The convivialities indulged in at funerals were productive to-day of a tragedy long remembered in Scotland. Mr Carnegie of Lour, residing in the burgh of Forfar, had a daughter to be buried, and before the funeral, he entertained the Earl of Strathmore, his own brother James Carnegie of Finhaven, Mr Lyon of Bridgeton, and some others of the company, at dinner in his house. After the ceremony, these gentlemen adjourned to a tavern, and drank a good deal. Carnegie of Finhaven got extremely drunk. Lyon of Bridgeton was not so much intoxicated; but the drink made him rude and unmannerly towards Finhaven. Afterwards, the Earl of Strathmore went to call at the house of Mr Carnegie’s sister, Lady Auchterhouse, and the other gentlemen followed. Here it may be remarked that the whole of this group of persons were, like a large proportion of the Forfarshire gentry, of Jacobite prepossessions. The earl’s late brother and predecessor in the title had fallen at Sheriffmuir, on the Chevalier’s side; so had Patrick Lyon of Auchterhouse, husband of the lady now introduced to notice, and brother of Bridgeton. The presence of a lady, and that lady a widowed sister-in-law, failed to make Bridgeton conduct himself discreetly. He continued his boisterous rudeness towards Finhaven; rallied him coarsely about his not |1728.| being willing to marry one of his daughters to Lord Rosehill, about his having no sons, about his debts; took him offensively by the breast; and even used some rudeness towards the lady herself. In the dusk of the evening, the party sallied out to the street, and here Bridgeton went so far in his violence towards Finhaven as to push him into a deep and dirty kennel, which nearly covered him from head to foot with mire. Finhaven, now fully incensed, rose, and drawing his sword, ran up to Bridgeton, with deadly design; but the earl, seeing him advance, pushed Bridgeton aside, and unhappily received the lunge full in the middle of his own body. He died forty-nine hours after the incident.
Carnegie of Finhaven was tried on the ensuing 2d of August for premeditated murder; an absurd charge absurdly supported by long arguments and quotations of authority, in the style of that day. In his ‘information,’ the accused man called God to witness that he had borne no malice to the earl; on the contrary, he had the greatest kindness and respect for him. ‘If it shall appear,’ said he, ‘that I was the unlucky person who wounded the earl, I protest before God I would much rather that a sword had been sheathed in my own bowels.’ All that he admitted was: ‘I had the misfortune that day to be mortally drunk, for which I beg God’s pardon.’ He declared that, being in this state at the time, he did not so much as remember that he had seen the earl when he came out of the kennel. The defence proposed for him by his counsel was, that, the circumstances of the case considered, he was not guilty of murder, but of manslaughter. Strange to say, the court, sacrificing rationality to form and statute, overruled the defence: they found the fact that the prisoner having really given the wound whereof the Earl of Strathmore died, to be relevant to infer the pains of law against him. The killing being indisputable, Carnegie would have been condemned if the jury should merely give a verdict on the point of fact. In these circumstances, his counsel, Robert Dundas of Arniston, stood forth to tell the jury that they were entitled to judge on the point of law as well as the point of fact. He asserted that the only object for their deliberation, was whether they could conscientiously say that Carnegie had committed murder, or whether his guilt was not diminished or annihilated by the circumstances of the case. The jury, almost beyond expectation, gave a verdict of ‘Not Guilty,’ thus establishing a great constitutional principle.[[678]]
1728. Aug. 15.
The noted fierté of the Scottish nobility and gentry was beginning at this time to give way somewhat, under the general desire to promote the arts of industry, and partly because of the hopelessness of public employments for young scions of aristocracy in all but favoured Whig circles. We must not, therefore, be surprised when a tragical tale of this date brings before us the fact that Patrick Lindsay, described as heir-male of the grand old House of Lindsay of the Byres, and who, a few years afterwards, married a daughter of the sixteenth Earl of Crawford, was now an upholsterer in the Parliament Close of Edinburgh, and dean of guild for the city. Neither ought it to appear as incredible that one of his apprentices was a youth named Cairns, younger son of a gentleman of good estate residing at Cupar-Fife.
The tale was simply this—that, on the evening noted, between eight and nine o’clock, Cairns was found in the shop expiring from the effects of a violent blow on the head, apparently inflicted by a hammer, while the box containing the guildry treasure was missing. It was believed that some vile people who then haunted the city, knowing of the box being kept in Lindsay’s shop, had formed a design to possess themselves of it, and had effected their end at the expense of murder, at the moment when the place was about to be closed for the night. A number of vagrants were taken up on suspicion, and the box was soon after found, empty.[[679]]
Aug. 18.
