Volume 2 — REIGN OF CHARLES II.: 1660-1673. (continued 3)

1670. Apr. 11.

1670.

Major Weir was strangled at a stake and burnt in Edinburgh, for a series of sexual offences of the most abominable kinds. His sister, Jean Weir, who was involved in her brother’s guilt, suffered next day the less severe penalty of hanging. These were old people, and hitherto of good character.224 The major, indeed, was a religious professor of the highest style of sanctity, making unusual pretensions to strictness in piety, and noted for his power in prayer. He seems to have been a singular example of a paradox in human nature far from uncommon, and which may well make us all humble—an exalted strain of moral sentiment, refining overmuch, in coexistence with secret and inexpressibly degrading propensities. The poor man seems to have been at length unable any longer to endure the sense of secret guilt and hypocrisy; he sent to the public authorities to come and take him up. Unable to believe in the turpitude of one externally so well reputed, they sent physicians of his own religious party to see if he were not speaking from a disordered mind; and it was only when these reported him perfectly sane and collected, that he was taken into custody. It appeared that he had been addicted to his loathsome offences for a long course of years. The major was condemned upon his own confession, and thenceforth remained stupid and inaccessible to all that was said to him. He would not hear any minister pray to or for him, telling them, when they offered, that it was in vain—‘his condemnation was sealed; and since he was to go to the devil, he did not wish to anger him!‘—Law.

Jean Weir confessed, besides, to intercourse with evil spirits. The devil had supplied her with lint to her wheel, and when she lived at Dalkeith, she had had a familiar, ‘who used to spin extraordinary quantities of yarn for her in a shorter time than three or four women could have done the same.’ That this wretched old woman was under the influence of hallucinations, there can be no doubt. When she and her brother were apprehended, ‘she desired the guards to keep him from laying hold of a certain staff, which, she said, if he chanced to get into his hands, he would certainly drive them out of doors, notwithstanding all the resistance they could make. This magical staff was all of one piece of thornwood, with a crooked head; she said he received it of the devil, and did many wonderful things with it.... It was ordered by the judges to be burnt with his body.’225

July 29.

1670.

Lord Rutherford, whom we have seen so recently figuring in the romantic affair of the Bride of Baldoon, was now engaged in one of a very different kind—prosecuting a Captain Rutherford for the improbation of certain documents believed to have been forged by him, in order to establish claims on the estate of his lordship’s late brother, the second lord. The captain, after lying a long time in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, was sent for by the Lords of Session (July 27, 1671) to be interrogated about the case. As he was coming along under the care of Robert Hamilton, macer of the court, ‘he pretends there were some papers in Colliston’s chamber in Bess Wynd, which would be of great use to him if he took them with him; and therefore begged leave to fetch them, and paroled he should presently return. The macer trusting him simply, Rutherford makes his escape; the rumour whereof running up and down the town, Towie Barclay, who was but lately released from his confinement in Glasgow, comes in to the Lords in the Inner House, and proffered to find him out and fetch him again within an hour; which accordingly he did with a great deal of zeal, expressing that he could not abide cheatry by anything in the world; such persons know one another’s lurking-places so weel.’—Foun.

Captain Rutherford was kept in prison seven years, while justice hesitated about his deservings; but at length, on Sir George Mackenzie coming in as king’s advocate, with resolutions to be more vigorous, the culprit was tried along with William Rutherford, messenger, for the crime of forging writs, and both were soon after (November 28, 1678) executed in the Grassmarket.

Aug.

1670.

