The case is worthy of notice, chiefly on account of the list of articles contained in the coffer—evidencing as they do a degree of wealth which few will be prepared to find belonging to a Scottish nobleman of that age. There were—‘of Portugal ducats and other species of foreign gold to the avail of twenty thousand pounds or thereby; thretty-sax dozen of gold buttons; ane rich jewel all set with diamonts, whilk the earl resavit as ane gift given to him the time he was ambassador in Denmark, worth sax thousand merks; the Queen of Denmark’s picture in gold, set about with rich diamonts, estimat to five thousand merks; ane jasp stane for steming of bluid,410 estimat to five hundred French crowns; ane chenyie of equal pearl, wherein was four hundred pearls great and small; twa chenyies of gold, of twenty-four unce wecht; ane other jewel of diamonts set in gold worth three thousand merks; ane great pair of bracelets, all set with diamonts, price thereof five hundred crowns; the other pair of gold bracelets, at sax hundred pounds the pair; ane turcas ring worth ten French crowns; ane diamont set in ane ring, price twenty-eight French crowns; with ane number of other small rings set with diamonts and other rich stanes in gold, worth three hundred French crowns; mair sixteen thousand merks of silver and gold ready-cunyit, whilk was within the said green coffer; together with the haill tapestry, silver-work, bedding, and other guids, geir, and plenishing, being within the said place.’—Pit.
The king, in a letter to the Chancellor Hay, dated 22d August 1624, alludes to a recommendation he had formerly sent, that this injury to his esteemed councillor the Earl Marischal should be inquired into, and adds: ‘Whereas we are informed that, in a later letter under our hand, we have shewn to you that it was not our pleasure nor meaning in ony former letters to hurt the said Lady Marischal or ony other person, these are now expressly to mak it known to you, that we nather gave direction to insert any sic clause in our letters, nather, at the putting of our hand to the samen, did tak heed thereto, nor never meant ony sic favour to her who hath so ill deserved of one for whose sake we were only to respect her.’ And then he added a command to proceed with the case against the peccant lady.—An. Scot.
‘Lord Colville took journey to France, to crave the re-establishment of the Scots Guard and Company of Scottish Men at Arms, according to their first institution and the French king’s promise often made to that effect.’—Bal.
The Scots Guard of the French king was an old institution, and for a long time past the command had passed from generation to generation of the Sieurs D’Aubigné (Earls and Dukes of Lennox). Louis XIII. readily agreed to the proposed revival of the corps, and designed to confer the command on Ludovick, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, the favourite councillor of King James. It chanced, however, that the duke was suddenly cut off by apoplexy (February 1624), ‘beloved and lamented’ beyond all remembered example, ‘because he was naturally inclined to do good without distinction of persons.’—G. H. S. The honour was therefore transferred to his nephew, Lord Gordon, son of the Marquis of Huntly.
In July 1625, Lord Gordon made his first muster of the corps on the Links of Leith, in presence of several officers deputed by the French king for that purpose. These gentlemen had been conducted to Edinburgh by Sir Robert Gordon, Tutor of Sutherland; they were there entertained in the handsomest manner by the Lord Gordon and other nobles, ‘and sent home again to their master, the French king, in great satisfaction and content.’ Lord Gordon’s younger brother, Lord Melgum, was his lieutenant, and the first gentleman of the company was Sir William Gordon, son of George Gordon of Kindroch, a branch of the family of Pitlurg.—G. H. S.
‘... the king’s picture in the hall of the palace of Linlithgow fell ... and brake in pieces. The like befell the king of France’s picture, in that same place, six weeks before his death.’—Cal.
