A newspaper advertisement informed the world that ‘There is a certain gentleman living at Glasgow, who has put forth a problem to the learned—proposing, if no man answer it, to do it himself in a few weeks—viz., Whether or not it is possible so to dispose a ship, either great or small, that, although she, or it, be rent in the bottom, and filled full of water, or however tossed with tempest, she, or it, shall never sink below the water; and also that the same may be reduced to practice.’[551]
An election of a member of parliament for a Highland county was apt to bring forth somewhat strenuous sentiments, and the scene sometimes partook a good deal of the nature of a local civil war.
A representative of Ross-shire being to be chosen, there came, the night before, to Fortrose, the greatest man of the north, the Earl of Sutherland, heading a large body of armed and mounted retainers, who made a procession round the streets, while an English sloop-of-war, in friendly alliance with him, came up to the town and fired its guns. Hundreds of Highlanders, his lordship’s retainers, at the same time lounged about. The reason of all this was, that the opposition interest was in a decided majority, and a defeat to the Whig candidate seemed impending. When the election came on, there were thirty-one barons present, of whom eighteen gave their votes for General Charles Ross of Balnagowan, the remainder being for Captain Alexander Urquhart of Newhall. Hereupon, Lord Sutherland’s relative and friend, Sir William Gordon of Invergordon, sheriff of the county, retired with the minority, and went through the form of electing their own man, notwithstanding a protest from the other candidate. ‘Immediately after this separation, Colin Graham of Drynie, one of the deputy-lieutenants of the county, came into the court-house, with his sword in his hand, accompanied by Robert Gordon of Haughs and Major John Mackintosh, with some of the armed Highlanders whom they had posted at the door, with drawn swords and cocked firelocks, and did require the majority (who remained to finish the election), in the name of the Earl of Sutherland, to remove out of the house, otherwise they must expect worse treatment. Major Mackintosh said they would be dragged out by the heels. Upon which the barons protested against those violent proceedings, declaring their resolution to |1722.| remain in the court-house till the election was finished, though at the hazard of their lives; which they accordingly did.’[552]
The Catholics had of late been getting up their heads in the north, especially in districts over which the Gordon family held sway; and the open practice of the Romish rites before large congregations in the Banffshire valleys, was become a standing subject of complaint and alarm in the church-courts. When at length the government obtained scent of the Jacobite plot in which Bishop Atterbury was concerned, it sympathised with these groans of the laden spirits in Scotland, and permitted some decided measures of repression to be taken.
Accordingly, this day, being Sunday, as the Duchess-Dowager of Gordon—Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk—was having mass performed at her house in the Canongate, Edinburgh, in the presence of about fifty professors like herself of the Catholic religion, Bailie Hawthorn, a magistrate of the Canongate, broke open the doors, and seized the whole party. The ladies were bailed, and allowed to depart; but the priest, Mr John Wallace, was marched to prison. We are informed by Wodrow that Wallace had been ordained a Protestant minister thirty-five years before.[553] The Lord Advocate would not at first listen to any proposal for his liberation, though several persons of distinction came to plead for it; but at length bail was taken for him to the extent of a thousand merks Scots. Being indicted under the statute of 1700, he failed to stand his trial, and was outlawed.[554]
Before the upbreak of this plot, considerable numbers of gentlemen under attainder daily presented themselves on the streets of Edinburgh, emboldened of course by the mildness of the government; but, one or two of them having been seized and put up in the Castle, it came to pass, 15th May, that not one was any longer to be seen. Mr Wodrow, who records these circumstances, expresses the feeling of the hour. ‘It’s certain we are in a most divided and defenceless state; divisions on the one hand, rancour and malice on the other, and a wretched indolence among too many. But the Lord liveth!’[555]
The Canongate, which had so often, in the sixteenth century, |1722.| been reddened with the best blood in Scotland, was still occasionally the scene of wild transactions, though arising amongst a different class of persons and from different causes. A local journalist chronicles a dreadful tragedy as occurring on its pavé at this date.
