There was at this time a dearth of victual in Scotland, and it was considered to be upon the increase. The magistrates and justices of Edinburgh arranged means for selling meal in open market, though in quantities not exceeding a firlot, at twelve shillings Scots per peck. They also ordered all possessors of grain to have it thrashed out and brought to market before the 20th of May, reserving none to themselves, and forbade, |1709.| on high penalties, any one to buy up grain upon the road to market.[417]
A well-disposed person offered in print an expedient for preventing the dearth of victual. He discommended the fixing of a price at market, for when this plan was tried in the last dearth, farmers brought only some inferior kind of grain to market, ‘so that the remedy was worse than the disease.’ Neither could he speak in favour of the plan of the French king—namely, the confiscating of all grain remaining after harvest—for it had not succeeded in France, and would still less suit a country where the people were accustomed to more liberty. He suggested the prohibition of exportation; the recommending possessors of grain to sell it direct to the people, instead of victual-mongers; and the use of strict means for fining all who keep more than a certain quantity in reserve. This writer thought that the corn was in reality not scarce; all that was needed was, to induce possessors of the article to believe it to be best for their interest to sell immediately.[418]
There is an ancient and well-known privilege, still kept up, in connection with the palace and park of Holyroodhouse, insuring that a debtor otherwise than fraudulent, and who has not the crown for his creditor, cannot have diligence executed against him there; consequently, may live there in safety from his creditors. At this time, the privilege was taken advantage of by Patrick Haliburton, who was in debt to the extraordinary amount of nearly £3000 sterling, and who was believed to have secretly conveyed away his goods.
It being also part of the law of Scotland that diligence cannot be proceeded with on Sunday, the Abbey Lairds, as they were jocularly called, were enabled to come forth on that day and mingle in their wonted society.
It pleased Patrick Haliburton to come to town one Sunday, and call upon one of his creditors named Stewart, in order to treat with him regarding some proposed accommodation of the matters that stood between them. Mr Stewart received Patrick with apparent kindness, asked him to take supper, and so plied his hospitality as to detain him till past twelve o’clock, when, as he was leaving the house, a messenger appeared with a writ of caption, and conducted him to prison. Patrick considered himself as |1709.| trepanned, and presented a complaint to the Court of Session, endeavouring to shew that a caption, of which all the preparatory steps had been executed on the Sunday, was the same as if it had been executed on the Sunday itself; that he had been treacherously dealt with; and that he was entitled to protection under the queen’s late indemnity. The Lords repelled the latter plea, but ‘allowed trial to be taken of the time of his being apprehended, and the manner how he was detained, or if he offered to go back to the Abbey, and was enticed to stay and hindered to go out.’[419] The termination of the affair does not appear.
A case with somewhat similar features occurred in 1724. Mrs Dilks being a booked inmate of the Abbey sanctuary, one of her creditors formed a design of getting possession of her person. He sent a messenger-at-law, who, planting himself in a tavern within the privileged ground, but close upon its verge, sent for the lady to come and speak with him. She, obeying, could not reach the house without treading for a few paces beyond ‘the girth,’ and the messenger’s concurrents took the opportunity to lay hold of her. This, however, was too much to be borne by a fairplay-loving populace. The very female residents of the Abbey rose at the news, and, attacking the party, rescued Mrs Dilks, and bore her back in triumph within the charmed circle.[420]
The Rev. James Greenshields, an Irish curate, but of Scottish birth and ordination—having received this rite at the hands of the deposed Bishop of Ross in 1694—set up a meeting-house in a court near the Cross of Edinburgh, where he introduced the English liturgy, being the first time a prayer-book had been publicly presented in Scotland since the Jenny Geddes riot of July 1637. Greenshields was to be distinguished from the nonjurant Scottish Episcopalian clergy, for he had taken the oath of abjuration (disclaiming the ‘Pretender’), and he prayed formally for the queen; but he was perhaps felt to be, on this account, only the more dangerous to the Established Church. It was necessary that something should be done to save serious people from the outrage of having a modified idolatry practised so near them. The first effort consisted of a process raised by the landlord of the house against Mr Greenshields, in the Dean |1709.| of Guild’s court, on account of his having used part of the house, which he took for a dwelling, as a chapel, and for that purpose broken down certain partitions. The Dean readily ordained that the house should be restored to its former condition. Mr Greenshields having easily procured accommodation elsewhere, it became necessary to try some other method for extinguishing the nuisance. A petition to the presbytery of Edinburgh, craving their interference, was got up and signed by two or three hundred persons in a few hours. The presbytery, in obedience to their call, cited Mr Greenshields to appear before them. He declined their jurisdiction, and they discharged him from continuing to officiate, under high pains and penalties.