Such incidents were then invariably noted with superstitious awe. Aubrey tells us that on the first day of the sitting of the Long Parliament, the picture of Archbishop Laud fell in his closet, by the breaking of the string.411
George, Earl of Caithness, was one of the most unruly spirits of his age. The almost uncontrolled power which he possessed in his own remote country, was generally employed by him in advancing base and selfish purposes, and half his life was passed in a state of outlawry. Sometimes he is found at war with the Sutherland family, sometimes with his neighbours the Mackays of Strathnaver. One year, he is proclaimed a rebel; the next, he is found honoured with a royal commission against some other rebel. (See the account of the case of the Earl of Orkney in 1615.) He was overwhelmed with debt, yet did not regard it much. His son, Lord Berriedale, having become responsible for him, lay five years in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, as a prisoner to the earl’s creditors, while Caithness himself passed a pleasant life in his sea-cliff fortalices of Girnigo and Aikergill, in the far north. There must have been something plausible about this singular noble. Notwithstanding all the injuries he had inflicted on the Sutherland family, and the badness of his general character, he contrived, in 1619, to patch up a reconciliation with Sir Robert Gordon, a most respectable man, a friend and servant of the king, and who represented the interests of that great family. He had on that occasion visited Sir Robert in Sutherland, and Sir Robert in his turn spent several days with the earl at Girnigo. The truce, however, was not of long continuance, for the Earl of Caithness’s outrages were incessant. It was felt by the Privy Council as a scandal to the country, that such a hardy rebel against the ordinary authorities of the land should exist, and they looked about for the means of putting him down. The usual expedient of the age was resorted to—namely, to employ some other great man against him—thus accomplishing by a kind of private war what ought to have been the business of a force of their own. Sir Robert was the man they pitched upon.
Behold, then, this courtier of St James’s and Newmarket, leaving those scenes in the south where he was accustomed to meet Bacon and (not many years ago) Shakspeare, and coming down to the land of Mackays, Guns, and Sinclairs, in order to conduct an army against one of those rude grandees who could even trouble a king. He had a strange associate in the enterprise; Lord Berriedale had been liberated from prison, on a paction with the creditors, that he might do what he could to bring his heartless father within the grasp of the law.
Sir Robert’s forces were the Clan Sutherland and their friends, a selection of the most active and hardy, and all well armed. Assembling in Strathullie, and having been properly arranged and officered, they lost no time in setting forth to cross the Ord. A company of the Clan Gun went before to clear the ground and prevent surprise. Before they had advanced far into Caithness, they learned that the earl, unable to withstand so great a force, had deserted the country, and taken refuge in Orkney, intending to go thence to Norway. At Latheron, James Sinclair of Murkle, Sir William Sinclair of Mey, the Laird of Forss, and some other Caithness magnates, came to yield their obedience and offer their assistance. Sir Robert received them with great civility, but ‘gave small trust to some of them; neither suffered he any of the inhabitants to come in or go out of the army after the setting of the sun until sunrising.’
Passing Wick, he conducted his troops to Girnigo, a castle so strongly placed on the verge of a lofty cliff overhanging the sea, that there might have been some difficulty in taking it. The keys, however, were at once rendered up, and so the army took quiet possession of the fortress. They went forward, and, in like manner took Aikergill and Keiss, two forts which the earl had abandoned in succession. Meanwhile, Sir Robert had spies throughout all Caithness to report to him about the dispositions of the people. They were said to be quiet, but angry that any of the House of Sutherland should be charged with such a commission against their lord.
Learning that Lady Caithness, who was his cousin-german, had removed to a house a few miles distant, Gordon went to pay his respects to her. She pleaded for her husband, on the ground that he was not attempting any resistance; but Sir Robert left her no hopes of his being speedily pardoned. He proceeded with deliberation to settle Lord Berriedale in possession of the country and its fortresses, and made various other arrangements for its benefit; after which he returned in triumph to Dunrobin, and dismissed his men. ‘Thus you see how the Earl of Caithness, having attained to the top of fortune’s wheel, and to the height of his desires, by his service in Orkney, did by his own misdemeanours, and wicked actions, fall into this extremity, which a man of his life and conversation could not escape. Neither could the Earl of Orkney’s example, which was recent before his eyes, divert him from the course which brought him to this misery. A notable example to posterity.’—G. H. S.
During the earlier half of this year, Scotland suffered under a famine of extreme severity. There was a vast increase to the usually inordinate number of beggars, in consequence of many of the poorer class of tenants throwing their farms in the hands of their landlords, and wandering forth in search of food. And it is remarked that the condition of these new mendicants was the most miserable of all, ‘because they, being for the most part ashamed to beg, underlies all the extremities wherethrough the pinching of their bellies may affect them; whereas, by the contrair, strong and sturdy beggars, by their importunity and crying, and sometimes by extorting of almous, are in some measure relieved.’ The administrators of the state are found in alarm that, unless something be done to enable the poor to tide over till the new harvest should be realised in September, ‘numbers of them will betake themselves to live by stowth or [ere] they will starve through hunger, whilk will not only produce a foul imputation agains the whole land, but the wrath and anger of God will be wakened.’ At the date noted, therefore, the Privy Council took measures for bringing the principal men together in their respective county towns to arrange for a taxation according to means and substance, in order to procure victual for the poor. A hundred merks for every thousand pounds of substance was the rate recommended.