‘In the afternoon, Captain Chiesley and Lieutenant Moodie, both of Cholmly’s Regiment, which lies encamped at Bruntsfield Links, having quarrelled some time before in the camp, meeting on the street of the Canongate, the captain, as we are told, asked Mr Moodie whether he had in a certain company called him a coward? And he owning he had, the captain beat him first with his fist, and then with a cane; whereupon Mr Moodie drew his sword, and, shortening it, run the captain into the great artery. The captain, having his sword drawn at the same time, pushed at Mr Moodie, who was rushing on him with his sword shortened, and thus run him into the lower belly, of which in a few minutes he died, without speaking one word, having had no more strength or life left him than to cross the street, and reach the foot of the stair of his lodgings, where he dropped down dead. The captain lived only to step into a house near by, and to pray shortly that God might have mercy on his soul, without speaking a word more. ’Tis said Mr Moodie’s lady was looking over the window all the while this bloody tragedy was acting.’[556]
A duel which happened about the same time between Captains Marriot and Scroggs proved fatal to both.
‘Four of those poor deluded people called Quakers, two men and two women, came about noon to the Cross [of Edinburgh], when one of the women, who by her accent seemed to be of Yorkshire, after several violent agitations, said, that she was appointed by God to preach repentance to this sinful city; that a voice of mortality, as she called it, had sounded in her ears, and that desolation and all kinds of miseries would befall the inhabitants if they did not repent. After she had spoke about a quarter of an hour, a party of the city-guard carried her and the other three prisoners to the main guard.’
Some years after, one Thomas Erskine, a brewer, made himself conspicuous as a Quaker preacher in Edinburgh. One Saturday, January 17, 1736, he ‘made a religious peregrination through this city. He made his first station at the Bow-head [reputed as |1722.| the head-quarters of the saints in Edinburgh], where he pronounced woes and judgments on the inhabitants of the Good Town, if they did not speedily repent. Thence he walked to the Cross, where he recapitulated what he had evangelised by the way, and concluded with desiring his auditory to remember well what he had told them. However, he gave them forty days to think on’t.’
One day, in the ensuing July, Erskine sent a notice to the quiet little country town of Musselburgh, to the effect that the Spirit had appointed him to hold forth to them in the marketplace at five in the afternoon; and, accordingly, at the appointed hour, he mounted the Cross, and discoursed to a large audience.[557]
A second attempt was now made to obtain possession of the forfeited Seaforth estates for the government. It was calculated that what the two factors and their attendants, with a small military force, had failed to accomplish in the preceding October, when they were beat back with a fatal loss at Aa-na-Mullich, might now be effected by means of a good military party alone, if they should make their approach through a less critical passage. A hundred and sixty of Colonel Kirk’s regiment left Inverness under Captain M‘Neil, who had at one time been commander of the Highland Watch. They proceeded by Dingwall, Strath Garve, and Loch Carron, a route to the north of that adopted by the factors, and an easier, though a longer way. Donald Murchison, nothing daunted, got together his followers, and advanced to the top of Maam Attadale, a high pass from Loch Carron to the head of Loch Long, separating Lochalsh from Kintail. Here a gallant relative named Kenneth Murchison, and a few others, volunteered to go forward and plant themselves in ambush in the defiles of the Choille Van [White Wood], while the bulk of the party should remain where they were. It would appear that this ambush party consisted of thirteen men, all peculiarly well armed.
On approaching this dangerous place, the captain went forward with a sergeant and eighteen men to clear the wood, while the main body came on slowly in the rear. At a place called Altanbadn, in the Choille Van, he encountered Kenneth and his associates, whose fire wounded himself severely, killed one of his grenadiers, and wounded several others of the party. He persisted in advancing, and attacked the handful of natives with |1722.| sufficient resolution. They slowly withdrew, as unable to resist; but the captain now obtained intelligence that a large body of Mackenzies was posted in the mountain-pass of Attadale. It seemed as if there was a design to draw him into a fatal ambuscade. His own wounded condition probably warned him that a better opportunity might occur afterwards. He turned his forces about, and made the best of his way back to Inverness. Kenneth Murchison quickly rejoined Colonel Donald on Maam Attadale, with the cheering intelligence that one salvo of thirteen guns had repelled the hundred and sixty sidier roy.[558] After this, we hear of no renewed attempt to comprise the Seaforth property.
Strange as it may seem, Donald Murchison, two years after thus a second time resisting the government troops, came down to Edinburgh with eight hundred pounds of the earl’s rents, that he might get the money sent abroad for his lordship’s use. He remained a fortnight in the city unmolested. He would on this occasion appear in the garb of a Lowland gentleman; he would mingle with old acquaintances, ‘doers’ and writers; and appear at the Cross amongst the crowd of gentlemen who assembled there every day at noon. Scores would know all about his doings at Aa-na-Mullich and the Choille Van; but thousands might have known, without the chance of one of them betraying him to government.
