The preaching of funeral sermons received little favour in Scotland during the early period of the Reformed Church. “We have,” says Baillie, writing from London during the sitting of the Westminster Assembly, “with much difficulty, passed a proposition for abolishing their ceremonies at burials, but our difference about funeral sermons seems irreconcilable. As it has been here and everywhere preached, it is nothing but an abuse of preaching, to serve the humours only of rich people for a reward. Our Church has expressly discharged them, on many good reasons; it’s here a good part of the minister’s livelihood, therefore they will not quit it. After three days’ debate, we cannot yet find a way of agreeance.”
It was in consequence of this inability to agree on the subject that the Scottish commissioners at Westminster declined to hear the sermon preached on the occasion of the funeral of Pym. Baillie wrote:—“On Wednesday, Mr Pym was carried from his house to Westminster on the shoulders, as the fashion is, of the chief men of the Lower House, all the House going in procession before him, and before them the Assembly of Divines. Marshall had a most eloquent and pertinent funeral sermon—which we would not hear, for funeral sermons we must have away, with the rest.”
The earliest registers of deaths are those of Aberdeen, which commence in 1560; Perth, beginning in 1561, and the Canongate, Edinburgh, in 1565. The register of burials in the last-named parish commences in 1612, and that of Greyfriars in 1658. Those of rural parishes generally commence in the last century, and they are, as a rule, more or less imperfect. It appears from the Edinburgh registers, in which the deaths are summarised annually, that the mortality has greatly diminished during the last hundred and fifty years. In the first four decades of the last century, nearly two-thirds of the deaths were those of children, and the deaths of adult females were double those of adult males. The dawn of a better state of things appears in 1741, when the deaths of 276 men, 401 women, and 942 children, were registered, which, if we accept the generally received statement that the population of the city was then fifty thousand, gives an annual average death-rate of 34 per thousand. The average mortality of the ten years ending with 1878, as shown by the report of the Registrar General, was 24 per thousand; and that of the week ending October 8, 1898, was 20 per thousand; which was precisely that of the thirty-three largest towns of the southern portion of the island.
Contemporary events in other places were not unfrequently recorded in the local registers of deaths in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, in the Aberdeen register, we have the murder of Lord Darnley very circumstantially recorded as follows, though under a wrong date:—“The ninth [10th] day of February, the year of God 1566, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, King of Scotland, who married Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, daughter to King James the Fifth, was cruelly murdered under night, in Edinburgh, in the Cowgate, at the Kirk of Field, by James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, and other his assisters, whose deed God revenge. So be it.”[13] The ascription of the crime to Bothwell does not appear in the Canongate register, which merely records the fact of Darnley being blown up with gunpowder.
The assassination of the Earl of Murray is recorded in several parish registers. The session clerk of Aberdeen recorded it, with much particularity, as follows:—“The twenty-third day of January, the year of God 1569, James, Earl of Murray, Lord Abernethy, Regent to the King and realm of Scotland, was cruelly murdered and shot in the town of Linlithgow, by a false traitor, James Hamilton of Bodywallhaucht, by the conspiracy and treason of his own servant, William Kircaldy, and John Hamilton, bloody Bishop of St. Andrew’s, whose deed we pray God to revenge. So be it.” With equal circumstantiality the same clerk made an entry in the register of the murder of Coligny, and the horrible massacre of the Protestants of Paris, on St. Bartholomew’s day, 1572, which event he prays God to revenge.
Some of the entries in the church registers of Edinburgh are of considerable historical interest. In that of St. Giles is chronicled the removal of the remains of the Marquis of Montrose from the Abbey Church of Holyrood to St. Giles’s Church, where they were honoured with a magnificent and pompous funeral. The entry in the register of burials records the final interment as follows:—“11 May 1661.—The Rt. Hon. James, Marquis of Montrose, Earl of Kincardine, Lord Grahame and Mugdok, His Majesty’s late commissioner and Captain General for the kingdom of Scotland, and knt. of most hon. order of the Garter, was conveyed from the kirk of Holyrood House with great honour and solemnity to St. Giles’s kirk and buried.” The corpse had been, in the first instance, interred at the Burgh Muir, so that this was the third removal.
The register of the Greyfriars’ Church, Edinburgh, contains the following record of another and more generally interesting translation:—“Robert Garvock, Patrick Forman, James Stewart, David Fernie, Alexander Russell, was executed in the Gallowlee, for owning the truth, upon the 10 day of October 1681 years, and their heads fixed upon Bristo Port, taken down and buried privately in Louristone Yards, now accidentally dug up upon the 15 day of October 1726, and buried decently upon the 19 day of the said month in the Greyfriars’ churchyard, close to the Martyrs’ Tomb.”
The grandeur of the final interment of the remains of the Marquis of Montrose, followed later by the costly obsequies of Lord Roslin, induced the Scottish Parliament, in 1681, to pass an Act which, besides restricting the number of persons who might attend the funeral of a person of rank to one hundred, prohibited “the using or carrying of any branches, banners, and other honours at church, except only the eight branches to be upon the pall, or upon the coffin where there is no pall.” The Act seems, however, to have had little effect in diminishing the excessive costliness of funerals among all classes above the very poorest. The funeral of Sir William Hamilton, who died in 1707, was attended with a display and an amount of hospitality which cost a sum equal to two years of his salary as a judge. The funeral of Lachlan Macintosh, chief of the Highland clan of that name, in 1736, cost (including the customary festivities) a sum which involved his successors in pecuniary embarrassments for a century afterwards. The funerals of Highland chiefs were attended by all the clan, sometimes numbering thousands of persons, and the procession to the place of burial extending to more than a mile in length; the coronach—a hymn of lamentation, an example of which may be found in Scott’s “Lady of the Lake”—being chanted by hundreds of voices, accompanied by the bagpipes.