REIGN OF GEORGE I.: 1714–1727. (continued 3)
Reading edition
Before the upbreak of this plot, considerable numbers of gentlemen under attainder daily presented themselves on the streets of Edinburgh, emboldened of course by the mildness of the government; but, one or two of them having been seized and put up in the Castle, it came to pass, 15th May, that not one was any longer to be seen. Mr Wodrow, who records these circumstances, expresses the feeling of the hour. ‘It’s certain we are in a most divided and defenceless state; divisions on the one hand, rancour and malice on the other, and a wretched indolence among too many. But the Lord liveth!’[555]
Aug. 3.
The Canongate, which had so often, in the sixteenth century, 467|1722.| been reddened with the best blood in Scotland, was still occasionally the scene of wild transactions, though arising amongst a different class of persons and from different causes. A local journalist chronicles a dreadful tragedy as occurring on its pavé at this date.
‘In the afternoon, Captain Chiesley and Lieutenant Moodie, both of Cholmly’s Regiment, which lies encamped at Bruntsfield Links, having quarrelled some time before in the camp, meeting on the street of the Canongate, the captain, as we are told, asked Mr Moodie whether he had in a certain company called him a coward? And he owning he had, the captain beat him first with his fist, and then with a cane; whereupon Mr Moodie drew his sword, and, shortening it, run the captain into the great artery. The captain, having his sword drawn at the same time, pushed at Mr Moodie, who was rushing on him with his sword shortened, and thus run him into the lower belly, of which in a few minutes he died, without speaking one word, having had no more strength or life left him than to cross the street, and reach the foot of the stair of his lodgings, where he dropped down dead. The captain lived only to step into a house near by, and to pray shortly that God might have mercy on his soul, without speaking a word more. ’Tis said Mr Moodie’s lady was looking over the window all the while this bloody tragedy was acting.’[556]
A duel which happened about the same time between Captains Marriot and Scroggs proved fatal to both.
Aug. 7.
‘Four of those poor deluded people called Quakers, two men and two women, came about noon to the Cross [of Edinburgh], when one of the women, who by her accent seemed to be of Yorkshire, after several violent agitations, said, that she was appointed by God to preach repentance to this sinful city; that a voice of mortality, as she called it, had sounded in her ears, and that desolation and all kinds of miseries would befall the inhabitants if they did not repent. After she had spoke about a quarter of an hour, a party of the city-guard carried her and the other three prisoners to the main guard.’
Some years after, one Thomas Erskine, a brewer, made himself conspicuous as a Quaker preacher in Edinburgh. One Saturday, January 17, 1736, he ‘made a religious peregrination through this city. He made his first station at the Bow-head [reputed as 468|1722.| the head-quarters of the saints in Edinburgh], where he pronounced woes and judgments on the inhabitants of the Good Town, if they did not speedily repent. Thence he walked to the Cross, where he recapitulated what he had evangelised by the way, and concluded with desiring his auditory to remember well what he had told them. However, he gave them forty days to think on’t.’
One day, in the ensuing July, Erskine sent a notice to the quiet little country town of Musselburgh, to the effect that the Spirit had appointed him to hold forth to them in the marketplace at five in the afternoon; and, accordingly, at the appointed hour, he mounted the Cross, and discoursed to a large audience.[557]
Aug. 29.
A second attempt was now made to obtain possession of the forfeited Seaforth estates for the government. It was calculated that what the two factors and their attendants, with a small military force, had failed to accomplish in the preceding October, when they were beat back with a fatal loss at Aa-na-Mullich, might now be effected by means of a good military party alone, if they should make their approach through a less critical passage. A hundred and sixty of Colonel Kirk’s regiment left Inverness under Captain M‘Neil, who had at one time been commander of the Highland Watch. They proceeded by Dingwall, Strath Garve, and Loch Carron, a route to the north of that adopted by the factors, and an easier, though a longer way. Donald Murchison, nothing daunted, got together his followers, and advanced to the top of Maam Attadale, a high pass from Loch Carron to the head of Loch Long, separating Lochalsh from Kintail. Here a gallant relative named Kenneth Murchison, and a few others, volunteered to go forward and plant themselves in ambush in the defiles of the Choille Van [White Wood], while the bulk of the party should remain where they were. It would appear that this ambush party consisted of thirteen men, all peculiarly well armed.
On approaching this dangerous place, the captain went forward with a sergeant and eighteen men to clear the wood, while the main body came on slowly in the rear. At a place called Altanbadn, in the Choille Van, he encountered Kenneth and his associates, whose fire wounded himself severely, killed one of his grenadiers, and wounded several others of the party. He persisted in advancing, and attacked the handful of natives with 469|1722.| sufficient resolution. They slowly withdrew, as unable to resist; but the captain now obtained intelligence that a large body of Mackenzies was posted in the mountain-pass of Attadale. It seemed as if there was a design to draw him into a fatal ambuscade. His own wounded condition probably warned him that a better opportunity might occur afterwards. He turned his forces about, and made the best of his way back to Inverness. Kenneth Murchison quickly rejoined Colonel Donald on Maam Attadale, with the cheering intelligence that one salvo of thirteen guns had repelled the hundred and sixty sidier roy.[558] After this, we hear of no renewed attempt to comprise the Seaforth property.
Strange as it may seem, Donald Murchison, two years after thus a second time resisting the government troops, came down to Edinburgh with eight hundred pounds of the earl’s rents, that he might get the money sent abroad for his lordship’s use. He remained a fortnight in the city unmolested. He would on this occasion appear in the garb of a Lowland gentleman; he would mingle with old acquaintances, ‘doers’ and writers; and appear at the Cross amongst the crowd of gentlemen who assembled there every day at noon. Scores would know all about his doings at Aa-na-Mullich and the Choille Van; but thousands might have known, without the chance of one of them betraying him to government.
General Wade, writing a report to the king in 1725, states that the Seaforth tenants, formerly reputed the richest of any in the Highlands, are now become poor, by neglecting their business, and applying themselves to the use of arms. ‘The rents,’ he says, ‘continue to be collected by one Donald Murchison, a servant of the late earl’s, who annually remits or carries the same to his master into France. The tenants, when in a condition, are said to have sent him free gifts in proportion to their several circumstances, but are now a year and a half in arrear of rent. The receipts he gives to the tenants are as deputy-factor to the Commissioners of the Forfeited Estates, which pretended power he extorted from the factor (appointed by the said commissioners to collect those rents for the use of the public), whom he attacked with above four hundred armed men, as he was going to enter upon the said estate, having with him a party of thirty of your majesty’s troops. The last year this Murchison marched in a public manner to Edinburgh, to remit eight hundred pounds to France for his master’s use, and remained fourteen days there 470|1722.| unmolested. I cannot omit observing to your majesty, that this national tenderness the subjects of North Britain have one for the other, is a great encouragement for rebels and attainted persons to return home from their banishment.’[559]
Donald was again in Edinburgh about the end of August 1725. On the 2d of September, George Lockhart of Carnwath, writing from Edinburgh to the Chevalier St George, states, amongst other matters of information regarding his party in Scotland, that Daniel Murchison (as he calls him) ‘is come to Edinburgh, on his way to France’—doubtless charged with a sum of rents for Seaforth. ‘He’s been in quest of me, and I of him,’ says Lockhart, ‘these two days, and missed each other; but in a day or two he’s to be at my country-house, where I’ll get time to talk fully with him. In the meantime, I know from one that saw him, that he has taken up and secured all the arms of value in Seaforth’s estate, which he thought better than to trust them to the care and prudence of the several owners; and the other chieftains, I hear, have done the same.’[560]
The Commissioners on the Forfeited Estates conclude their final report in 1725 by stating that they had not sold the estate of William Earl of Seaforth, ‘not having been able to obtain possession, and consequently to give the same to a purchaser.’
In a Whig poem on the Highland Roads, written in 1737, Donald is characteristically spoken of as a sort of cateran, while, in reality, as every generous person can now well understand, he was a high-minded gentleman. The verses, nevertheless, as well as the appended note, are curious:
‘Keppoch, Rob Roy, and Daniel Murchisan,
Cadets or servants to some chief of clan,
From theft and robberies scarce did ever cease,
Yet ‘scaped the halter each, and died in peace.
This last his exiled master’s rents collected,
Nor unto king or law would be subjected.
Though veteran troops upon the confines lay,
Sufficient to make lord and tribe a prey,
Yet passes strong through which no roads were cut,
Safe-guarded Seaforth’s clan, each in his hut.
Thus in strongholds the rogue securely lay,
Neither could they by force be driven away,
Till his attainted lord and chief of late
By ways and means repurchased his estate.’[561]
1722.
471‘Donald Murchison, a kinsman and servant to the Earl of Seaforth, bred a writer, a man of small stature, but full of spirit and resolution, fought at Dunblane against the government anno 1715, but continued thereafter to collect Seaforth’s rents for his lord’s use, and had some pickerings with the king’s forces on that account, till, about five years ago, the government was so tender as to allow Seaforth to re-purchase his estate, when the said Murchison had a principal hand in striking the bargain for his master. How he fell under Seaforth’s displeasure, and died thereafter, is not to the purpose here to mention.’
