Sep. 5.
Donald M‘Donald, commonly called theHalkit Stirk,227had been liberated from the Edinburgh Tolbooth in December 1660, on caution being given by Donald M‘Donald, younger of Slate, to the extent of £1000 sterling, that the prisoner should present himself, when called upon, to answer anything that could be laid to his charge. It being found that the Halkit Stirk had ever since lived the life of a robber, and had committed divers slaughters, the young Laird of Slate was now called upon to render up the delinquent or forfeit his caution. The young laird accordingly brought the Halkit Stirk before the Council, and got a discharge of his bond. The robber was committed to the Tolbooth.
1671.
During this year, a great impulse seemed to be given to Quakerism both in England and Scotland. It being found, says Law, that a rejection of ordinances and the Scriptures were not taking with the people, they began to have preaching and prayer at their meetings, and to acknowledge the Bible as the rule of their life and judge of controversies. The profession was found thus to be more ‘ensnaring.’ Some men of note, and of parts and learning, such as Robert Barclay of Urie, whoafterwards wrote theApology for the Quakers, now joined the society.
In his dedication to the king, written in 1675, Mr Barclay claimed credit for his sect, not only that they meddled with no civil affairs, but that, in the times of most violent persecution, being ‘clothed in innocency, they have boldly stood to their testimony for God, without creeping into holes or corners, or once hiding themselves, as all other dissenters have done’—rather a severe taunt at the extreme Presbyterians, who had been contenders for the political supremacy of their church, and had now to comport themselves as rebels. The Presbyterians, while themselves suffering, approved of the severities against these most innocuous of all Christians; they only thought them not severe enough. Wodrow speaks of the Council as, in 1666, ‘coming to somegood resolutionsagainst Quakers,’ but complains generally of its slackness concerning ‘that dangerous sect,’ which, he says, ‘spread terribly during this reign.’
One William Napier, a seafaring man in Montrose, had turned Quaker, and other Quakers began in consequence to draw towards that place, keeping frequent meetings in Napier’s house, ‘to the great scandal of religion and disturbance of the peace and quiet of the burgh.’ On the 12th of January 1672, ‘betwixt twenty and thretty persons did convene at William Napier his house, where they had such pretendit devotion as they pleased to devise, whereupon a great tumult and confusion was like to have been made,’ and the magistrates, to settle matters as far as possible, clapped up fifteen of the congregation in the Tolbooth. On a petition from the magistrates, representing how by these doings the people were becoming ‘deboshed in their principles,’ the Council ordered that William Napier should be sent to Edinburgh, and imprisoned during pleasure in the Tolbooth there, while the rest of the prisoners should remain in durance at Montrose. In this case the Council ultimately took a lenient course. On a humble petition from Napier, representing the injury he would sustain in his business from an intended voyage being stopped, he was ordered to be set at liberty after about a fortnight’s confinement. Three of the company were ordered, on petition, to be liberated eight months after, and on the ensuing day a general order was issued for the liberation of any other Quakers that might still remain in confinement at Montrose.—P. C. R.
1671.
A general order was issued by the Council, in March 1672, to the magistrates of Aberdeen, commanding them to executethe laws against a number of the citizens who had deserted the parish churches on account of Quakerism, enjoining that these people should be strictly punished according to act of parliament—that is, fined in the proportion of a fourth of their means for the offence.
In March 1673, there were eleven men in prison at Kelso for attending a Quaker meeting; but the Council, unwilling to keep them confined till the circuit court could try them, sent the Earl of Roxburgh with a commission to judge whether they might be set at liberty or not.
The liberty of conscience which the Quakers asserted as a principle made them unscrupulous in associating with papists, and this formed one of the strongest grounds of prejudice against them. Law relates a childish story of a gentleman Quaker at Montrose being induced by his daughter to repent, and return to church, where he confessed that the chief Quakers kept up a correspondence with the chief papists and with the pope; as also that they ‘had converse with Satan.’
We are assured by Robert Law,228that while Quakerism was spreading with an alarming rapidity, there was also a startling abundance of profanity and of abominable offences. Some propensities were indulged with great licence; ‘drunkenness without any shame, men glorying in it;’ ‘dreadful oppression; high contempt of the gospel; gross idolatry; a woman in the south drinking the devil’s health and [that of] his servants; self-murder; and witchcraft and sorceries very common; all which threatened a sad stroke from God upon us.’
The woman here adverted to by Law seems to have been one Marion M‘Call, spouse to Adam Reid in Mauchline. She was tried, May 8, 1671, before the Court of Justiciary at Ayr, for ‘drinking the good health of the devil,’ and judged to be taken on the first Wednesday of June to the Market Cross of Edinburgh, ‘to be scourged by the hangman from thence to the Nether Bow, and thereafter to be brought back to the Cross again and have her tongue bored and [be] burnt on the cheek;’ further, she was not to return to the county of Ayr on pain of death.229
1671.