Mr Greenshields having persisted, next Sunday, in reading prayers to his congregation, the magistrates, on the requirement of the presbytery, called him before them, and formally demanded that he should discontinue his functions in their city. Daniel Defoe, who could so cleverly expose the intolerance of the Church of England to the dissenters, viewed an Episcopalian martyrdom with different feelings. He tells us that Greenshields conducted himself with ‘haughtiness’ before the civic dignitaries—what his own people of course regarded as a heroic courage. He told them positively that he would not obey them; and accordingly, next Sunday, he read the service as usual in his obscure chapel. Even now, if we are to believe Defoe, the magistrates would not have committed him, if he had been modest in his recusancy; but, to their inconceivable disgust, this insolent upstart actually appeared next day at the Cross, among the gentlemen who were accustomed to assemble there as in an Exchange, and thus seemed to brave their authority! For its vindication, they were, says Defoe, ‘brought to an absolute necessity to commit him;’ and they committed him accordingly to the Tolbooth.
Here he lay till the beginning of November, when, the Court of Session sitting down, he presented a petition, setting forth the hardship of his case, seeing that there was no law forbidding any one to read the English liturgy, and he had fully qualified to the civil government by taking the necessary oaths. It was answered for the magistrates, that ‘there needs no law condemning the English service, for the introducing the Presbyterian worship explodes it as inconsistent,’ and the statute had only promised that the oath-taking should protect ministers who had been in possession of charges. ‘The generality of the |1709.| Lords,’ says Fountainhall, ‘regretted the man’s case;’[421] but they refused to set him at liberty, unless he would engage to ‘forbear the English service.’ Amongst his congregation there was a considerable number of English people, who had come to Edinburgh as officers of Customs and Excise. It must have bewildered them to find what was so much venerated in their own part of the island, a subject of such wrathful hatred and dread in this.
Greenshields, continuing a prisoner in the Tolbooth, determined, with the aid of friends, to appeal to the House of Lords against the decision of the Court of Session. Such appeals had become possible only two years ago by the Union, and they were as yet a novelty in Scotland. The local authorities had never calculated on such a step being taken, and they were not a little annoyed by it. They persisted, nevertheless, in keeping the clergyman in his loathsome prison, till, after a full year, an order of the House of Lords came for his release. Meanwhile, other troubles befell the church, for a Tory ministry came into power, who, like the queen herself, did not relish seeing the Episcopalian clergy and liturgy treated contumeliously in Scotland. The General Assembly desired to have a fast on account of ‘the crying sins of the land, irreligion, popery, many errors and delusions;’ and they chafed at having to send for authority to Westminster, where it was very grudgingly bestowed. It seemed as if they had no longer a barrier for the protection of that pure faith which it was the happy privilege of Scotland, solely of all nations on the face of the earth, to enjoy. Their enemies, too, well saw the advantage that had been gained over them, and eagerly supported Greenshields in his tedious and expensive process, which ended (March 1711) in the reversal of the Session’s decision. ‘It is a tacit rescinding,’ says Wodrow, ‘of all our laws for the security of our worship, and that unhappy man [an Irish curate of fifteen pounds a year, invited to Edinburgh on a promise of eighty] has been able to do more for the setting up of the English service in Scotland than King Charles the First was able to do.’