The end of Donald’s career can scarcely now be passed over in this slighting manner. The story is most painful. The Seaforth of that day—very unlike some of his successors—was unworthy of the devotion which this heroic man had shewn to him. When his lordship took possession of the estates which Donald had in a manner preserved for him, he discountenanced and neglected him. Murchison’s noble spirit pined away under this treatment, and he died in the very prime of his days of a broken heart.[562] He lies in a remote little churchyard on Cononside, in the parish of Urray, where, I am happy to say, his worthy relative, Sir Roderick I. Murchison, is at this time preparing to raise a suitable monument over his grave.
When Dr Johnson and James Boswell, in their journey to the Hebrides, 1773, came to the inn at Glenelg, they found the most wretched accommodation, and would have been without any comfort whatever, had not Mr Murchison, factor to Macleod in Glenelg, sent them a bottle of rum and some sugar, ‘with a polite message,’ says Boswell, ‘to acquaint us, that he was very sorry he did not hear of us till we had passed his house, otherwise he should have insisted on our sleeping there that night.’ ‘Such extraordinary attention,’ he adds, ‘from this gentleman to entire strangers, deserves the most honourable commemoration.’ This gentleman, to whom Johnson also alludes with grateful admiration of his courtesy in the Journey to the Western Islands, was a near relative of Donald Murchison.
Sep. 1.
A high wind shook the crops of Lothian, particularly damaging the pease. It was considered ‘a heavy stroke,’ as the people thereabouts 472|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.
473There 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 474|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.
‘The fellow went immediately off in a boat for Glasgow, and from thence came here [Edinburgh], the people in the house having no suspicion but that Lawers was asleep, till about eleven o’clock, when they found him as above, swimming in his blood. Upon recollection on several passages which happened with respect to Duncan Campbell, they presently found him to have been the murderer, and caused the magistrates of Greenock write to the magistrates of Glasgow to apprehend him; but he being gone for Edinburgh, the provost wrote in to our provost here, whereupon there was a search here ... but the villain is not as yet found.
‘The occasion of this execrable murder is said by the murderer’s friends to be to prevent Lawers going back in the marriage, whereof he was then apprehensive; and being a relation of the bride’s, and very active in bringing on that courtship, the devil tempted him to that unparalleled cruelty. But we rather believe that it was to rifle his pockets, for his breeches were from under his head, and nothing but a Carolus and four shillings in them; whereas it is most certain that Lawers always carried a purse of gold with him, and more especially could not but have it when he intended to celebrate his marriage.’[569]
Campbell was extensively advertised for as ‘a tall thin man, loot-shouldered, pock-pitted, with a pearl or blindness in the right eye,’ dressed in ‘a suit of gray Duroy clothes, plain-mounted, a big red coat, and a thin light wig, rolled up with a ribbon;’ ‘betwixt 30 and 40 years of age;’[570] and a hundred guineas were offered for his apprehension; but we do not hear of his having ever been brought to justice.
Sir Alexander Murray of Stanhope, Peeblesshire, was one of those men who, possessed of some talent and insight, are so little under the government of common prudence and good temper, that they prove rather a trouble than a benefit to their fellow-creatures. In youth, during the life of his father, he married a beautiful and accomplished woman, Grizel Baillie, grand-daughter by her father of the patriot Robert Baillie of Jerviswood, unjustly put to death in 1684, and by her mother 475|1723.| of the eminent statesman Patrick Hume, Earl of Marchmont; but after four years of unhappy life, the lady had been separated from him in 1714, after which time she lived for a long series of years in her father’s family, in the enjoyment of universal esteem and respect. Sir Alexander was led by his ardent speculative mind into a series of projects which left him in the middle of life a broken man, and an object of pity to the public. His case is the more deplorable, that many of his ideas were founded upon a just conception of the wants and the capabilities of his country, and only required means and favourable circumstances to have been carried out to his own and the general advantage.
At this date, he bought a great peninsula of Argyleshire territory, named Ardnamurchan, which he desired, by mining and improved methods of agriculture and social economy, to make a model for the redemption of the entire kingdom from barbarism, sloth, and poverty. He believed the mountains throughout much of the West Highlands and Hebrides to be crossed by mineral veins of great value, and that it was possible from these to realise a great amount of wealth. As to improvement of the surface, it was his belief—contrary to the general impression—that the best plan was to commence a course of improvement upon the tops of the hills. He had observed traces of ancient tillage on the high grounds of Peeblesshire, and, pondering on the matter, had come to see that, the high grounds being naturally most liable to humidity, from the clouds settling upon them, it was of importance to the low grounds that the higher should be drained first. This being effected, and the surplus water led along the hillsides in trenches or canals, he would have the administration of moisture over the surface in a great measure in his own hands. What the Argyleshire and Inverness chiefs thought of such a plan amidst their semi-diluvial existence, we do not learn, but we may imagine something of it.
Sir Alexander tells us that he found his barony of twenty-four Scots miles long occupied by 1352 persons, among whom there was not one devoted to any mechanic art or trade. He tells us that, in one year, he drained a large tract of hilly and boggy ground, one-fourth part of which next year yielded him a hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of hay at fourpence per stone. He also commenced mining works, in connection with which there rose a village named New York, containing about 500 persons, many of whom were skilled English workmen. These mines, however, he afterwards leased to the York Buildings Company. He was the 476|1723.| first person who introduced any kind of trade into the district, and he assures us that, in his efforts at general improvement he spent large sums of his own patrimony. Yet, while benefiting the inhabitants in this way, he was the subject of jealousy amongst the better class of people, who regarded him as an alien, a Lowlander, and a spy upon their actions. His cattle were ham-strung or stolen, and his sheep forced over precipices. The buildings on his property were set on fire. There were even plans formed to murder him, from which it was a wonder that he escaped. Strange to say, ten years of such difficulties did not suffice to disgust him with Ardnamurchan, and he is found, first in 1732, and again in 1740, appealing to Walpole and to parliament for assistance to carry out his plans, all that he required being an abolition of the heritable jurisdictions which enslaved the lower classes to their landlords, and a flotilla of gun-boats to maintain law and order in the country.[571]
An Edinburgh newspaper notices the death, on the 18th of May 1743, of Sir Alexander Murray of Stanhope, baronet, ‘to whom may be justly applied that beautiful passage from Seneca: “Ecce spectaculum dignum, ad quod respiciat Deus! ecce par Deo dignum, vir fortis cum malâ fortunâ compositus!”’ The writer of the article on Ardnamurchan in the New Statistical Account of Scotland, states that the plough has long passed over the site of New York, and that no trace of it remains in the district, excepting in a few English names scattered among the native population.
It may be remarked as to Sir Alexander’s mining schemes in Ardnamurchan, that in a portion of the district—namely, the valley of Strontian—lead-mines have been successfully worked at intervals since his time, the proprietor occasionally realising from £1000 to £1500 a year. The mineral strontites, from which was deduced the earth strontia, was discovered here, and named from Strontian. There was a prevalent belief in the reign of George II. that many valuable minerals might be obtained amongst the Highland mountains, if there were a possibility of working them. The actual discovery of marble in a few places served to support the notion. A very prosaic poet thus alludes to the matter about 1737:
‘No more with stucco need we vessels lade,
Enough thereof has been at Kelso made.[572]
477Nor need our jamms with foreign marble shine,
There’s beauteous marble at the Craig of Boin.
Yea, Ross and Sutherland rocks of marble shew,
Which vie in whiteness with the driven snow,
And black-veined marble is in Perthshire found,
Wherewith Banffhouse is ribatted around.’
1723.
The poet adds by way of explanation: ‘Craig of Boin is a rock of marble, veined and diversified with various colours, now a part of the Earl of Findlater’s estate, but formerly belonging to Mr Ogilvie of Boin, from whom Louis XIV. of France got so much of the said marble as finished one of the finest closets in Versailles.’ ‘Sir James Ramsay of Banff, in Perthshire, after he had built his mansion-house, found out a quarry of jet-black marble, whereupon he pulled the freestone ribats out of the windows, and put marble ones in their place.’[573]
Soon after this time, we find a society in activity at Edinburgh, ‘for promoting Natural Knowledge,’ which in 1743 invited ‘noblemen, gentlemen, and others, who have discovered or may discover any unusual kinds of earths, stones, bitumens, saline or vitriolic substances, marcasites, ores of metals, and other native fossils, whose uses and properties they may not have an opportunity of inquiring into by themselves, to send sufficient samples of them, with a short account of the places where and the manner in which they are found, directed to Dr Andrew Plummer, one of the secretaries to the Philosophical Society, and the Society undertake, by some of their number, to make the proper trials at their own charge, for discovering the nature and uses of the Minerals, and to return an answer to the person by whom they were sent, if they are judged to be of any use or can be wrought to advantage.’[574]
To return to personal matters connected with the speculative baronet of Stanhope—the beauty, accomplishments, and moral graces of Lady Murray made it the more unfortunate that she should have been united to one who, with whatever merits, was of too unsteady nature to have ever made any woman happy. It is alleged that, on the second day of their wedded life, a ferocious and unsatisfiable jealousy took possession of his mind, in consequence of seeing his young wife dancing with a friend of his own named Hamilton. He could not dispossess himself of the idea that she loved another better than him. His behaviour to her 478|1723.| would have proved him to have a slight touch of insanity in his composition, even if his ill-calculated projects had not been sufficient to do so. Lady Murray was an admired and popular person in both Scottish and English society. Amongst her friends, the chief authors of the day stood high. Gay introduces her into the group of goodly dames who welcomed Pope back from Greece—that is, congratulated him on his completion of the translation of Homer. After speaking of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he says:
‘The sweet-tongued Murray near her side attends.’
