[100] On the 8th of June 1643, a case came before the Privy Council, at the instance of Lawrence Mercer and others, students at St Andrews, who complained of a scandalous charge got up against them by James Stewart of Ardvoirlich and his two sons, Robert and Harry, to the effect that umwhile Alexander Stewart, son of the first party, and brother of the two others, had received deadly injuries from them in a college tumult, and died in consequence. It was shewn that Alexander had provoked a tumult by his insolent speeches, and afterwards lay for a day or two in bed, but was found on inspection to be quite well, and he had lived in good health for nine months after. The lords accordingly declared the complainers to be innocent of what was laid to their charge.
[101] Notes to the Waverley Novels.
[102] In a curious and rare pamphlet, by William Lithgow, descriptive of the siege of Newcastle (Edinburgh, printed by Robert Bryson, 1645), we get some idea of the wretched state to which the place was reduced in consequence of its investiture of several months. ‘We found great penury and scarcity of victuals, ammunition, and other necessaries within that dejected town; so that they could not have held out ten days longer, unless the one half had devoured the other. The plague was raging in Gateside, Sandside, Sunderland, and many country villages about.’ For this reason, Tynemouth was obliged to surrender also; ‘the pestilence having been five weeks there with a great mortality, they were glad to yield and to scatter themselves abroad, but to the great undoing and infecting of the country about.’
Lithgow, by the way, was dissatisfied with the treatment of Newcastle by his countrymen. ‘As they abused their victory,’ says he, ‘in storming the town, with too much undeserved mercy, so they as unwisely and imprudently overreached themselves, in plundering the town with an ignorant negligence and careless omission.... And as they thus defrauded themselves with a whistle in their mouths, so they pitifully prejudged, by this their inveigled course, the common soldiers of their just due and dear-bought advantages.’
[103] ‘At Botarie, 25th October 1648, the brethren ordained to intimat out of their several pulpits, that whosoever receipts and converses with excommunicat persons, should be processed before the presbytery.’—Strathbogie Presbytery Record.
[104] Producing a fire by the friction of two sticks against each other.
[105] Daughter-in-law of the Lady Frendraught formerly noticed.
[106] Records of the Kirk of Scotland, 1838, p. 446.
[107] Peterkin’s Records of the Kirk of Scotland, p. 427.
[108] Maitland Miscell., i. 436.