In July, the famine ‘increased daily, till at last many, both in burgh and land, died of hunger. Many poor came to Edinburgh for succour, of which number some died in the streets.’ A fast was held on account of the calamity; ‘the sermons began every day in the week at seven hours, and ended at nine. Immediately after the fast was ended, that same night, 7th of July, there was such a fire in the heaven, with thunder and fire-flaught, that the hearers and beholders thought verily that the day of judgment was come.’—Cal.
‘There was this harvest-time ane great mortality ... ten or twelve died ordinarily every day [in Perth] from midsummer to Michaelmas’ [September 29].—Chron. Perth.
It was probably to this famine that a story told by Wodrow refers. While the poor people were dying in great numbers in the fields, ‘some people passing by saw a young child about seven years old, lying and dying by a dike-side—which could not but move their pity, though they could give it no relief. They observed the child to get up to its feet, and looking up cheerfully towards heaven, clapping its hands, making a tripping and dancing motion with its feet, they heard it cry: “O! Lamb’s days for evermore! O! Lamb’s days for evermore! I see heaven! Lamb’s days for evermore!” And with that it presently fell down and died. I had this from my mother, who had it from her mother, and that it was told as a certain truth.’—W. A.
Bessie Smith, of Lesmahago, appeared before the presbytery of Lanark, and confessed sundry dealings with unlawful arts. She had ‘charmed the heart-fevers.’ The patients, kneeling under her direction, asked their health ‘for God’s sake, for Sanct Spirit, for Sanct Aikit, for the nine maidens that died in the boortree in the Ladywell Bank—This charm to be buik and beil to me, God grant that sae be.’ She also ‘appointed them the wayburn leaf, to be eaten nine mornings.’—R. P. L.
While the Egyptians were everywhere a proscribed race, and often the victims of an indiscriminate severity, there was one spot where mercy and even kindness seems to have been extended to them. This was Roslin. Sir William Sinclair of Roslin, Lord Justice-general under Queen Mary, riding home one day from Edinburgh, found a poor Egyptian about to be hanged on the gibbet at the Burgh-moor, and brought him off unharmed. In remembrance of this kindness, ‘the whole body of gipsies were accustomed to gather in the stanks [marshes] of Roslin every year, where they acted several plays during the months of May and June.’ So tells us the quaint Father Hay, a connection of the Roslin family; and he adds: ‘There are two towers which were allowed them for their residence, the one called Robin Hood, the other Little John.’
At the time noted, the Privy Council had their attention called to this Patmos of the outlawed race. They remark that, ‘while the laws enjoined all persons in authority to execute to the deid the counterfeit thieves and limmers, the Egyptians,’ it was nevertheless reported that a number of them were now within the bounds of Roslin, ‘where they have a peaceable receipt and abode as if they were lawful subjects, committing stowths and reifs in all parts where they may find the occasion.’ The Council, therefore, issued an order to the sheriff of the district, who happened to be Sinclair younger of Roslin himself, commanding him ‘to pass, search, seek, hunt, follow, and pursue the said vagabond thieves and limmers,’ and bring them to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh for due punishment.—P. C. R.
An order for the execution of a number of Egyptians was actually issued on the ensuing 27th of January.
One Thomas Grieve was tried in Edinburgh for carrying on a species of medical practice by witchcraft. He was accused of having cured many people of heavy sickness and grievous diseases, by various magical arts; as, for instance, the making of signs and crosses upon them, the washing of their shirts in south-running streams, and the uttering of unknown words. He took sickness off a woman near Leslie, in Fife, and put it upon a cow, ‘whilk thereafter ran wood [mad] and died.’ He cured William Kirk’s bairn in Tullibole, of the morbus caducus, ‘by straiking back the hair of his head,’ and wrapping the child in an anointed cloth, by that means putting him asleep. To cure diseased cattle, he sprinkled a byre with enchanted water. He passed various patients through a hasp of yarn three several times, and then threw the hasp into a fire, where it burned blue; thus the people were cured. He was alleged to have cured William Cousin’s wife by manifest sorcery, ‘causing her husband heat the coulter of his plough, and cool the same in water brought from Holywell of Hillside, thereafter making certain conjurations, crosses, and signs upon the water,’ which he caused the patient to drink. One of the items in the dittay was, ‘curing James Mudie, his wife and children, of the fever; in curing his wife, by causing ane great fire to be put on, and ane hole to be made in the north side of the house, and ane quick hen to be put furth thereat, at three several times, and ta’en in at the house-door witherships [contrary to the course of the sun]; thereafter taking the hen, and putting it under the sick woman’s oxter or arm, and therefra carrying it to the fire, where it was halden doun and burnt quick therein.’
