Encouraged by the triumph of Mr Greenshields, and the popularity of the Tory administration, the Scottish Episcopalians began in many places to introduce the liturgy of the Church of England. The old Scottish horror for that form of devotion was excited in a high degree; church-courts were full of terror and grief; in some parts, the mob was ready to make a new reformation. In the course of 1711, a good deal of pretty effectual work was done for the appeasing of the popular anxiety. According to a contemporary narration—‘Mr Honeyman, for using the Church of England liturgy at Crail, was prosecuted and deposed by the presbytery, and if the magistrates and people were not Episcopal, he had fallen under very severe punishments. It is but few months since Mr Dunbreck was libelled by the presbytery, prosecuted by the magistrates, and threatened by the Lord Advocate, for using the English liturgy in the Earl Marischal’s own house at Aberdeen, to whom he was chaplain. The Earl of Carnwath this summer was threatened to have his house burned over his head, if he continued the English service in it, and his chaplain thereafter forced to leave his family.’ In November 1711, the presbytery of Perth deposed Henry Murray, a pre-Revolution incumbent of Perth hitherto undisturbed, because he used the English service at baptisms and burials, and the liturgy in worship.[442]
At the date of the present article, the two parties had what Wodrow calls ‘a little ruffle’ at Auchterarder—a bleak parish in Strathearn, which has at various times contrived to make a prominent appearance in ecclesiastical politics. The trouble arose in consequence of an attempt to use the funeral-service of the English Church at a funeral. ‘The common people,’ says Wodrow, ‘though not very Presbyterian in their principles, yet they reckoned the service popery, and could not away with it. When the corpse came to |1712.| the churchyard, the women and country-people began and made a great mutiny. The Lord Rollo, a justice of the peace, interposed, but to no purpose. The Duke of Montrose’s bailie, Graham of Orchil, was there; and writes it was not Presbyterians, but the whole of the common people there; and they chased off the liturgy-man, and they behoved to bury in their wonted manner.’
Just at this crisis, the Tory administration of the Church-of-England-loving Anne interposed with an act of toleration for the distressed Episcopalians of Scotland, enabling clergymen, who had orders from Protestant bishops, and took the oaths of allegiance, assurance, and abjuration, to celebrate divine service—using, if they chose, the English liturgy—and to perform baptisms and marriages, without molestation; only further enjoining such clergymen to pray for the queen, the Princess Sophia, and the rest of the royal family, under a penalty of twenty pounds. The church commission had fasts, and prayers, and addresses against the measure—even spoke of reviving the Solemn League and Covenant—but their resistance was in vain.
Hitherto, the western section of the country had been clear of this abomination; but, in November, to the great distress of the serious people of Glasgow, an attempt was made there to set up the Episcopal form of worship. The minister officiating was one Cockburn, ‘an immoral profane wretch, and very silly,’ according to Mr Wodrow, ‘a tool fit enough for beginning such a work;’ who, however, had prepared well his ground by qualifying to the government. A number of persons of social importance joined the congregation. ‘The Earl of Marr, and [the Laird of] Bannockburn were there lately with two coaches, and many go out of curiosity to see it.’[443] The boys took the matter up in their usual decisive manner; but the Toleration Act compelled protection from the magistrates, and three town-officers stood guard at the chapel door. On the 27th of December, an English soldier having died, his officers wished to have him buried according to the solemn ritual of his church, and Mr Cockburn performed the ceremony in canonicals in the cathedral cemetery, the company all uncovered, and a rabble looking on with suppressed rage. The clergy took a look into the statute-book, to see if they should be obliged to endure this kind of insolence as well as the liturgy. Wodrow had hopes that Cockburn’s congregation would tire of |1712.| supporting him, though his ‘encouragement’ did not exceed twenty-two pounds a year, or that his free conversation and minced oaths would make them put him away. A foolish shoemaker who attended his chapel having lost his wife, Cockburn wished to have a second exhibition of the funeral-service; but the magistrates would not allow it. One day, he was baptising a soldier’s child at a house in the Gorbals, and great was the commotion which it occasioned among the multitude. On coming out, he was beset by a host of boys calling to him ‘Amen, Amen!’ the use of this word in the service being so odious to the public, that it had stuck to Cockburn as a nickname. For nearly two years were the religious feelings of the people outraged by the open and avowed practice of the ‘modified idolatry’ in the midst of them, when at length a relief came with the Hanover succession. As soon as it was known that Queen Anne was no more, occidental human nature could no longer be restrained. On the evening of the 6th of August 1714, the little chapel was fairly pulled down, and the minister and his wife were glad to flee for their lives. So ended Episcopalian worship in Glasgow for a time.[444] A few verses from a popular ballad will assist in giving us some idea of the local feelings of the hour:
A Dumfriesshire minister communicated to Wodrow an account he had got from the Laird of Waterside, a factor of the Duke of Queensberry, of a spectacle which the laird and many others had |1712.| seen about sunset one evening in this month, about a mile from Penpont. ‘There appeared to them, towards the sea, two large fleets of ships, near a hundred upon every side, and they met together and fairly engaged. They very clearly saw their masts, tackling, guns, and their firing one at another. They saw several of them sunk; and after a considerable time’s engagement they sundered, and one part of them went to the west and another to the south.’
