May 15.
1650.
‘The new Psalm-books were read and ordained to be sung through all the kingdom.’—Nic. This was the translation of the Psalms which is still used by the Church of Scotland and all Presbyterian congregations in the kingdom. It was based on a homely version produced originally in 1643, by Francis Rous, a member of the Long Parliament, who ultimately became provost of Eton, and died in 1658. What was rather odd, Rous was at this time joined to the sectaries, against whom the Scotch church entertained so bitter a feeling. It must be admitted that his version underwent great improvements in the hands of the committees of the General Assembly appointed for its revision. As now finally set forth, it was in many respects most felicitous. The general strain and metre is that of the old homely native ballad. It is occasionally harsh and obscure, has a few Scottish idioms, and sometimes requires an obsolete pronunciation to make out the prosody; yet, with all these obvious faults, it perhaps comes nearer to the simple archaic beauty of the original than any other metrical translation.[140]
May 21.
1650.
The Marquis of Montrose, taken in an unsuccessful attempt to restore the king without the ceremony of the Covenant, was hanged in Edinburgh on a gibbet thirty feet high. The heroic firmness displayed at his death harmonised well with the gallantry exhibited in his short but brilliant career. It affords a striking idea of the taste of men of the highest rank in that age, that the Marquis of Argyle appeared on a balcony to see him driven on the hangman’s hurdle to the prison from which he was two days after to walk to the gallows, and that Lord Lorn took post at a window near the scaffold, to see the body cut to pieces after death. The head being stuck on the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, and the limbs sent for exhibition over the ports of Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, and Aberdeen, Charles II. was compelled to behold those ghastly relics of the most loyal of his subjects, when, less than a month after, he progressed through the country. If Montrose had died free of excommunication, his body would have been given to his friends; as matters stood, it was inhumed beneath a gibbet at the Burgh-moor. There was, however, a female heart that secretly wept for the untimely end of the great marquis. His niece, Lady Napier, sent men by night who dug up the body, and stole away the heart; and this relic she consigned to a steel case made out of the hero’s sword, which again she enclosed in a gold filagree box, which had been presented by a doge of Venice to her husband’s grandfather, the inventor of the logarithms. It will be found that, after the Restoration, when it became the fate of Argyle and others to atone by their blood for the severities inflicted on Montrose, the remains of the culprit of 1650 were gathered together and treated with a funeral that might have been honourable to a king. The heart and its case were, however, retained in the possession of the Napier family for several generations, and only were lost sight of amidst the confusions of the French Revolution.[141]
July.