We shall afterwards see further proceedings in the matter of the Equivalent.
Oct. 3.
Walter Scott of Raeburn, grandson of the Quaker Raeburn who suffered so long an imprisonment for his opinions in the reign of Charles II.,[[387]] fought a duel with Mark Pringle, youngest son of Andrew Pringle of Clifton. It arose from a quarrel the two gentlemen had the day before at the head-court of Selkirk. They were both of them young men, Scott being only twenty-four years of age, although already four years married, and a father. The contest was fought with swords in a field near the town, and Raeburn was killed. The scene of this melancholy tragedy has ever since been known as Raeburn’s Meadow-spot.
Pringle escaped abroad; became a merchant in Spain; and falling, on one occasion, into the hands of the Moors, underwent such a series of hardships, as, with the Scottish religious views of that age, he might well regard as a Heaven-directed retribution for his rash act. Eventually, however, realising a fortune, he returned with honour and credit to his native country, and purchased the estate of Crichton in Edinburghshire. He died in 1751, having survived the unhappy affair of Raeburn’s Meadow-spot for forty-four years; and his grandson, succeeding to the principal estate of the family, became Pringle of Clifton.
The sixteenth article of the act of Union, while decreeing that a separate mint should be kept up in Scotland ‘under the same rules as the mint in England’—an arrangement afterwards broken through—concluded that the money thereafter used should be of the same standard and fineness throughout the United Kingdom. It thus became necessary to call in all the existing coin of Scotland, and substitute for it money uniform with that of England. It was at the same time provided by the act of Union, that any |1707.| loss incurred by the renewal of the coin of Scotland should be compensated out of the fund called the Equivalent.[[388]]
The business of the change of coinage being taken into consideration by the Privy Council of Scotland, several plans for effecting it were laid before that august body; but none seemed so suitable or expedient as one proposed by the Bank of Scotland, which was to this effect: ‘The Directors undertook to receive in all the species that were to be recoined, at such times as should be determined by the Privy Council, and to issue bank-notes or current money for the same, in the option of the ingiver of the old species, and the Privy Council allowing a half per cent. to the Bank for defraying charges;’[[389]] the old money to be taken to the mint and coined into new money, which should afterwards replace the notes.
Mr David Drummond, treasurer of the Bank, ‘a gentleman of primitive virtue and singular probity,’ according to Thomas Ruddiman—a hearty Jacobite, too, if his enemies did not belie him—had a chief hand in the business of the renovation of the coin, about which he communicated to Ruddiman some memoranda he had taken at the time.
‘There was brought into the Bank of Scotland in the year 1707:
| Value in Sterling Money. | |
|---|---|
| Of foreign silver money, | £132,080 : 17 : 00 |
| Milled Scottish coins [improved coinage subsequent to 1673], | 96,856 : 13 : 00 |
| Coins struck by hammer [the older Scottish coin], | 142,180 : 00 : 00 |
| English milled coin, | 40,000 : 00 : 00 |
| Total, | £411,117 : 10 : 00 |
‘This sum, no doubt, made up by far the greatest part of the silver coined money current in Scotland at that time; but it was not to be expected that the whole money of that kind could be brought into the bank; for the folly of a few misers, or the fear that people might have of losing their money, or various other dangers and accidents, prevented very many of the old Scots coins from being brought in. A great part of these the goldsmiths, in aftertimes, consumed by melting them down; some of them have been exported to foreign countries; a few are yet [1738] in private hands.’[[390]]