Wodrow goes on to relate what Mr James Boyes told him of shootings heard one morning about the same time in Kintyre. ‘The people thought it had been thunder, and went out to see what sort of day it was like to be. All appears clear, and nothing like thunder. There were several judicious people that saw, at some distance from them, several very great companies of soldiers marching with their colours flying and their drums beating, which they heard distinctly, and saw the men walking on the ground in good order; and yet there were no soldiers at all in that country, nor has been a long time. They heard likewise a very great shooting of cannon: ... so distinct and terrible, that many of the beasts broke the harrow and came running home.’
Wodrow notes, at this time, a piece of bad taste on the part of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, whose family had in recent times acquired by purchase that ancient possession of the Home family. The old burial-place of the Earls of Home had been turned by Sir James into a stable, and he resisted both the clamour of the public and the private remonstrance of the aggrieved family on the subject. ‘Because the minister shewed some dislike at this unnatural thing, he is very uneasy to him.’
This act of Sir James Hall necessarily shocked Episcopalians; and to such an extent was the feeling carried, that a distinct pamphlet on the subject was published in London. The writer of this tells us, that, having made an excursion into Scotland in the summer of 1711, he tarried for a while at the post-house of Cockburnspath, and thus had an opportunity of seeing the ‘pretty little church’ near Dunglass House. He found that Sir James had gathered off all the grave-stones from the churchyard, to give scope for the growing of grass. He had ‘made the nave of the church a stable for his coach-mares, and dug up the graves of the dead, throwing away their bones, to make way for a pavement for his horses.... He has made the choir a coach-house, and |1712.| broken down the great east end wall, to make a great gate to let his coaches in, that they may stand where the altar of God did stand. The turret is a pigeon-house, and over this new stable he has made a granary. There is also a building called an aile, adjoining the north side of the church, which is still a burying-place (still belonging to the Earl of Home), in which Sir James keeps hay for his horses, though his own first lady, who was daughter to Sir Patrick Home of Polwarth (now Earl of Marchmont), and his own only son, lie buried there.’
The writer states that Sir James’s father, though ‘of no family,’ but only a lord mayor of Edinburgh, had kept this church in good repair all his lifetime, and bestowed upon it a new pulpit. The neighbouring gentlemen had remonstrated against the desecration, and one had offered to build for him separate conveniences such as he wanted, provided he would spare the church; but all in vain. He adds: ‘Sir James is still as well esteemed by the whole party as ever he was, and in full communion with their kirk; nor could I learn of any reproof he ever had from his spiritual guides, the Mass Johns, upon this account; though ’tis most apparent that, had his Presbyterian holders-forth interposed, as they might and ought to have done, and as in other cases they are very apt to do when religion or even morality are not near so much concerned as here, Sir James durst not have attempted the doing this wicked thing.’