The Lords of Session decided this day on a critical question, involving the use of a word notedly of uncertain meaning. John Purdie having committed an act of immorality on which a parliamentary act of 1661 imposed a penalty of a hundred pounds in |1709.| the case of ‘a gentleman,’ the justices of peace fined him accordingly, considering him a gentleman within the construction of the act, as being the son of ‘a heritor,’ or land-proprietor. ‘When charged for payment by Thomas Sandilands, collector of these fines, he suspended, upon this ground that the fine was exorbitant, in so far as he was but a small heritor, and, as all heritors are not gentlemen, so he denied that he had the least pretence to the title of a gentleman. The Lords sustained the reason of suspension to restrict the fine to ten pounds Scots, because the suspender had not the face or air of a gentleman: albeit it was alleged by the charger [Sandilands] that the suspender’s profligateness and debauchery, the place of the country where he lives, and the company haunted by him, had influenced his mien.’[422]
An anonymous gentleman of Scotland, writing to the Earl of Seafield, on the improvement of the salmon-fishing in Scotland, informs us how the fish were then, as now, massacred in their pregnant state, by country people. ‘I have known,’ he says, ‘a fellow not worth a groat kill with a spear in one night’s time a hundred black fish or kipper, for the most part full of rawns unspawned.’ He adds: ‘Even a great many gentlemen, inhabitants by the rivers, are guilty of the same crimes,’ little reflecting on ‘the prodigious treasure thus miserably dilapidated.’
Notwithstanding these butcheries, he tells us that no mean profit was then derived from the salmon-fishing in Scotland; he had known from two to three thousand barrels, worth about six pounds sterling each, exported in a single year. ‘Nay, I know Sir James Calder of Muirton alone sold to one English merchant a thousand barrels in one year’s fishing.’ He consequently deems himself justified in estimating the possible product of the salmon-fishing, if rightly protected and cultivated, at forty thousand barrels, yielding £240,000 sterling, per annum.[423]
At Inchinnan, in Renfrewshire, there fell out a ‘pretty peculiar accident.’ One Robert Hall, an elder, and reputed as an estimable man, falling into debt with his landlord, the Laird of Blackston, was deprived of all he had, and left the place. Two months before this date, he returned secretly, and being unable to live |1710.| contentedly without going to church, he disguised himself for that purpose in women’s clothes. It was his custom to go to Eastwood church, but curiosity one day led him to his own old parish-church of Inchinnan. As he crossed a ferry, he was suspected by the boatman and a beadle of being a man in women’s clothes, and traced on to the church. The minister, apprised of the suspicion, desired them not to meddle with him; but on a justice of peace coming up, he was brought forward for examination. He readily owned the fact, and desired to be taken to the minister, who, he said, would know him. The minister protected him for the remainder of the day, that he might escape the rudeness of the mob; and on the ensuing day, he was taken to Renfrew, and liberated, at the intercession of his wife’s father.[424]
The General Assembly passed an act, declaring the marriage of Robert Hunter, in the bounds of the presbytery of Biggar, with one John [Joan] Dickson to be incestuous, the woman having formerly been the mother of a child, the father of which was grand-uncle to her present husband. The act discharged the parties from remaining united under pain of highest censure.
The church kept up long after this period a strict discipline regarding unions which involved real or apparent relationship. In May 1730, we find John Baxter, elder in Tealing parish, appealing against a finding of the synod, that his marriage with his deceased wife’s brother’s daughter’s daughter, was incestuous. Two years later, the General Assembly had under its attention a case, which, while capable of being stated in words, is calculated to rack the very brain of whoever would try to realise it in his conceptions. A Carrick man, named John M‘Taggart, had unluckily united himself to a woman named Janet Kennedy, whose former husband, Anthony M‘Harg, ‘was a brother to John M‘Taggart’s grandmother, which grandmother was said to be natural daughter of the said Anthony M‘Harg’s father!’ The presbytery of Ayr took up the case, and M‘Taggart was defended by a solicitor, in a paper full of derision and mockery at the law held to have been offended; ‘a new instance,’ says Wodrow,’ of the unbounded liberty that lawyers take.’[425] The presbytery having condemned the marriage as incestuous, M‘Taggart appealed in wonted form to the synod, which affirmed the former decision, and ordered a retractation of the offensive paper on pain of |1710.| excommunication. The case then came before the General Assembly, who left it to be dealt with by its commission. It hung here for six years, during which it may be presumed that M‘Taggart and his wife were either separated or only lived together under the load of presbyterial censure; and at length, in March 1738, it was sent back, along with the still older case of Baxter, by the commission to the Assembly itself.[426] How it was ultimately disposed of, I have not learned.