He here alluded to her fascinating powers as a songstress, which she is said to have exercised with marvellous effect in singing the songs of her native land. Lady Murray wrote in her latter days a memoir of her parents, which was published in 1822, and is one of the most charming pieces of biography in the language.[575]
On the 14th of October 1721, when Lady (then Mrs) Murray was living in her father’s house in Westminster, a footman of her brother-in-law, Lord Binning, named Arthur Gray, a Scotsman, was led by an insane passion to invade her chamber in the middle of the night, armed with a drawn sword in one hand and a pistol in the other. All the rest of the family being asleep, she felt how far removed she was from help and protection, and therefore parleyed with the man in the gentlest terms she could use, to induce him to leave her room; but half an hour was thus spent in vain. At length, watching an opportunity, she pushed him against the wall, seized his pistol with one hand, and with another rang the bell. Gray then ran off. He was tried for the offence, and condemned to death, but reprieved. The affair made of course a great deal of noise, and was variously regarded, according to the feelings of individuals. All persons, good and amiable, like Mrs Murray herself, sympathised with her in the distress and agitation which it gave her, and admired the courage and presence of mind she had displayed. The poor outcast poet Boyse represented this generous view of the case in the verses To Serena, which he wrote in Mrs Murray’s honour:
‘’Twas night, when mortals to repose incline,
And none but demons could intrude on thine,
When wild desire durst thy soft peace invade,
And stood insulting at thy spotless bed.
479Urged all that rage or passion could inspire,
Death armed the wretch’s hand, his breast was fire.
You more than Briton saw the dreadful scene,
Nor lost the guard that always watched within,’ &c.[576]
1723.
A different class of feelings was represented by Mrs Murray’s friend, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who wrote a ballad on the occasion, full of levity and something worse, which may be found in the work quoted below.[577] This jeu d’esprit Mrs Murray resented in a manner which was felt to be unpleasant by Lady Mary, who with difficulty obtained a reconciliation through the intercession of her sister, the Countess of Mar.[578]
May 9.
An Edinburgh newspaper of this date makes an announcement of a very homely and simple kind, but from which one may nevertheless draw a few inferences illustrative of the age. It is ‘to give notice, that there is a fine bullock to the value of £20 sterling to be killed at Dalkeith the 14th of May, and to be exposed to sale the 16th instant; and whoever has a mind for any of the said bullock, let them repair to the fleshmarket of Dalkeith against the hours of nine and ten o’clock in the morning, on the said 16th day of May, where they shall be kindly entertained by the owners of the said ox: likewise you shall have him more reasonable in proportion than any beef was sold in Scotland this year of God. For your encouragement, you shall have his principal pieces, such as his back-sayes, his fore-sayes, breasts, runners, flanks, hook-bones, marrow-bones, collop-pieces, and rump-pieces, all at 4s. Scots per pound, and his other pieces at 3s. per pound; or, if you please to buy it by the lump without weighing, they shall be welcome. The said ox is two ells and one inch high; in length from the root of the ear to his hip-bone, two yards three quarters; it is calculated by all tradesmen that ever did see him, that he will have ten stone-weight of tallow in his belly. He is one of the same country breed, bought by George Lamb, drover in Greenlaw, from the Right Honourable Lord Hopetoun in the year 1721. There is none in this age ever did see any in this place of Britain like him; I doubt if any such as him be, or to be equalised in England at this day. He has been fed this two years, and he is only six years old just now.’[579]
1723. Aug.
480Mr Wodrow was never long without some perilous affair to grieve over. ‘We have,’ says he at this date, ‘lamentable accounts of the growth of Episcopal Jacobite meeting-houses in the north, especially in Angus. The Commission [of the General Assembly] has sent up an address about them.’[580]
In the summer of the previous year, a chapel for the use of those in communion with the Church of England according to law, was opened at the foot of Blackfriars’ Wynd, in Edinburgh, with ‘an altar and pulpit handsomely adorned.’ The newspapers of the day inform us—‘Some impious persons, in contempt of all laws human and divine, have demolished several of the glass-windows; but it’s hoped that care will be taken to prevent such scandalous abuses in time coming.’[581]
The summer of this year was remarked to be unusually dry and sultry, with little wind. The air seemed stagnant, and the water unwholesome. Vast abundance of flies resulted, and a bloody flux became prevalent. ‘In one quarter of the parish [of Eastwood, in Renfrewshire],’ says Wodrow, ‘I saw nineteen sick persons in one day [August 23], and all of them save one of the flux.’ ‘I have never seen so much sickness in Eastwood for twenty years.’[582]
Nov. 7.
A symptom of the gradual softening away of the sombre habits of the people was exhibited in the earlier part of this year, in the commencement of what was called the Assembly in Edinburgh, by which was meant an arrangement for a weekly meeting of the younger people of both sexes, for the purpose of dancing. The adventure was at first on a very modest scale, and the place of meeting—‘in the great hall in Patrick Steil’s Close’—might be considered as obscure.[583] The people who patronised it were chiefly of those at once Tories in politics and Episcopalians in religion, 481|1723.| who, all through the last century, stood in opposition to the general feelings and habits of their countrymen. They were doubtless well satisfied of the legitimate and even laudable character of their design; yet it appears they felt themselves put on the defensive before the public, and were not a little solicitous to give their project a fair appearance. It was loudly proclaimed that the improvement of manners, the imparting of a ‘genteel behaviour,’ was in view; the utility of healthful exercise was insinuated; and a great point was made of the balances to be handed to the poor, for whose benefit no regulated charitable institution as yet existed. Great care was also professedly taken to insure perfect propriety on the part of the company. The ball opened at four in the afternoon, and was rigorously closed at eleven. Without tickets, at half-a-crown each, there could be no admission. Discreet matrons held indisputable sovereignty over the scene, before whom no vice could dare to shew its face.
The Assembly, of course, met with opposition from the square-toed part of society. ‘Some of the ministers published their warnings and admonitions against promiscuous dancing, and in one of their printed papers, which was cried about the streets, it was said that the devils were particularly busy upon such occasions.’[584] A paper pellet was launched, under the title of A Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to his Friend in the City, with an Answer thereto, concerning the New Assembly; from which we learn that there were serious apprehensions, not only that these weekly meetings would introduce effeminate habits amongst the nobility and gentry, preventing them from serving their country in ‘the useful arts and sciences,’ but that they would encourage vice and prodigality, and thus prove ‘scandalous to religion, and of dangerous consequence to human society.’ The gentleman of the city was particularly distressed in remarking, that ‘the ordinary time spent in public worship each Lord’s Day comes short of the seven hours spent in the Assembly.’ He remarked, moreover, that Edinburgh was a place to which young men were sent for their education, and also to learn ‘merchandising’ and mechanical employments. These young persons would now be liable to be diverted from their proper pursuits in order to study how best to dress themselves for the Assembly, and how in that scene of levity they might best make favour with the fair. After attending there, they would most likely go to taverns. In 482|1723.| short, they would be thoroughly depraved, and the objects of their parents in sending them to town entirely frustrated.
The institution was viewed with especial horror by the more stern professors of Presbyterianism, as folly appears from a book of Patrick Walker, written soon after, in which he reviews the vanities of the age generally. ‘Some years ago,’ he says, ‘we had a profane, obscene meeting, called the Horn Order;[585] and now we have got a new assembly and public meeting called Love for Love ... all nurseries of profanity and vanity, and excitements to base lusts; so that it is a shame to speak of these things that are said and done amongst them. Some years ago, our women deformed their heads with cock-ups’ [‘some of them half a yard high, set with wires’]; ‘and now they deform their bodies with farthingales nine yards about; some of them in three stories, very unbecoming women professing godliness.... If we would allow ourselves to think or consider, we need not be so vain or look so high, being born heirs of wrath, and our bodies to go to a consuming stinking grave ... and considering the end of our clothing and how we came by them, to cover our nakedness and for warmness to our bodies, and that the sheep’s old clothes are our new.’