The writer goes on to remark what he calls the inconsistency of the Presbyterians in insisting that baptism shall always be performed in a church. ‘There are instances to be given, if need were, of their letting infants die without their baptism, rather than sprinkle them out of a church.’ ‘I shall mention but one other of their inconsistencies; ’tis that of their Judaical, if not Pharisaical observation of the Lord’s Day, which they call the Sabbath. This they set up most rigidly as their characteristic, though they pretend to admit of nothing as a principle, nor allow of any stated practice ecclesiastic, for which they have not a positive command in the Holy Scriptures. They despise the decrees and canons of the church, even in the early ages of it; nor does the unanimous consent of the primitive fathers of the first three centuries weigh with them; and yet I humbly think they must either take the observation of the first day of the week as the Lord’s Day or weekly Easter from the authority of the church; else it would puzzle them to get clear of the observation of the seventh day or |1712.| Jewish Sabbath from the morality of the fourth commandment by any positive gospel precept.’[446]
An ingenious piece of masked Jacobitism is described in a newspaper as taking place in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. ‘Thursday last’—so runs the paragraph—‘being the anniversary of the birth and happy restoration of King Charles II., of ever-blessed memory, was solemnly observed by Charles Jackson, merchant in Edinburgh, who had the honour to have his majesty stand godfather to him in the church of Keith at his baptism; and his majesty, by assuming the name of Jackson, was happily preserved from his enemies’ hands, after his escape out of the Royal Oak. In consideration of these honours conferred upon him by his sacred majesty, and being lineally descended from a stock of the loyalists, he invited all such, by public advertisement, to solemnise that memorable day, at an enclosure called Charles’s Field, lying a mile south from this city (where he hath erected a very useful bleaching-field), and there entertained them with diversity of liquors, fine music, &c. He had likewise a splendid bonfire, and a spacious standard erected, with a banner displayed upon it, whereon was very artfully drawn his sacred majesty in the Royal Oak, the bark wherein he made his escape, and the colonel who conducted him on board, taking leave of his majesty. The company round the bonfire drank her majesty, Queen Anne’s [health], and the memory of the happy Restoration, with great joy and demonstrations of loyalty. The night concluded with mirth; and the standard being brought back to Mr Jackson’s lodgings, carried by a loyal gentleman bareheaded, and followed by several others with trumpets, hautboys, and bagpipes playing before them, where they were kindly entertained.’[447]
Whatever might be the personal delinquencies and shortcomings of the judges, they never could be charged with a disposition to let other people off too easily. On the contrary, one is always struck by the appearances of severity in their treatment of those who fell into their hands. Two men of a humble order, named Rutherford and Gray, had been induced by a low agent, |1712.| named Alexander Pitblado, to adhibit their names as witnesses to a paper bearing to be a guarantee by Dean of Guild Warrender for the rent of a house occupied by one Isabel Guild, being the insignificant sum of £25 Scots. It became Pitblado’s fortune—doubtless, not undeservedly—to be carried away as a recruit to Flanders. The guarantee was detected to be a forgery. Rutherford and Gray were taken into custody, and carried before the magistrates, where they readily admitted that Pitblado had induced them to give their signatures, on the assurance that Warrender had signed the paper.
The Lord Advocate thought the case worthy of the notice of the judges; so the two men were brought up to the court, with a statement of their offence against the 5th act 1681. It was determined that the matter was proper to be decided summarily, and the culprits made no objection to this course, for, as they said, they had not means of living in jail to wait for a more deliberate trial. It was also determined that the Lords could decide in the case with shut doors. Rutherford, now fearing that his fault inferred death, withdrew his former confession, but was at length prevailed on to confess once more, telling, what we can well believe to have been the truth, that he had been ensnared by Gray to do what he did in pure simplicity. ‘The Lords considered that, though it was a very small sum, yet it was a dangerous case to let witnesses escape on pretence of simplicity, where they neither see the party sign nor own the subscription; therefore resolved to impose some stigma and censure to terrify others; and so ordained them to be brought on Wednesday, being the market-day, to the great door of the Parliament House, by the hand of the hangman, with a paper on their breasts bearing their crime, and there to stand betwixt ten and eleven in the forenoon, and from that to be conducted to the pillory at the Tron, and there to stand the other hour between eleven and twelve, with papers on their breast: and in regard Gray had seduced Rutherford to sign, they ordained his lug to be nailed to the Tron; and being informed that Rutherford was a notar, they deprived him, and declared them both infamous.’
