1666.
Another remarkable case of the same kind of interference with family arrangements on account of religion, occurs in the Council record of the same day. Walter Scott of Raeburn, brother of William Scott of Harden, had been converted to Quakerism, and on that account was incarcerated in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh. There it was soon discovered by his relations that he was exposed to the conversation of other Quakers, prisoners like himself, ‘whereby he is hardened in his pernicious opinions and principles, without all hope of recovery, unless he be separat from such pernicious company.’ There was, however, a more serious evil than even this, in the risk which his children ran of being perverted to Quakerism, if allowed to keep company with their father. On a petition, therefore, the Council gave the brother Harden warrant (June 22, 1665) to take away Raeburn’s children, two boys and a girl, from their father, that they might be educated in the true religion. He, ‘after some pains taken with them in his own family, sent them to the city of Glasgow, to be bred at the schools there.’ On a second petition from Harden, the Council ordered an annuity of £1000 Scots to be paid to him, out of Raeburn’s estate, for the maintenance of the children; and they also ordered the father himself to be removed to Jedburgh Tolbooth, ‘where his friends and others may have occasion to convert him.’ ‘To the effect he may be secured from the practice of other Quakers,’ the Lords ‘discharged the magistrates of Jedburgh to suffer any persons suspect of these principles to have access to him.’
The younger son of the Quaker Raeburn was Walter Scott, commonly called Beardie, great-grandfather of an illustrious modern novelist. Beardie, so styled from his wearing a long beard, escaped Quakerism, but fell into Jacobitism at a time when that was not less dangerous than Quakerism had once been. The circumstances here narrated form part of what is alluded to by Sir Walter Scott, when he makes Jedediah Cleishbotham confess himself as bound to a kind of impartiality between the Prelatic and Presbyterian factions of the seventeenth century, by reason that ‘my ancestor was one of the people called Quakers, and suffered a severe handling from either side, even to the extenuation of his purse and the incarceration of his person.’[214]
Raeburn continued to be a prisoner in Jedburgh jail in June 1669, when the Privy Council gave a fresh order that ‘none of his persuasion should have access to him, except his own wife.’ It was at that time found that ‘John Swinton, Walter Scott of Raeburn, Mr George Keith, and Mr Robert Burnett, Tutor of Leys, are not only Quakers themselves, but also studies by all means to pervert and seduce others from their duty and obedience and to engage them in the same error with themselves,’ for which purpose they, ‘in contempt of the laws, keep frequent meetings with other Quakers.’ Swinton was ordered to enter himself as a prisoner in Stirling Castle, where none but his son should have access to him. On the 29th of July, the Council gave warrant for the imprisonment of Mr George Keith, Quaker, in the Edinburgh Tolbooth, and that no one suspected to be of his persuasion should have access to him.
1666.
At length, on the 1st of January 1670, after suffering imprisonment for four and a half years, Raeburn was ordained to be set at liberty from jail, but still to remain within the bounds of his own lands, and to see no other Quaker under a penalty of a hundred pounds, his children meanwhile remaining as they were. Mr George Keith was set at liberty on the 6th of March, but only to go into voluntary exile.
Under apprehension that the Tutor of Leys would seek to affect the mind of his nephew Sir Thomas Burnett, who was now a minor, the mother of the child caused him to be carried away from all his father’s friends, ‘which,’ says the Tutor, ‘will inevitably ruin him in his education in literature and all other virtuous breeding.’ The Tutor brought the matter before the Privy Council, representing that, in order to clear himself of all suspicion of a desire to influence the child’s mind, he was arranging ‘to have sent him to Glasgow, to Mr Gilbert Burnett, professor of divinity there, who is ane brother son of the family, there to have been educat at schools and universities under the said Mr Gilbert his inspection and care,’ when the mother took the matter thus violently into her hands. The two parties being summoned before the Council, and having made their respective statements, it was ordered that the child should be restored to the Tutor, all Quaker as he was, that he might be sent to school.
Sep.
Another excellent harvest was secured in Scotland, and very early.—Nic.