Patrick fairly wondered how any one that ever knew what it was to bow a knee in prayer, ‘durst crook a hough to fyke and fling at a piper’s and fiddler’s springs. I bless the Lord,’ says he, ‘that so ordered my lot in my dancing-days, that made the fear of the bloody rope and bullets to my neck and head, the pain of boots, thumbikens, and irons, cold and hunger, wetness and weariness, to stop the lightness of my head and the wantonness of my feet.’ He felt bound to denounce dancing as a ‘common evil,’ especially among young professors, and he was peculiarly indignant at there being a dancing tune called the Cameronian March, which he conceived to be a mockery of the worthy name of Richard Cameron. In Patrick’s view, however, dancing was 483|1723.| but a symptom of a general departure from the grave, correct habits of former times. ‘In our speech,’ says he, ‘our Scripture and old Scots names are gone out of request; instead of Father and Mother, Mamma and Papa, training children to speak nonsense, and what they do not understand.’ He likewise complains of ‘a scandalous omission of the worship of God in families ... abounding amongst us in Edinburgh, the most part singing only a verse of a psalm and reading a chapter; on the Sabbath evening some pray and many not, and no more till the next Sabbath evening.’ The open profanation of the Lord’s Day he saw to be more and more abounding in Scotland. ‘The throng streets, particularly fields, milk-houses, ale-houses in and about sinful Edinburgh, is a sad evidence of this; many going to the fields before sermons, and after sermons multitudes go to their walks.’ He states that ‘three in one parish in 1716, and nine together in a neighbour parish in 1717, all of them professors, went to the cornfields in these Sabbath mornings, and did shear so many sheaves of corn.’
The poet Allan Ramsay, who maintained a Horatian code of gaiety and enjoyment in the midst of puritanic soberness, strongly took part with the Assembly, and addressed its fair adherents in a poem which, with its prose dedication, has supplied us with some of the above facts. Allan may have had his heart in his theme, but little is to be said for the eloquence of his verses; nor were some of his views as to the pleasures of the Assembly at all calculated to do away with the prejudices of its opponents. We are told, however, that both in the case of the Assembly and that of the Playhouse, hereafter to be noticed, ‘the ministers lost ground, to their great mortification, for the most part of the ladies turned rebels to their remonstrances.’[586]
Two young men destined to be remembered by their country were in the habit of attending the Assembly: one of them a hard-headed, yet speculative genius, rising at the bar; the other a philandering, sentimental being, absorbed in poetry and Jacobitism; their names Henry Home of Kames and William Hamilton of Bangour; at this time, living in bonds of strongest friendship. Hamilton one day addressed Home ‘in the Assembly,’ thus:
‘While, crowned with radiant charms divine,
Unnumbered beauties round thee shine;
When Erskine leads her happy man,
And Johnston shakes the fluttering fan;
484When beauteous Pringle shines confest,
And gently heaves her swelling breast,
Her raptured partner still at gaze,
Pursuing through each winding maze;
Say, youth, and canst thou keep secure
Thy heart from conquering beauty’s power?
· · · · ·
For me, my happier lot decrees
The joys of love that constant please....
My Hume, my beauteous Hume, constrains
My heart in voluntary chains....
Has she not all the charms that lie
In Gordon’s blush and Lockhart’s eye;
The down of lovely Haya’s hair,
Killochia’s shape or Cockburn’s air?’...
1723.
This affords us some idea of the beauties who gave its first attractions to the Assembly.
Nov. 9.
As a symptom of a good tendency, it is pleasant to notice at this date the establishment of a Society for Improving in the Knowledge of Agriculture, which proposed to hold quarterly general meetings in Edinburgh. The Marquis of Lothian, the Earl of Kinnoull, Lord Elibank, John Campbell, Esq., Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Sir George Dunbar of Mochrum, Sir Alexander Hope of Kerse, Mr Lumsden of Innergellie, Mr John Murray, one of the Clerks of Session, and Ronald Campbell of Balerno, W.S., are enumerated as amongst the constituent members.[587] The Society in a short time comprehended three hundred of the principal landholders of Scotland. The centre and animating spirit of the fraternity is understood to have been a young Galloway gentleman, Robert Maxwell of Arkland, who about this time took a lease of the farm of Clifton-hall, near Edinburgh, and was there disposed to make experiments in improved husbandry.
The Improvers, as they were called, from the very first shewed a spirit of activity. In September 1724, we hear of them as being about to publish a book upon the fallowing of ground, the method of ordering ground for grass-seeds, the winning and cleaning of flax, and rules for bleaching linen cloth. At the same time, they patriotically entered into a resolution to discourage the use of smuggled foreign spirits by their personal example, and to use means for promoting the manufacture of spirits from native products.[588]
1723.
485A few of their doings appear to us in a somewhat ludicrous light. For example—in July 1732, they figure in a tradesman’s advertisement of Punch Brandy, as certifying it to be ‘a very nice and exact composition,’ after ‘trials of it both in drams and punch.’
Two years later, it goes equally out of its way, but with better excuse, in recommending the woollen cloths made by Andrew Gardner, merchant in Edinburgh, and Andrew Ross, clothier in Musselburgh, as ‘sufficient cloths’ from five to fifteen shillings a yard; the encouraging of which will tend to advance a branch of native industry, and prevent the pernicious exportation of wool.
Nevertheless, there is all fair reason to believe that the Improvers were really worthy of their name. A volume of their Transactions, which Maxwell edited in 1743, enables us to judge of the general scope of their efforts. Meeting once a fortnight at a house near Hope Park, they received queries from individuals throughout the country on agricultural subjects, took these into consideration, and prepared answers. Fallowing, manuring, enclosing, how to treat different kinds of soils, the merits of the Lucerne and St Foin grasses, were the chief subjects discussed; and it must be acknowledged that their transactions bear a general air of judgment and good sense, in addition to a most earnest desire to make two blades grow where one grew before, and so increase the general wealth of the country.
The president for a number of years was Thomas Hope of Rankeillor, a man who deserves to be better remembered than he is. He took, in 1722, a long lease of a marshy meadow to the south of Edinburgh, drained it, and made it into a fine park with shady walks for the recreation of the citizens. He had travelled in England, France, and Holland, to pick up hints for the improvement of agriculture, and he was indefatigable in his efforts to get these introduced at home. It was somewhere in prospect of his park that the Society held its meetings. His relative, the contemporaneous Earl of Hopetoun, the Earl of Stair, the Earl of Ilay, Lord Cathcart, Lord Drummore, Sir John Dalrymple of Cousland, and Mr Cockburn of Ormiston, were other special zealots in the business of the Society, and whose names figure honourably in its transactions. It is particularly remembered, to the honour of the Earl of Stair, that he was the first to raise turnips in the open fields, and so laid the foundation of the most important branch of the store-husbandry of modern times.
1723. Dec.
486When cattle were stolen in the Highlands, one of the means commonly taken for their recovery was to send an emissary into the supposed country of the thief, and offer a reward for his discovery. This was known among the Highlanders as tascal-money, and held in general abhorrence; yet it was sometimes effectual for its purpose.
The Camerons, living at issue with the government, had many disorderly men among them, and tascal-money became accordingly with them a peculiar abomination. To so great a height did this run, that a large portion of the clan voluntarily took oath to each other, over a drawn dirk, according to their custom, that they would never receive any such reward; otherwise might the weapon be employed in depriving them of their lives.
A creagh had taken place, and one of the Camerons was strongly suspected of having given information and taken the unclean thing. A few of his companions consequently called at his house one evening, and, pretending to have some business with him, took him out from his wife and family to a place at such distance as to be out of hearing, where they coolly deprived him of his life. The story is only related in the pages of Burt;[589] but there is too good reason to believe in its verity. The reporter adds, that for the same offence, another was made away with, and never more heard of.
1724. Jan.
A more gay and easy style of ideas was everywhere creeping in, to replace the stern and sombre manners of former less happy times. The ever-watchful Mr Wodrow observed the process going on even in the comparatively serious city of Glasgow. He remarks at this time how the young men of that city are less religiously educated than formerly, and how, going abroad in mercantile capacities, they come back with the loose habits of other countries. At the university, the students were beginning to evince a tendency to freedom of thought, and the statement of Trinitarian doctrines by the professors sometimes excited amongst them appearances of dissent and of derision. In the city where there had been a few years back seventy-two regular meetings for prayer, there were now four, while clubs for debating on miscellaneous, and often irreverent questions, were coming into vogue. The discipline of the church was beginning to be less regarded; delinquents receive countenance from society; women of improper 487|1724.| character were occasionally seen on the open street! It seemed to Mr Wodrow that some desolating stroke was impending over the western city. Indeed, they had already lost twenty thousand pounds through the Custom-house difficulties regarding tobacco. ‘I wish it may be sanctified to them.’
The worthy minister of Eastwood received soon after a small piece of comforting information from Orkney. A minister in that archipelago, being one Saturday detained from crossing a ferry to preach next day, was induced to break the Sabbath in order to fulfil his engagement, for which, as ‘scandalous,’ the presbytery processed him. It ‘shews they are stricter there in discipline than we are.’ On the other hand, the College lads at Glasgow, excited by the process of the presbytery and synod against the liberal Professor Simson, went the length of writing a play taking off the city clergy. ‘Matters are come to a sad pass when people begin openly to mock and ridicule gospel ministers; that strikes at the root of all religion!’
Mr Wodrow’s report about the state of religion in the army is contradictory. On one page, we hear a lamentation for some serious Christian officers who had left no successors; on another, there is rejoicing over several still living, of the highest religious practice, as Colonel Blackader, Colonel Erskine, Lieut.-colonel Cunninghame, and Major Gardiner of ‘Stair’s Gray Horse.’ These were all of them men of the strictest morals, and who gave much of their time to religious exercises, Gardiner spending four hours every morning in ‘secret religion.’ Regarding the conversion of this last gentleman, whose fate it was to die on the field of Prestonpans, and to have his life written by Doddridge, Wodrow rather unexpectedly fails to give any trace of the strange tale told by his biographer regarding his conversion, remarking, on the contrary, that the change wrought on him a few years ago was ‘gradual and insensible.’