Law elsewhere tells of a debauch, at which a similar indecorum was committed, and which was the means of carrying off twomembers of the Scottish peerage. It was the more remarkable as occurring in January 1643, when the nation at large had certainly some most serious concerns on hand, and the general tone was earnestly religious. It is stated that the Earl of Kelly, the Lord Kerr, and David Sandilands, ‘Abercrombie’s brother,’ with other two gentlemen, being met one day, fell a carousing, and, to encourage each other in drinking, began to give healths. When they had drunk many healths, not knowing whose to give next, ‘one of them gives the devil’s health, and the rest pledges him. Sandilands that night, going down stairs, fell and broke his neck; Kelly and Kerr within a few days sickened of a fever and died; the fourth also died shortly; and the fifth, being under some remorse, lived some time.’ It may be added that ‘ane great drink,’ as it was called in a chronicle of the day, having thus carried off Lord Kerr, the titles of his father, the Earl of Roxburgh, passed by his daughter into a branch of another family, the Drummonds of Perth. This victim of the wine-cup had appeared for the Covenant at Dunse Law, but afterwards became a royalist.
1672.Feb. 26.
From the commencement of the religious troubles in 1638, the Privy Council Record gives comparatively few of those notices of new manufactures attempted in Scotland, or proposed to be introduced by strangers, for which the previous thirty years of peace were so remarkable. Amidst endless notices of religious persecution, it gives an agreeable surprise, at the date noted, to light upon an application from Philip Vander Straten, a native of Bruges, for the benefit of naturalisation and freedom of working and trafficking, while embarking a considerable sum of money in a work at Kelso ‘for dressing and refining of wool.’ The petition was at once complied with.—P. C. R.
1672.
Two years later (March 19, 1674), the commencement of a humbler and less useful branch of industry is noted. At that date, Andrew M‘Kairter represented to the Privy Council that, being a young boy at the schools of Dalmellington at the time of the Pentland insurrection in 1666, he had joined in that affair, and after its conclusion, ‘out of a childish fear did run away to Newcastle, and having there, and in London, and Holland, served ane long apprenticeship? in spinning of tobacco,’ he was now returned to his native country, and ‘hath set up the said trade at Leith.’ His desire was to make his peace with the government by signing the bond for the public peace. The Councilentertained the petition graciously, and Andrew became, we may suppose, the first practitioner of tobacco-spinning in Leith.
Apr.
At this time, and for six months previously, the small-pox raged in Glasgow. Hardly a family escaped the infection, and eight hundred deaths and upwards occurred.—Law.
Some sensation was excited by the rumour that in a ship lying at Newcastle, called theCape of Good Hopeof London, the devil had appeared in bodily shape, in the habit of a seaman, with a blue cravat about his neck, and desired the master of the ship to remove out of her; which he did not obey till sic time as she began to sink in the ocean. Then he, with his company, took his cock-boat, who were saved by another ship coming by. This was testified by the oaths of them that were in her.—Law.It is seldom that the devil is found so obliging as he seems to have been in this case.
It may serve to verify the possibility of such a rumour in the reign of Charles II., that, in March 1682, the Privy Council was informed that ‘one Margaret Dougall is imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Ayr, as alleged guilty of raising and consulting the devil;’ and an order was given that she be transported from sheriff to sheriff until brought to and placed in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, that she might be brought to a legal trial.—P. C. R.
May 27.
Aug. 22.
Joannes Michael Philo, physician, and ‘sworn operator to his majesty,’ was, on petition, allowed to erect a public stage in Edinburgh for the practice of his profession, but ‘discharged to have any rope-dancing.’—P. C. R.It was some time after stated regarding this personage, that he did erect a stage in Edinburgh, and ‘thereon has cured thretteen blind persons, several lame, and cut several cancers, and done many other notable cures, as is notourly known, and that out of mere charity.’ He was therefore invested by the Council, on petition, with a warrant to go and do likewise in all the other burghs of the kingdom, up till February next; the Council further recommending him to the magistrates of these burghs, that they may give him due help and countenance.
1672.
His stage was then taken down by the magistrates of Edinburgh, ‘before he could have time to complete many considerable cures,’ which he had had on hand. There also came to him from remote parts of the country ‘five or six poor blind people, and as manywith cancers, whose poverty will not admit the same to be done otherwise than upon the public stage, where they have their cure gratis and their entertainment in the meantime upon [the operator’s] charges.’ He therefore petitioned to have his stage re-erected in Edinburgh for a time; which was complied with.
June 12.
On the parliament sitting down to-day, under the Duke of Lauderdale as commissioner, his ‘lady, with the number of thirty or forty moe ladies, accompanies the duke to the parliament in coaches, and are set down in the Parliament House, and sat there to hear the commissioner’s speech.’—Law.‘A practice so new and extraordinary, that it raised the indignation of the people very much against her; they hating to find that aspired to by her, which none of our queens had ever attempted.’ It ‘set them to inquire into her origin and faults, and to rail against the lowness of the one, and the suspicions of the other.... This malice grew daily against her.’
The duke, at fifty-seven, and, it is said, only six weeks a widower, had married the duchess in the preceding February in London, all their friends in Edinburgh making feasts on their marriage-day, while ‘the Castle shot as many guns as on his majesty’s birthday.’ Her grace, now forty-five years of age, was in her personal qualities and history a most remarkable woman. Her wit and cleverness were something singular; ‘nor had the extraordinary beauty she possessed while she was young, ceded at the age at which she was then arrived.’ The daughter of one who had been minister of Dysart, she was Countess of Dysart in her own right, and by Sir Lionel Tollemache had had a large family, which is still represented in the peerage. There was something romantic in her union with the now all-powerful Lauderdale. He had owed to her his life, through her influence with Cromwell, and in his marriage, which was discommended by all his friends, ‘he really yielded to his gratitude.’230For the next ten years, it might be said that Lauderdale and his clever duchess were all but nominally king and queen of Scotland.