The Privy Council was pretty fully occupied at this time in summoning and fining individuals who had been present at unauthorised religious meetings. For example, ‘Robert Burnes, merchant in Glasgow,’ expiated by a fine of 300 merks his having been at a conventicle lately held at Kirkintilloch. Four persons, described as merchants, were fined each in £100 Scots for being at such a meeting in Hilderston House, Linlithgowshire. A fifth, who had not only been there, but had a child baptised on the occasion, suffered to double the amount. A great number were brought into trouble by having been present at a famous conventicle held a short time before at the Hill of Beith, near Dunfermline. Adam Stobie and eight other men, who had been at both that conventicle and another at Livingseat, and who refused to take an oath regarding them, were ‘ordained to be carried to the plantations in America, and discharged to return under pain of death.’ In thus so harshly thwarting the extreme Presbyterians in their predilections as to clergymen and meetings for worship, the government must have calculated on a certain support from the reactionary feeling engendered by the recent twenty-two years of troubles—that feeling under which we may presume they themselves acted. But a constant repetition of such proceedings against members of the community who were only exercising a natural privilege, and meaning no harm to their fellow-creatures, could not fail to create very bitter feelings, and gradually muster elements for the destruction of the existing régime. There was at the same time an effort to deal what was doubtless intended to be equal justice towards the various dissenters whom the Presbyterians themselves were accustomed to persecute when in the possession of power. There were even now Quakers in the tolbooths of Aberdeen, Inverury, Montrose, Edinburgh, and other towns, charged with no other offence than that of holding meetings for their own kind of devotion. Professors of the Catholic faith were also from time to time assailed in ways which, one would think, must have been sufficiently annoying to them, although, there is reason to believe, not quite up to that point of severity which would have been satisfactory to the people on the opposite extreme.

On a slight eminence beside the pastoral Doveran in Banffshire, is a little old-fashioned manor-house, surrounded as usual by a few trees, and bearing the descriptive name of Kinnairdie. Rothiemay and Frendraught—names of painful memory—are in the neighbourhood. Kinnairdie was occupied by the Crichtons of Frendraught, zealous, though unobtrusive Catholics. Word came to the Council as it sat in Edinburgh (August 1670), that in this retired villa ‘there is usual resort publicly to mass every Lord’s day, and four families of the heritors in the parish do, upon the ringing of a bell, go to a room in the said house where there is ane altar erected, and priests do officiate.’ The sheriff of the county was immediately ordered to go and inquire into the matter, to apprehend the priest if he could, and also ‘seize upon any vestments or other popish ornaments made use of in their superstitious worship.’

1670.

The sheriff soon after reported that he had seized a Mr Patrick Primrose, who was believed to have officiated as priest at Kinnairdie. He was ordered by the Council to keep this person strictly secured till he should be subjected to trial. By and by, however, ‘being informed that Mr Patrick Primrose, prisoner in the Tolbooth of Banff, doeth belong to the queen’s majesty as one of her servants,’ the Council ordered his liberation, ‘he always obliging himself to depart furth of the kingdom, and shall never return thereto under the pain of death.’ This was a comparatively merciful dealing; but poor Primrose was not destined to be benefited by it. Whether the Tolbooth of Banff had not agreed with his health, or some natural disease fell upon him, so it was that he soon after died.

On the 3d of August 1671, severe proceedings were taken with several north-country Catholic families, Gordon of Carmellie, Gordon of Littlemill, and Grant of Ballindalloch, for harbouring papist priests, and being present at mass; also against four priests named Leith, Ross, Forsyth, and Burnet, for saying mass, baptising children, and performing the ceremony of marriage, contrary to divers acts of parliament. On the 1st of February 1672, the Council, understanding that the Countess of Traquair, ‘being popishly affected, doth keep in family with her her son, the Earl of Traquair, and endeavours to educate him in the popish profession, and for that effect doth keep ... Irving, a priest, to instruct him therein,’ ordered messengers-at-arms to apprehend her ladyship, or if she could not be laid hold of, to summon her at the Cross of Edinburgh, that she and her son might come before them, in order that they might arrange for his ‘education and breeding conform to act of parliament.’

