At this time, while the country was suffering from famine, there was a renewing of the Covenant with fasting and humiliation in St Andrews presbytery. ‘After this exercise,’ says James Melville, one of those chiefly concerned in ordering it, ‘we wanted not a remarkable effect.’ ‘God extraordinarily provided victuals out of all other countries, in sic store and abundance as was never seen in this land before;’ without which ‘thousands had died for hunger,’ ‘for,’ he goes on to say, ‘notwithstanding of the infinite number of bolls of victual that cam hame from other parts, all the harvest quarter of that year, the meal gave aucht, nine, and ten pounds the boll, and the malt eleven and twal, and in the south and west parts many died.’
June 7. 1596.
Napier, still brooding over the dangers from popery, devised at this time certain inventions which he thought would be useful for defending the country in case of invasion. One was a mirror like that of Archimedes, which should collect the beams of the sun, and reflect them concentratedly in one ‘mathematical point,’ for the purpose of burning the enemy’s ships. Another was a similar mirror to reflect artificial fire. A third was a kind of shot for artillery, not to pass lineally through an enemy’s host, destroying only those that stand in its way, but which should ‘range abroad within the whole appointed place, and not departing furth of the place till it had executed his [its] whole strength, by destroying those that be within the bounds of the said place.’ A fourth, the last, was a closed and fortified carriage to bring harquebussiers into the midst of an enemy—a superfluity, one would think, if there was any hopefulness in the third of the series. ‘These inventions, besides devices of sailing under the water, with divers other stratagems for harming of the enemies, by the grace of God and work of expert craftsmen, I hope to perform.’[212] So wrote Napier at the date noted in the margin. Sir Thomas Urquhart describes the third of the devices as calculated to clear a field of four miles’ circumference of all living things above a foot in height: by it, he said, the inventor could destroy 30,000 Turks, without the hazard of a single Christian. He adds that proof of its powers was given on a large plain in Scotland, to the destruction of a great many cattle and sheep—a particular that may be doubted. ‘When he was desired by a friend in his last illness to reveal the contrivance, his answer was that, for the ruin and overthrow of man, there were too many devices already framed, which if he could make to be fewer, he would, with his might, endeavour to do; and that therefore, seeing the malice and rancour rooted in the heart of mankind will not suffer them to diminish, the number of them, by any concert of his, should never be increased.’[213]
June 24.
John, Master of Orkney, was tried for the alleged crime of attempting to destroy the life of his brother the Earl of Orkney, first by witchcraft, and secondly by more direct means. The case broke down, and would not be worthy of attention in this place, but for the nature of the means taken to inculpate the accused. It appeared that the alleged witchcraft stood upon the evidence of a confession wrung from a woman called Alison Balfour, residing at Ireland, a village in Orkney, who had been executed for that imaginary crime in December 1594. The counsel for the Master shewed that, when this poor woman made her ‘pretended confession,’ as it might well be called, she had been kept forty-eight hours in the cashielaws—an instrument of torture supposed to have consisted of an iron case for the leg, to which fire was gradually applied, till it became insupportably painful. At the same time, her husband, a man of ninety-one years of age, her eldest son and daughter, were kept likewise under torture, ‘the father being in the lang irons of fifty stane wecht,’ the son fixed in the boots with fifty-seven strokes, and the daughter in the pilniewinks, that they, ‘being sae tormented beside her, might move her to make any confession for their relief.’ A like confession had been extorted from Thomas Palpla, to the effect that he had conspired with the Master to poison his brother, ‘he being kept in the cashielaws eleven days and eleven nights, twice in the day by the space of fourteen days callit [driven] in the boots, he being naked in the meantime, and scourgit with tows [ropes] in sic sort that they left neither flesh nor hide upon him; in the extremity of whilk torture the said pretended confession had been drawn out of him.’ Both of these witnesses had revoked their confessions, Alison Balfour doing so solemnly on the Heading Hill of Kirkwall, when about to submit to death for her own alleged crime, of which she at the same time protested herself to be innocent. These are among the most painful examples we anywhere find of the barbarous legal procedure of our ancestors.—Pit.
Aug. 3. 1596.
One John Dickson, an Englishman, was tried for uttering slanderous speeches against the king, calling him ‘ane bastard king,’ and saying ‘he was not worthy to be obeyed.’ This it appeared he had done in a drunken anger, when asked to veer his boat out of the way of the king’s ordnance. He was adjudged to be hanged.—Pit. It is curious on this and some other occasions to find that, while the king got so little practical obedience, and the laws in general were so feebly enforced, such a severe penalty was inflicted on acts of mere disrespect towards majesty.