A high wind shook the crops of Lothian, particularly damaging the pease. It was considered ‘a heavy stroke,’ as the people thereabouts |1722.| lived much on pease-meal. Apropos to this fact, Wodrow speaks of an individual who had much ploughing to execute, and who found it advantageous to feed his horses on pease-bannocks: ‘he finds it a third cheaper [than corn], and his horses fatter and better.’[[563]] It is curious that this farmer, ‘abnormis sapiens,’ came to the same point which Baron Liebig has attained in our age, by scientific investigation, as to the nutritive qualities of pease.
The extensive coal-field of East Lothian gave occasion for several efforts in the mechanical arts, which might be regarded as early and before their time, when the general condition of the country is considered. Some years before the Revolution, the Earl of Winton had drained his coal-pits in Tranent parish, by tunnels cut for a long way through solid rock, on such a scale as to attract the attention of George Sinclair, professor of natural philosophy in Glasgow, who, in the preface to his extraordinary work, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, speaks of them as something paralleling the cutting of the Alps by Hannibal. Such a mode of taking off the water from a coal-mine, where the form of the ground admitted it, was certainly of great use in days when as yet there were no steam-engines to make the driving of pumps easy.[[564]]
The forfeited estate of the Earl of Winton having been bought in 1719 by the York Buildings Company, a new and equally surprising addition was at this time made to the economy of the coal-works, in the form of a wooden railway, between one and two miles long, connecting the pits with the salt-works at Prestonpans and the harbour at Port-Seton. A work so ingenious, so useful, and foreshewing the iron ways by which, in our age, the industrial prospects of the world have been so much advanced, comes into strong relief when beheld in connection with the many barbarisms amidst which it took its rise. But the oddity of its associations does not end here, for, when a Highland army came down to the Lowlands twenty-three years afterwards, seeking with primitive arms to restore the House of Stuart, the first of its battles was fought on the ground crossed by this railway, and General Cope’s cannon were actually fired against the clouded Camerons[[565]] from a position on the railway itself!
1723. Jan.
There was published in Edinburgh a poem, entitled the Mock Senator—‘pretended to be translated from an Arabian manuscript, wherein, under feigned and disguised names, the author seems to lash some persons in the present administration.’ The magistrates—whom we have seen exercising a pretty sharp censorship over the newspaper press—‘committed to prison Mr Alexander Pennecuik, the supposed author of this poem, and discharged the hawkers to sell or disperse the same.’[[566]]
Mar.
At this time, two criminalities of the highest class occurred amongst persons of rank in Scotland.
On the 30th of March, Mrs Elizabeth Murray, ‘lady to Thomas Kincaid, younger, of Gogar-Mains,’ was found dead on the road from Edinburgh to that place, with all the appearance of having been barbarously murdered. It was at once, with good reason, concluded that the horrible act had been perpetrated by her own husband. He succeeded in escaping to Holland.[[567]]
Pennecuik, the burgess-poet, has a poem on the murder of Mrs Kincaid by her husband, from which it would appear that she had been an amiable and long-suffering woman, and he a coarse and dissolute man. He adds a note at the end, ‘Ensign Hugh Skene engaged in the plot.’[[568]]
Only three weeks later (April 22), Sir James Campbell of Lawers was foully murdered at Greenock by his apparent friend, Duncan Campbell of Edramurkle. The facts are thus related in a contemporary letter. ‘Lawers had been in a treaty of marriage with [Campbell of] Finab’s daughter, which Edramurkle was very active to get accomplished, out of a seeming friendship for Lawers. After the marriage articles were agreed upon, they went together to make a visit to the young lady, and, in return, came to Greenock on Friday the 19th last [April], where they remained Saturday and Sunday—Edramurkle all the while shewing the greatest friendship for Lawers, and Lawers confiding in him as his own brother. Upon the Saturday, pretending to Lawers that he had use for a pistol, he got money from him to buy one, which accordingly he did, with ball and powder. The use he made of this artillery was to discharge two balls into Lawers’s head, while he was fast asleep, betwixt three and four on Monday’s morning; and which balls were levelled under his left eye, and went through |1723.| his head, sloping to the back-bone of his neck ... he was found in a sleeping posture, and had not moved either eye or hand.