General Wade, writing a report to the king in 1725, states that the Seaforth tenants, formerly reputed the richest of any in the Highlands, are now become poor, by neglecting their business, and applying themselves to the use of arms. ‘The rents,’ he says, ‘continue to be collected by one Donald Murchison, a servant of the late earl’s, who annually remits or carries the same to his master into France. The tenants, when in a condition, are said to have sent him free gifts in proportion to their several circumstances, but are now a year and a half in arrear of rent. The receipts he gives to the tenants are as deputy-factor to the Commissioners of the Forfeited Estates, which pretended power he extorted from the factor (appointed by the said commissioners to collect those rents for the use of the public), whom he attacked with above four hundred armed men, as he was going to enter upon the said estate, having with him a party of thirty of your majesty’s troops. The last year this Murchison marched in a public manner to Edinburgh, to remit eight hundred pounds to France for his master’s use, and remained fourteen days there |1722.| unmolested. I cannot omit observing to your majesty, that this national tenderness the subjects of North Britain have one for the other, is a great encouragement for rebels and attainted persons to return home from their banishment.’[559]
Donald was again in Edinburgh about the end of August 1725. On the 2d of September, George Lockhart of Carnwath, writing from Edinburgh to the Chevalier St George, states, amongst other matters of information regarding his party in Scotland, that Daniel Murchison (as he calls him) ‘is come to Edinburgh, on his way to France’—doubtless charged with a sum of rents for Seaforth. ‘He’s been in quest of me, and I of him,’ says Lockhart, ‘these two days, and missed each other; but in a day or two he’s to be at my country-house, where I’ll get time to talk fully with him. In the meantime, I know from one that saw him, that he has taken up and secured all the arms of value in Seaforth’s estate, which he thought better than to trust them to the care and prudence of the several owners; and the other chieftains, I hear, have done the same.’[560]
The Commissioners on the Forfeited Estates conclude their final report in 1725 by stating that they had not sold the estate of William Earl of Seaforth, ‘not having been able to obtain possession, and consequently to give the same to a purchaser.’
In a Whig poem on the Highland Roads, written in 1737, Donald is characteristically spoken of as a sort of cateran, while, in reality, as every generous person can now well understand, he was a high-minded gentleman. The verses, nevertheless, as well as the appended note, are curious:
‘Donald Murchison, a kinsman and servant to the Earl of Seaforth, bred a writer, a man of small stature, but full of spirit and resolution, fought at Dunblane against the government anno 1715, but continued thereafter to collect Seaforth’s rents for his lord’s use, and had some pickerings with the king’s forces on that account, till, about five years ago, the government was so tender as to allow Seaforth to re-purchase his estate, when the said Murchison had a principal hand in striking the bargain for his master. How he fell under Seaforth’s displeasure, and died thereafter, is not to the purpose here to mention.’
The end of Donald’s career can scarcely now be passed over in this slighting manner. The story is most painful. The Seaforth of that day—very unlike some of his successors—was unworthy of the devotion which this heroic man had shewn to him. When his lordship took possession of the estates which Donald had in a manner preserved for him, he discountenanced and neglected him. Murchison’s noble spirit pined away under this treatment, and he died in the very prime of his days of a broken heart.[562] He lies in a remote little churchyard on Cononside, in the parish of Urray, where, I am happy to say, his worthy relative, Sir Roderick I. Murchison, is at this time preparing to raise a suitable monument over his grave.
When Dr Johnson and James Boswell, in their journey to the Hebrides, 1773, came to the inn at Glenelg, they found the most wretched accommodation, and would have been without any comfort whatever, had not Mr Murchison, factor to Macleod in Glenelg, sent them a bottle of rum and some sugar, ‘with a polite message,’ says Boswell, ‘to acquaint us, that he was very sorry he did not hear of us till we had passed his house, otherwise he should have insisted on our sleeping there that night.’ ‘Such extraordinary attention,’ he adds, ‘from this gentleman to entire strangers, deserves the most honourable commemoration.’ This gentleman, to whom Johnson also alludes with grateful admiration of his courtesy in the Journey to the Western Islands, was a near relative of Donald Murchison.