Jan. 29.
The treatment of a bad class of insolvents at this period seems to have been considerably different from anything of the kind now in fashion. On this day, according to an Edinburgh newspaper, ‘one George Cowan, a Glasgow merchant, stood in the pillory here, with this inscription on his breast: George Cowan, a notorious fraudulent bankrupt.’
Feb.
A Society for cultivating historical literature was established in Edinburgh, though not destined to make any great or permanent 488|1724.| mark on the age. It took its rise among men of Whig professions, and, perhaps, its having party objects in view was mainly what forbade it to acquire stability or perfect any considerable work. At its head is found a man of no small merit as an editor of historical muniments, James Anderson. It included the names of the Rev. George Logan, afterwards noted for his controversies with Ruddiman; Charles M‘Ky, professor of history in the Edinburgh University; and two or three other persons of less note.[590] Mr Wodrow, whose laborious History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland had now been a couple of years before the world, was invited to join. The first business before this Society was to consider what could be done towards a new edition of the works of George Buchanan. These had been published in goodly form by Robert Freebairn in 1715—a credit to the Scottish press in externals, and in the learning of the editor, Thomas Ruddiman; but the Whigs had to regret that the annotations were in a strain sadly out of harmony with that of a democratic author; and hence their desire to see another edition. The Society was now holding meetings once a fortnight for the preparation of such a work, and were even disposed to ask that an edition contemplated in Holland should be delayed till theirs came out, in order that their views should obtain additional circulation;[591] yet it never came to perfection, and the curtain of oblivion soon after falls upon the Historical Society.
Mar.
Gordon of Glenbucket had been invested by the Duke of Gordon in some lands in Badenoch by virtue of a wadset.[592] The tenants, Macphersons, felt aggrieved at having a new landlord put over them, and refused to pay any rent. Glenbucket consequently raised a process at law for their ejection, a measure which was then as much calculated to engender murderous feelings in Scotland, as it has since been in Ireland.
Five or six of them, young fellows, the sons of gentlemen, including Alexander Macpherson, son of Breakachie; Andrew Macpherson, son of Benchar; and John Macpherson, nephew of Killihuntly, came one evening to Glenbucket’s house, which they entered as seeming friends. He was sickly and under the influence of medicine, and was sitting on his low-framed bedstead, preparing to go to rest. They told him they had come to express their regret for the dispute which had happened—they were now resolved 489|1724.| to acknowledge him as their landlord, and pay him rent—and they had only to entreat that he would withdraw from the legal proceedings he had entered upon. While addressing him in this manner, they gradually drew close to him, in order to prevent him from defending himself against their contemplated onslaught, for they knew his courage and vigour, and that he was not far from his arms. They then suddenly fell upon him with their dirks, and, having him for the moment at advantage, they gave him many wounds, though none that were deadly. He contrived, amidst the bustle, to lay hold of his broadsword, which lay on the tester of his bed; and thus armed, he soon drove his assassins from the house. Burt, who relates this incident,[593] remarks, with just surprise, that it took place within sight of the barrack at Ruthven.[594]
The young men above named, being believed to be the perpetrators of this crime, were soon after outlawed for failing to attend the summons of the Court of Justiciary. They were so far under terror of the law, that they found it necessary to ‘take to the bent;’ but they nevertheless continued with arms in their hands, and, in company with others who had joined them, lived tolerably well by spulyie committed on the Duke of Gordon’s tenants in Badenoch.
In November 1725, General Wade is found sending a circular to the officers commanding the six Highland companies, ordering them, in compliance with a request from the duke, to use diligence in discovering and taking these outlaws, and any who might harbour them, in order to their being brought to justice. This effort, however, seems to have been attended with no good effect; and in the ensuing July, the duke wrote to the general, expressing his ‘free consent that application be made for taking off the sentence of fugitation’ against six associates of the assassins—namely, 490|1724.| John Macpherson in Bellachroan; Elias Macpherson in Coraldie; Alexander Macpherson, nephew to Killihuntly; William Macpherson, son to Essick; Donald Macpherson, son to John Oig Macpherson in Muccoul; and Lachlan Macpherson of Laggan, provided they delivered up their arms, and promised to live as obedient subjects to King George in future. His Grace at the same time expressed his opinion, that it was ‘absolutely necessary for the peace of Badenoch’ that the three principals in the attack on Glenbucket should be brought to justice. The general accordingly ordered fresh and vigorous efforts to be made for the apprehension of these persons.[595] We learn from Burt that they were ultimately forced to take refuge in foreign countries.
Apr. 8.
The people of Edinburgh were regaled with the amusing spectacle of a bank beat through the city, by permission of King George, for recruits to the king of Prussia’s regiment of ultra-tall grenadiers. Two guineas of earnest-money were administered. A local chronicler assures his readers, that ‘those listed are men of such proper size and good countenances, as we need not be ashamed of them in foreign services.’[596] A recruiting for the same regiment is noticed in Edinburgh four years later.
Apr. 10.
The Rev. Mr J. Anderson, in a letter of this date, gives Mr Wodrow an account of a dumb gentleman, a Mr Gordon, who attracted great attention on account of the knowledge he appeared to have of things not patent to ordinary observation, and with which he had no visible means of becoming acquainted. The powers of clairvoyance occasionally attributed in old times to dumb persons have already been adverted to. Gordon, who was a man of respectable connections, and seventy years of age, a widower with three grown children, and supported chiefly by going about among his friends, had thoroughly excited the wonder of Mr Anderson.
A lady, missing some brandy, asked Mr Gordon who had taken it; ‘upon which he went to the kitchen, and brought up one of the maid-servants, to whom, before her lady, he signed that she had stolen the keys of the cellar and taken it away ... the servant was forced to own all.’
On another occasion, ‘a gauger coming in, whom he had never 491|1724.| seen before, he signed before the company present what was his business; that he had been a soldier, and how long he had been a gauger in this country, and how long in Fife, and that he had once been suspended, and again reponed, with several other particulars, which astonished the man, who owned all to be truth.’
‘A child of seven years of age engaging one of the company to play with pins at Heads and Points, the person soon got all his pins, the child having no skill to hide them. The lady, the mother of the child, told the person in jest she would win back the child’s pins; and, Gordon drawing near, he still directed her how to lay when the other person was hiding, and she never failed to win till all were got back.... When he gets money from ministers, he very oft signs whether they give it out of their own pocket or out of the poor’s box.... To a minister’s family here he signed, when he came to the house, where he was, and sometimes what he was doing—particularly at a certain hour, if he was shaving; which, upon the minister’s return, he owned to be true.’
Some, adds Mr Anderson, ‘think he has converse with a familiar spirit; and it’s certain that dumb people have frequently been their tools.’[597]
May.
There was profound peace, and the seasons for twelve years past had been favourable; yet we hear at this time of a general poverty in the land, and that, too, from a reporter in the neighbourhood of Glasgow, where, if anywhere, there had been some fruitful industry in consequence of the Union. Mr Wodrow’s statements are, indeed, to be taken with some caution, as his views of national wellbeing are apt to be distorted by his fears regarding changes of religious feeling and practice. Still, the picture he draws must have involved some, though not the whole truth.
He tells that under this peace ‘we are growing much worse. The gentry and nobility are either discontent or Jacobite, or profane; and the people are turning loose, worldly, and very disaffected. The poverty and debts of many are increasing, and I cannot see how it can be otherwise. There are no ways to bring specie into this country. Trade is much failed [the tobacco-trade of the Clyde had temporarily declined under the malignant efforts of the English ports]. Any trade we have is of that kind that takes money from among us, and brings in French brandy, Irish meal [oatmeal was but fourpence a peck], tea, &c. Unless it be 492|1724.| a few coals from the west [the coal-field of Ayr and Renfrewshires], and some black-cattle from the south [Galloway], and many of these are not our breed, but Irish, I see no branch of our business that brings in any money. The prodigious run of our nobility and gentry to England, their wintering there, and educating their children there ... takes away a vast deal of money every year. It’s plain we are overstocked with people, considering their idleness, and that makes the consumpt very great;’ which ‘will infallibly at length impoverish us. To say nothing of the vast losses many have sustained by the South Sea, York Buildings, our Fishing Company, and other bubbles. The Lord, for our sins, is angry, and frowns upon us, in outwards [i. e., outward circumstances].’[598]
In the district of Galloway (Kirkcudbright and Wigtonshires), where the basis of the population is Celtic, the idleness and consequent poverty of the people was peculiarly great. There was a prodigious number of small tenantry, of very indolent character, and who were accustomed to ‘run out’ or exhaust their land to the last extremity, cropping it two years for one of lea, of course without manure, and being at the same time generally several years behind in their rents. It was a state of things very like what our own advanced age has been fated strangely to see prevalent over large tracts of Ireland and of the Highlands of Scotland—a fearful misapplication and misplacement of human nature, with frightful natural consequences in chronic misery and disorganisation. The landlords, anxious to introduce a better system, began to subdivide and enclose their lands, in order to stock them with black-cattle, and to eject tenants hopelessly sunk in idleness and poverty.
