The concluding line of M. de St. Priest's work contains a sentiment which will doubtless find ready echo in the hearts of his countrymen, ever jealous of Great Britain's aggrandisement and territorial growth. "May Sicily" he says, "never become a second Malta." The wish, whose heartfelt sincerity cannot be doubted, points to the possibility, not to say the probability, of the event deprecated; an event which, however unwelcome to France, would, in many respects, be highly advantageous to the two parties more immediately concerned. So manifest are the benefits that it is almost impertinent to point them out. Sicily would find efficient protection, commercial advantages, a paternal and liberal government; England would obtain a storehouse and granary, and an excellent position whence to observe and check French progress in Northern Africa, should the ambition of the young republic, or of any other government that may succeed it, render interference necessary. At the present moment, when half Europe is unhinged, political speculation becomes doubly difficult; but whatever turn events take, there is little likelihood of France either abandoning her African colony or resting contented with its present extent. Doubtless, she will some day lay hold of Tunis, or at least make the attempt. It is but a short sail from Tunis to Sicily. The peace-at-all-price men, who would fain dispense with fleets and armies, and trust to the spread of philanthropy for the protection of Britain and its colonies, would have no fresh cause for their insipid and querulous grumblings in the annexation of Sicily to the British empire. It would be unnecessary to recruit an additional drummer, or man a cock-boat the more. The island Sicilians, of more hardy frame and courageous temper than their Continental neighbours, are, as they have lately shown, able to defend their liberties. They would furnish troops and mariners, who, with British discipline and direction, need be second to none in Europe. Increased advantages should of course be afforded to Sicilian produce imported into Great Britain. This would cut two ways. Whilst benefiting the Sicilian, and encouraging him to industry, it would spur the stolid and stubborn lawgivers of Spain to moderate the absurd tariff which excludes foreign manufactures from that country, save through illicit channels. Under British protection and British laws, Sicily, if she cannot hope ever to resume her ancient grandeur and prosperity, would flourish and improve to an extent impossible during her ill-assorted union with Naples.
CRIMES AND REMARKABLE TRIALS IN SCOTLAND.
KIDNAPPING—PETER WILLIAMSON'S CASE.
Before entering on the personal history of a man whose adventures carried him through all the strata of social life, from the feathered savage of the Prairies to the industrious burgess in small-clothes, let us give a few incidental notices of that crime—kidnapping, or man-stealing,—his subjection to which was the opening scene of his eventful career. We can, perhaps, scarcely point to a more distinct type of feebleness in the law of any country than the frequency of this crime. In that community where the people, marked off by any distinction in race or appearance—where persons born in serfdom, or of a particular line, or speaking a peculiar language—are doomed to slavery, the laws may be unjust and barbarous in the extreme, but it does not follow that they are feeble. The slavery exists by them, not in spite of them. It is in the country where the person, free by the law, is seized, and, in defiance of the law, held in forced bondage, in obedience to the interest or the malevolence of individuals, that this characteristic of feebleness is so prominently developed. The purloiner of coin or plate can only be tracked by external incidents; there is nothing in his connexion with the property that in itself proclaims his crime. The horse and cattle-stealer have to deal with less silent commodities; but even the objects of their depredations are not placed in an unnatural position by ownership, and have no voice wherewith to proclaim their custodier's dishonesty. But the man who holds another in possession in a free country, is a criminal in the eye of every one who sees him exercise his ownership; and he carries about with him a perpetual witness and accuser, who is under the strongest inducements to be ever vigilant and ever active. The law under which common thefts are practised, is only that which does not see far into a millstone; but the law under which kidnapping may be pursued with impunity, is deaf, and blind, and, paralytic. Owing to the strong central administration of justice in England, it does not appear that this crime was ever very prevalent in the south. We find, indeed, in Whitelock's Memorials, under