1713. May 1.
Died, Sir James Steuart, Lord Advocate for Scotland, aged about seventy-eight, greatly lamented by the Presbyterians, to whom he had ever been a steadfast friend. The General Assembly, in session at the time, came in a body to his funeral, which was the most numerously attended ever known in Edinburgh, the company reaching from the head of the close in which his lordship lived, in the Luckenbooths, to the Greyfriars’ Churchyard. For several years, bodily infirmity confined him to a chair; but his mind continued clear to the last. Sir James had shewn some unsteadiness to his principles in the reign of James II., but nevertheless was forced to fly his country, and he only returned along with King William, whose manifesto for Scotland he is understood to have written.
Great general learning, legal skill, and worldly policy, marked Sir James Steuart; but the most remarkable characteristic of the man, considering his position, was his deep piety. Wodrow, who speaks of him from personal knowledge, says: ‘His death was truly Christian, and a great instance of the reality of religion.... He had a great value for religion and persons of piety. He was mighty in the Scriptures; perfectly master of [them]; wonderful in prayer. That winter, 1706–7, when he was so long ill, he was in strange raptures in his prayers sometimes in his family. He used to speak much of his sense of the advantage of the prayers of the church, and in a very dangerous sickness he had about thirteen years ago, he alleged he found a sensible turn of his body in the time of Mr George Meldrum’s prayer for him. He never fell into any trouble but he gave up his name to be |1713.| prayed for in all the churches of the city of Edinburgh. His temper was most sweet and easy, and very pleasant. He was a kind and fast friend, very compassionate and charitable.’[[460]]
May 11.
The Lord Drummond, eldest son of the exiled Earl of Perth, and his wife, Jean Gordon, daughter of the Duke of Gordon, had a son and heir born to them, the same who afterwards took a conspicuous part in the rebellion of 1745, which he did not long outlive. Politics, long adverse to the house of Drummond, smiled on the birth of this infant heir, for never since the Revolution did the Whig interest seem more depressed. Lord Drummond was encouraged by these circumstances to take a step which would have been dangerous a few years before. It is related as follows by Wodrow: ‘The baptism of my Lord Drummond’s son [was performed in October] at his own house by a popish bishop with great solemnity. The whole gentlemen and several noblemen about, were gathered together; and when the mass was said, there were very few of them went out. Several justices of peace and others were there. This is a fearful reproach upon the lenity of our government, to suffer such open insults from papists.’[[461]]
Two months later, Wodrow notes: ‘The papists are turning very open at Edinburgh, and all over Scotland there is a terrible openness in the popish party.’ It is alleged in a popular contemporary publication, that there were fully forty Catholic priests living with little effort at concealment in Scotland; some of them very successful in winning over ignorant people to their ‘damnable errors;’ while ‘one Mr Bruce, a popish bishop, had his ordinary residence in Perthshire, where he had his gardens, cooks, and other domestic servants, and thither the priests and emissaries of inferior rank resorted for their directions and orders.... Their peats and other fuel were regularly furnished them ... [they had] also their mass-houses, to which their blind votaries resorted almost as publicly as the Protestants did to their parish churches.’[[462]]
Oct. 20.
Died Dr Archibald Pitcairn, a man in most respects so strongly contrasted with his recently deceased countryman, Sir James Steuart, as to impress very strongly the absurdity of trying to ascribe any particular line of character to a nation or any other |1713.| large group of people. To nearly every idea associated with the word Scotsman, Pitcairn, like Burns and many other notable Caledonians, stands in direct antagonism: he was gay, impulsive, unworldly, full of wit and geniality, a dissenter from Calvinism, and a lover of the exiled house of Stuart. Conviviality shortened his life down to the same measure which a worn-out brain gave to Sir Walter Scott—sixty-one years. But he parted with the world in great serenity and good-humour, studying to make his last year useful for the future by writing out some of his best professional observations, and penning cheerful verses to his friends on his death-bed. In these, to the refutation of vulgar calumnies, he failed not to express his trust in a future and brighter existence:
‘Animas morte carere cano:
Has ego, corporibus profugas, ad Sidera mitto,