Among those ejected on the estates of Gordon of Earlstoun and the Viscountess Kenmure, were two farmers of better means, whose only fault was that they would not engage for the solvency of their sub-tenantry; and these two now banded together to support each other in keeping possession of their holdings. Others readily came into this covenant. A common sense of suffering, if not wrong, pervading the country, raised up large bands of the miserable people, who, deeming the enclosures a symbol of the antagonist system, began to pull these down wherever they came. ‘Their manner was to appoint a meeting on Tuesday, and continue together till Thursday, and then separate. They prepared 493|1724.| gavelochs [levers] and other instruments, and did their work most dexterously. Herds and young boys first turned over the head and loose stones; then the women, with the hand and shoulders, turned down the dike; the men came last, and turned up the foundation.’ A band of thirty of the Levellers, as they were ominously called, went to Kirkcudbright, and there published a manifesto, declaring the government of the country to be now in the hands of the tenantry, and ordering all who had any debates to come to them and get them determined.
The gentlemen of the district, irritated, and to some extent alarmed, called in a military force under Lord Crichton and a French Protestant refugee officer, Major Du Carry, to preserve the peace. The lairds of Heron and Murdoch, and Gordon of Earlstoun, were for strong measures; Murray of Broughton and Colonel Maxwell inclined to leniency and persuasion. Seven or eight of the ringleaders being taken up, a sort of fiery cross went through the country on the ensuing day, though a Sunday, ordering the people to assemble at three points for their defence; and a stand was actually made by about thirty against the attack of the troops. One of the gentlemen of the district had a horse wounded under him by a rioter. It seems to have been a fierce and determined encounter on the part of the Levellers; but it ended, as such encounters always end, in the defeat of the insurgent party, of whom sixteen were taken prisoners. As these were being carried away, a mob of women, strong in their weakness and their misery, assailed the soldiers, and one sprang like a wildcat upon a trooper, but only to be trampled under his horse. The soldiers succeeded in lodging their prisoners in Kirkcudbright tolbooth. At the trials which ensued, ‘those who had any funds were fined; some were banished to the plantations; others were imprisoned. A respectable man, of the name of M‘Laherty, who lived in Balmaghie parish ... on his being brought to trial, one of the justices admired a handsome Galloway which he rode, and the justice told him, if he would give him the Galloway, he would effect his acquittal, which he accordingly did.’[599]
These severities brought the levelling system to a close in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright; it was kept up for some time later in Wigtonshire, but gradually died away there also. The country was left in the hands of the gentry and soldiery, without any 494|1724.| effectual remedy being applied to the evils out of which the dike-breaking had sprung. Herds of miserable people continued going about Galloway, a subject of painful but fruitless compassion to the rest of their countrymen.[600]
A venerable gentleman, just quoted, was able, in 1811, to give the following striking picture of the general manner of living of the Galloway rural population of 1724. ‘The tenants, in general,’ he says, ‘lived very meanly on kail, groats, milk, gradden grinded in querns turned by the hand, and the grain dried in a pot, together with a crock ewe[601] now and then about Martinmas. They were clothed very plainly, and their habitations were most uncomfortable. Their general wear was of cloth, made of waulked plaiding, black and white wool mixed, very coarse, and the cloth rarely dyed. Their hose were made of white plaiding cloth, sewed together, with single-soled shoes, and a black or blue bonnet, none having hats but the lairds, who thought themselves very well dressed for going to church on Sunday with a black kelt-coat of their wife’s making.... The distresses and poverty felt in the country during these times ... continued till about the year 1735. In 1725, potatoes were first introduced into the stewartry [of Kirkcudbright] by William Hyland, from Ireland,[602] who carried them on horses’ backs to Edinburgh, where he sold them by pounds and ounces. During these times, when potatoes were not generally raised in the country, there was for the most part a great scarcity of food, bordering on famine; for in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright and county of Dumfries, there was not as much victual produced as was necessary for supplying the inhabitants; and the chief part of what was required for that purpose was brought from the sand-beds of Esk in tumbling cars, on the Wednesdays, to Dumfries; and when the waters were high by reason of spates—there being no bridges—so that these cars could not come with the meal, I have seen the tradesmen’s wives, in the streets of Dumfries, crying because there was none to be got. At that period there was only one baker in Dumfries, and he made bawbee baps of coarse flour, chiefly bran, which he occasionally carried in creels to the fairs of Urr and Kirkpatrick. The produce of the country in general was gray corn, and you might have travelled from Dumfries to Kirkcudbright, which is twenty-seven miles, without seeing any other grain, except in a gentleman’s 495|1724.| croft, which, in general, produced bear or bigg for one-third part, another third in white oats, and the remaining third in gray oats. At that period there was no wheat raised in the country: what was used was brought from Teviot; and it was believed that the soil would not produce wheat.... Cattle were very low. I remember being present at the Bridge-end of Dumfries in 1736, when Anthony M‘Kie, of Netherlaw, sold five score of five-year-old Galloway cattle in good condition to an Englishman at £2, 12s. 6d. each; and old Robert Halliday, who was tenant of a great part of the Preston estate, told me that he reckoned he could graze his cattle on his farms for 2s. 6d. a head—that is to say, his rent corresponded to that sum.’[603]
July 6.
Allan Ramsay, in some jocular verses, compliments Mr David Drummond, advocate, for the victory he this day gained as an archer, in ‘shooting for the bowl’ at Musselburgh. The old gentleman had gained the prize of the silver arrow exactly fifty years before. These trivial facts suggest the existence of what was called a Royal Company of Archers all through the reigns of Anne and the first George, a sodality composed almost exclusively of the Jacobite aristocracy, and, in fact, a sort of masked muster for the cause of the exiled Stuart. Besides private convivial meetings, where doubtless much enigmatical affection for the old line of princes found vent, there was an annual meeting for a shooting-match, attended by a showy procession through the streets of Edinburgh, in order to impress the public with an idea of their numbers, and the rank and influence of the members. They had their captain-general, usually a nobleman of the highest rank; their first and second lieutenant-generals, their adjutant, and other officers; their colours, music, and uniforms; in short, a pretty effective military organisation and appearance. The dress, which they innocently believed to be after the ancient Roman model, was of tartan trimmed with green silk fringe, with a blue bonnet trimmed with green and white ribbons, and the badge of St Andrew in the front; their bows and swords hung with green and white ribbons; the officers being further distinguished by having the dress laid over with silver lace. The cavalier spirit of Allan Ramsay glowed at seeing these elegant specimens of the Aristoi of Scotland engaged at butts and rovers, and often poured itself forth in verses to their praise. Pitcairn, 496|1724.| Sir William Bennet of Grubbet, and Sir William Scott of Thirlstain, were equally ready to celebrate in Latin sapphics their contentions for the bowl and silver arrow at Musselburgh—drolly translated Conchipolis in their verses. There was a constant and obvious wish on the part of the society to look as ‘braid’[604] as possible, and so let the world slily understand how many men of mark were in their hearts favourable to the still hoped for restoration.
The Royal Company had a particularly ostentatious parade in Edinburgh on the 10th of July 1732. Having assembled in the Parliament Square, a party of thirty-six was despatched under the Earl of Wemyss to the Duke of Hamilton’s lodging in Holyrood, to bring up the standard, on which, besides other insignia, was depicted the national lion ramping in gold, with the significant motto, ‘Pro patria dulce periculum.’ They then marched through the city to the Links in the following order, as described by a sympathising contemporary record:
‘The Duke of Hamilton, captain-general, preceded by the Lord Bruce on horseback, with fine Turkish furniture, who acted as major-general in absence of the Earl of Crawford; next, the music, consisting of trumpets, hautboys, cors-de-chasse, alternately playing the proper march of the company, and answered by nine drums (all in the company’s livery), and they again by the music-bells. Mr David Drummond, advocate, president of the council; Sir Archibald Primrose of Dunipace, and William Sinclair of Roslin, brigadiers, at the head of the first brigade. My Lord Viscount Oxford, brigadier, marched up the second brigade; my Lord Kinnaird, brigadier, the third; George Lockhart of Carnwath, brigadier, the fourth. The Earl of Wigton, second lieutenant-general, before the colours, which were carried by the Earl of Cassillis; and the Lord Rollo, supported by the Earl of Kilmarnock, and Master Thomas Lyon, brigadiers, led up the centre brigade; David Smith of Methven, brigadier, the sixth brigade; Sir Robert Stewart of Tillicultry, brigade the seventh; the eighth and last brigade by the Lord Cranston, brigadier, followed up by James Hepburn of Keith, and the Lord Gairlies, brigadiers, and closed in the rear by the Earl of Wemyss, first lieutenant-general; Colonel John Stewart, brother to Grantully, and Arthur Forbes of Pittencrief, acting as adjutants-general, on horseback, on the wings of the several brigades.
1724.
497‘In front of all marched the several decked horses, and other equipage, &c., of the several officers, which, being very rich and magnificent, made a very fine show; and after them, the silver arrow, carried by the company’s officer.