Accordingly, eight days after, the countess having obeyed the citation, the Council ordained that before the 22d instant she should ‘send her son to Glasgow, and cause deliver him to Mr Gilbert Burnet, Professor of Divinity, to be educat and bred at the College of Glasgow, in the company of the said Mr Gilbert, at the sight, and by the advice, of the Archbishop of Glasgow,’ no servants to be allowed to attend the young earl ‘bot such as are of the reformed religion.’ On the same day, Wauchope, younger of Niddry, and the Lord Semple, were ordered to bring and deliver up their children, ‘in order to their education with some Protestant friend,’ Lord Semple being at the same time called to account ‘for sending his eldest son abroad contrair to the Council’s order.’ Wauchope was on this occasion ordered to give up his eldest son into the charge of his own father, the elder laird, and the parents were forbidden to have for the future any intercourse with their child, except in presence of the Protestant preceptor, into whose charge he was to be put.

1670.

We soon after hear of the Countess of Traquair being subjected to a horning for disobeying the Council’s order, while Lord Semple was put into ward in Edinburgh Castle for sending his son to Doway, and only liberated on a petition craving pardon for his offence, and giving caution to the extent of ten thousand merks for ‘sending his third son to be educat in schools in Glasgow.’

Lord and Lady Semple yielded to the order of the Council regarding their third son; but the result appears to have been of a kind satisfactory to neither party. In April 1678, Lady Semple (her husband being then dead) complained to the Council regarding her son, that, ‘either through the neglect of those he was recommended to, or through the general humour and corruption of the place, he has been frequently withdrawn from the public ordinances, and so seduced and poisoned with bad principles anent his majesty’s government and laws, as may not only hazard his small fortune, but render his loyalty altogether suspect.’ At her ladyship’s request, the Council gave commission to the Bishop of Argyle and Lord Ross to appoint ‘a person of sound principles’ to attend the boy as his pedagogue.

In March 1672, the Council sent orders to the sheriffs of Aberdeen and Banff for taking stern measures with the papists of their bounds. Sayers and hearers of mass were to be summoned to answer for their ‘crimes,’ to be excommunicated and escheat, and their estates given to the universities. The sheriffs were enjoined to give their support to the bishop and clergy of the diocese in ‘suppressing and rooting out of Popery and Quakerism.’ And ‘whereas we are informed that there is a superstitious monument erected upon the grave of the late Mr Patrick Primrose, priest, in St Peter’s Chapel in the parish of Botarie, we authorise and require you to cause demolish the same.’ Very likely, some of Patrick’s skulking flock had ventured to put upon his tomb that emblem which most expressively recalls what the Saviour suffered for all sects alike. No such thing could be for a moment endured.

1670.

The Presbyterian historians of the age speak of these papist persecutions as not springing from a right zeal. Wodrow says the rulers could not ‘for shame’ but do something of that sort, while at the same time doing so much against the Whigs. Indeed, Sir George Mackenzie plainly confesses, it was for ‘allaying the humour of the people,’ to convince them that the rulers were themselves disinclined to popery, the people being ‘bred to believe that episcopacy was a limb of antichrist.’226 A most deplorable exhibition of Christian feeling on all hands truly. As regards the persecution of the extreme Presbyterians, which was beyond all comparison the deadliest then going on, it takes one of its most curious aspects when, as sometimes happened, an element of benevolence towards some other kind of person intruded. For example, Mr Walter Birnie, preacher, having shewn that he was thrown out of bread in his own profession, and, being blind, could go about no other employment, the Council ordered him two hundred merks to be taken in equal parts out of fines lately imposed on John Tennant in Moss-side and the Lady Glanderston. The pages of Wodrow have familiarised us so much with the idea of the Privy Council as a kind of inquisition for the suppression of a respectable dissent, that we can scarcely think of it in any other character. Yet a survey of its records would shew many beneficent and merciful edicts mingling with the severe orders against conventiclers. Petitions for freedom from sickly prisoners or for an abatement of fines, are yielded to in numberless instances—indeed, they appear to have never been refused. In all matters apart from the unhappy religious disputes, there is no lack of humane feeling or of a desire to promote the good of the community.

Aug. 16.

1670.