The assize, having read the depositions of sundry parish ministers, and being ‘ripely advised,’ sentenced Thomas to be strangled at a stake and burnt.—Pit.
‘... about nine hours at night, there appeared like a rainbow in the west, the moon shining clearly in the east, with some rain in the meantime, whereat many wondered.’—Cal.
From Martinmas of the preceding year to the end of January in the present, there was a hard continuous frost, which, after a slight thaw, was resumed, and lasted till the 23d of February. During this time, ‘eleven carts, with twenty-one puncheons of wine, came over upon the ice from Dundee here.’—Chron. Perth.
‘About the midst of Januar, four gentlemen of good credit, having gone out of Stirling some two miles or thereby, to pass their time, heard sensibly like the shots of many muskets, and after that, taking better heed, like the beating upon drums, and playing upon piffers and the sound of trumpets; and last of all, the shot of great cannons; so that for fear they went back again to the town, and reported what they had heard.’—Cal.
The Town Council of Aberdeen had occasion to consider an abuse which had lately crept into their burgh, in the form of ‘costly banqueting at the baptising of bairns,’ and the ‘convocating of great numbers of people thereto.’ It is mentioned that, on these occasions, there were ‘all sorts of succours [sugars], confections, spiceries, and dessert, brought from foreign parts, beside great superfluity of venison, and wild meat of all sorts ... and withal, extraordinary drinking and scolling [health-drinking] ... to the slander of the town, in sic a calamitous time, when God is visiting the whole land with dearth and famine, and mony poor anes [are] dying and starving at dykes and under stairs for cauld and hunger.’
The Council ordained that hereafter no person of whatever degree should have ‘mae than four gossips and four cummers at the maist’ at their baptisms, that not more than six women be invited ‘to convoy the bairn to and frae the kirk,’ and that twelve should be the utmost amount of company present ‘at the dinner, supper, or afternoon’s drink.’ All extravagances at table were at the same time strictly forbidden.
The wappinshaw was a periodical muster of the irregular armed force of the country; it got its name from the more immediate purpose of the assembly—namely, an exhibition of weapons. At Dunfermline, on this day, while a wappinshaw was going on, ‘William Anderson, son till John Anderson, bailiff of the said town, and Charles Richeson, his servant, being shooting a shot with some of their friends in a certain place of the town, [a little piece of the lunt flieth upon a thack-house, which easily kindled. The fire increased with the violency of the wind412], and did flie from house to house, and sometimes wald flie over ane house without doing it any harm, but wald burn the next house, till the great admiration of all men; so that this fire burnt so meikle of the town, that, excepted the abbey and the kirk thereof, the tenth part were not free of it. This, by the judgment of all the beholders, was thought till have been some divinity, or some witchcraft, rather nor this foresaid accidental fire.’—Jo. H.
‘The fire began at twelve hours, and burnt the whole town, some few sclate houses excepted, before four afternoon; goods and geir within houses, malt and victual in kilns and barns, were consumed.’—Cal.
The town of Dunfermline consisted at this time of 120 houses, containing 287 families.—Bal.
There was a collection in the parish churches for ‘the support of the town of Dunfermline, burnt with fire’ (R. P. L.); and, in June 1625, King Charles I. ordered £500 sterling to be added to the fund for the relief of the poorer class of sufferers.—P. C. R.
