Greenshields, continuing a prisoner in the Tolbooth, determined, with the aid of friends, to appeal to the House of Lords against the decision of the Court of Session. Such appeals had become possible only two years ago by the Union, and they were as yet a novelty in Scotland. The local authorities had never calculated on such a step being taken, and they were not a little annoyed by it. They persisted, nevertheless, in keeping the clergyman in his loathsome prison, till, after a full year, an order of the House of Lords came for his release. Meanwhile, other troubles befell the church, for a Tory ministry came into power, who, like the queen herself, did not relish seeing the Episcopalian clergy and liturgy treated contumeliously in Scotland. The General Assembly desired to have a fast on account of ‘the crying sins of the land, irreligion, popery, many errors and delusions;’ and they chafed at having to send for authority to Westminster, where it was very grudgingly bestowed. It seemed as if they had no longer a barrier for the protection of that pure faith which it was the happy privilege of Scotland, solely of all nations on the face of the earth, to enjoy. Their enemies, too, well saw the advantage that had been gained over them, and eagerly supported Greenshields in his tedious and expensive process, which ended (March 1711) in the reversal of the Session’s decision. ‘It is a tacit rescinding,’ says Wodrow, ‘of all our laws for the security of our worship, and that unhappy man [an Irish curate of fifteen pounds a year, invited to Edinburgh on a promise of eighty] has been able to do more for the setting up of the English service in Scotland than King Charles the First was able to do.’
Nov. 9.
The Lords of Session decided this day on a critical question, involving the use of a word notedly of uncertain meaning. John Purdie having committed an act of immorality on which a parliamentary act of 1661 imposed a penalty of a hundred pounds in |1709.| the case of ‘a gentleman,’ the justices of peace fined him accordingly, considering him a gentleman within the construction of the act, as being the son of ‘a heritor,’ or land-proprietor. ‘When charged for payment by Thomas Sandilands, collector of these fines, he suspended, upon this ground that the fine was exorbitant, in so far as he was but a small heritor, and, as all heritors are not gentlemen, so he denied that he had the least pretence to the title of a gentleman. The Lords sustained the reason of suspension to restrict the fine to ten pounds Scots, because the suspender had not the face or air of a gentleman: albeit it was alleged by the charger [Sandilands] that the suspender’s profligateness and debauchery, the place of the country where he lives, and the company haunted by him, had influenced his mien.’[[422]]
An anonymous gentleman of Scotland, writing to the Earl of Seafield, on the improvement of the salmon-fishing in Scotland, informs us how the fish were then, as now, massacred in their pregnant state, by country people. ‘I have known,’ he says, ‘a fellow not worth a groat kill with a spear in one night’s time a hundred black fish or kipper, for the most part full of rawns unspawned.’ He adds: ‘Even a great many gentlemen, inhabitants by the rivers, are guilty of the same crimes,’ little reflecting on ‘the prodigious treasure thus miserably dilapidated.’
Notwithstanding these butcheries, he tells us that no mean profit was then derived from the salmon-fishing in Scotland; he had known from two to three thousand barrels, worth about six pounds sterling each, exported in a single year. ‘Nay, I know Sir James Calder of Muirton alone sold to one English merchant a thousand barrels in one year’s fishing.’ He consequently deems himself justified in estimating the possible product of the salmon-fishing, if rightly protected and cultivated, at forty thousand barrels, yielding £240,000 sterling, per annum.[[423]]
1710. Feb.
At Inchinnan, in Renfrewshire, there fell out a ‘pretty peculiar accident.’ One Robert Hall, an elder, and reputed as an estimable man, falling into debt with his landlord, the Laird of Blackston, was deprived of all he had, and left the place. Two months before this date, he returned secretly, and being unable to live |1710.| contentedly without going to church, he disguised himself for that purpose in women’s clothes. It was his custom to go to Eastwood church, but curiosity one day led him to his own old parish-church of Inchinnan. As he crossed a ferry, he was suspected by the boatman and a beadle of being a man in women’s clothes, and traced on to the church. The minister, apprised of the suspicion, desired them not to meddle with him; but on a justice of peace coming up, he was brought forward for examination. He readily owned the fact, and desired to be taken to the minister, who, he said, would know him. The minister protected him for the remainder of the day, that he might escape the rudeness of the mob; and on the ensuing day, he was taken to Renfrew, and liberated, at the intercession of his wife’s father.[[424]]
May.
The General Assembly passed an act, declaring the marriage of Robert Hunter, in the bounds of the presbytery of Biggar, with one John [Joan] Dickson to be incestuous, the woman having formerly been the mother of a child, the father of which was grand-uncle to her present husband. The act discharged the parties from remaining united under pain of highest censure.
The church kept up long after this period a strict discipline regarding unions which involved real or apparent relationship. In May 1730, we find John Baxter, elder in Tealing parish, appealing against a finding of the synod, that his marriage with his deceased wife’s brother’s daughter’s daughter, was incestuous. Two years later, the General Assembly had under its attention a case, which, while capable of being stated in words, is calculated to rack the very brain of whoever would try to realise it in his conceptions. A Carrick man, named John M‘Taggart, had unluckily united himself to a woman named Janet Kennedy, whose former husband, Anthony M‘Harg, ‘was a brother to John M‘Taggart’s grandmother, which grandmother was said to be natural daughter of the said Anthony M‘Harg’s father!’ The presbytery of Ayr took up the case, and M‘Taggart was defended by a solicitor, in a paper full of derision and mockery at the law held to have been offended; ‘a new instance,’ says Wodrow,’ of the unbounded liberty that lawyers take.’[[425]] The presbytery having condemned the marriage as incestuous, M‘Taggart appealed in wonted form to the synod, which affirmed the former decision, and ordered a retractation of the offensive paper on pain of |1710.| excommunication. The case then came before the General Assembly, who left it to be dealt with by its commission. It hung here for six years, during which it may be presumed that M‘Taggart and his wife were either separated or only lived together under the load of presbyterial censure; and at length, in March 1738, it was sent back, along with the still older case of Baxter, by the commission to the Assembly itself.[[426]] How it was ultimately disposed of, I have not learned.