Francis Irving, brother of the Laird of Drum, was before the Privy Council, on account of some very offensive demonstrations which he had lately made. Being a convert from the Protestant faith, he was unusually given to the entertaining of Jesuit priests and the getting up of masses. Under his favour and that of a few similar zealots, a priest had been emboldened to hold a public disputation in favour of his religion, an ‘insolency’ of which there had not been an example in Scotland since Quentin Kennedy argued with John Knox at Maybole. On a recent occasion, at Aberdeen, when certain persons were to be burned for sorcery and witchcraft, and a great crowd was assembled, ‘though he knew that it is a Christian and usual custom that the ministers and people do join in prayers to God for the persons who are to suffer, yet he ... when the minister and people went to prayer, stood covered to the great offence of the people, who knew him,’ and when some reminded him of his duty, ‘he quarrelled, at least caused his servant quarrel them.’ His sister Elizabeth, also a papist, being deceased, he resolved to have her buried in a public way in St Nicolas’ Church in Aberdeen, being the principal church there, and for this purpose he collected a great company of his own persuasion, and ‘that the strength, interest, and boldness of the papists there might the more appear,’ he ‘in a most insolent and treasonable way, did raise in arms and bring to the town, from Comar, a band of Highlandmen, armed with guns, hagbuts, pistols, bows and arrows, and other weapons.’ These, ‘after they had entered at the —— Port, albeit they might have taken a nearer and more private way to the Lady Drum her lodging, where the corpse lay, in the Guestraw,’ being resolved to affront and provoke the magistrates and people, ‘had the confidence to march to the said house alongst ——, being the most populous and public street in the said town, in rank and order and in warlike posture, a commander marching before and another behind, to the great astonishment and grief of his majesty’s good subjects, affected to the purity of religion.’ On the morning of the day of the funeral, a gentleman went at the order of Francis to the provost of the burgh, told him what was to be done that night, and warned him that, if the people thronged about the funeral company, and any ‘inconvenience ensue therethrough,’ it should be at the peril of the magistracy, who ought to restrain their people—‘which was a practice without parallel for insolency and boldness.’ ‘About eleven o’clock that night, the corpse being lifted was carried to the church of Aberdeen, with great show and in a public way, with many torches, a great multitude of persons accompanying, the coffin being covered with velvet or cloth, with a cross upon the same, and a priest or some other person going before the corpse, holding out his arms before him, and carrying a crucifix under his cloak or using some other superstitious ceremony.’ The Highlandmen, having their swords drawn, guarded the corpse and torches, ‘and when they came to the church-door, divers others of the company drew their swords and did hold them drawn in the church all the time the corpse was [being] buried.’ ‘In the throng, two of the inhabitants of the town was wounded.’ ‘Next morning, the Highlandmen having marched out of the town, many of them in a braving and insulting manner did shoot and discharge their guns as they went by the provost’s lodging.’

1670.

Francis was found guilty of ‘a high and insolent riot,’ and condemned to be imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh during pleasure, besides paying the expenses incurred in his prosecution. It does not appear that he suffered much confinement in jail; but he was forbidden to approach within a mile of Aberdeen. It was only on petition that he obtained so far a relaxation from this sentence as to be permitted to visit his mother there, in order to settle some weighty affairs of hers, on which he acted as trustee. On a subsequent petition in July 1671, he was freed from this restraint.—P. C. R.

Sep. 12.

One Campbell, a writer in Edinburgh, having obtained decreet for a debt against Sir Alexander Cunningham of Robertland, sent a messenger to the baronet’s house with a band of armed Highlanders to poind goods for the amount. Sir Alexander being from home, the party found no difficulty in taking some horses from his grounds, and bringing them to the cross of Irvine to be sold. ‘Sir Alexander gets notice of it; he runs to the Earl of Eglintoun, as bailie of the district; complains how he was affronted, that some had come and plundered his horse under pretence of poinding; [and] procures from him some twenty men to go and recover them. With thir men he enters Irvine, and with violence offers to hinder their poinding. The provost being present, entreated them to behave civilly, and remember they were in a burgh-royal. Robertland’s man [Alexander Kennedy], after much insolent boasting, drew his sword and ran at the provost, and would undoubtedly have slain him, had he not been immediately knocked down by some of the town-officers, and killed.’