A high wind shook the crops of Lothian, particularly damaging the pease. It was considered ‘a heavy stroke,’ as the people thereabouts |1722.| lived much on pease-meal. Apropos to this fact, Wodrow speaks of an individual who had much ploughing to execute, and who found it advantageous to feed his horses on pease-bannocks: ‘he finds it a third cheaper [than corn], and his horses fatter and better.’[563] It is curious that this farmer, ‘abnormis sapiens,’ came to the same point which Baron Liebig has attained in our age, by scientific investigation, as to the nutritive qualities of pease.
The extensive coal-field of East Lothian gave occasion for several efforts in the mechanical arts, which might be regarded as early and before their time, when the general condition of the country is considered. Some years before the Revolution, the Earl of Winton had drained his coal-pits in Tranent parish, by tunnels cut for a long way through solid rock, on such a scale as to attract the attention of George Sinclair, professor of natural philosophy in Glasgow, who, in the preface to his extraordinary work, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, speaks of them as something paralleling the cutting of the Alps by Hannibal. Such a mode of taking off the water from a coal-mine, where the form of the ground admitted it, was certainly of great use in days when as yet there were no steam-engines to make the driving of pumps easy.[564]
The forfeited estate of the Earl of Winton having been bought in 1719 by the York Buildings Company, a new and equally surprising addition was at this time made to the economy of the coal-works, in the form of a wooden railway, between one and two miles long, connecting the pits with the salt-works at Prestonpans and the harbour at Port-Seton. A work so ingenious, so useful, and foreshewing the iron ways by which, in our age, the industrial prospects of the world have been so much advanced, comes into strong relief when beheld in connection with the many barbarisms amidst which it took its rise. But the oddity of its associations does not end here, for, when a Highland army came down to the Lowlands twenty-three years afterwards, seeking with primitive arms to restore the House of Stuart, the first of its battles was fought on the ground crossed by this railway, and General Cope’s cannon were actually fired against the clouded Camerons[565] from a position on the railway itself!
There was published in Edinburgh a poem, entitled the Mock Senator—‘pretended to be translated from an Arabian manuscript, wherein, under feigned and disguised names, the author seems to lash some persons in the present administration.’ The magistrates—whom we have seen exercising a pretty sharp censorship over the newspaper press—‘committed to prison Mr Alexander Pennecuik, the supposed author of this poem, and discharged the hawkers to sell or disperse the same.’[566]
At this time, two criminalities of the highest class occurred amongst persons of rank in Scotland.
On the 30th of March, Mrs Elizabeth Murray, ‘lady to Thomas Kincaid, younger, of Gogar-Mains,’ was found dead on the road from Edinburgh to that place, with all the appearance of having been barbarously murdered. It was at once, with good reason, concluded that the horrible act had been perpetrated by her own husband. He succeeded in escaping to Holland.[567]
Pennecuik, the burgess-poet, has a poem on the murder of Mrs Kincaid by her husband, from which it would appear that she had been an amiable and long-suffering woman, and he a coarse and dissolute man. He adds a note at the end, ‘Ensign Hugh Skene engaged in the plot.’[568]
Only three weeks later (April 22), Sir James Campbell of Lawers was foully murdered at Greenock by his apparent friend, Duncan Campbell of Edramurkle. The facts are thus related in a contemporary letter. ‘Lawers had been in a treaty of marriage with [Campbell of] Finab’s daughter, which Edramurkle was very active to get accomplished, out of a seeming friendship for Lawers. After the marriage articles were agreed upon, they went together to make a visit to the young lady, and, in return, came to Greenock on Friday the 19th last [April], where they remained Saturday and Sunday—Edramurkle all the while shewing the greatest friendship for Lawers, and Lawers confiding in him as his own brother. Upon the Saturday, pretending to Lawers that he had use for a pistol, he got money from him to buy one, which accordingly he did, with ball and powder. The use he made of this artillery was to discharge two balls into Lawers’s head, while he was fast asleep, betwixt three and four on Monday’s morning; and which balls were levelled under his left eye, and went through |1723.| his head, sloping to the back-bone of his neck ... he was found in a sleeping posture, and had not moved either eye or hand.
‘The fellow went immediately off in a boat for Glasgow, and from thence came here [Edinburgh], the people in the house having no suspicion but that Lawers was asleep, till about eleven o’clock, when they found him as above, swimming in his blood. Upon recollection on several passages which happened with respect to Duncan Campbell, they presently found him to have been the murderer, and caused the magistrates of Greenock write to the magistrates of Glasgow to apprehend him; but he being gone for Edinburgh, the provost wrote in to our provost here, whereupon there was a search here ... but the villain is not as yet found.