What would these church authorities have thought of a recent act of the state of Indiana, which permits marriages with any of the relations of a deceased partner, and forbids the union of cousins!
‘Some ill-disposed persons, said to be of the suppressed parish of Barnweil [Ayrshire], set fire to the new church of Stair in the night-time; but it was quickly smothered. The occasion was thought to be the bringing the bell from Barnweil to Stair. I have scarce heard of such are instance of fire being wilfully set to a church.’—Wodrow.[427] The parish of Barnweil having been suppressed, and half the temporalities assigned to the new parish of Stair, the inhabitants appear to have been exasperated beyond all bounds, and hence this offence.
David Bruce, a youth of fifteen, accompanied by five companions of about the same age, all of the city of St Andrews, went out in a boat to amuse themselves, but, losing one of their oars, and being carried out to sea, they were unable to return. It was late in the evening before their friends missed them. A boat was sent in the morning in quest of them, but in vain. Meanwhile, the boys were tossed up and down along the waters, without being able to make any shore, although they were daily in sight of land. At length, after they had been six days at sea without food or drink, an easterly wind brought them ashore at a place called Hernheuch, four miles south of Aberdeen, and fifty north of St Andrews. They were all of them in an exhausted condition, and two of them near death. By the direction of an honest countryman, John Shepherd, two of the boys were able to climb up the steep cliff beneath which their skiff had touched shore. Shepherd received them into his house, and lost no time in sending for help to Aberdeen. Presently, the Dean of Guild, |1710.| Dr Gregory a physician, and Mr Gordon a surgeon, were on the spot, exerting themselves by all judicious means to preserve the lives of the six boys, five of whom entirely recovered.
Robert Bruce, goldsmith in Edinburgh, father of David Bruce, ‘in thankful commemoration of the preservation of his son,’ had a copperplate engraved by Virtue, with a full-length portrait of the lad, and a view of the six boys coming ashore in the boat. David Bruce was for many years head cashier of Drummond’s bank at Charing Cross, and lived till 1771.[428]
‘One Robert Fleming, a very poor man, who taught an English school at Hamilton, was taken up for cheating some poor people with twenty-shilling notes, all wrote with his own hand, and a dark impression made like the seal of the Bank [of Scotland]. He was prosecuted for the forgery; and, on his own confession, found guilty, and condemned to death; but having been reprieved by her majesty several times, and at last during pleasure, he, after her majesty’s death, obtained a remission.’[429]
This poor man, in his confession before the Lords who examined him, said he had forged fifty, but only passed four notes, the first being given for a shawl to his wife. ‘He declared that he intended to have coined crown-pieces; and the stamp he had taken in clay, which he shewed; but, which is most remarkable of all, [he] confessed that he made use of one of the Psalms, that he might counterfeit the print of the notes the better by practice, in writing over those letters that were in the Psalm, and which he had occasion to write in the bank-notes. My Lord Forglen had forgot what Psalm it was; but the man said the first words of the Psalm which appeared to him was to this purpose: “The eyes of the Lord behold the children of men;” which was truly remarkable.’[430]
Died at Paisley Abbey, of small-pox, the Countess of Dundonald, celebrated for her beauty, and not less remarkable for her amiable and virtuous character. She left three infant daughters, all of whom grew in time to be noted ‘beauties,’ and of whom one became Duchess of Hamilton, and the other two the Countesses of Strathmore and Galloway. The death of the lovely young Lady Dundonald of a disease so loathsome and |1710.| distressing, was deeply deplored by a circle of noble kindred, and lamented by the public in general, notwithstanding the drawback of her ladyship being an adherent of the Episcopal communion. Wodrow, who condemns the lady as ‘highly prelatical in her principles,’ but admits she was ‘very devote and charitable,’ tells us how, at the suggestion of Dr Pitcairn, Bishop Rose waited on the dying lady, while the parish minister came to the house, but was never admitted to her chamber. Wodrow also states, that for several Sundays after her death, the earl had sermon preached in his house every Sunday by Mr Fullarton, an Episcopalian, ‘or some others of that gang;’ and on Christmas Day there was an administration of the communion, ‘for anything I can hear, distributed after the English way.’ ‘This,’ adds Wodrow, ‘is the first instance of the communion at Yule so openly celebrate in this country’ since the Revolution.[431]
The last time we had the Post-office under our attention (1695), it was scarcely able to pay its own expenses. Not long after that time, in accordance with the improved resources of the country, it had begun to be a source of revenue, though to a very small amount. It was conducted for three years before the Union by George Main, jeweller in Edinburgh, with an average yearly return to the Exchequer of £1194, 8s. 10d., subject to a deduction for government expresses and the expense (£60) of the packet-boat at Portpatrick. Immediately after that time, the business of the central office in Edinburgh was conducted in a place no better than a common shop, by seven officials, the manager George Main having £200 a year, while his accountant, clerk, and clerk’s assistant had respectively £56, £50, and £25, and three runners or letter-carriers had each 5s. per week.