‘There was on this occasion an infinite crowd of spectators, who came from all quarters to see this splendid appearance, and who expressed their satisfaction by loud acclamations.
‘The lord provost and magistrates saw the procession from a window, and were saluted by the several officers, as did General Wade from a balcony in the Earl of Murray’s lodgings. The governor of Damascus came likewise to see the ceremony. Betwixt one and two o’clock, the company arrived in the Links, whence, after shooting for the arrow (which was won by Mr Balfour of Forret), they marched into Leith in the same order; and after dinner, returned to the city, and saw acted the tragedy called Macbeath.’[605]
It is very sad to reflect how the Earl of Kilmarnock and some others of this noble company came to ruin a few years after by carrying the play a little too far.
July 15.
The magistrates of Edinburgh issued an edict proceeding upon a recital that disturbances have arisen, and may further arise, from gentlemen carrying firearms, and their servants wearing dirks and broadswords, in the streets, a practice ‘contrary to the rules of decency and good order;’ wherefore it was now strictly forbidden.[606] It is to be remarked that in this prohibition there is no notice taken of the swords worn by gentlemen.
July.
The danger arising to the government from having a rude people of disaffected sentiments and hardy warlike character seated in the north-west parts of Scotland, was now brought before it with sufficient urgency to cause the adoption of remedial measures. An effectual disarming act, the raising of armed companies in the pay of the government, the completion of a line of forts, and the formation of roads by which these should be accessible and the benefits of civilisation imparted to the country, were the chief means looked to for doing away with the Highland difficulty. A sensible English officer, General George Wade, was sent down to act as commander-in-chief of the troops in Scotland, and carry these measures into effect.
1724.
498If we may believe a statement which there is all reason to believe except one—the character of its author, who was no other than Simon Lord Lovat—it was high time that something was done to enforce the laws in the Highlands. In William’s reign, there had been an armed watch and a severe justiciary commission; but they had long been given up; so, after a temporary lull, things had returned to their usual course. The garrisons at Fort William, Killicummin, and Inverness proved ineffectual to restrain the system of spoliation, or to put down a robbers’ tax called black-mail [nefarious rent], which many paid in the hope of protection.
The method by which the country was brought under this tax is thus stated: ‘When the people are almost ruined by continual robberies and plunders, the leader of the band of thieves, or some friend of his, proposes that for a sum of money to be annually paid, he will press a number of men in arms to protect such a tract of ground, or as many parishes as submit to pay the contribution. When the contributions are paid, he ceases to steal, and thereby the contributors are safe. If he refuse to pay, he is immediately plundered. To colour all this villainy, those concerned in the robberies pay the tax with the rest, and all the neighbourhood must comply, or be undone.’[607] Black-mail naturally prevailed in a marked manner in fertile lowland districts adjacent to the Highlands, as Easter Ross, Moray, and the Lennox.
Directly with a view to the prevention of robberies, and the suppression of this frightful impost, the government established six companies of native soldiery, selected from clans presumedly loyal, and respectively commanded by Lord Lovat, Sir Duncan Campbell of Lochnell, Colonel Grant of Ballandalloch, Colonel Alexander Campbell of Finab, John Campbell of Carrick, and George Monro of Culcairn. The whole, consisting of four hundred and eighty men, were dressed in plain dark-coloured tartan, and hence were called the Reicudan Dhu, or Black Watch. Burt reports an allegation, that one of the commanders [Lord Lovat?] used to strip his tenants of their best plaids, wherewith to invest his men at a review. On the other hand, there were men of such birth and breeding in the corps, that they had gillies to do drudgery for them. They were posted in small parties throughout the more lawless parts of the country, and are represented as having been reasonably effective for their purpose.
1724.
499For the disarming of the disaffected clans, Wade had his six native companies and four hundred troops of the line ready at Inverness to proceed with the work in June 1725; but the riot about the malt-tax at Glasgow delayed his measures, and it was not till the 10th of August that he marched in force towards the rendezvous of the Mackenzies at Brahan Castle. The heads of the clan saw it to be necessary to obey, or to appear to obey, and also to promise that in future the rents of their chief, the forfeited Earl of Seaforth, should be paid to the state, instead of to Donald Murchison. The general on his part allowed them to understand that, very probably, if they made this submission, their chief would be pardoned and restored. One little concession they had to ask from the English general—let him spare them the humiliation of delivering their arms in the presence of the Reicudan Dhu. To this the general consented. He sent the native loyalists to guard the passes to the westward.
It must have been a solemn and interesting sight to an English officer of impressionable feelings, if such a being then existed, when the troops took up their position in front of that grand old Highland fortress, amidst scenery of the most magnificent kind, to receive the submission of a high-spirited people, who had resisted as long as resistance was possible. First came the gentlemen or duine-wassels, about fifty in number, to pay their respects to the general. Then followed in slow procession along the great avenue, the body of the clansmen, in parishes, forty or fifty in each, marching four and four, and bringing their arms on horses. On arriving in front of the house, they unloaded and deposited the weapons, drank the king’s health, and slowly turned away.[608] ‘The chiefs of the several tribes, and other principal gentlemen of the country, dined the same day with the general, and great civilities and mutual assurances of good offices passed on both sides. They promised the general that the rents of the estate should be punctually paid to the crown, for the use of the public, and a dutiful submission [rendered] to his majesty’s government.’[609] Weapons to the number of 784 were given in; but in reality they were only the oldest and most worn of the arms possessed by this great clan. Donald Murchison had taken 500|1724.| care previously to gather up all their best arms into some central store unknown to the government.[610]
Following this example, and partly, it is alleged, induced by little favours extended or promised by the general, the rest of the Jacobite clans, the Macdonalds, Camerons, Macleods, &c., made an appearance of surrendering their arms at various appointed stations during the autumn. The entire number of articles given in was 2685. The total expense of the collection was about £2000, and the general gives us an idea of the true state of the case, beyond what he possessed himself, when he tells us that the articles for the most part were worth little more than the price of old iron.
General Wade received submissive letters from many of the chiefs and others who had been in the insurrection of 1715, all professing anxiety for pardon, and promising a quiet life in future. There was none more submissive than one from Rob Roy, who contrived to make it appear that his treason was against his will. ‘It was my misfortune,’ says he, ‘at the time the Rebellion broke out, to be liable to legal diligence and caption, at the Duke of Montrose’s instance, for debt alleged due to him. To avoid being flung into prison, as I must certainly have been, had I followed my real inclinations in joining the king’s troops at Stirling, I was forced to take party with the adherents of the Pretender; for the country being all in arms, it was neither safe nor possible for me to stand neuter.’ Of course, this was meant by Rob as merely a civil apology for deliberate rebellion. To give it confirmation, he told the general: ‘I not only avoided acting offensively against his majesty’s forces upon all occasions, but, on the contrary, sent his Grace the Duke of Argyle all the intelligence I could from time to time, of the situation and strength of the rebels; which I hope his Grace will do me the justice to acknowledge.’ It is to be hoped that Rob was not here so dishonest as to speak the truth. There is ample reason to believe that the frank English general was imposed upon by the professions made by the Jacobite chiefs, for he reported to government that disaffection was much abated, and interested himself zealously for the pardon of several of the attainted gentlemen.
A poor woman named Margaret Dickson, an inhabitant of the parish of Inveresk, was tried under the act of 1690 for concealment 501|1724.| of pregnancy in the case of a dead child. A defence was made for her that she was a married woman, though living separate from her husband; but it was of no avail. |Sep. 2.| A broadside—which proceeds upon a strong approval of the text, that ‘the works of God are works of wonder, and his ways past finding out’—gives a minute recital of the circumstances of her execution in the Grassmarket; how the hangman did his usual office of pulling down her legs; and how the body, having hung the usual time, was taken down and put into a coffin, the cooms of which were nailed fast at the gibbet-foot. It then proceeds. ‘Being put into a cart, to transport her corpse to be interred in the churchyard of Inveresk, whither the magistrates had allowed her friends to carry her, there happened a scuffle betwixt her friends and some surgeon-apprentices and others, their accomplices, on this side of the Society Port. One, with a hammer, broke down one of the sides of the cooms of the chest; which, having given some air, and, together with the jolting of the cart, set the blood and vitals agoing. The people intrusted with transporting her body having stopped at Peffermill to take a refreshment, and left her upon a cart in the highway, two joiners, from curiosity, came from a house to view the coffin, and, to their surprise, heard a noise within. Acquainting the persons concerned, they proposed to open the other side of the cooms of the chest, which, after some opposition, was agreed to. The coom being taken off, they perceived her to draw up her limbs. One Peter Purdie, a practitioner of phlebotomy, providentially breathed a vein, from which streamed blood, which recovered her so far, that twice she said: “O dear!” Being brought to her feet, she was supported by two to a brae-side, where the blood returned to her lips and cheeks, which promised a sudden recovery. Being laid upon blankets in a corn-cart, her head and body upheld by a woman, she was driven to Musselburgh, where she remained, at the magistrates’ command, all night; had restoratives and means of sustenance given her; was visited by Mr Robert Bonally, one of the ministers of that place, who prayed over her; and next morning was laid in a bed in her brother James Dickson, weaver, his house, whither a great many flock every day to see her, and not a few gave her money. She had little appearance of recovering her health or senses next day, and cried out to let her be gone, for she was to be executed on Wednesday, but is now pretty well—only complains of a pain in her neck. She went to church on Sunday last, and heard sermon, where the people were so anxious to see her, 502|1724.| that the minister was obliged to conduct her out of the churchyard to keep her from being trodden down by the multitude. She still remains in a hopeful way of recovering strength and judgment. May this amazing dispensation of Providence be sanctioned to her, and teach all who shall hear it to act a needy dependence upon, and live to the glory of God, to whom belong the issues of life and death!’[611]
Another brief chronicler of the time informs us, that Maggie devoted the Wednesday ensuing upon that on which she was executed to solemn fasting and prayer, in gratitude for her deliverance, and had formed the resolution so to employ each recurring Wednesday during the remainder of her life.[612] It is also stated that her husband, struck with a forgiving interest in her, took her ultimately back to his house. She lived to have several children creditably born, and cried salt for many a day through the streets of Edinburgh, universally recognised and constantly pointed out to strangers as ‘Half-hangit Maggie Dickson.’