Four days later, having in the interval undergone their sentence, they petitioned for liberation from jail, which was granted. Then, however, came in George Drummond, the Goodman of the Tolbooth, with a claim for his dues, which they were totally unable to pay. Before the Union, the Lords in such a case could throw the expense upon the Treasury; but now they were |1712.| without any such resource, and neither could they force the jailer to pass from his demand. In this dilemma, they after all acted a humane part, and made up the necessary sum out of their own pockets.[448]
The Edinburgh Courant intimated, in an advertisement, that ‘Robert Campbell, commonly known by the name of Rob Roy Macgregor, being lately intrusted by several noblemen and gentlemen with considerable sums for buying cows for them in the Highlands, has treacherously gone off with the money, to the value of £1000 sterling, which he carries along with him.’ This is the first public reference to a person who has become the theme of popular legend in Scotland to an extent little short of Robin Hood in England, and finally has had the fortune to be embalmed in a prose fiction by one of the greatest masters in modern literature.
It is generally admitted that Rob Roy was a man of good birth and connections, though belonging to a family or clan which for upwards of a century had been under proscription, and obliged to live a rather skulking kind of life. He had become possessed in an honourable manner of certain lands on the skirts of Ben Lomond, in the county of Stirling, composed wholly of mountain-ground, and of little annual value, yet sufficient to maintain him, the principal place being Inversnaid, on the isthmus between the Lochs Lomond and Katrine, where hundreds of tourists now pass every summer-day, but which was considered a very outlandish situation in the time of Queen Anne. His family name being illegal by act of parliament, he had adopted that of Campbell, in compliment to the Argyle family, which patronised him. The business of purchasing Highland cattle at the Crieff and other markets, and getting them transferred to England, where they were to be fattened and consumed, was for some years after the Union a favourite one amongst gentlemen of good rank, and it attracted the sagacious and active mind of Robert Macgregor Campbell. With some funds supplied by his neighbours, and part of which, at least, is said to have come primarily from the Duke of Montrose, on an understanding that the lenders were to share in the profits, he entered on the traffic with spirit, and conducted it for a time with success; but the defalcations of a subordinate agent or partner, named Macdonald, cut short his |1712.| career in trade, and left him in serious pecuniary difficulties. The aspect which the affair took at the Court of Session in Edinburgh was, that Robert Macgregor Campbell drew bills on Graham of Gorthie and other gentlemen for cattle he was to buy for them, realised the money, and then ‘did most fraudulently withdraw, and fled, without performing anything on his part, and thereby became unquestionably a notour and fraudulent bankrupt;’[449] while in reality he was probably only the victim of a fraud, and obliged to keep out of the way in consequence of the unreasonable severities of the law towards men in his situation. It was a sufficiently barbarous measure to advertise an unfortunate man as a fraudulent bankrupt seeking to screen himself from justice; but the Duke of Montrose—in some other respects but a poor representative of his illustrious great-grandfather—went further: he caused his factor, Mr Graham of Killearn, to fall upon Macgregor’s poor little holding of Craigrostan and Inversnaid, and thrust out from it the wife and family of the late owner.
This treatment turned the milk of Macgregor’s nature to bitterness, and it is not surprising, when the general condition of the country, and the ordinary strain of men’s ideas in that age are considered, that he sought in a wild and lawless way to right himself with his oppressors—above all with the Duke of Montrose. From the rough country round Ben Lomond, he could any night stoop upon his Grace’s Lowland farms, and make booty of meal and cattle. Strange to say, while thus setting the law at defiance, he obtained a certain steady amount of countenance and protection from both of the great Campbell chiefs, Argyle and Breadalbane. The government made an effort to impose a check upon his career by planting a little fort at Inversnaid;[450] but Rob Roy, nevertheless, continued in his lawless course of |1712.| life. On the side of Loch Lomond, near Inversnaid, there is a cave formed by a flexure in the stratification of the mountain: here Rob occasionally took refuge when hard pressed. It is curious to reflect that this strange exemplification of predatory life was realised in a not very remote part of our island, in the days when Addison and Pope were regaling the refined people of London with the productions of their genius. Rob is described as a short, robust man, with bushy hair and beard, and legs covered so thickly with red hair as to resemble those of a Highland bull. His cognomen ‘Roy’ expresses his ruddy complexion. It is admitted that, amidst his wild life, he was not without humanity or feeling for the unfortunate, and, what is perhaps more strange, that he was a sagacious and politic sort of person, who never would go into any quarrel or contention which was not likely to result in some practical benefit or advantage. It was probably owing to this cool temperament, that, though he mustered a body of clansmen for the Stuart cause in 1715, he yet stood neutral at the battle of Sheriffmuir, alike afraid to offend King James, on the one hand, and his patron, the Duke of Argyle, on the other.