An act of the British parliament[432] now placed the Scottish Post-office under that of England, but with ‘a chief letter-office’ to be kept up in Edinburgh. The charge for a letter from London to Edinburgh was established at sixpence, and that for other letters at twopence for distances within fifty English miles, greater distances being in proportion. For the five years following the Union, there was an annual average gain of £6000—a striking improvement upon 1698, when Sir Robert Sinclair found he could not make it pay expenses, even with the benefit of a pension of £300 a year.
The light-thoughted part of the public was at this time regaled by the appearance of a cluster of small brochures printed in blurred type on dingy paper, being the production of William Mitchell, tin-plate worker in the Bow-head of Edinburgh, but who was pleased on his title-pages to style himself the Tinklarian Doctor. Mitchell had, for twelve years, been employed by the magistrates of the city as manager of the lighting of the streets, at the moderate salary of five pounds. He represented that his predecessor in the office had ten pounds; but ‘I took but five, for the town was in debt.’ The magistrates, doubtless for reasons satisfactory to themselves, and which it is not difficult to divine, had deprived him of his post. ‘Them that does them a good turn,’ says he, ‘they forget; but they do not forget them that does them an ill turn; as, for example, they keep on a captain [of the town-guard, probably] for love of Queensberry, for making the Union—I believe he never did them a good turn, but much evil to me, [as] he would not let me break up my shop-door the time of the fire, before my goods was burnt.’ The poor man here alludes to a calamity which perhaps had some share in driving his excitable brain out of bounds. Being now in comparative indigence, and full of religious enthusiasm, he took up at his own hands an office of which he boasted that no magistrate could deprive him, no less than that of giving ‘light’ to the ministers of the Church of Scotland, who, he argued, needed this service at his hands—‘otherwise God would not have raised me up to write to them.’ The ministers, he candidly informs us, did not relish his taking such a duty upon him, since he had never received any proper call to become a preacher: some of them called him a fool, and the principal of a college at St Andrews went the length of telling him to burn his books. But he acted under an inward call which would not listen to any such objections. He thought the spirit of God ‘as free to David and Amos the herds, and to James, John, and Simon the fishers, and Matthew and Levi the customers, as to any that will bide seven years at college.’ And, if to shepherds and fishermen, why not to a tin-plate worker or tinkler? ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ &c.
The Tinkler’s Testament, which was the great work of Mitchell, was heralded by an Introduction, dedicating his labours to Queen Anne. He claimed her majesty’s protection in his efforts to illuminate the clergy, and hinted that a little money to help in printing his books would also be useful. He would willingly go to converse with her majesty; but he was without the means of travelling, |1711.| and his ‘loving wife and some small children’ hindered him. This brings him to remark that, while he lived upon faith, ‘my wife lives much upon sense,’ as the wives of men of genius are very apt to do. After all, ‘although I should come, I am nothing but a little black man, dull-like, with two scores upon my brow and a mole on my right cheek;’ which marks ‘I give to your majesty, in case any person come up in a counterfeit manner;’ nevertheless, ‘if I had clothes, I would look as big as some gentlemen.’[433]
In this pamphlet, Mitchell abuses the ministers roundly for neglect of their flocks, telling that for six years the pastor of his parish had never once inquired for him. They would go and play at bowls, alleging it was for their health, and allow suffering souls to perish. It was as if he were employed by a gentleman to make lanterns—took the money—but never made the articles required, for want of which the gentleman’s servants were hindered in their work, and perished in pits. ‘Now whether think ye an immortal soul or my lanterns of most value? I will sell a good lantern at ten shillings [Scots], though it be made of brass; but the whole world cannot balance one soul.’
The Tinkler’s Testament he dedicated to the Presbyterian ministers of Scotland, telling them ‘not to be offended, although I be set over you by providence,’ nor ‘think that I shall be like the bishops that were before me—necessity gives me a right to be your overseer—necessity that hath neither law nor manners.’ ‘I know you will not hear of a bishop over you, and therefore I shall be over you, as a coachman to drive you to your duty.’ He saw their deficiencies in what had happened in his own case. In his evil days, they never told him sufficiently of his sins. He might almost have supposed he was on the way to heaven for anything they said to him. It was affliction, not their ministrations, which had loosed him from the bonds of sin. Their own preachings were cold and worthless, and so were those of the young licentiates whom they so often engaged to hold forth in their stead. Here he applied another professional parable. ‘You employ me to make a tobacco-box. I spoil it in the making. Whether is you |1711.| or I obliged to pay the loss? I think ye are not obliged to pay it. Neither am I obliged to take these sermons off your hand.’ ‘Perhaps,’ he adds, ‘you trust in your elders.’ But ‘I may keep strange women in my house for them; I may stay out till twelve o’clock at night and be drunk for them: a cart-horse, when he comes up the Bow, may teach them their duty, for it will do its duty to the outmost of its power; and before it will disobey, it will fall to the ground.’ In short, the Tinkler had been used by these clergy with a lenity which he felt to be utterly inexcusable.
It is to be feared that the Tinkler was one of those censors whom no kind of conduct in persons of authority will please, for we find him in this brochure equally furious at the ministers for not preaching evangelical discourses, and for being so slack in telling their flocks of the weighty matters of the law. He threatens to tell very sad things of them at the great day, and yet he protests that it is not from hatred to them. If such were his feelings, he would not be at the pains to reprove them; still less would he have ever given Dean of Guild Neilson a speaking-trumpet for a seat in the kirk, not worth twenty shillings sterling, seeing it is but a back-seat, where he may fall asleep, and the minister never once call on him to sit up. ‘This,’ however, ‘is only a word by the by.’
One great charge which the Tinkler has to make against the clergy is, that they are afraid to preach freely to the consciences of men, for fear of angering the great. ‘If ye be feared to anger them, God will not be feared to anger you. “Cry aloud and spare not; tell the poor their transgressions, and the great folk their sins.”’ Then he proposes to relate something of the justice he had himself experienced. ‘The Laird of Cramond hath laid down a great cairn of stones before my shop-door, which takes away my light. They have lain near these two years (because he is rich). If I lay down but two carts-full, I believe they would not lie twenty-four hours. I pursued a man at court; I could both have sworn and proved that he was owing me; yet, because he had a blue cloak and a campaign wig, the judge would not take his oath, and would not take my word. I had a mind to buy a blue cloak, that I might get justice; but I was disappointed by the dreadful fire. I bought some wool from a man. He would not give it out of his house till I gave my bill. The goods was not weighed, and I feared they came not to so much money; yet the man persuaded me if it was not so, he would |1711.| restore me the money back. I believed his word, because I am a simple man. So I pursued the man, thinking to get my money. The judge told me I would get no money, although there were a hundred pounds of it; so I went home with less money than I came out.... Ye will say, what is the reason there is so little justice; I shall tell you my opinion of it. I have a vote for choosing our deacon. A man comes to me and offers me a pint to vote for such a man. I take it because he never did me no ill, and because I am a fool-body. I vote for the man. So fool-tradesmen make fool-deacons, and fool-deacons make fool-magistrates, and fool-magistrates make fool-ministers. That is the reason there is so little justice in the city.’ The crazy whitesmith has here touched a point of failure in democratic institutions which wiser men have overlooked.
