The sentence was commuted by the king’s order to banishment from Edinburgh for Cruikshanks, and for the other two to banishment from the king’s dominions, both during his royal pleasure.—Pit. Cal.
A little trait of the domestic circumstances of Catholics of rank at this time is worthy of notice. The Earl of Errol, as a recusant papist, was only enabled to remain in his country on condition that he should not pass beyond a small circle around his own castle in Aberdeenshire. Being embarrassed by debt, and troubled by his creditors, he found himself constrained to take some legal steps ‘for the provision of his mony young children, and settling of some good course for the estate of his house.’ It was necessary that he should be allowed to break temporarily through the obligation under which he lay to live within a certain space round his house. He therefore got a formal licence (November 9, 1615), ‘to repair to Edinburgh, and there to remain in some lodging, not kything ony way in daylight upon the heich street, for ten days after the 20th of November.’—P. C. R.
Apr.
1615.
On the Saturday before Pasch Sunday, ‘ane extraordinar riot’ took place in the usually quiet little burgh of Burntisland. The gentleman who acted as chamberlain of the queen in the management of her dotarial estate of Dunfermline, was called upon, in the course of his duty, to send ‘precepts of warning to remove’ to Burntisland, ‘according to common order.’ No immediate steps of a strong character were meditated; it was merely a form of law. The inhabitants, led, as afterwards appeared, by their pastor, Mr William Watson, conceived a violent anger at the proceeding, and determined to give it an active resistance. When the officer and his witness came to the cross for the execution of his office, he was assailed by ‘a multitude of women, above ane hundred, of the bangster Amazon kind’—so states the grave chancellor, Earl of Dunfermline—and ‘maist uncourteously dung [driven] off his feet, and his witness with him, they all hurt and bloodit, all his letters and precepts reft frae him, riven and cast away, and sae staned and chased out of the town.’ The magistrates are alleged to have looked on without interference; nay, ‘the bailie’s awn wife’ was ‘the principal leader of this tumultuary army of Amazons;’ so that there was no room to doubt that the male inhabitants were the instigators of the riot.
Some sharp measures were taken for the punishment of the rioters, and the chancellor besought the king to send off Mr Watson to some quieter part of the country, and ordain Burntisland ‘to be provided with some minister of mair calm port, to rule and circumsede sic het humours as may be in that people.’—M. S. P.
Accordingly, on the 14th of December, the Council decreed that Mr William Watson should ‘transport himself out of the burgh of Burntisland’ before the 10th of January next, and thereafter ‘on nae wise repair to the said burgh, [nor] within aucht miles of the same, and on nae wise entertein ony intelligence with the inhabitants of Burntisland in ony matter concerning the government of that town.’—P. C. R. The king sent a warrant from Newmarket for this being carried into effect.
Apr. 26.