The baronet prosecuted the burgh for this slaughter, before the Privy Council, but without success. How the burgh sped, in a counter-prosecution for riot in their bounds, does not appear.—Foun.

Sep.

The Marquis of Douglas, a young man, after being engaged for marriage with the daughter of one Widow Jack, a taverner at Perth, was wedded at Alloa House to Lady Barbara Erskine, daughter of the Earl of Mar.—Lam.

This was an unfortunate marriage for the lady. The marquis, a man of profligate conduct, was subsequently led by his factor, Lowrie of Blackwood (said to have been a rejected suitor of the lady), to suspect his marchioness of infidelity, and they were consequently separated, after she had born him one child. The sorrows of the Marchioness of Douglas were described in a popular ballad of the day, some verses of which constitute the favourite song of Waly, waly!

1670.

The prose reality of all this was, that the marchioness by and by obtained a decree of the Privy Council, allowing her a provision out of her husband’s estate.

The marquis, by a subsequent marriage, was the father of the semi-mad Duke of Douglas and of the celebrated Lady Jane Douglas.

1671. Jan. 19.

William Head and John Fergusson, who had ‘practised a lottery by authority in the kingdom of England,’ were authorised by the Privy Council to set up a similar adventure in any part of Scotland they pleased, ‘without let or molestation, they behaving themselves as becometh.’—P. C. R.

Mar. 2.

During the early years of the reign of Charles II., a custom prevailed to a great extent of obtaining from the Privy Council protections against the diligence of creditors. Sometimes a Highland chief could not come to Edinburgh on important affairs of his own, without this safeguard; sometimes the Council could not otherwise be favoured with the company of some man of local influence, whom it desired to see upon important public business. Sir Mungo Murray was unable to attend the funeral of his cousin and namesake, ‘late lieutenant of one of his majesty’s troops of guards,’ unless he got ‘protection against the rigidity of his creditors.’ At this date, the Council received an application for a protection from James Arnot, postmaster at Cockburnspath, an important station on the road from Edinburgh to Berwick. James having involved himself in debt, not only was his person ‘in hazard to be taken with captions, but the horses and furniture reserved for the public use of the lieges upon the post-road are threatened to be poindit.’ As the government owed him as much as would pay his debts, it seemed but reasonable that they should save him from his creditors, which they accordingly did by granting him and his horses protection for a year.—P. C. R.

1671. May 14.

A young woman named Elizabeth Low had an excrescence upon her forehead, eleven inches long, and usually regarded as a horn. It was this day cut out by Arthur Temple of Ravelrig, and deposited in the museum of the Edinburgh University, with a silver plate attesting its history. Law notes that the girl was alive in 1682, and had another horn growing out of the same place.

June 1.

Heriot’s Hospital having been for some years established, with sixty boys as inmates, it was customary to hold the 1st of June as a holiday in honour of the founder, one part of the formalities being a procession of the magistrates to the Hospital at nine in the morning ‘to hear sermon.’ David Pringle, ‘nearest of kin to the founder,’ acted as surgeon and barber to the boys, these two heterogeneous crafts being somehow combined by our ancestors. To prepare the boys for appearance this morning before the civic dignitaries, it was necessary that they should be polled; accordingly, about seven in the morning, Mr Pringle, his other servants being absent about his business, sent a boy to the Hospital, desiring him to take with him any person he could readily get to further the work. The boy unluckily omitted to look for a barber free of the city corporation of barber-chirurgeons, and took with him one William Wood, who was only free of the suburban district of Portsburgh.

1671.