A singular and not very decent lawsuit took place at this time between the Earl of Bute and his stepmother, the Dowager Countess, widow of the first earl, by whom this family was first raised to any considerable distinction. When the deceased peer went to Bath in the spring of 1710, a few months before his death, he granted a liferent of 3300 merks (£183, 6s. 8d. sterling) to his lady. The present peer—father, by the way, of George III.’s celebrated minister—refused to pay this annuity, and the countess raised an action against him for it, and also for the annual rents of her own son’s patrimony. The only objection presented by the earl in his defence was, that the lady had profited unduly already out of her husband’s property, having at his death appropriated large sums of ‘lying money.’ The matter being referred to her oath, she acknowledged having had in hand at her lord’s death forty pounds, with a purse containing ‘sundry medals and purse-pennies given by the earl and others to her and her son, in which number there were some guineas; and the whole might be about £60 sterling.’ She averred that ‘she had nothing as the product of any trade she drove, except two or three ells of alamode;’[451] |1712.| she had made nothing in her husband’s lifetime by lending money; there had been presents from the tenants in kind and in money, and her husband had given them to her. The peer seems to have gained nothing by challenging the claims of his stepmother beyond the forty pounds of ‘lying money.’[452]
The stricter Presbyterians, commonly called Cameronians—the people chiefly involved in the persecutions of the Stuart reigns—had been left unsatisfied by the Revolution, and were now as antagonistic to the presbyterian church as they had ever been to the late episcopacy. For years they held together, without ministers, or the means of getting any trained in their peculiar walk of doctrine; but at length one or two schismatics cast off by the church put themselves at their head, the chief being Mr John Macmillan, formerly minister of Balmaghie in Galloway. Oaths to the state, neglect of the Covenant, and general compliances with the spirit of the times, were the stumbling-blocks which these people regarded as disqualifying the national establishment for their allegiance.
The Cameronians chiefly abounded in the counties of Lanark, Dumfries, and Kirkcudbright, and their Canterbury was the small burgh of Sanquhar in Nithsdale. Whenever any remarkable political movement was going on in the country, these peculiar people were pretty sure to come to the cross of Sanquhar and utter a testimony on the subject. The last occasion when this was done was at the Union, a measure which it pleased ‘the Antipopish, Antiprelatic, Antierastian, Antisectarian, True Presbyterian Church of Scotland’ (for so they styled themselves), to regard as ‘sinful,’ because it involved a sanction to that English prelatic system which the Solemn League and Covenant had bound the Scottish nation to extirpate.
While still brooding over the ‘land-ruining, God-provoking, soul-destroying, and posterity-ensnaring-and-enslaving Union,’ the act of toleration, so manifestly designed for a relief to the prelatists, came like a bellows to blow up the fire. Sundry meetings were held, and at length a general one at the upland village of Crawford-John (26th of May 1712), where it was finally decided on that the faithful and true church should renew the Solemn League and Covenant.
It was at a place called Auchensaugh, on the top of a broad |1712.| mountain behind the village of Douglas, that the meeting was held for this purpose. The transaction occupied several days. On the first, there was a prayer for a proper frame of spirit, followed by a sermon, as this was again by an engagement to duties, amongst which the uprooting of all opinions different from their own was the most conspicuous. The people were dismissed with an exhortation from Mr Macmillan upon their ‘unconcerned carriage and behaviour.’ On the second day, it was reckoned that about seventeen hundred were present, including, however, many onlookers brought by curiosity. There was now read an acknowledgment of sins, and the people were invited to clear their consciences by declaring any of which they had been guilty. One confessed having made a rash oath; another that he had attended the Established Church; several that they had been married by the Erastian clergy. One, hearing of the sinfulness of tests and oaths, rather unluckily confessed his having sworn the Covenant at Lesmahago. A number had to deplore their having owned William and Mary as their lawful sovereigns. Mr Macmillan seems to have been a little perplexed by the innocent nature of their sins. After all this was at an end, the Solemn League was read and sworn to, article by article, with uplifted hands. A day of interval being allowed, there was a third of devotion. On the fourth, a Sunday, there was an administration of the communion, which must have been a striking sight, as eight tables were set out upon the moor, each capable of accommodating sixty persons. ‘It was a very extraordinary rain the whole time of the action.’
