It is not unworthy of remark, that the Privy Council Record contains no notice of these outrages in the north, beyond an entry dated November 9, 1592, adverting to ‘great cruelties, herships, and disorders recently committit by the lawless broken Highlandmen of the Clan Chattan, Clan Cameron, Clanranald, and others pretending their dependence on the Earls of Huntly and Athole;’ which had ‘sae wrackit and shaken louss sundry parts of the north country, that great numbers of honest and peaceable folks are murtherit, their houses burnt now in the winter season, their guids spulyit, disponit, and exponit in prey, in far greater rigour nor it was with foreign enemies;’ for which reasons a commission was granted to the Earl of Angus to go north and deal with the said earls for the pacification of the country, and, failing this, to raise the well-affected people in arms, and put down the lawless by force. This view of the matter is so inconsistent with the statement of Sir Robert Gordon, above quoted, as to suggest that the Scottish government knew hardly anything of the relations of parties, and had heard only of there being troubles in a certain district. No notice whatever is taken of the sweeping vengeance executed by the Earl of Huntly upon the Mackintoshes and Grants. Certainly, no feature of the time is more remarkable than this freedom and power of the great nobles to do what they considered justice upon their enemies, while the king was unable by any force under his own immediate control to protect himself in his own palace.
We learn from another source, that the Earl of Angus brought matters to a bearing in conformity with the king’s direction, by causing ‘baith the parties subscryve ane assurance, bot of their awn form.’—Moy.
Feb. 28.
Richard Graham had for some years been noted as a prominent licentiate of the devil’s medical college. He professed to despise common witchcraft as a vulgar thing, and would only admit that he consulted spirits. Spottiswoode, speaking of the death of the good Earl of Angus, says: ‘In the time of his sickness, when the physicians found his disease not to proceed of any natural cause [it was concluded to be by enchantment], one Richard Graham being brought to give his opinion of it, made offer to cure him, saying, as the manner of these wizards is, “that he had received wrong.” But when he [the earl] heard that the man was suspected to use unlawful arts, he would by no means admit him, saying: “That his life was not so dear to him, as, for the continuance of it some years, he would be beholden to any of the devil’s instruments; that he held his life of God, and was willing to render the same at His good pleasure, knowing he should change it for a better.”‘[190]
1591-2.
It is related that Sir Lewis Bellenden, Lord Justice-clerk, dealt with Graham to raise the devil. Graham having raised him in Sir Lewis’s own yard in the Canongate, ‘he [Sir Lewis] was thereby so terrified that he took sickness and thereof died.’—Stag. State.
It was satisfactorily made out that Graham had been the adviser of the witch Barbara Napier and her associates; and we have just seen that the Earl of Bothwell was likewise believed to have consulted him regarding the king’s death. This wizard, therefore—‘notour and knawn necromancer, ane common abuser of the people’—was apprehended; and on the day noted in the margin, he was ‘worried and burnt at the Cross of Edinburgh.’ According to Calderwood, ‘he stood hard to his former confession touching Bothwell’s practice against the king; that Arran, Lord Fairnyear,[191] was an enchanter; that the devil was raised at the Laird of Auchinleck’s dwelling-place, and in Sir Lewis Bellenden the Justice-clerk’s yard. The bruit [rumour] went that the chancellor [Maitland] had some tables and images about his neck, and that he was sure [safe] so long as he used them so; but Richard Graham deponed no such matter.’
Mar. 7.