1689.
On Sunday, the 31st of March—while the town was under the excitement of the siege of the Castle by the troops of the new government—Sir George Lockhart attended worship, as usual, in the New Church, a portion of St Giles’s cathedral. Chiesley came armed, and endeavoured, by money offered to the bedral, to get into Lord Castlehill’s seat, which was just behind that of the President, being resolved there to wreak out his vengeance, although certain to lose his own life in consequence. Not succeeding in getting into this seat, he flitted restlessly about the church till the conclusion of the service, when he walked out, and preceded the Lord President to the head of the close near by,[321] in which the latter had his residence. The President came along, attended by Lord Castlehill and Mr Daniel Lockhart, and as he entered the close saluted Chiesley, who gloomily returned his greeting. To pursue the narrative of a contemporary: ‘My Lord Castlehill and Daniel Lockhart convoyed him a piece down the close, and talked a while with him, after which they both departed. The President called back the last, and whilst Daniel was returning, Dalry approached, to whom Daniel said: “I thought you had been at London,” without any other answer than that he was there [that is, here] now. Daniel offered to take him by the hand; but the other shuffled by him, and coming close to the President’s back, discharged his pistol before that any suspected his design. The bullet going in beneath the right shoulder and out at the left pap, was battered on the wall. The President immediately turned about, looked the murderer grievously in the face, and then finding himself beginning to fail, he leant to the wall, and said to Daniel: “Hold me, Daniel, hold me.” These were his last words. He was carried immediately to his own house, and was almost dead before he could reach it. Daniel and the President’s chaplain apprehended in the meanwhile Dalry, who owned the fact, and never offered to flee. He was carried to the guard, kept in the Weigh-house, and afterwards taken to prison. The President’s lady, hearing the shot and a cry in the close, got in her smock out of bed, and took the dead body in her arms; at which sight, swooning, she was taken to her chamber. The corpse were laid in the same room where he used to consult.’—Father Hay.
The murderer was tortured, but confessed nothing, and in three days he was hanging in chains at Drumsheuch; whence, however, his body was stolen away by his friends. Within the present century, on enlarging a cellar in Dalry house, a skeleton with some rusty irons about it was found in the earth, and concluded to be the remains of Chiesley.
Here—for the present, at least—ends our record of domestic occurrences and things in Scotland. It brings the life of the nation from the rudeness of the middle of the sixteenth century down to the comparative civilisation of the close of the seventeenth, when the existing political system was nearly settled. A strange phantasmagoria, beginning with the half mail-clad baron and his band of followers in swords and pistols, and ending in the silken and embroidered gallant in full periwig and a rapier for show. We have seen in the earlier years of the period little regard for law amongst the people, and no power in the government to enforce it. But gentlemen have latterly rather fallen out of the custom of stabbing an enemy as he walked the High Street. They no longer go in force and in ‘effeir of weir’ to assail a neighbour in his house, or throw lighted brands into it, or drive off his horses and cattle, by way of making out a point of legal satisfaction from him. The maintenance of any form of peace in Aberdeenshire or Banffshire does not now wholly depend on the good-will of the head of the Gordon family, himself a constant offender against law in as far as he clung to the Romish religion. As regards the protection of life and property, a great improvement has evidently been effected. It is evident from many circumstances that, during the whole time, there was a pressing tendency to improvement—partly to be accounted for, doubtless, by the near neighbourhood of England. But it was impeded by the almost incessant civil strife that was kept up in consequence of the contention between two principles of ecclesiastical polity—an assertion of infallibility and independence in the church on the one hand, and an effort to bend this to supposed state necessities on the other: men, in trying to make each other Episcopalians and Presbyterians, almost ceasing to be Christians. Throughout this broil, some fine traits of earnestness and self-devotion were evoked; but so absorbing a concentration of the general mind on certain theological or quasi-theological doctrines could not be healthful, could not be favourable even to a sound spirit of religion, could not but check any enlightened desire for material improvements. Hence, the population was yet small and generally poor, and little had yet been done to advance the arts of life. There had never yet been beyond the most feeble attempts in any kind of manufactures: even such articles as paper and woollen cloth had to be imported. No movement had yet been even thought of for advancing any branch of rural economy. Scotland had sent forth no voice in either literature or science; her universities could not train either the lawyer or the physician. She had not a bank, and there was not perhaps above half a million of coin in circulation. No news-sheet had yet taken root in the country. A post system had only existed on a small scale during the last twenty-five years. No stage-coaches were yet permanently established between our towns, or between Edinburgh and London. The most delicate lady, under noble rank, had to perform journeys on horseback, and if she had not strength or health to ride, she could not travel. No system of police existed in any city of the realm.
In certain intellectual and moral respects, the country was in no better state. The judge was understood to be accessible to private persuasions; and even direct bribes were suspected. The people believed as firmly in witchcraft as in the first principles of their religion, and we are not yet come within thirty years of the last example of a poor wretch burnt for mishaps that chanced to follow her evil wishes. Gentlemen of ancient family and good account were not above using the basest tricks or the grossest violence, in order to secure, by marriage, the fortune of some hapless young heiress of eleven years of age. Fallacies about markets and marketings were rife; monopolies and patents over-rode the people and kept them in poverty, no man being yet quite able to believe that there was room in the world for anybody but himself. Having concluded about any matter of opinion, men could bear with no dissent from that. It seemed to them the highest of earthly duties, that the thing each felt as a religious error should be rooted out, even though that could only be done by the extirpation of the persons entertaining it. This was to be doing God service and saving men from destruction; no one perceiving that the object aimed at was never attained, or that, if attainable, it was an immorality to attempt its attainment. Even the Claim of Rights, in which the sufferings of Presbytery since 1660 were enumerated, and its claims asserted, set forth among its demands that no popish book should henceforth be allowed to be printed.
Such was the Scotland of 1689—an improvement upon the Scotland of 1560, though to no great extent. Perhaps, after all, if we consider how surprisingly late are all the great discoveries, inventions, and social arrangements for convenience; how gaslight, steam-machinery, railways, and the electric-telegraph are of our own day; how lately it is that mankind learned that air and water are gaseous compounds, that gravitation arranges the worlds, that our own little earth passed through a long and wonderful history before man came upon it; how it is but as yesterday that the British people led the way in universal liberation of industry, and unhappily have yet many obvious social evils to be cured; we shall not greatly wonder that this land of mountain and flood, seated far northward and off at a side, was no better than it was at the close of the reign of the last James. We may at least view congratulatingly one thing which has been made out—that the bulk of the people shall be allowed to have, under sanction of law, the style of external Christianity which they prefer; so that, anyhow, it shall not be the majority which is persecuted. That attained—and only smaller denominations treated with harshness—behold, the country begins to make a real, though at first slow advance. In five years from the settlement of its religious troubles, it has its first bank; in a few years more, it has native newspapers. Other troubles or chances of trouble being removed by a union with England, and the suppression of all hopes in favour of a discrowned dynasty, commerce becomes active; an improved agriculture commences; and nearly every kind of manufacture for which England is distinguished, takes hearty root with us. Scotsmen, frugally reared, and endowed with the elements of learning at their parish-schools, go forth into every realm to take leading positions. Literature and science are cultivated at home with the most brilliant success. And the short period of a century sees nearly every disadvantageous contrast between our country and her neighbours obliterated.
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1688. Dec.