[296] Creech’s Fugitive Pieces, p. 82.
[297] Letters to Earl Aberdeen (Spal. Club), p. 36.
[298] The same with Mr Thomas Stewart noticed at p. 245 of this volume.
[299] Coltness Collections.
[300] Sir Thomas’s father, Sir James Stewart of Coltness, presided as provost of Edinburgh at the execution of Montrose. Ho suffered imprisonment after the Restoration, and is said to have been only rescued from something worse by the intercession of a cavalier gentleman whose son’s life he had saved by his humane intercession some years before.
[301] Adverted to in this volume, p. 211.
[302] The Council (April 23) ordered three hundred pounds to the Rosses out of vacant stipends; but it is most unlikely that the money or any part of it was ever realised.
[303] In April 1684, Mrs Jean Barron, relict of the minister of Birse, craved charity of the Privy Council as the daughter of Mr Robert Barron, professor of divinity at Aberdeen, who ‘having had the honour to be the first who opposed the Covenant,’ was pursued for his life and banished on that account, finally dying in exile, in such poverty that any means he might have had for the maintenance of his family was lost; nor had any benefit ever been derived from his nomination to the bishopric of Orkney, by which King Charles I. had endeavoured to recompense his sufferings. Mrs Jean was now with three fatherless children reduced to great misery, in which she humbly hoped that the Council would not allow the daughter of so great a sufferer to remain. The Council recommended her case to the Lord Treasurer.
Anna Morton represented herself to the Council (July 20, 1685) as the daughter of Mr William Morton, formerly minister of South Leith, who, in 1640, for his refusal of the Covenant, was ‘not only thrust out of his church, and plundered of all his goods and gear, but, from the violent malice of these bloody persecutors, the Covenanters, was necessitat for shelter of his life to leave his native country and fly to England, where, thereafter, through their cruel malice, he was most pitifully used, being apprehended and incarcerat within the prison of York, and continued there in a most miserable and penurious condition, to the utter ruin of himself, his family, his fortune, and estate;’ all of which was fully testified by competent witnesses. The petitioner was now a widow with a charge of children, in helpless poverty and wretchedness, all traceable to the impoverishment of her father. The Council ordered her two thousand merks out of the vacant stipends of the diocese of Argyle.
[304] The death of the old Laird of Dumbiedykes in Scott’s tale of the Heart of Mid-Lothian, involves an allusion to this piece of national music: ‘He drank three bumpers of brandy continuously, and “soughed awa’,” as Jenny expressed it, in an attempt to sing Deil stick the Minister.’