The Privy Council readily apprehended that the prosecution of ‘this damnable and cruel intention’ would both breed danger to the parties and produce great trouble and controversy among their friends, to the disturbance of his majesty’s peace, if timous remeed be not provided. They therefore summoned the parties before them to give assurance of their good behaviour.
Deeming, as was formerly remarked, anything that illustrates the progress of the arts as worthy of notice in this record, though perhaps trifling in itself, we may advert to Mr Alexander Hamilton, brother to the secretary Earl of Melrose, as having now obtained a patent of twenty-one years for a new cart invented by him, ‘wherein greater weight and burdens may with far less force be drawn, and conveniently carried, than hath been done with ony other kind of cart hitherto known or heretofore used.’[419]
‘Sandy Hamilton,’ or ‘Dear Sandy,’ as he was called, was a man of note on account of his skill in some of the useful arts, particularly in those connected with the munitions of war. He practised these arts for some time in Germany, whence he was recalled to England, where the king granted him pensions and allowances to the amount of £800 sterling per annum. When the Civil War broke out, he joined his countrymen, and helped to fit out the Covenanting army of 1640 with a species of short but effective gun, which was carried slung between two horses, and the serviceableness of which was proved at the battle of Newburn-ford, when the Scots crossed the Tyne in the face of the enemy and became masters of Newcastle.
1624.
In this year we have the latest known notice of a woman of extraordinary attainments who had lived for many years in Edinburgh, practising an art in which she was long after pronounced to have never been excelled. Caligraphy, or the art of beautiful writing, was in greater vogue in the seventeenth century than in our more utilitarian days. Under what circumstances Esther Inglis, a Frenchwoman residing in the Scottish capital, came to give her days to so laborious an art, we do not learn. Neither are we aware how it was that Esther came to live in the Scottish capital. There, however, we find her, so early as 1599, writing one of the little manuscript volumes which have given her celebrity. This book, preserved in the Bodleian Library, is entitled Les Proverbes de Salomon, escrites en diverses sortes de Lettres, par Esther Anglois, Françoise. A Lislesbourg en Ecosse. 1599. ‘This delicate performance,’ says Ballard,[420] ‘gains the admiration of all who see it; every chapter is wrote in a different hand; as is the dedication, and some other things at the beginning of the book, which makes near forty several sorts of hands. The beginnings and endings of the chapters are adorned with most beautiful head and tail pieces, and the margins are elegantly decorated with the pen, in imitation, I suppose, of the beautiful old manuscripts. The book is dedicated to the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s great favourite. At the beginning are his arms, neatly drawn, with all its quarterings—in number fifty-six. In the fifth leaf is her own picture, done with the pen, in the habit of that time. In her right hand, a pen, the left resting upon a book opened; in one of the leaves of which is written De l’Eternel le bien: de moi le mal, ou rien. On the table before her there is likewise a music-book lying open, which perhaps intimates that she had some skill in that art. Under the picture is an epigram in Latin, made by Andrew Melvin; and on the next page another, composed by the same author, which is as follows:
Æmula naturæ manus exprimit una figuras
Mille, animans pictis Signa pusilla notis,
Signa creans animata, polûm spirantia signa:
Quæ picturata margine limbus obit.