The Clan Chattan or MacIntosh, seated in the centre of Inverness-shire, were dependents of the Earls of Moray. None had entered more heartily into the revenge of the Bonny Earl’s death against the Marquis of Huntly, and for this service they had obtained certain lands from the Moray family. Now, that the Earl of Moray was reconciled with Huntly, he did not see any occasion longer to patronise or favour the MacIntoshes; so he attempted to remove them from the lands formerly conferred upon them. ‘This the Clan Chattan could hardly endure,’ says Sir Robert Gordon: about Whitsuntide, assembling five hundred men under their infant chief’s uncle, Lachlan MacIntosh [afterwards, by the by, a stout loyalist in the Civil War], ‘they keepit the fields in their Highland weed upon foot, with swords, bows, arrows, targets, hagbuts, pistols, and other Highland arms, and first began to rob and spulyie the earl’s tenants (who laboured their possessions) of their haill goods, geir, insight plenishing [household furniture], horse, nolt, sheep, corns, and cattle, and left them nothing that they could get within their bounds; syne fell in sorning throughout Moray, Stratherrick, Urquhart, Ross, Sutherland, Brae of Mar, and divers other parts, taking their meat and food perforce where they could not get it willingly, frae friends as well as frae their foes, yet still kept themselves from shedding of innocent blood.’
The Earl of Moray first brought a band of Monteith Highlanders against these marauders; but the expedition seems to have failed. Another enterprise of the same kind was no more successful. It was not till he went to London, and procured a power of lieutenancy in the north from the king, that he brought the MacIntoshes to subjection. The affair had a very characteristic ending. ‘Some slight loons [poor fellows], followers of the Clan Chattan, were execute; but the principal outbreakers and malefactors were spared and never troubled.’ Further, the ‘honest men’ who had disobeyed the order for refusing all supply to the MacIntoshes, being put to trial, the odd scene was presented of the criminals standing as witnesses against them; and while these culprits obtained pardon, their humane resetters ‘were soundly fined in as great sums as their estates might bear, and some above their estates were fined, and every one warded within the Tolbooth of Elgin, till the last mite was paid.’—Spal. ‘The fines were granted by his majesty to the Earl of Moray, as the fines for resetting the Clan Gregor were given to the Earl of Argyle; but these fines did not much advantage either of these two earls.’—G. H. S.
Dissent from the ‘comely order’ of church matters was still making itself apparent. We hear at this time of many people in Edinburgh holding private meetings for religious exercises, in contempt of the ordinary services of their regular pastors in the parish churches. ‘Like as they have assumed to these their seditious conventicles the name of Congregations, and done what in them lies falsely to impress on the hearts of his majesty’s people a persuasion that his majesty persecutes the sincere professors of true religion, and introduces corruption in the church-government.’ Considering how such practices ‘brought forth damnable sects of Anabaptists, Families of Love, Brownists, Arminians, Illuminati, and mony such pests, enemies to religion, authority, and peace, and occasions the murder of millions of people,’ the Privy Council thought proper to issue a proclamation, strictly forbidding all such meetings.
The Council had at the same time before them a set of Edinburgh citizens, partly the same as those whom the king had proposed to banish a few years before413—namely, William Rig of Aitherny, one of the bailies, John Hamilton, apothecary, John Mean, merchant, and John Dickson, ‘flesher’—who had again come into collision with the ecclesiastical authorities. At the usual congregational meeting before the celebration of the communion, Rig—‘puffed up,’ says Spottiswoode, ‘by a conceit of his own abilities’—took it upon him to challenge Dr Forbes ‘for sundry points of doctrine delivered by him in his sermons.’ Dr Forbes was a man of remarkable learning and dignity of character, for which reasons he was in time appointed bishop of Edinburgh by Charles I. It did not seem to him proper that he should be liable to the censure of a lay citizen, and he therefore declined to listen to the bailie. Rig then openly threatened the clergy, ‘that, unless they returned to the old form of administering the holy communion, the whole people would forsake them;’ and in this he was supported by his friends Mean, Hamilton, and Dickson. The Council took the affair up as an attempt to produce a schism in the church and a violation of the law. They answered, however—if we are to believe one of their own party—‘so wisely, punctually, and modestly, that the Council admired them.’ They were, nevertheless, to satisfy the king, sent to various prisons, as guilty of a misdemeanour. They ‘remained there, till by great dealing, pains, and moyen, they were relieved again.’—Row.