This coming to the ears of Archibald Temple, deacon of the said city corporation, a court was speedily held, and David Pringle summoned before it, to answer for the irregularity committed by his boy. The medical officer of Heriot’s Hospital ingenuously confessed the error; but represented his boy as having simply taken the readiest assistant he could get, ‘without the least intention to give the calling offence:’ he added his solemn promise that no such impropriety should ever again occur. The court was disposed to pass over the matter as trivial; but the deacon, having reason to believe that Pringle designedly employed Wood, pressed for punishment, and solemnly vowed he would see it inflicted. He very soon caused Wood to be put up in the Tolbooth. Pringle hereupon appealed to the Town Council for the liberation of Wood, and so further incensed the corporation against himself. By using influence with the magistrates, they obtained a warrant for the apprehension of Pringle, by which he was ‘necessitat for some time to keep his house, and durst not come abroad, they having officers both at the head and foot of the close to watch and catch him.’ Notwithstanding a petition from him to the Town Council, representing the case, Temple and some of his colleagues persevered till they got Pringle put up in jail, there to be during the Council’s pleasure, and till he should give satisfaction to ‘the calling.’ They also, during his confinement, passed an ordinance depriving him of all the benefits of his own connection with the corporation, till he should have made full acknowledgment of his offence in writing, and submitted to appropriate censure. In short, the affair, trivial at first, came to be a passionate contention between the barber corporation and their delinquent member, they determined to assert their privileges, and he resolute to make no unworthy submission. After much altercation, the affair came before the Privy Council, who employed the Earl of Argyle and the Earl of Linlithgow to inquire into and report upon it, and it was not till the 11th of January 1672 that the case was adjusted by Pringle making an apology, and the corporation reponing him in his privileges.—P. C. R.

Sep. 5.

Donald M‘Donald, commonly called the Halkit Stirk,227 had been liberated from the Edinburgh Tolbooth in December 1660, on caution being given by Donald M‘Donald, younger of Slate, to the extent of £1000 sterling, that the prisoner should present himself, when called upon, to answer anything that could be laid to his charge. It being found that the Halkit Stirk had ever since lived the life of a robber, and had committed divers slaughters, the young Laird of Slate was now called upon to render up the delinquent or forfeit his caution. The young laird accordingly brought the Halkit Stirk before the Council, and got a discharge of his bond. The robber was committed to the Tolbooth.

1671.

During this year, a great impulse seemed to be given to Quakerism both in England and Scotland. It being found, says Law, that a rejection of ordinances and the Scriptures were not taking with the people, they began to have preaching and prayer at their meetings, and to acknowledge the Bible as the rule of their life and judge of controversies. The profession was found thus to be more ‘ensnaring.’ Some men of note, and of parts and learning, such as Robert Barclay of Urie, who afterwards wrote the Apology for the Quakers, now joined the society.

In his dedication to the king, written in 1675, Mr Barclay claimed credit for his sect, not only that they meddled with no civil affairs, but that, in the times of most violent persecution, being ‘clothed in innocency, they have boldly stood to their testimony for God, without creeping into holes or corners, or once hiding themselves, as all other dissenters have done’—rather a severe taunt at the extreme Presbyterians, who had been contenders for the political supremacy of their church, and had now to comport themselves as rebels. The Presbyterians, while themselves suffering, approved of the severities against these most innocuous of all Christians; they only thought them not severe enough. Wodrow speaks of the Council as, in 1666, ‘coming to some good resolutions against Quakers,’ but complains generally of its slackness concerning ‘that dangerous sect,’ which, he says, ‘spread terribly during this reign.’

One William Napier, a seafaring man in Montrose, had turned Quaker, and other Quakers began in consequence to draw towards that place, keeping frequent meetings in Napier’s house, ‘to the great scandal of religion and disturbance of the peace and quiet of the burgh.’ On the 12th of January 1672, ‘betwixt twenty and thretty persons did convene at William Napier his house, where they had such pretendit devotion as they pleased to devise, whereupon a great tumult and confusion was like to have been made,’ and the magistrates, to settle matters as far as possible, clapped up fifteen of the congregation in the Tolbooth. On a petition from the magistrates, representing how by these doings the people were becoming ‘deboshed in their principles,’ the Council ordered that William Napier should be sent to Edinburgh, and imprisoned during pleasure in the Tolbooth there, while the rest of the prisoners should remain in durance at Montrose. In this case the Council ultimately took a lenient course. On a humble petition from Napier, representing the injury he would sustain in his business from an intended voyage being stopped, he was ordered to be set at liberty after about a fortnight’s confinement. Three of the company were ordered, on petition, to be liberated eight months after, and on the ensuing day a general order was issued for the liberation of any other Quakers that might still remain in confinement at Montrose.—P. C. R.