Even Wodrow, who has taken such pains to commemorate the sufferings of these people under prelacy, seems to have been unable to look with patience on their making such demonstrations against the church now established.[453] Such earnestness in intolerance, such self-confidence in opinion, cannot be read of in our age without strange feelings. After all, the Covenanters of Auchensaugh were good enough to invite the rest of the community to join them, ‘being anxious to get the divisions which have long wrecked this church removed and remedied;’ nay, they were ‘willing, for peace and unity, to acknowledge and forsake whatever we can rationally be convinced to be bad in our conduct and management,’[454] though it would have probably been a serious |1712.| task for a General Assembly of angels to produce such a conviction.
About this time, and for long after, there flourished an enthusiast named John Halden, who considered himself, and a friend of his named James Leslie, as above all and peculiarly the proper representatives of the martyrs Cameron, Cargill, Hackston, Hall, Skeen, Balfour, &c., according to the tenor of the Rutherglen, Sanquhar, and Lanark Declarations. John, like his predecessors, declared not merely spiritual but temporal war against all the existing powers, seeing they had declined from the Covenant, exercised an Erastian power in the church, and were tyrants over the state. Nay, he declared war against ‘the enemies of Christ’ all over the world, denouncing the curse of Meroz against all who would not join him. Halden and Leslie, since there was no government they could submit to, professed their desire and endeavour to ‘set up a godly magistracy, and form a civil state’ themselves; and it is to be feared that the community remained grievously insensible to the offered blessing. The Lord Advocate did not even do them the honour to consider them dangerous. The only active step we hear of John Halden taking was to burn the Abjuration Oath at the Cross of Edinburgh, on the point of a dagger (October 28, 1712), proclaiming with a loud voice, as he went off up the High Street: ‘Let King Jesus reign, and let his enemies be scattered!’
Dr Pitcairn, the prince of wits and physicians in his day, being an Episcopalian and a Jacobite, moreover a man of gay and convivial habits, did not stand in good repute among the severer of the Presbyterian clergy. Regarding many things connected with religion from a peculiar point of view, which was not theirs, he sometimes appeared to them, by the freedom of speech he assumed on such points, and by the cast of comicality which he gave them, to be little better than an unbeliever. Wodrow in his Renfrewshire parish heard of him and his associates with serious concern. It was reported, he tells us, that ‘Dr Pitcairn and others do meet very regularly every Lord’s Day, and read the Scriptures, in order to lampoon and ridicule it. It’s such wickedness that, though we had no outward evidences, might make us apprehensive of some heavy rod.’[455]
The Rev. James Webster, one of the Edinburgh clergy of that |1712.| day, was distinguished by the highest graces as an evangelical preacher. He had been a sufferer under the ante-Revolution government, and hated a Jacobite with a perfect hatred. To the Jacobites, on the other hand, his high Calvinism and general severity of style were a subject of continual sarcasm and epigram; and it is not unlikely that Pitcairn had launched at him a few jokes which he did not feel over meekly. In a poem of Pitcairn’s, Ad Adenas, there is, indeed, a passage in which Mr Webster, as minister of the Tolbooth kirk, a part of St Giles’s, is certainly glanced at:
Perhaps this very remark gave rise to all that followed.
One day, in a company where the magistrates of Edinburgh were present, Mr Webster fell into conversation with Mr Robert Freebairn, the bookseller. The minister complained that, in his auctions, Freebairn sold wicked and prohibited books; in particular, he had lately sold a copy of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius Tyanæus, which deists and atheists were eager to purchase, because it set forth the doings of that impostor as on a level with the miracles of Jesus. It being insinuated that these auctions ministered to an infamous taste, Mr Freebairn asked Mr Webster to ‘condescend upon persons;’ whereupon the latter unguardedly said: ‘Such persons, for example, as Dr Pitcairn, who is known to be a professed deist. As a proof of what I say, at that very sale where you found so many eager to purchase the Life of Apollonius, when some one remarked that a copy of the Bible hung heavy in comparison on your hands, Pitcairn remarked: “No wonder, for, you know, Verbum Dei manet in æternum,” which was a direct scoffing at the sacred volume.’
Pitcairn, having this conversation reported to him by Freebairn, took it with lamentable thin-skinnedness, and immediately raised an action against Webster before the sheriffs for defamation. Webster advocated the case to the Lords, on the ground that the sheriffs were not the proper judges in such a matter; and, after a good deal of debating, the Lords, considering that the pursuer shewed too much keenness, while the defender appeared willing to give reasonable satisfaction, recommended the Lord-justice Clerk ‘to endeavour to settle the parties amicably;’ and so the affair seems to have ended.[456]
In the early part of this month, the Rev. Mr Wodrow made an excursion into Galloway, and noted on the way several characteristic circumstances. ‘I find,’ he says, ‘they have no great quantity of straw, and necessity has learned them to make thrift of fern or breckans, which grow there very throng [close]. They thatch their houses with them ... stript of the leaves ... and say it lasts six or eight years in their great storms.’ He adverts to the moat-hills near some of the parish churches, and great cairns of stones scattered over the moors. Of a loch near Partan, he says: ‘There seem to be tracks of roads into it upon all hands;’ a description reminding us of the glacial grooves and scratches seen on rocks dipping into several of the Scottish lakes. ‘I notice,’ he says, ‘all through the stewartry [of Kirkcudbright] the houses very little and low, and but a foot or two of them of stone, and the rest earth and thatch. I observe all the country moorish. I noticed the stones through many places of far more regular shapes than in this country [Renfrewshire]. On the water of Ken they are generally spherical [boulders]. Through much of the moorish road to Crogo, they are square and long. The strata that with us lie generally horizontally, there in many places lie vertical.’
The worthy martyrologist received from a Galloway minister, on this tour, an account of the witches who were rife in the parish of Balmaclellan immediately after the Revolution. ‘One of them he got discovered and very clear probation of persons that saw her in the shape of a hare; and when taken she started up in her own shape. When before the judge, he observed her inclinable to confess, when of a sudden, her eyes being fixed upon a particular part of the room, she sank down in the place. He lifted her up and challenged her, whether her master had not appeared in that place. She owned it was so, confessed, and was execute. All this process is in the records of the presbytery, of which I am promised ane abstract.’[457]
Wodrow seems to have had a taste for geology, though the word did not then exist. He thus wrote to Edward Lluyd, August 26, 1709: ‘My house [is] within a quarter of a mile of the Aldhouse Burn, where you and I were lithoscoping. My pastoral charge does not allow me that time I once had, to follow out these subterranean studies, but my inclination is just the same as when I saw you, or rather greater, and I take it to be one of |1712.| the best diversions from more serious work, and in itself a great duty, to view and admire my Maker in his works, as well as his word. I have got together some stone of our fossils hereabout, from our marl, our limestone, &c.’[458]
The Edinburgh Courant newspaper contains several notices of a flood which happened this day in the west of Scotland, generally admitted to be the greatest in memory. Wodrow, who calls it ‘the greatest for ane age,’ says it prevented all travelling for the time between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The lower parts of the western city were, as usual on such occasions, deep in water, to the ruin of much merchandise, and the imprisonment of (it is said) twelve hundred families in the upper parts of the houses. A boat sailed about in the Briggate. The house of Sir Donald Macdonald—a gentleman regarded with great jealousy in Glasgow on account of his unpopular religion—is described in one account as immersed to the depth of three fathoms; which is probably an exaggeration. But we may believe Wodrow when he tells us that ‘the water came up to the well in the Saltmarket.’
Great anxiety was felt at Glasgow for the safety of the fine old bridge, which had its arches ‘filled to the bree.’ Vast quantities of country produce and of domestic articles of all descriptions were brought down on the surface of the Clyde and other rivers of the province involved by the flood. Several lives were lost. At Irvine and other parts of Ayrshire, as well as in Renfrewshire, bridges were carried away, and great general damage inflicted. ‘A man and a woman were lost upon the water of Kelvin, and if the Laird of Bardowie had not sent his boat from his loch, to the said water of Kelvin, there had been a great many more people lost therein.’