William Rig and John Mean appear, from the report of their contemporary and friend, Mr John Livingstone, to have been earnest Christians of the evangelical type. Rig was ‘much exercised in spirit, and of great experience in the ways of God. I have been several times with him in private meetings, and observed that when he prayed, he began with bitter and heavy complaints and confession beyond any. He spent his income chiefly on pious uses.’ Mean ‘used both summer and winter to rise about three o’clock in the morning, and always, as he put on his clothes, he used to sing some part of a psalm, and then went to his closet, where he was employed in religious exercises till six. By that time, the rest of his family being got up, he worshipped with them, and then went to his shop. He was so much master of the Scripture, [that] though he had been half sleeping, he could have corrected readers if they miscalled or wrong cited ony scripture.’414
During the time when the king was pressing on the innovations in the church, dissentients of this kind were rising everywhere throughout the southern districts of Scotland, many of them lairds, a few of them nobles, but most of them belonging to the middle classes of society. Of the lairds, Livingstone enumerates Halhill (Fife), Crosshill (Lanarkshire), Cunningham-head, Cessnock, and Rowallan (Ayrshire). There was also a number of ladies, some of them of noble birth, who embraced and strongly held fast the evangelical views. Such were Margaret Countess of Wigton, Anne Marchioness of Hamilton, the Countess of Eglintoun, and Lady Loudon. For the time, these people, as well as the more earnest of the clergy, were kept silent under the frown of an imperious government, or made themselves but little heard; but the fire burned not the less intensely for being covered up; and when the time for resistance came, it was ready to break forth with the greater violence that it had been so long suppressed.
Almost as a matter of course, while these Presbyterian recusants were in hands, the state authorities took some order with papistry. John Gordon of Craig in Aberdeenshire had attracted their notice as ‘an excommunicat trafficking papist,’ who, not content with blaspheming the truth and its preachers himself, did all that he could to ‘withhold his people from coming to the kirk, boasting [threatening] some, and persuading others;’ thus, it is alleged, ‘he steirs up mony not weel satled in their religion to imitate him in his contemptuous and lawless proceedings, and in effect has cassen that pairt of the country lowss.’ The Council now charged Gordon to appear and answer for his offences. They likewise despatched an order to the magistrates of Aberdeen, for the routing up of a set of Catholics who for some time had been allowed to live peaceably there, commanding that they be taken and warded till further orders.—P. C. R. The government could calculate with tolerable security on the feeling of the great bulk of the people, that by thus striking a blow at popery, they would be allowed without much remonstrance to deal that severity towards puritanism which would frighten it from a troublesome opposition to the now semi-episcopalian establishment.
John Gordon of Craig was obliged for the time to leave the kingdom; but somehow the king was always forgiving to papists, and we accordingly find that in January 1625, having made submission and promised good behaviour in future, this ‘excommunicat trafficking papist’ was allowed to return to Scotland (P. C. R.), but not ultimately to rest there, as will hereafter be seen.
A Border thief, described as Adie Usher in Birkinhaugh, servant of Robert Elliot of Redheugh, was condemned and hanged at Edinburgh for sundry acts of cattle-stealing. In most of his proceedings he had been accompanied by his son, Willie Usher, a mere boy, who was also presented for trial, but spared on account of his youth.—Pit. After Willie Usher had spent some months in the Thieves’ Hole in Edinburgh, the Lords of the Privy Council received a complaint from him, ‘heavily regretting his hard estate and condition by his detention, thir mony owks bygane, miserably in ward in the Thieves’ Hole of Edinburgh, without possibility or mean to entertein himself, he being a young innocent boy not past the age of fourteen years, and his umwhile father having underlain his punishment and sufferit death for the crime laid to the said Willie’s charge.’ The Lords consequently ordered the magistrates ‘to attend the commodity of some ship going to the Low Countries,’ and see Willie set aboard thereof, ‘and mak intimation to the said Willie that if at ony time hereafter he sall return without licence, it sall be capital unto him.’—P. C. R.
The master of Adie Usher seems to have been under suspicion of a concern in his delinquencies. In November, when about to fly from the city on account of infection, the Privy Council entered an order in the case of Lady Jean Stewart, whose husband, Robert Elliot of Redheugh, had been for some time a prisoner in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh. She had represented ‘the utter distress, misery, and want whereunto she and her poor children are reduced, having contracted great debts and impandit her abulyiements and clothes for enterteinment of her husband in ward—and she is brocht to that pitch of necessity, that she has nowther means to live nor credit to afford him ony further supply.’ The Council ordered her a hundred merks for past charges, and granted her the sum of ‘threttein shillings and four pennies’ during pleasure—apparently meaning a daily allowance of 1s. 1-1/3d. sterling.—P. C. R.