Aaron Hill, a well-born English gentleman, who had been manager of Drury Lane Theatre, and wrote many well-received plays and poems—who, moreover, had travelled over Europe and some parts of Asia and Africa—is at this date found writing to his wife from what he calls ‘the Golden Groves of Abernethy,’ meaning the great natural forest of that name on Speyside, in the county of Elgin. It is a strange association of persons and things for a period when even of civilised Scotsmen scarcely ever one made his way north of the Grampians. It had come about, however, in a very natural way.
The York-Buildings Company, which had already formed connections with Scotland by the purchase of several of the forfeited estates, was induced to take a lease from Sir James Grant of Grant, of the magnificent but hitherto useless pine-forest |1728.| of Abernethy, thinking they should be able to apply the timber for the use of the navy. Had the wood been only removable by land-carriage, it would have been useless, as before; but they had been led to understand that there was no difficulty in floating it down the Spey to the sea, where it might be shipped off for the south. Aaron Hill, who was a very speculative genius, having before this time headed a scheme for making olive-oil out of beech-nuts, and concocted a plan for settling a part of Carolina, made a journey to the Spey in 1726, and easily convinced himself of the practicability of the project. The Company, accordingly, commenced operations in 1728, with Mr Hill as their clerk. They sent a hundred and twenty-five work-horses, with a competent number of wagons, and apparatus of all the kinds required; they erected substantial wooden-houses, saw-mills, and an iron-foundry, all of them novelties regarded with wonder by the simple natives.[[680]] They had also a salaried commissary to furnish provisions and forage. Tracks being formed through the forest, and men trained to the work, trees were felled to the number of forty or fifty in a day, and brought down to the bank of the river. There, under the direction of Mr Hill, they were bound in rafts of sixty or eighty, with deals laid upon the surface to form a platform; and for each such raft two men were held as sufficient to navigate it to the sea, one sitting with a guiding-oar at one end, and another at the other. Before this time, the natives had been accustomed to float down rafts of three or four trees tied together with a rope, the attendant sitting in a curragh, or boat of hide, from which he was ready to plunge into the stream when any impediment called for his interference.[[681]] What a Drury Lane manager would think on witnessing a mode of navigation coeval with the first state of savagery, we cannot tell; but he had no little difficulty in inducing the people to adopt a more civilised mode of conducting his grand timber-rafts. Till he first went in one himself, to shew that there was no danger, not one of the Abernethy foresters would venture in so prodigious a craft. There was, in reality, something problematical in the undertaking, for the river was in some places partially blocked by sunken rocks; but the genius of Hill was |1728.| equal to all emergencies. Taking advantage of a dry season, when these shoals were exposed, he kindled immense wood-fires upon them, and when the rock was thus heated, he caused water to be thrown upon it, thus making it splinter, and so enable his men to break it up and clear the passage.
It was in high spirits that our poet wrote to his wife from the Golden Groves of Abernethy, for they were really productive of gold, no less than £7000 worth of timber being realised by his Company. ‘The shore of the Spey,’ says he, ‘is all covered with masts from 50 to 70 feet long, which they are daily bringing out of the wood, with ten carriages, and above a hundred horses.... In the middle of the river lies a little fleet of our rafts, which are just putting off for Findhorn harbour; and it is one of the pleasantest sights possible to observe the little armies of men, women, and children who pour down from the Highlands to stare at what we have been doing.’ What seems chiefly to have impressed the natives, was the liberality with which the business of wood-cutting was conducted. It seemed to them a wasteful extravagance, and if it be true that barrels of tar would be burned in bonfires, and barrels of brandy broached on joyful occasions among the people, five of whom died in one night in consequence, the imputation was not unjust. Nevertheless, the work was highly successful, and might have been carried on longer than it was, if the Company had not called away their people to work at their lead-mines.[[682]]
During the time which Mr Hill spent in Scotland, he was received with great civilities by the Duke of Gordon and other eminent persons, and was complimented with the freedom of Aberdeen, Inverness, and other burghs. In his collected poems are found a number of short epigrammatic pieces which he wrote during his residence in Scotland; among the rest, his oft-printed epigram, beginning: ‘Tender-handed stroke a nettle.’ But Burt adds another, which he found scribbled on a window ‘at the first stage on this side Berwick:’