‘The occasion of this execrable murder is said by the murderer’s friends to be to prevent Lawers going back in the marriage, whereof he was then apprehensive; and being a relation of the bride’s, and very active in bringing on that courtship, the devil tempted him to that unparalleled cruelty. But we rather believe that it was to rifle his pockets, for his breeches were from under his head, and nothing but a Carolus and four shillings in them; whereas it is most certain that Lawers always carried a purse of gold with him, and more especially could not but have it when he intended to celebrate his marriage.’[569]
Campbell was extensively advertised for as ‘a tall thin man, loot-shouldered, pock-pitted, with a pearl or blindness in the right eye,’ dressed in ‘a suit of gray Duroy clothes, plain-mounted, a big red coat, and a thin light wig, rolled up with a ribbon;’ ‘betwixt 30 and 40 years of age;’[570] and a hundred guineas were offered for his apprehension; but we do not hear of his having ever been brought to justice.
Sir Alexander Murray of Stanhope, Peeblesshire, was one of those men who, possessed of some talent and insight, are so little under the government of common prudence and good temper, that they prove rather a trouble than a benefit to their fellow-creatures. In youth, during the life of his father, he married a beautiful and accomplished woman, Grizel Baillie, grand-daughter by her father of the patriot Robert Baillie of Jerviswood, unjustly put to death in 1684, and by her mother |1723.| of the eminent statesman Patrick Hume, Earl of Marchmont; but after four years of unhappy life, the lady had been separated from him in 1714, after which time she lived for a long series of years in her father’s family, in the enjoyment of universal esteem and respect. Sir Alexander was led by his ardent speculative mind into a series of projects which left him in the middle of life a broken man, and an object of pity to the public. His case is the more deplorable, that many of his ideas were founded upon a just conception of the wants and the capabilities of his country, and only required means and favourable circumstances to have been carried out to his own and the general advantage.
At this date, he bought a great peninsula of Argyleshire territory, named Ardnamurchan, which he desired, by mining and improved methods of agriculture and social economy, to make a model for the redemption of the entire kingdom from barbarism, sloth, and poverty. He believed the mountains throughout much of the West Highlands and Hebrides to be crossed by mineral veins of great value, and that it was possible from these to realise a great amount of wealth. As to improvement of the surface, it was his belief—contrary to the general impression—that the best plan was to commence a course of improvement upon the tops of the hills. He had observed traces of ancient tillage on the high grounds of Peeblesshire, and, pondering on the matter, had come to see that, the high grounds being naturally most liable to humidity, from the clouds settling upon them, it was of importance to the low grounds that the higher should be drained first. This being effected, and the surplus water led along the hillsides in trenches or canals, he would have the administration of moisture over the surface in a great measure in his own hands. What the Argyleshire and Inverness chiefs thought of such a plan amidst their semi-diluvial existence, we do not learn, but we may imagine something of it.
Sir Alexander tells us that he found his barony of twenty-four Scots miles long occupied by 1352 persons, among whom there was not one devoted to any mechanic art or trade. He tells us that, in one year, he drained a large tract of hilly and boggy ground, one-fourth part of which next year yielded him a hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of hay at fourpence per stone. He also commenced mining works, in connection with which there rose a village named New York, containing about 500 persons, many of whom were skilled English workmen. These mines, however, he afterwards leased to the York Buildings Company. He was the |1723.| first person who introduced any kind of trade into the district, and he assures us that, in his efforts at general improvement he spent large sums of his own patrimony. Yet, while benefiting the inhabitants in this way, he was the subject of jealousy amongst the better class of people, who regarded him as an alien, a Lowlander, and a spy upon their actions. His cattle were ham-strung or stolen, and his sheep forced over precipices. The buildings on his property were set on fire. There were even plans formed to murder him, from which it was a wonder that he escaped. Strange to say, ten years of such difficulties did not suffice to disgust him with Ardnamurchan, and he is found, first in 1732, and again in 1740, appealing to Walpole and to parliament for assistance to carry out his plans, all that he required being an abolition of the heritable jurisdictions which enslaved the lower classes to their landlords, and a flotilla of gun-boats to maintain law and order in the country.[571]
An Edinburgh newspaper notices the death, on the 18th of May 1743, of Sir Alexander Murray of Stanhope, baronet, ‘to whom may be justly applied that beautiful passage from Seneca: “Ecce spectaculum dignum, ad quod respiciat Deus! ecce par Deo dignum, vir fortis cum malâ fortunâ compositus!”’ The writer of the article on Ardnamurchan in the New Statistical Account of Scotland, states that the plough has long passed over the site of New York, and that no trace of it remains in the district, excepting in a few English names scattered among the native population.