the date of 9th May 1645—"An ordinance against such who are called spirits, and use to steal away and take up children, and, bereave their parents of them, and convey them away." The measure then adopted, which will be found among the ordinances of the Long Parliament, shows us that it had become customary to seize children and carry them out of the country, to be employed as slaves in the plantations, or probably to be sold to the Mediterranean pirates. The ordinance says, "Whereas, the houses of Parliament are informed that divers lewd persons do go up and down the city of London and elsewhere, and in a most barbarous and wicked manner steal away many little children, it is ordered by the Lords and Commons, in Parliament assembled, that all officers and ministers of justice be hereby straitly charged and required to be very diligent apprehending all such persons as are faulty in this kind, either in stealing, selling, buying, enveigling, purloining, conveying, or receiving children so stolen, and to keep them in safe imprisonment till they may be brought to severe and exemplary punishment. It is further ordered, that the marshals of the Admiralty and the Cinque Ports do immediately make strict and diligent search in all ships, and vessels upon the river, and at the Downs, for all such children, according to such directions as they have, or shall receive from the committee of the Admiralty and Cinque Ports." The few reports we have of English cases of kidnapping are too profusely dressed up with technicalities to permit us to see the naked facts. Shower reports the case of Lees v. Dassigny, the 34th of Charles II. An English common-law reporter never condescends to know the year of the Christian era; he knows only that of the king's reign, and if he had to mention the foundation of the Turkish empire, he would mark it as the 28th Edward I.; while the discovery of America would as undoubtedly be an event of the 8th Henry VII. When we turn to our chronological tables, we find that the 34th of Charles II. means the year 1682. How far the pleadings throw any light on the adventures of the youth who had been kidnapped and sent abroad, the reader may judge from a fair specimen:—"They sue an homine replegiando in the name of the young Turbett; and after an alias and a pluries, they get an elongatus est per quendam Philippum Dassigny infra nominatum. This was to the Sheriff of London, whereas the defender never lived in London, but at Wapping, in Middlesex," &c. The effect of the pleading, of which this is the commencement, was, that the accused might be bailed, "and on security to bring home the boy in six months, death and the perils of the seas excepted, he was discharged on bail. In Trinity term the boy came home, and being brought into court was delivered to the father; but they never proceeded." Sir Thomas Raymond gives us the further information, that the kidnapper was a merchant trading to Jamaica, and that the victim "was a scholar at Merchant Taylor's school, and a hopeful young youth."[11] An act of King William's reign shows that the offence was still prevalent, by imposing penalties on the masters of vessels leaving people behind in "his Majesty's plantations or elsewhere." It appears to have been almost solely for the foreign market that kidnapping was practised in England. The cultivated and populous character of the country, the power of the laws, and the perpetual vicinity of a kind of parochial municipalities, probably rendered the forcible seizure and imprisonment of individuals within the country too difficult and dangerous an operation to have been frequently accomplished by force; though the fatal facilities for confinement in lunatic asylums may have frequently made them the living tombs of those whom the rapacity, or the malignant passions of others, have doomed to imprisonment. Yet, were we to take foreign novelists as true painters of English manners, we would find in Madame Cotin's Malvina, that a French beauty having secured the affections of an English duke, his powerful relations seize her after she has become his wife, and lock her up in a turret of their private castle, where, though the neighbouring physician and the clergyman visit her, and all the world knows that she is imprisoned, no one dares to interfere in her behalf; and her fate is only balanced by that of her husband, whom the Attorney-General transports, by a writ of Habeas Corpus, to the West Indies. Somewhat similar, if our memory serves us right, are the notions of British liberty embodied in Walladmor, the story got up to pass as a Waverley novel at one of the Leipsic fairs, where, in the year 1818, the Lord Lieutenant is found committing every person with whom he quarrels to his private dungeons in his own castle.
