If, as has been insinuated by cavalier writers, the Scotch nobles were prompted in their joining the religious movement of 1637 by a fear of the revocation of church-lands, they were now suffering a severe punishment for their hypocrisy. Under the late exhausting wars, in which they had incurred vast expenses, and the penal fines imposed on them by Cromwell, they might well be described by a contemporary writer as nearly all ‘wracked.’ Our authority sums them up in the following terms:
1654.
‘Dukes Hamilton, the one execute, the other slain; their [e]state forfault[ed]; one part gifted to English sogers; the rest will not pay the debt. Huntly execute; his sons all dead but the youngest; there is more debt on the house nor the land can pay. Lennox is living, as a man buried, in his house of Cobham. Douglas and his son Arran are quiet men of no respect. Argyle almost drowned in debt, in friendship with the English, but in hatred with the country. Chancellor Loudon lives like an outlaw about Athole, his lands comprised for debt, under a general very great disgrace. Marischal, Rothes, Eglintoun and his three sons, Crawford, Lauderdale, and others, prisoners in England, and their lands all either sequestrat or forfault[ed], and gifted to English sogers. Balmerino suddenly dead, and his son, for public debt, comprisings, and captions, keeps not the causey [that is, cannot appear in public].’
Landed proprietors, merchants, and indeed the entire community, were now in a state of prostration in consequence of the wars. According to the diarist Nicoll—‘The poverty of the land daily increased, by reason of inlaik of trade and traffic, both by sea and land, the people being poor and under cess, quarterings, and other burdens. Falsets and dyvours [bankrupts] daily increased; sundry of good rank, nobles, gentry, and burgesses, denuncit to the horn, their escheats taken, their persons imprisoned, and deteinit therein till their death. Bankrupts and broken men, through all parts of the nation, for fear of caption and warding, were forced to flie to Glencairn and Kenmure, who were now in arms against the English.’
In April of this year, an additional trouble and burden fell upon the people, in consequence of the royalist insurrections, no person being now allowed to travel from home without a pass, for which a shilling sterling was charged. Scotland must have then been in much the same condition as Hungary and Lombardy were under the Austrians after 1848.
The summer of this year was exceedingly fine, producing ripe peas and cherries at the beginning of June, and yielding an early and abundant harvest; so that the best oatmeal was only fourpence sterling per peck. ‘The lambs and fowls were also at ane exceeding cheap rate’ (Nic.), and it is also stated that, from the abundance of herrings in the west seas, these fish were sold so low as twopence a hundred. Cheese was, in the west country, at 2s. 6d. sterling per stone.—Caldwell Papers. This bounty of Providence is not spoken of by contemporary journalists as abating in any degree the sufferings of the people—though these, we cannot doubt, would have been much greater if there had been a dearth. Just at this time, Nicoll returns to the subject of the general distresses of the country. ‘Much people,’ he says, ‘were brought to misery,’ and the land ‘groaned under its calamities and burdens.’
1654.
Owing to the drought of the summer, the wells on which Edinburgh depended for water ran dry, ‘sae that the inhabitants could not get sufficient for ordering their meat.’ Nevertheless, ‘all the west country had more than ordinar abundance of rain and weet.’—Nic. The same writer adds afterwards that the people of Edinburgh were obliged to go a mile before they could get any clean water, ‘either for brewing of ale, or for their pot meat.’