My feet burning from me.’
He’s ta’en the rings from aff his hands,
And thrown them o’er the wall;
Saying: ‘Give them to my lady fair,
Where she sits in the hall.’
1630.
This dismal event created a universal feeling of horror, and plunged the friends of the deceased into the greatest grief. The Laird and Lady of Frendraught were, to all appearance, deeply concerned for what had taken place. On the morning after the fire, the lady, ‘busked in a white plaid, and riding on a small nag, having a boy leading her horse, without any more in her company, in this pitiful manner she came weeping and mourning to the Bog, desiring entry to speak with my lord; but this was refused; so she returned back to her own house, the same gate she came, comfortless.’—Spalding. Her repulse was the more remarkable, as Lady Frendraught was a cousin of the marquis, and brought into bonds of sympathy with him and his family by being a Catholic. A fixed suspicion that she and her husband were the authors of the fire, had taken possession of the Huntly and Rothiemay families, as well as of the populace generally, though not the slightest evidence of guilt has ever been brought against them, and their loss of valuable papers, and of gold and silver articles, to the value, it was alleged, of a hundred thousand marks, rendered any concern of theirs in the fire-raising the very reverse of probable. The laird himself acted in the manner of an innocent man anxious to clear himself of suspicion. He came immediately to the Chancellor Lord Dupplin at Perth, desiring his protection, and offering to submit to trial. The Privy Council do not seem ever to have felt that there were any grounds for charging him with the guilt popularly imputed to him.
More particular suspicions fell upon John Meldrum of Redhill, the quondam adherent of Frendraught, but who had latterly fallen into such bad terms with him; likewise upon John Tosh, the master-household of Frendraught. These persons were accordingly apprehended, brought to Edinburgh, and examined. A servant-girl called Wood was also seized and subjected to torture, with a view to extracting her knowledge of the circumstances; but this only produced prevarications, making her evidence of no avail,[32] and for which she was scourged and banished the kingdom.
In March 1631, the Marquis of Huntly, having resolved ‘not to revenge himself by way of deed,’ as his panegyrist Spalding does not fail to tell us—as if it were a great merit—proceeded to Edinburgh in order to lay his wrongs before the Privy Council. Four commissioners appointed by this body soon after proceeded to Frendraught, which they examined with great care, in company with several noblemen and gentlemen of the district. They found evidence that the fire had originated in the ground-vault of the tower, where there were marks of it in three several places, one of these being directly under the round hole in the roof which communicated with Melgum’s apartment above. They could not determine whether it was accidental; but they felt assured that ‘no hand without could have raised the fire without aid from within.’[33]
1630.