We need no writers of romance to find instances of kidnapping in Scotland before the Union. The vast solitudes which frequently separated inhabited districts from each other, the feudal fortalices scattered hither and thither, the weakness of the crown, the judicial powers possessed by many of the barons; and we may add to this, the spirit of clanship, which surrounded every Highland chief with an army of retainers, as faithful to the preservation of his secrets as they were relentless in avenging his feuds—all conspired to render it too easy for a powerful individual to adopt such a form of outrage against his enemy. Not that the practice was pursued in the manner of a sordid trade, as we have found it followed in England, and as we shall find that at a later period it was adopted among ourselves. The Scots had no colonies to be supplied with this species of living merchandise; and in truth the human animal has seldom been with us so valuable a commodity in the home market, as greatly to raise the cupidity of his neighbour.
Those who ventured on kidnapping flew at high game. A young or a superannuated king requiring the aid of able counsellors, nay, sometimes a monarch in the vigour of his power, would be the object of such an attempt. Among lesser personages, statesmen offensively powerful, dignified churchmen about to issue ecclesiastical censures, and judges of the Court of Session prepared to give adverse decisions, were in great request, and eagerly sought after. Alexander Gibson of Durie, for some time a principal clerk of session, and afterwards a judge in that court—lawyers know him as the author of a folio volume of reports of more than average unreadability—was a special victim, having been twice successfully spirited away. In 1604, George Meldrum, younger of Dumbreck, was tried for several acts of this description, of one of which Durie, then "ane of the clerks of our sovereign Lord's Council and Session," was a victim. Among those whom the kidnapper took to his assistance were—"John Johnston, called Swyne-foot," and some other worthies, comprehensively described as "ane company of common and notorious thieves, brigands, and murderers," who assembled "with swords, hagbuts, and pistolets." Durie was residing in St Andrews, and it appears that his enemy employed "ane fellow called Craik, the said George Meldrum's own man," to watch his motions. He was riding, as it would appear, on the bank of the Firth of Tay, opposite to Dundee, accompanied by a brother barrister and his servant, when the ambuscade "treasonably put violent hands on their persons," and "took them captives and prisoners." Their captor "reft fra them their purses, with certain gold and silver being therein, extending to the quantity of three hundred merks or thereby"—an act which the indictment reproachfully mentions as specially unworthy of "ane landed man." Meldrum proceeded with his captive through Fifeshire to Kinghorn, on the Forth; thence, crossing over to Leith, he marched through Edinburgh, "passing the palace gate of Holyroodhouse"—a circumstance to which the indictment alludes as a powerful illustration of the audacity of the transaction. The party then proceeded through Lothian and Tweeddale across the Border "unto England, to George Ratcliff's house, where they detained him captive and prisoner for the space of eight days or thereby."[12] Thus was this high official conveyed a distance of about a hundred miles, not only through the most populous and fertile part of the kingdom, but through the centre of the metropolis, under the very shadow of the throne; and that not by any of the great barons who could command an army of followers, but by a petty country gentleman, aided by a few Border freebooters.
The second private captivity of Durie was accomplished on the principle on which an elector is sometimes abstracted. It was for the purpose of defeating his adverse vote on the bench in a cause then before the court. Sir Walter Scott mentions the incident in the notes to the "Border Minstrelsy;" and the reader who remembers his picturesque and spirited narrative may perhaps be amused by seeing how the same event appears in the sober garb of a reporter of decisions. Forbes, in his "Journal of the Session," says—
"Some party in a considerable action before the session, finding the Lord Durie could not be persuaded to think his plea good, fell upon a stratagem to prevent the influence and weight that his lordship might have to his prejudice, by causing some strong masked men kidnap him in the Links of Leith at his diversion on a Saturday afternoon, and transport him to some blind and obscure room in the country, where he was detained captive without the benefit of daylight a matter of three months—though otherwise civilly and well entertained—during which time his lady and children went in mourning for him as dead. But after the cause aforesaid was decided, the Lord Durie was carried back by incognitoes, and dropped in the same place where he had been taken up."[13]