitution of his country, and his hatred of popish idolatry, which he feared would be the plague of Scotland, he was prevented from delivering on the scaffold, but it was printed after his death, and, widely circulated through both kingdoms, tended greatly to promote the cause for which he died.