This singular genius afterwards published a brochure, entitled The Great Tinklarian Doctor Mitchell his Fearful Book, to the Condemnation of all Swearers, at the end of which he announced another ‘concerning convictions;’ ‘the like of it ye have not heard since Cromwell’s days.’ But probably the reader has now heard enough of the effusions of the white-ironsmith of the Bow-head.[434]
Notwithstanding the severity of the laws against Catholic priests, and particularly that of 1701, which a proclamation two years back put into fresh vigour, there was at least one minister of the hated faith of Rome sheltered in Edinburgh. It would be curious to learn under what disguise he contrived to live in a city where all, except a handful of people, were disposed to tear him in pieces. From its being mentioned that his paraphernalia for worship belonged to Lady Seaforth, it may be surmised that he lived under her protection. Thomas Mackie, being now at last apprehended by the magistrates, and ordained to remove immediately out of Britain, was so bold as to call for a suspension of their act in the Court of Session, setting forth that he had lived for many years inoffensively in Edinburgh—the vestments, altar, crucifixes, &c., found in his house belonged to the Countess of Seaforth—he had not been taken in the act of saying mass, and it had not been proved that he was a priest—finally, and above all, the magistrates of Edinburgh were going beyond their powers in banishing any one forth of the island. The magistrates having answered these objections, the Lords ‘ordained him to enact himself to remove betwixt and a day out of the kingdom; and in case of refusal, to be imprisoned till a ship was ready to transport him.’[435]
Immemorial custom gave a right to the steward-depute of the stewartry of Kirkcudbright to get a mart cow out of every parish in his jurisdiction, being twenty-nine in number. He was not required to observe any particular form or ceremony in raising this mail, beyond sending an officer to the parish to pitch upon and seize the cow, and offer the owner five shillings Scots, called the Queen’s Money, which entitled him to relief from his fellow-parishioners, according to the value of their respective estates. In October 1711, William Lindsay of Mains, steward-depute under the Marquis of Annandale, principal steward, sent his officer, William Hislop, to take a cow from the parish of Southwick, and the man pitched upon a beast belonging to John Costein of Glensoane. John, however, ‘did violently oppose the officer in the execution of his office to uplift the cow; and making a convocation of his tenants and others, his complices, by force of arms resisted the officer, whom he beat and bruised with many strokes, and rescued his cow.’
For this offence, Costein and his associates were now brought before the Court of Justiciary. They pleaded several objections to the custom, as a defence of their conduct; but all these were overruled by the Lords, and their offence was declared to be liable to an arbitrary punishment.[436]
‘About the beginning of this month, Whiston’s Primitive Christianity came down to Edinburgh, and was seized in the booksellers’ shops by the magistrates.’[437]
‘The end of this last and the beginning of this month, we have some accounts of a sickness in Fife, from some of the crew of a ship that came out before their quarantine was performed; but it seems the Lord hath hitherto prevented it. It’s, indeed, a wonder we are not visited with some heavy rod.’[438]
The art of printing had fallen sadly off in Scotland during the latter half of the seventeenth century. James Watson[439] points out truly that Bassandyne’s folio Bible of 1576, Arbuthnot’s first edition of Buchanan’s History in 1582, Andro Hart’s Bible of 1610, and the Muses’ Welcome to King James in 1618, were well printed books; the last of these Bibles so much so, that ‘many after-impressions of the Bible in folio, had, as the greatest commendation that could be made of them, at the foot of their title-pages, that they were “conform to the edition printed by Andro Hart.”’ Watson adds: ‘The folio Common Prayer-book, printed before the Troubles by Robert Young, then printer for this kingdom to the Royal Martyr, is a pregnant instance of this. I have with great pleasure viewed and compared that book with the English one in the same volume, printed about the same time by the king’s printer in England; and Mr Young’s book so far exceeded the other, that there could be no comparison made between them. You’ll see by that printed here, the master furnished with a very large fount, four sheets being inset together; a vast variety of curiously cut head-pieces, finis’s, blooming letters, fac-totums, flowers, &c. You’ll see the compositor’s part done with the greatest regularity and niceness in the Kalendar, and throughout the rest of the book; the pressman’s part done to a wonder in the red and black, and the whole printed in so |1712.| beautiful and equal a colour, that there is not any appearance of variation. But this good and great master was ruined by the Covenanters for doing this piece of work, and forced to fly the kingdom.’
After the Restoration, one Archibald Hislop, a bookseller, with William Carron as his workman, produced a neat edition of Thomas à Kempis and some other small books. Some Dutchmen, who had been brought over to assist Hislop’s successor, John Cairns, also printed a few respectable volumes, including the acts of parliament, and Sir Robert Sibbald’s Prodromus; but all tendency to attain or maintain the level formerly attained, was checked by a monopoly which was granted to one Andrew Anderson in 1671. This Anderson, who seems to have come from Glasgow, was early in that year condemned by the Privy Council for a very faulty edition of the New Testament; yet, for ‘payment of a composition in exchequer and other weighty reasons,’ they immediately after granted him, as king’s printer, an exclusive right to print all kinds of lawful books in Edinburgh, with a right of supervision over all other typographers within the kingdom. He died in 1679; but his widow succeeded to the monopoly, and exercised it for some years with the greatest rigour, persecuting all who attempted to interfere with the business of printing. As might be expected, the productions of her own press were miserable beyond all example; she both produced bad and erroneous editions of the Bible, and much fewer of them than were required to satisfy the demands of the public. A restriction was at length put upon her privilege, so as to allow general printing to be executed by others; but she continued through the whole term of her patent to be the sole printer of the Scriptures in Scotland. Fac-similes of a few pages from her Bibles—in poor blurred type, almost unintelligible with errors, with italic letters employed wherever the Roman fount fell short, and some lines wholly without spaces between the words—would appal the reader. It plainly appears that no such functionary as a corrector was at any time kept by Mrs Anderson; nor was she herself able to supply the deficiency. The Bible being then almost the only school-book in use, we may imagine what unrequired difficulties were added to the task of gaining a knowledge of the elements of the English language. What, for example, was a poor child to make of the following passage in her duodecimo Bible of 1705: ‘Whyshoulditbethoug tathingincredi ble wtyou, yt God should raise the dead?’ Mrs Anderson’s Bibles being of such |1712.| a character, there was a great importation of English and foreign copies, but only in despite of strenuous efforts on her part to keep them out. Strange to say, when now her government patent expired, she contrived to obtain the appointment of printer to the Church of Scotland. Her ability to buy up a heavy stock of acts of the General Assembly was what secured her this piece of otherwise most unmerited patronage.
Had the government patent expired a few years earlier, she might, for anything that appears, have obtained a renewal of it also. But, now that a Tory ministry was in power, this lucrative privilege was conferred on two zealous Jacobites—Mr Robert Freebairn, publisher, and Mr James Watson, printer. These gentlemen were better typographers than Mrs Anderson; and the Bibles they issued were much superior. But their Tory principles prevented them from long enjoying the privilege. Probably acting in the spirit of their patrons, they ‘seem to have exercised a discretionary power of declining to publish royal proclamations when they were not consonant with their own views; otherwise it is difficult to discover why the queen’s proclamation against unlawful intruders into churches and manses was printed, not by either of her majesty’s printers, but by John Reid in Bell’s Wynd.’[440] This zeal led Freebairn, on the breaking out of the rebellion in 1715, to go to Perth with printing apparatus and materials, to act as printer for the person whom he called James the Eighth; and he consequently forfeited his patent.[441] Politics now favoured Mrs Anderson. In partnership with an Englishman named Baskett, the king’s printer for England, she once more became the exclusive printer of the Scriptures in Scotland, and for forty-one years more! The Bibles produced during the greater part of that time were indeed a little better than those under the former patent—the general progress of the country necessitated some little improvement—but they were still far inferior to the unprivileged productions of the Scottish press during the same epoch.
There is a reflection which must, or ought somewhat to modify |1712.| our feeling regarding this monstrous absurdity; namely, that the printing of the Scriptures was kept upon the footing of a monopoly, with the effect of poor work and high prices, till our own age, and that so lately as 1823 the patentees, in a legal document, set forth their expenses in erecting a printing-office and ‘other charges of various descriptions,’ as entitling them ‘to enjoy the relative profits and emoluments without interference from any quarter.’