If we are to believe the observant minister of Eastwood, the whole air at this season seemed ‘infected.’ He notes the frequency of madness in dogs, and that, owing to various epidemics, as ‘the galloping fever,’ sore throat, and measles, scarce a third of the people of Glasgow were able to appear in church.
‘I am told,’ he adds, ‘the Blantyre Doctor did presage this evil harvest and the floods; and they talk, but whether true or false I know not, that there is to be another and greater flood, wherein the Clyde shall be three steps up the Tolbooth stair in Glasgow.’
Mr Robert Monteath was at this time preparing his celebrated Theater of Mortality, a collection of the sepulchral inscriptions existing throughout Scotland. It had already cost him ‘eight years sore travel, and vast charges and expenses.’ He now advertised for assistance in his task, ‘desiring all persons who have any valuable epitaphs, Latin, prose or verse, English verse only, or any historical, chronological, or moral inscriptions,’ to send just and authentic copies of them to him ‘at his house in the College Wynd, Edinburgh.’ He took that opportunity of stating his hope that ‘all generous persons will cheerfully subscribe his proposals in a matter so pious, pleasant, profitable, and national.’[459]
Died, Sir James Steuart, Lord Advocate for Scotland, aged about seventy-eight, greatly lamented by the Presbyterians, to whom he had ever been a steadfast friend. The General Assembly, in session at the time, came in a body to his funeral, which was the most numerously attended ever known in Edinburgh, the company reaching from the head of the close in which his lordship lived, in the Luckenbooths, to the Greyfriars’ Churchyard. For several years, bodily infirmity confined him to a chair; but his mind continued clear to the last. Sir James had shewn some unsteadiness to his principles in the reign of James II., but nevertheless was forced to fly his country, and he only returned along with King William, whose manifesto for Scotland he is understood to have written.
Great general learning, legal skill, and worldly policy, marked Sir James Steuart; but the most remarkable characteristic of the man, considering his position, was his deep piety. Wodrow, who speaks of him from personal knowledge, says: ‘His death was truly Christian, and a great instance of the reality of religion.... He had a great value for religion and persons of piety. He was mighty in the Scriptures; perfectly master of [them]; wonderful in prayer. That winter, 1706–7, when he was so long ill, he was in strange raptures in his prayers sometimes in his family. He used to speak much of his sense of the advantage of the prayers of the church, and in a very dangerous sickness he had about thirteen years ago, he alleged he found a sensible turn of his body in the time of Mr George Meldrum’s prayer for him. He never fell into any trouble but he gave up his name to be |1713.| prayed for in all the churches of the city of Edinburgh. His temper was most sweet and easy, and very pleasant. He was a kind and fast friend, very compassionate and charitable.’[460]
The Lord Drummond, eldest son of the exiled Earl of Perth, and his wife, Jean Gordon, daughter of the Duke of Gordon, had a son and heir born to them, the same who afterwards took a conspicuous part in the rebellion of 1745, which he did not long outlive. Politics, long adverse to the house of Drummond, smiled on the birth of this infant heir, for never since the Revolution did the Whig interest seem more depressed. Lord Drummond was encouraged by these circumstances to take a step which would have been dangerous a few years before. It is related as follows by Wodrow: ‘The baptism of my Lord Drummond’s son [was performed in October] at his own house by a popish bishop with great solemnity. The whole gentlemen and several noblemen about, were gathered together; and when the mass was said, there were very few of them went out. Several justices of peace and others were there. This is a fearful reproach upon the lenity of our government, to suffer such open insults from papists.’[461]
Two months later, Wodrow notes: ‘The papists are turning very open at Edinburgh, and all over Scotland there is a terrible openness in the popish party.’ It is alleged in a popular contemporary publication, that there were fully forty Catholic priests living with little effort at concealment in Scotland; some of them very successful in winning over ignorant people to their ‘damnable errors;’ while ‘one Mr Bruce, a popish bishop, had his ordinary residence in Perthshire, where he had his gardens, cooks, and other domestic servants, and thither the priests and emissaries of inferior rank resorted for their directions and orders.... Their peats and other fuel were regularly furnished them ... [they had] also their mass-houses, to which their blind votaries resorted almost as publicly as the Protestants did to their parish churches.’[462]