Public teachers and students required to take the oath of supremacy—A boy imprisoned for refusing—Husbands punished for their wives’ contumacy—Landlords for their tenants—Overtures of the council—Country put under military law—Reprisals—Outrages of the commissioners of shires—Death of Sharpe—Escape of Veitch—Murder of Inchdarnie.
Early in the beginning of the next year, (January 2, 1679,) the council instructed the Archbishop of St Andrews and the Bishops of Edinburgh and Aberdeen, to call before them the principals, professors, and other office-bearers of their respective Universities, and also all the masters of the public schools within their boundaries, and require them to subscribe the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and the declaration owning the government of the church by archbishops and bishops, and its establishment; which Mr Alexander Dickson, professor of the Hebrew language in the College of Edinburgh, Mr Heriot, teacher in the High School, Mr George Sinclair, Leith, Mr Allan, his assistant, Mr Alexander Strang, schoolmaster, Canongate, and Mr John Govan, his assistant, with Mr James Scot, junior,—refusing to do, were all removed from their respective charges, as examples to others; and it appears to have had a salutary effect, as we do not read of any “pedagogues” after this being prosecuted for contumacy. But it was again repeated and urged by proclamation, that the due execution of their acts, forbidding pedagogues, chaplains, and schoolmasters, to officiate without license from their respective ordinaries, should be observed, and that no youth should be suffered to enter into the second classes in colleges, or received as apprentices, until they obliged themselves to keep the church. The reiterated repetition of these injunctions strongly implies the repugnance which must have existed among the people to the form of religion then endeavoured to be forced upon them, while it exhibits in the most glaring light that combination of clerical and magisterial despotism, which is a necessary consequence of a state establishment of any peculiar denomination, against the light and wishes of a numerous and instructed part of the community. So anxious, too, were these Scottish political puritans to preserve the youth from any infection, that they even carried their zeal the length of imprisoning a boy about fourteen years of age for being at a conventicle, and subjected him to several weeks’ confinement, till some of their own number, ashamed of such proceedings, set the child at liberty.
Children may be restrained, but women being more difficult to manage, it was thought proper to punish their husbands, instances of which occurred in the cases of Sir William Fleming of Ferm, commissary of Glasgow, and of William Anderson, the late lord provost, who were both before the council the same day, and fined for the delinquencies of their wives, although they themselves seem to have been regular church-goers. Dame Margaret Stewart, the spouse of Sir William, and Mrs Macdougal, the spouse of the provost, were charged with having been present at a conventicle kept by Mr John Welsh, at Langside, in the parish of Cathcart, seated upon high chairs on either side of the said Mr John, and with having kept company with him at other times; in addition to which the Lady Fleming had allowed other ministers to preach, pray, or expound Scripture in the house of Ferm, aggravated by her entertaining the preachers before or after these exercises. The lady did not deny that she had heard Mr Welsh preach, and also confessed that she had been guilty of showing hospitality to the same faithful minister of Christ; for which the council fined Sir William, her husband, in the sum of four thousand merks, ordaining him to pay the money or find security before he left Edinburgh. In order, however, that a husband should not suffer for his wife’s fault, whose conduct they yet allowed it was not in his power sometimes to control, they declared that if she survived him, then his heirs should retain as much as he payed of fine, together with interest from the time of payment, out of the first end of her jointure; and if she should die first, her executors were to be liable, which they alleged would be a check on the zeal of the ladies, if they paid no regard to the interest of their husbands. Lord Fountainhall, who records this decision, asks, with all due legal gravity, “But what if they have no executors? or if it be the husband or her own children?”
Not only were husbands thus prosecuted for their ladies’ misdemeanours, but landlords were made accountable for the conduct of their tenants. A most oppressive instance occurred in the case of one George Turnbull, a baxter or baker in Edinburgh, himself a regular conformist. The council being informed that conventicles were held in the chamber of Isobel Crawford, which she rented in the flat of a house belonging to him, he was summoned before them and interrogated upon oath, as to the rent of the whole flat? He stated it at one hundred pounds per annum; and three conventicles being either proved or not denied to have met there, he was fined three hundred pounds, Scots, or twenty-five pounds sterling, for what he was neither accessary to, nor had any knowledge of.
Tyranny is never stationary when introduced into a country, until it either level all resistance, and degrade a nation into one quiescent mass of torpid subjection, or rouse the people to a pitch of determined enthusiastic irresistless exertion, which drives their oppressors from the land. At this period, the evident design of the Scottish rulers was to accomplish the former limb of the alternative, though it eventually led to the last. “The overtures” sent by the “committee for public affairs,” to be proposed to his sacred majesty by the Duke of Lauderdale, to heal the schism and disorders of the church, plainly evidence this. Their grand object was to root out all conventicles; and now that the forces were raised, whereby these seditious disorders might, as they imagined, be easily and effectually suppressed, they represented to the king the necessity of his empowering the council to nominate sheriff-deputes, bailie-deputes of regalities, and stewart-deputes, to enforce their acts against withdrawers from public ordinances, keepers of conventicles, and those guilty of conversing with intercommuned persons or vagrant preachers, whenever the resident deputes had been remiss in their duty; and that his majesty’s forces might be ordered upon all occasions, when required, to concur with these officers, or whoever might be appointed by them for the more speedy and effectual execution of their sentences and decrees. His majesty gave his hearty approval to the proposal, and the whole south and west of Scotland was placed under military law, as far at least as assembling to attend upon the ordinances of religion was concerned. All officers and soldiers of the standing army or militia were commanded forcibly to dissipate the persons found by them at conventicles, and previously indemnified for any slaughter or mutilation they might commit in so doing. They were to seize the preachers and as many of the hearers as they could; the former to be carried to prison, the latter to be detained till they found sufficient caution to answer for their crimes according to law; and they were empowered to carry off the upper garments of such as they could not secure, in order to be used in evidence against them when afterwards apprehended. All arms, and the horses of all who were armed, were ordered to be seized, and the meanest sentinel was warranted to break open doors and other lockfast places in searching after suspected or intercommuned persons.[[111]]
[111]. The soldiers were thus distributed:—Three companies of foot in Canongate and Leith; one at Calder, and one at Stirling; one at Culross and Clackmannan; one at Cupar and Falkland; four at Glasgow; two in the shire of Ayr; and one in each of the shires of Renfrew, Lanark, and Galloway; and one in the town of Kelso. The eighteenth company to be at the major-general’s disposal. One squadron of his majesty’s horse-guards to be at Edinburgh, another in Stirling, the third in Fife, and the fourth in Borrowstounness. One troop at Glasgow, one in Merse and Teviotdale, and one in Galloway. The dragoons were to be distributed in companies of twenty-five each, Galloway, Ayr, Calder, Culross, and Lanark, or otherwise arranged as the general shall see necessary; but they were to be kept in constant exercise patrolling the various districts, that they might be ready and prepared at the shortest notice to execute the orders given for dispersing any rendezvouses of rebellion.
To stimulate their satellites in the work of proscription and blood, who were already allowed to share in the plunder of those they seized, murdered, or robbed, and to urge their activity against the more eminent, and therefore more hated of those men, of whom the earth was not worthy—they were now offered additional rewards for their destruction. The price set upon the head of that “notour traitor, Mr John Welsh,” dead or alive, was nine thousand merks; for his accomplices, Mr Semple and Mr Arnot, three thousand; for any field-preacher declared fugitive, two thousand; and for any other “vagrant” or itinerant preacher, five hundred merks. The reasons assigned for such high rewards, were worthy the hypocrites by whom they were expressed—although we cannot help being astonished at the unblushing impudence which could publish falsehoods, so widely known to be such, without even the shadow of verisimilitude, to shield them from contempt—these were, to prevent the people from being seduced from public ordinances, or debauched to atheism and popery, by being exposed to hear Jesuits or any other irregular persons who dared take upon them the sacred office of the ministry.
About the beginning of March, the military apostles entered upon their labours; and among their first exploits was the seizure of twenty-three countrymen in Evandale, chiefly shepherds, whom they straitly examined upon oath, whether they had seen any men in arms going through the country during the last month. In the latter end of the same month, having been informed of a large meeting assembled to hear sermon at Cambeshead, in the parish of Lesmahago, near Lanark, a party went on purpose to disperse them; but on learning their numbers, and that many of them were well armed, they did not think it adviseable to attack them; but retiring to a little distance, they rifled some women who were going to the meeting of their plaids and Bibles, and took several men prisoners. When intelligence of this was brought to the meeting, a number of the men in arms were sent to demand the release of the prisoners and the restoration of the plunder. The officer in command refused to do either, and a scuffle ensued, in which the captain was wounded and a few of the soldiers taken prisoners, who were shortly after set at liberty without harm. As soon as an account of this trifling affair reached Glasgow, Lord Ross marched with a considerable party towards Lanark, and harassed the surrounding country for some weeks; and the council upon being apprised of it, ordered the commissioners for assessment in the shire to meet and provide hay, straw, and corn for the forces, who were immediately to be despatched thither to crush the rebels.
In Galloway, Gordon of Earlston and thirteen other gentlemen, who had been summoned for worshipping God or hearing his word preached in private houses or in the fields, or of speaking or lodging some others who had been guilty of the like enormities, were denounced and outlawed as if they had been malefactors of the deepest die. In Fife, three were fined; one in a thousand pounds Scots; another in one hundred; and the third in five hundred merks.
Pursuing their favourite measures, the prelatic myrmidons had successfully fanned, by their domineering insolence, the discontent they had widely kindled in the west, from which there appeared no means of escape, but by some desperate effort to which every day’s report of fresh aggression was rapidly driving the people. A few of the many irritating incidents which occurred have been preserved, but the amount of the suffering can only be guessed. The slightest attempts at what has been improperly denominated retaliation have been carefully registered. Of these I shall give two specimens, which were then paraded as instances of their “hellish principles,” and which, though they were not the actions of religious men, have been treated as the effects of fanaticism. The first was a trick played upon Major Johnston, one of the captains of the train-band of Edinburgh, a violent persecutor, but by whom was never discovered. “One night,” says Kirkton, “a boy came and told Johnston there was a conventicle in a certain close; for he was famously known for an active agent of satan to suppress preachings in the city and apprehend ministers, though sometimes he took money to overlook them. He (ever ready for such mischief) presently took a party of the town-guard, came and entered the house, where he found some men met about business, who seeing them enter so rudely with their weapons, did challenge him why he came so briskly. Finding no conventicle there, he and they began to jostle, (who were the aggressors I cannot tell,) but he with his men were the first provokers. Some of the gentlemen shot, as is said, a tobacco-stapple, or piece of broken money, at one of his followers, a soldier from the Castle, who fell, and died within ten days after. Another gripped the major himself, and cast him down on the floor; and they were so incensed that they offered to kill him. But he crying out wofully to spare his life, said—‘For Christ’s sake, send me not to hell,’ and swore he would never trouble any of these meetings again. Whether he was required to say this, or said it in his fear, I cannot tell; whereupon they spared his life, and let him and his party go not without some blae strokes they had got. The gentlemen then withdrew to their own quarters.