It may be remarked as to Sir Alexander’s mining schemes in Ardnamurchan, that in a portion of the district—namely, the valley of Strontian—lead-mines have been successfully worked at intervals since his time, the proprietor occasionally realising from £1000 to £1500 a year. The mineral strontites, from which was deduced the earth strontia, was discovered here, and named from Strontian. There was a prevalent belief in the reign of George II. that many valuable minerals might be obtained amongst the Highland mountains, if there were a possibility of working them. The actual discovery of marble in a few places served to support the notion. A very prosaic poet thus alludes to the matter about 1737:
The poet adds by way of explanation: ‘Craig of Boin is a rock of marble, veined and diversified with various colours, now a part of the Earl of Findlater’s estate, but formerly belonging to Mr Ogilvie of Boin, from whom Louis XIV. of France got so much of the said marble as finished one of the finest closets in Versailles.’ ‘Sir James Ramsay of Banff, in Perthshire, after he had built his mansion-house, found out a quarry of jet-black marble, whereupon he pulled the freestone ribats out of the windows, and put marble ones in their place.’[573]
Soon after this time, we find a society in activity at Edinburgh, ‘for promoting Natural Knowledge,’ which in 1743 invited ‘noblemen, gentlemen, and others, who have discovered or may discover any unusual kinds of earths, stones, bitumens, saline or vitriolic substances, marcasites, ores of metals, and other native fossils, whose uses and properties they may not have an opportunity of inquiring into by themselves, to send sufficient samples of them, with a short account of the places where and the manner in which they are found, directed to Dr Andrew Plummer, one of the secretaries to the Philosophical Society, and the Society undertake, by some of their number, to make the proper trials at their own charge, for discovering the nature and uses of the Minerals, and to return an answer to the person by whom they were sent, if they are judged to be of any use or can be wrought to advantage.’[574]
To return to personal matters connected with the speculative baronet of Stanhope—the beauty, accomplishments, and moral graces of Lady Murray made it the more unfortunate that she should have been united to one who, with whatever merits, was of too unsteady nature to have ever made any woman happy. It is alleged that, on the second day of their wedded life, a ferocious and unsatisfiable jealousy took possession of his mind, in consequence of seeing his young wife dancing with a friend of his own named Hamilton. He could not dispossess himself of the idea that she loved another better than him. His behaviour to her |1723.| would have proved him to have a slight touch of insanity in his composition, even if his ill-calculated projects had not been sufficient to do so. Lady Murray was an admired and popular person in both Scottish and English society. Amongst her friends, the chief authors of the day stood high. Gay introduces her into the group of goodly dames who welcomed Pope back from Greece—that is, congratulated him on his completion of the translation of Homer. After speaking of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he says:
He here alluded to her fascinating powers as a songstress, which she is said to have exercised with marvellous effect in singing the songs of her native land. Lady Murray wrote in her latter days a memoir of her parents, which was published in 1822, and is one of the most charming pieces of biography in the language.[575]
On the 14th of October 1721, when Lady (then Mrs) Murray was living in her father’s house in Westminster, a footman of her brother-in-law, Lord Binning, named Arthur Gray, a Scotsman, was led by an insane passion to invade her chamber in the middle of the night, armed with a drawn sword in one hand and a pistol in the other. All the rest of the family being asleep, she felt how far removed she was from help and protection, and therefore parleyed with the man in the gentlest terms she could use, to induce him to leave her room; but half an hour was thus spent in vain. At length, watching an opportunity, she pushed him against the wall, seized his pistol with one hand, and with another rang the bell. Gray then ran off. He was tried for the offence, and condemned to death, but reprieved. The affair made of course a great deal of noise, and was variously regarded, according to the feelings of individuals. All persons, good and amiable, like Mrs Murray herself, sympathised with her in the distress and agitation which it gave her, and admired the courage and presence of mind she had displayed. The poor outcast poet Boyse represented this generous view of the case in the verses To Serena, which he wrote in Mrs Murray’s honour:
A different class of feelings was represented by Mrs Murray’s friend, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who wrote a ballad on the occasion, full of levity and something worse, which may be found in the work quoted below.[577] This jeu d’esprit Mrs Murray resented in a manner which was felt to be unpleasant by Lady Mary, who with difficulty obtained a reconciliation through the intercession of her sister, the Countess of Mar.[578]
An Edinburgh newspaper of this date makes an announcement of a very homely and simple kind, but from which one may nevertheless draw a few inferences illustrative of the age. It is ‘to give notice, that there is a fine bullock to the value of £20 sterling to be killed at Dalkeith the 14th of May, and to be exposed to sale the 16th instant; and whoever has a mind for any of the said bullock, let them repair to the fleshmarket of Dalkeith against the hours of nine and ten o’clock in the morning, on the said 16th day of May, where they shall be kindly entertained by the owners of the said ox: likewise you shall have him more reasonable in proportion than any beef was sold in Scotland this year of God. For your encouragement, you shall have his principal pieces, such as his back-sayes, his fore-sayes, breasts, runners, flanks, hook-bones, marrow-bones, collop-pieces, and rump-pieces, all at 4s. Scots per pound, and his other pieces at 3s. per pound; or, if you please to buy it by the lump without weighing, they shall be welcome. The said ox is two ells and one inch high; in length from the root of the ear to his hip-bone, two yards three quarters; it is calculated by all tradesmen that ever did see him, that he will have ten stone-weight of tallow in his belly. He is one of the same country breed, bought by George Lamb, drover in Greenlaw, from the Right Honourable Lord Hopetoun in the year 1721. There is none in this age ever did see any in this place of Britain like him; I doubt if any such as him be, or to be equalised in England at this day. He has been fed this two years, and he is only six years old just now.’[579]
Mr Wodrow was never long without some perilous affair to grieve over. ‘We have,’ says he at this date, ‘lamentable accounts of the growth of Episcopal Jacobite meeting-houses in the north, especially in Angus. The Commission [of the General Assembly] has sent up an address about them.’[580]
In the summer of the previous year, a chapel for the use of those in communion with the Church of England according to law, was opened at the foot of Blackfriars’ Wynd, in Edinburgh, with ‘an altar and pulpit handsomely adorned.’ The newspapers of the day inform us—‘Some impious persons, in contempt of all laws human and divine, have demolished several of the glass-windows; but it’s hoped that care will be taken to prevent such scandalous abuses in time coming.’[581]
The summer of this year was remarked to be unusually dry and sultry, with little wind. The air seemed stagnant, and the water unwholesome. Vast abundance of flies resulted, and a bloody flux became prevalent. ‘In one quarter of the parish [of Eastwood, in Renfrewshire],’ says Wodrow, ‘I saw nineteen sick persons in one day [August 23], and all of them save one of the flux.’ ‘I have never seen so much sickness in Eastwood for twenty years.’[582]
A symptom of the gradual softening away of the sombre habits of the people was exhibited in the earlier part of this year, in the commencement of what was called the Assembly in Edinburgh, by which was meant an arrangement for a weekly meeting of the younger people of both sexes, for the purpose of dancing. The adventure was at first on a very modest scale, and the place of meeting—‘in the great hall in Patrick Steil’s Close’—might be considered as obscure.[583] The people who patronised it were chiefly of those at once Tories in politics and Episcopalians in religion, |1723.| who, all through the last century, stood in opposition to the general feelings and habits of their countrymen. They were doubtless well satisfied of the legitimate and even laudable character of their design; yet it appears they felt themselves put on the defensive before the public, and were not a little solicitous to give their project a fair appearance. It was loudly proclaimed that the improvement of manners, the imparting of a ‘genteel behaviour,’ was in view; the utility of healthful exercise was insinuated; and a great point was made of the balances to be handed to the poor, for whose benefit no regulated charitable institution as yet existed. Great care was also professedly taken to insure perfect propriety on the part of the company. The ball opened at four in the afternoon, and was rigorously closed at eleven. Without tickets, at half-a-crown each, there could be no admission. Discreet matrons held indisputable sovereignty over the scene, before whom no vice could dare to shew its face.