At the village of Gilmerton, four miles to the south of Edinburgh, the soft, workable character of the sandstone of the carboniferous formation, there cropping to the surface, tempted a blacksmith named George Paterson to an enterprise of so extraordinary a character, as to invest his name with distinction in both prose and rhyme. In the little garden at the end of his house, he excavated for himself a dwelling in the rock, composed of several apartments. Besides a smithy, with a fireplace or forge, there were—a dining-room, fourteen and a half feet long, seven broad, and six feet high, furnished with a bench all round, a table, and a bed-recess; a drinking-parlour, rather larger; a kitchen and bed-place for the maid; a liquor-cellar upwards of seven feet long; and a washing-house. In each apartment there was a skylight-window, and the whole were properly drained. The work cost the poor man five years of hard labour, being finished in the present year. Alexander Pennecuik, the burgess-bard of Edinburgh, furnished an inscription, which was carved on a stone at the entrance:
‘Here is a House and Shop Hewn in this Rock with my own Hands.
George Paterson.
‘Upon the earth thrives villainy and wo,
But happiness and I do dwell below;
503My hands hewed out this rock into a cell,
Wherein from din of life I safely dwell:
On Jacob’s pillow nightly lies my head,
My house when living, and my grave when dead:
Inscribe upon it when I’m dead and gone:
“I lived and died within my mother’s womb.”’
1724.
It is kept in remembrance that Paterson actually lived and practised his calling in this subterranean mansion for eleven years. Holiday-parties used to come from the neighbouring capital to see him and his singular dwelling; even judges, it is alleged, did not disdain to sit in George’s stone-parlour, and enjoy the contents of his liquor-cellar. The ground was held in feu, and the yearly duty and public burdens were forgiven him, on account of the extraordinary labour he had incurred in making himself a home.[613]
The idea of improving agricultural implements was hitherto unheard of in Scotland; but now a thrashing-machine was invented by Mr Michael Menzies, a member of the Scottish bar. On his request, the Society of Improvers sent a deputation to see it working at Roseburn, near Edinburgh; and these gentlemen reported upon it favourably.[614] I am unable to say whether it was identical with a thrashing-machine advertised in July 1735, as to be had of Andrew Good, wright in College Wynd, Edinburgh; one to thrash as much as four men, £30; one to do as much as six, £45; and so on in proportion, ‘being about £7, 10s. for each man’s labour that the machine does, which is but about the expense of a servant for one year.’ It was held forth, regarding this machine, that for the driving of one equal to four men, most water-mills would suffice, and one so working was to be seen at Dalkeith.[615]
It would appear, however, that the idea of a machine for thrashing had, after this time, completely fallen out of notice, as the one which has long been in use was, in its original form, the invention of Michael Stirling, farmer at Craighead, in the parish of Dunblane, who died in 1796, in the eighty-ninth year of his age.
‘This venerable man, when in the prime of life, had a strong propensity to every curious invention; and, after much thought 504|1724.| and study, he prepared and finished, in 1748, a machine for thrashing his corn. The axis of the thrashing-board was placed perpendicular, and was moved by an inner wheel on the same axis with an outer one that went by water. The men stood round about these boards like lint-cleaners, each man with his sheaf, and performed the work with great rapidity [at the rate of sixteen bolls of oats per diem]. Mr Stirling’s neighbours were by no means struck with the invention, but laughed at it, and called him a maggoty fellow. The wonderful powers of the machine, however, drew the attention of strangers, who came and picked up models, and so were enabled to erect others both in Scotland and England.’[616] Subsequently, Mr Meikle, at Alloa, obviated the inconvenience of the perpendicular arrangement of the axis, by laying it down in a horizontal form.
A machine for the winnowing of corn was, as far as can be ascertained, for the first time made in this island by Andrew Rodger, a farmer on the estate of Cavers in Roxburghshire, in the year 1737. It was after retiring from his farm to indulge a bent for mechanics, that he entered on this remarkable invention, and began circulating what were called Fanners throughout the country, which his descendants continued to do for many years.[617] This machine is well known to have been the subject of a religious prejudice among our more rigid sectaries, as indicated anachronously by Scott in the conversation between Mause Headrig and her mistress—‘a new-fangled machine for dighting the corn frae the chaff, thus impiously thwarting the will o’ Divine Providence by raising wind for your leddyship’s use by human art, instead of soliciting it by prayer, or patiently waiting for whatever dispensation of wind Providence was pleased to send upon the shielinghill.’[618] The ‘seceders’ are understood to have taken very strong ground in resistance to the introduction of fanners, deeming the wind as specially a thing made by God (‘he that createth the wind,’ Amos iv. 13), and therefore regarding an artificial wind as a daring and impious attempt to usurp what belonged to him alone. The author has been informed that an uncle of the late national poet, Robert Gilfillan, was extruded from a Fife congregation of this kind because of his persisting to use fanners.
1725. Jan.
505About the end of this month, the people of Orkney were thrown into some excitement by the arrival of a suspicious-looking vessel among their usually quiet islands. She professed to be a merchantman bound for Stockholm; but her twenty-two guns and crew of thirty-eight men belied the tale. In reality, she was a pirate-ship, recently taken under the care of a reckless man named Gow, or Smith, who had already made her the means of perpetrating some atrocious villainies in more southern seas. His alleged connection with Caithness by nativity, and Orkney by education, was perhaps the principal reason for his selecting this part of the world as a temporary refuge till some of his recent acts should be forgotten. His conduct, however, was marked by little prudence. He used to come ashore with armed men, and hold boisterous festivities with the islanders. He also made some attempts to enter into social relations with the gentlemen of the country. It was even said that, during his brief stay, he made some way in the affections of a young gentlewoman, who little imagined his real character. It was the more unaccountable that he lingered thus in the islands, after ten of his people, who had recently been pressed into his service, left his vessel, and made their escape in a boat—a circumstance that ought to have warned him that he could not long evade the notice of the law. In point of fact, the character of his ship and crew were known at Leith while he was still dallying with time in the taverns of Stromness.
At length, about the 20th of February, Gow left the southern and more frequented part of the Orkney group, and sailed to Calf Sound, at the north part of the island of Eday, designing to apply for fresh provisions and assistance to a gentleman residing there, who had been his school-fellow, Mr Fea, younger of Clestran. Chancing to cast anchor too near the island, the pirate found that his first duty must be to obtain the assistance of a boat to assist his men in bringing off the vessel. He sent an armed party of five under the boatswain to solicit this help from Mr Fea, who received them civilly, but immediately sent private orders to have his own boat sunk and the sails hidden. He took the party to a public-house, where he entertained them, and so adroitly did he manage matters, that ere long they were all disarmed and taken into custody. The people of the country and some custom-house officers had by this time been warned to his assistance.
Next day, a violent wind drove the vessel ashore on Calf Island, and Gow, without a boat, began to feel himself in a serious difficulty. He hung out a flag for a conference with Mr Fea, who 506|1725.| consequently sent him a letter, telling him that his only chance now was to yield himself, and give evidence against his company. The wretch offered goods to the value of a thousand pounds for merely a boat in which he could leave the coast; but Mr Fea only replied by renewing his former advice. Some conferences, attended with considerable danger to Mr Fea, took place; and Gow ultimately came ashore on Calf Island, and was secured. It is narrated that when he found himself a prisoner, he entreated to be shot before he should have to surrender his sword. His men were afterwards made prisoners without much difficulty.
Gow and his company were transported to London, and tried by the Court of Admiralty on the 27th of May. Himself and eleven others were found guilty, and condemned. There was at first some difficulty in consequence of his refusing to plead. The court, finding him refractory on this point of form, at first tried to bring him to reason by gentle means; but when these proved ineffectual, he was ordered to the press-yard, there to be pressed to death, after the old custom with those refusing to plead. His obstinacy then gave way, and his trial proceeded in due form, and he was condemned upon the same evidence as his companions. Nine were executed, of whom two—namely, Gow and his lieutenant, named Williams—were afterwards hung in chains.[619]