1671.

A general order was issued by the Council, in March 1672, to the magistrates of Aberdeen, commanding them to execute the laws against a number of the citizens who had deserted the parish churches on account of Quakerism, enjoining that these people should be strictly punished according to act of parliament—that is, fined in the proportion of a fourth of their means for the offence.

In March 1673, there were eleven men in prison at Kelso for attending a Quaker meeting; but the Council, unwilling to keep them confined till the circuit court could try them, sent the Earl of Roxburgh with a commission to judge whether they might be set at liberty or not.

The liberty of conscience which the Quakers asserted as a principle made them unscrupulous in associating with papists, and this formed one of the strongest grounds of prejudice against them. Law relates a childish story of a gentleman Quaker at Montrose being induced by his daughter to repent, and return to church, where he confessed that the chief Quakers kept up a correspondence with the chief papists and with the pope; as also that they ‘had converse with Satan.’

We are assured by Robert Law,228 that while Quakerism was spreading with an alarming rapidity, there was also a startling abundance of profanity and of abominable offences. Some propensities were indulged with great licence; ‘drunkenness without any shame, men glorying in it;’ ‘dreadful oppression; high contempt of the gospel; gross idolatry; a woman in the south drinking the devil’s health and [that of] his servants; self-murder; and witchcraft and sorceries very common; all which threatened a sad stroke from God upon us.’

The woman here adverted to by Law seems to have been one Marion M‘Call, spouse to Adam Reid in Mauchline. She was tried, May 8, 1671, before the Court of Justiciary at Ayr, for ‘drinking the good health of the devil,’ and judged to be taken on the first Wednesday of June to the Market Cross of Edinburgh, ‘to be scourged by the hangman from thence to the Nether Bow, and thereafter to be brought back to the Cross again and have her tongue bored and [be] burnt on the cheek;’ further, she was not to return to the county of Ayr on pain of death.229

1671.

Law elsewhere tells of a debauch, at which a similar indecorum was committed, and which was the means of carrying off two members of the Scottish peerage. It was the more remarkable as occurring in January 1643, when the nation at large had certainly some most serious concerns on hand, and the general tone was earnestly religious. It is stated that the Earl of Kelly, the Lord Kerr, and David Sandilands, ‘Abercrombie’s brother,’ with other two gentlemen, being met one day, fell a carousing, and, to encourage each other in drinking, began to give healths. When they had drunk many healths, not knowing whose to give next, ‘one of them gives the devil’s health, and the rest pledges him. Sandilands that night, going down stairs, fell and broke his neck; Kelly and Kerr within a few days sickened of a fever and died; the fourth also died shortly; and the fifth, being under some remorse, lived some time.’ It may be added that ‘ane great drink,’ as it was called in a chronicle of the day, having thus carried off Lord Kerr, the titles of his father, the Earl of Roxburgh, passed by his daughter into a branch of another family, the Drummonds of Perth. This victim of the wine-cup had appeared for the Covenant at Dunse Law, but afterwards became a royalist.

1672. Feb. 26.

From the commencement of the religious troubles in 1638, the Privy Council Record gives comparatively few of those notices of new manufactures attempted in Scotland, or proposed to be introduced by strangers, for which the previous thirty years of peace were so remarkable. Amidst endless notices of religious persecution, it gives an agreeable surprise, at the date noted, to light upon an application from Philip Vander Straten, a native of Bruges, for the benefit of naturalisation and freedom of working and trafficking, while embarking a considerable sum of money in a work at Kelso ‘for dressing and refining of wool.’ The petition was at once complied with.—P. C. R.

1672.

Two years later (March 19, 1674), the commencement of a humbler and less useful branch of industry is noted. At that date, Andrew M‘Kairter represented to the Privy Council that, being a young boy at the schools of Dalmellington at the time of the Pentland insurrection in 1666, he had joined in that affair, and after its conclusion, ‘out of a childish fear did run away to Newcastle, and having there, and in London, and Holland, served ane long apprenticeship? in spinning of tobacco,’ he was now returned to his native country, and ‘hath set up the said trade at Leith.’ His desire was to make his peace with the government by signing the bond for the public peace. The Council entertained the petition graciously, and Andrew became, we may suppose, the first practitioner of tobacco-spinning in Leith.

Apr.

At this time, and for six months previously, the small-pox raged in Glasgow. Hardly a family escaped the infection, and eight hundred deaths and upwards occurred.—Law.

Some sensation was excited by the rumour that in a ship lying at Newcastle, called the Cape of Good Hope of London, the devil had appeared in bodily shape, in the habit of a seaman, with a blue cravat about his neck, and desired the master of the ship to remove out of her; which he did not obey till sic time as she began to sink in the ocean. Then he, with his company, took his cock-boat, who were saved by another ship coming by. This was testified by the oaths of them that were in her.—Law. It is seldom that the devil is found so obliging as he seems to have been in this case.

It may serve to verify the possibility of such a rumour in the reign of Charles II., that, in March 1682, the Privy Council was informed that ‘one Margaret Dougall is imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Ayr, as alleged guilty of raising and consulting the devil;’ and an order was given that she be transported from sheriff to sheriff until brought to and placed in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, that she might be brought to a legal trial.—P. C. R.

May 27.

Aug. 22.

Joannes Michael Philo, physician, and ‘sworn operator to his majesty,’ was, on petition, allowed to erect a public stage in Edinburgh for the practice of his profession, but ‘discharged to have any rope-dancing.’—P. C. R. It was some time after stated regarding this personage, that he did erect a stage in Edinburgh, and ‘thereon has cured thretteen blind persons, several lame, and cut several cancers, and done many other notable cures, as is notourly known, and that out of mere charity.’ He was therefore invested by the Council, on petition, with a warrant to go and do likewise in all the other burghs of the kingdom, up till February next; the Council further recommending him to the magistrates of these burghs, that they may give him due help and countenance.

1672.

His stage was then taken down by the magistrates of Edinburgh, ‘before he could have time to complete many considerable cures,’ which he had had on hand. There also came to him from remote parts of the country ‘five or six poor blind people, and as many with cancers, whose poverty will not admit the same to be done otherwise than upon the public stage, where they have their cure gratis and their entertainment in the meantime upon [the operator’s] charges.’ He therefore petitioned to have his stage re-erected in Edinburgh for a time; which was complied with.

June 12.

On the parliament sitting down to-day, under the Duke of Lauderdale as commissioner, his ‘lady, with the number of thirty or forty moe ladies, accompanies the duke to the parliament in coaches, and are set down in the Parliament House, and sat there to hear the commissioner’s speech.’—Law. ‘A practice so new and extraordinary, that it raised the indignation of the people very much against her; they hating to find that aspired to by her, which none of our queens had ever attempted.’ It ‘set them to inquire into her origin and faults, and to rail against the lowness of the one, and the suspicions of the other.... This malice grew daily against her.’

The duke, at fifty-seven, and, it is said, only six weeks a widower, had married the duchess in the preceding February in London, all their friends in Edinburgh making feasts on their marriage-day, while ‘the Castle shot as many guns as on his majesty’s birthday.’ Her grace, now forty-five years of age, was in her personal qualities and history a most remarkable woman. Her wit and cleverness were something singular; ‘nor had the extraordinary beauty she possessed while she was young, ceded at the age at which she was then arrived.’ The daughter of one who had been minister of Dysart, she was Countess of Dysart in her own right, and by Sir Lionel Tollemache had had a large family, which is still represented in the peerage. There was something romantic in her union with the now all-powerful Lauderdale. He had owed to her his life, through her influence with Cromwell, and in his marriage, which was discommended by all his friends, ‘he really yielded to his gratitude.’230 For the next ten years, it might be said that Lauderdale and his clever duchess were all but nominally king and queen of Scotland.