The Assembly, of course, met with opposition from the square-toed part of society. ‘Some of the ministers published their warnings and admonitions against promiscuous dancing, and in one of their printed papers, which was cried about the streets, it was said that the devils were particularly busy upon such occasions.’[584] A paper pellet was launched, under the title of A Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to his Friend in the City, with an Answer thereto, concerning the New Assembly; from which we learn that there were serious apprehensions, not only that these weekly meetings would introduce effeminate habits amongst the nobility and gentry, preventing them from serving their country in ‘the useful arts and sciences,’ but that they would encourage vice and prodigality, and thus prove ‘scandalous to religion, and of dangerous consequence to human society.’ The gentleman of the city was particularly distressed in remarking, that ‘the ordinary time spent in public worship each Lord’s Day comes short of the seven hours spent in the Assembly.’ He remarked, moreover, that Edinburgh was a place to which young men were sent for their education, and also to learn ‘merchandising’ and mechanical employments. These young persons would now be liable to be diverted from their proper pursuits in order to study how best to dress themselves for the Assembly, and how in that scene of levity they might best make favour with the fair. After attending there, they would most likely go to taverns. In |1723.| short, they would be thoroughly depraved, and the objects of their parents in sending them to town entirely frustrated.
The institution was viewed with especial horror by the more stern professors of Presbyterianism, as folly appears from a book of Patrick Walker, written soon after, in which he reviews the vanities of the age generally. ‘Some years ago,’ he says, ‘we had a profane, obscene meeting, called the Horn Order;[585] and now we have got a new assembly and public meeting called Love for Love ... all nurseries of profanity and vanity, and excitements to base lusts; so that it is a shame to speak of these things that are said and done amongst them. Some years ago, our women deformed their heads with cock-ups’ [‘some of them half a yard high, set with wires’]; ‘and now they deform their bodies with farthingales nine yards about; some of them in three stories, very unbecoming women professing godliness.... If we would allow ourselves to think or consider, we need not be so vain or look so high, being born heirs of wrath, and our bodies to go to a consuming stinking grave ... and considering the end of our clothing and how we came by them, to cover our nakedness and for warmness to our bodies, and that the sheep’s old clothes are our new.’
Patrick fairly wondered how any one that ever knew what it was to bow a knee in prayer, ‘durst crook a hough to fyke and fling at a piper’s and fiddler’s springs. I bless the Lord,’ says he, ‘that so ordered my lot in my dancing-days, that made the fear of the bloody rope and bullets to my neck and head, the pain of boots, thumbikens, and irons, cold and hunger, wetness and weariness, to stop the lightness of my head and the wantonness of my feet.’ He felt bound to denounce dancing as a ‘common evil,’ especially among young professors, and he was peculiarly indignant at there being a dancing tune called the Cameronian March, which he conceived to be a mockery of the worthy name of Richard Cameron. In Patrick’s view, however, dancing was |1723.| but a symptom of a general departure from the grave, correct habits of former times. ‘In our speech,’ says he, ‘our Scripture and old Scots names are gone out of request; instead of Father and Mother, Mamma and Papa, training children to speak nonsense, and what they do not understand.’ He likewise complains of ‘a scandalous omission of the worship of God in families ... abounding amongst us in Edinburgh, the most part singing only a verse of a psalm and reading a chapter; on the Sabbath evening some pray and many not, and no more till the next Sabbath evening.’ The open profanation of the Lord’s Day he saw to be more and more abounding in Scotland. ‘The throng streets, particularly fields, milk-houses, ale-houses in and about sinful Edinburgh, is a sad evidence of this; many going to the fields before sermons, and after sermons multitudes go to their walks.’ He states that ‘three in one parish in 1716, and nine together in a neighbour parish in 1717, all of them professors, went to the cornfields in these Sabbath mornings, and did shear so many sheaves of corn.’
The poet Allan Ramsay, who maintained a Horatian code of gaiety and enjoyment in the midst of puritanic soberness, strongly took part with the Assembly, and addressed its fair adherents in a poem which, with its prose dedication, has supplied us with some of the above facts. Allan may have had his heart in his theme, but little is to be said for the eloquence of his verses; nor were some of his views as to the pleasures of the Assembly at all calculated to do away with the prejudices of its opponents. We are told, however, that both in the case of the Assembly and that of the Playhouse, hereafter to be noticed, ‘the ministers lost ground, to their great mortification, for the most part of the ladies turned rebels to their remonstrances.’[586]
Two young men destined to be remembered by their country were in the habit of attending the Assembly: one of them a hard-headed, yet speculative genius, rising at the bar; the other a philandering, sentimental being, absorbed in poetry and Jacobitism; their names Henry Home of Kames and William Hamilton of Bangour; at this time, living in bonds of strongest friendship. Hamilton one day addressed Home ‘in the Assembly,’ thus: