1618.
Thomas Ross, a man of good family, formerly minister of Cargill, in Perthshire, had gone to Oxford to study; but in a moment of partial lunacy—for the act can be accounted for in no other way—he wrote a libel on the Scottish nation, and affixed it to the door of St Mary’s Church. It spoke in scurrilous terms of the people of Scotland, excepting only the king and a few others, and counselled that the king should banish all Scots from his court. James took the matter in high dudgeon, and had Ross sent down to Scotland, with strict orders to bring him to condign punishment. He was accordingly tried at the date marginally noted, for an act of which the design was assumed to be to have stirred up the people of England ‘to the cruel, barbarous, and unmerciful murdering, massacring, and assassine of the haill Scots people, as well noblemen and councillors as others, attendants about his highness’s royal person in court.’ The unfortunate satirist professed penitence, and craved mercy, averring that he had been inops mentis at the time of his committing the act. Nothing could avail to save him. His right hand was first struck off, and then he was beheaded and quartered, his head being fixed on a prick at the Nether Bow Port, and his hand at the West Port.—Pit.
Aug. 29.
Mr John Guthrie, minister of Perth, ‘on ane Sunday after the afternoon’s sermon, married the Master of Sanquhar with Sir Robert Swift’s daughter, ane English knight in Yorkshire. Neither of the parties exceeded thirteen years of age.’—Chron. Perth.
Nov. 18.
‘About the midst of November, there appeared a prodigious comet in the morning, in the north-east, broad, and stretching with a large tail towards the north-west. It appeared fine and clear some few days in the beginning, and after became more dim and obscure, and vanished away at last in the north. This comet by appearance portended the wars of Germany, which began not long after, and continueth yet to this hour.’—Cal.
Dr Bembridge, ‘a very profound and learned mathematician,’ obliged the king with an account of this comet. He told him it was as far above the moon as the moon is above the earth, and not less than 2,300,000 English miles! Rushworth speaks of it as followed by, first, the Bohemian wars, then the German and Swedish, &c. ‘Dr Bembridge observed it to be vertical to London, and to pass over it in the morning; so it gave England and Scotland in their civil wars a sad wipe with its tail.’—Foun. Hist. Ob.
This notable comet was observed in Silesia, Rome, and Ispahan. From Skipton’s observations, Halley afterwards computed its orbit. It passed its perihelion on the 8th of November, at little more than a third of the earth’s distance from the sun. On the 9th of December, its tail was 70° in length, being, according to Kepler, the longest that had been seen for a hundred and fifty years.