During the time when the king was pressing on the innovations in the church, dissentients of this kind were rising everywhere throughout the southern districts of Scotland, many of them lairds, a few of them nobles, but most of them belonging to the middle classes of society. Of the lairds, Livingstone enumerates Halhill (Fife), Crosshill (Lanarkshire), Cunningham-head, Cessnock, and Rowallan (Ayrshire). There was also a number of ladies, some of them of noble birth, who embraced and strongly held fast the evangelical views. Such were Margaret Countess of Wigton, Anne Marchioness of Hamilton, the Countess of Eglintoun, and Lady Loudon. For the time, these people, as well as the more earnest of the clergy, were kept silent under the frown of an imperious government, or made themselves but little heard; but the fire burned not the less intensely for being covered up; and when the time for resistance came, it was ready to break forth with the greater violence that it had been so long suppressed.
1624. July 1.
Almost as a matter of course, while these Presbyterian recusants were in hands, the state authorities took some order with papistry. John Gordon of Craig in Aberdeenshire had attracted their notice as ‘an excommunicat trafficking papist,’ who, not content with blaspheming the truth and its preachers himself, did all that he could to ‘withhold his people from coming to the kirk, boasting [threatening] some, and persuading others;’ thus, it is alleged, ‘he steirs up mony not weel satled in their religion to imitate him in his contemptuous and lawless proceedings, and in effect has cassen that pairt of the country lowss.’ The Council now charged Gordon to appear and answer for his offences. They likewise despatched an order to the magistrates of Aberdeen, for the routing up of a set of Catholics who for some time had been allowed to live peaceably there, commanding that they be taken and warded till further orders.—P. C. R. The government could calculate with tolerable security on the feeling of the great bulk of the people, that by thus striking a blow at popery, they would be allowed without much remonstrance to deal that severity towards puritanism which would frighten it from a troublesome opposition to the now semi-episcopalian establishment.
John Gordon of Craig was obliged for the time to leave the kingdom; but somehow the king was always forgiving to papists, and we accordingly find that in January 1625, having made submission and promised good behaviour in future, this ‘excommunicat trafficking papist’ was allowed to return to Scotland (P. C. R.), but not ultimately to rest there, as will hereafter be seen.
July 21.
A Border thief, described as Adie Usher in Birkinhaugh, servant of Robert Elliot of Redheugh, was condemned and hanged at Edinburgh for sundry acts of cattle-stealing. In most of his proceedings he had been accompanied by his son, Willie Usher, a mere boy, who was also presented for trial, but spared on account of his youth.—Pit. After Willie Usher had spent some months in the Thieves’ Hole in Edinburgh, the Lords of the Privy Council received a complaint from him, ‘heavily regretting his hard estate and condition by his detention, thir mony owks bygane, miserably in ward in the Thieves’ Hole of Edinburgh, without possibility or mean to entertein himself, he being a young innocent boy not past the age of fourteen years, and his umwhile father having underlain his punishment and sufferit death for the crime laid to the said Willie’s charge.’ The Lords consequently ordered the magistrates ‘to attend the commodity of some ship going to the Low Countries,’ and see Willie set aboard thereof, ‘and mak intimation to the said Willie that if at ony time hereafter he sall return without licence, it sall be capital unto him.’—P. C. R.
1624.
The master of Adie Usher seems to have been under suspicion of a concern in his delinquencies. In November, when about to fly from the city on account of infection, the Privy Council entered an order in the case of Lady Jean Stewart, whose husband, Robert Elliot of Redheugh, had been for some time a prisoner in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh. She had represented ‘the utter distress, misery, and want whereunto she and her poor children are reduced, having contracted great debts and impandit her abulyiements and clothes for enterteinment of her husband in ward—and she is brocht to that pitch of necessity, that she has nowther means to live nor credit to afford him ony further supply.’ The Council ordered her a hundred merks for past charges, and granted her the sum of ‘threttein shillings and four pennies’ during pleasure—apparently meaning a daily allowance of 1s. 1-1/3d. sterling.—P. C. R.