Poland is described as in this age swarming with Scotch pedlers. Its port, Dantzig, contained a number of settled merchants of a respectable order, some of whom were seen from time to time returning to their native country with considerable realised wealth. Formerly, the Scotch merchants at Dantzig, having a kind of rule and governance among themselves, lived in such a way as to secure the esteem of the people of the country. But latterly, ‘discipline being dissolved, the most part of them use such a dissolute form of living, that they are odious to the inhabitants, hurtful to themselves, and despised by strangers, to the great ignominy of the whole nation.’ There was also a continual immigration of multitudes of miserable, debauched, and weakly people from Scotland, including ‘exorbitant numbers of young boys and maids unfit for any service,’ reminding us of the overflowings of the Irish population into England, Scotland, and the United States of America in more recent days.415 During this summer, owing, doubtless, to the pressure of the famine, this scandalous system had been carried to such a height, that the Scotch merchants were threatened with expulsion from the city. In this exigency, they wrote to the king, craving his intercession. Patrick Gordon, who acted as agent for the king in Dantzig, also wrote, apparently, at the same time, shewing how matters stood, and entreating that some order and rule should be established among his countrymen, as they should not otherwise be able much longer to withstand the strength of their enemies.416
The king wrote to the Earl of Mar, requesting him to send into Argyleshire and Glenorchy, for four or five couples of earth-dogs (terriers), which he was desirous of obtaining in order to transmit them to France. His majesty further requested ‘that ye have a special care that the oldest of them be not passing three years of age, and that ye send them not all in one ship, but some in one ship, and other some in another, lest one ship should miscarry.’417
The same Earl of Mar, having to spend the winter of 1631 in Stirling, and designing to amuse himself with fox-hunting, sent a letter to his cousin, the Laird of Glenurchy, entreating the favour of ‘a couple of good earth-dogs;’ and adding, what shews the importance of the favour, ‘I pray you use me as familiarly as I do you, for without ceremony, cousin, you shall not have a friend over whom ye have greater power than over me.’ P. S.—‘What ye send me, let it be good, although it be but one.’
There is at this time a glimpse of rationality regarding witchcraft in the public authorities, in as far as the Privy Council deemed it right to hesitate about the granting of commissions for the trial of persons charged with that crime. The Council had been troubled by the importunity of persons seeking for such commissions, and at the same time concerned to find that the informations on which the commissions were sought for ‘seemed to be very obscure and dark.’ As anxious for the truth, and to the intent that neither should the innocent be molested nor the guilty escape, they now arranged that all informations should henceforth pass through the hands of the bishop of the diocese, ‘to be seen and considered by him, and such of the ministry as he shall call unto him.’—P. C. R.
We have here a revelation of that doubt about the reality of witchcraft which is suspected to have lurked in the minds of all the principal official people throughout the seventeenth century. It was a time of comparative triumph for the established church. The bishops were not particularly in need of popularity. They could afford to be easy with both Romanists and necromancers. It was precisely in such circumstances that we could expect to find the chief administrative body letting slip a doubt as to the soundness of many of the alleged instances of sorcery lately subjected to trial.
The pest, which had been for some time before in Holland, broke out ‘in sundry houses in Edinburgh, to the great terror of the whole town. It began in Paul Hay418 a merchant’s house, a month before, and was not known till now; therefore the more dangerous, because hard to discern the clean from the unclean. Upon the last day of November, the president and other lords of Council and Session, meeting together, resolve to rise, and continue the session till the 8th of Januar.’—Cal.
One consequence of the occurrence of the pest at this time was, that the king’s design of enforcing a communion at Christmas, where all the people should kneel, was frustrated. Another result generally satisfactory was a relaxation of the severity against the Edinburgh citizens who were banished and imprisoned for opposing the new ceremonies. William Rig was allowed to leave his prison of Blackness, and remain for fifteen days with his wife at his house of Morton, where she was ‘very heavily visite with infirmity and sickness.’ Mean, having ‘a numerous family and his wife grit with child, and nane to have ane care for order-taking with them, how they sall be providit for and governit in this [time of] danger,’ was in like manner permitted to repair to Edinburgh, to see after them, and there remain till the 15th of January. So also John Hamilton was relieved from the Tolbooth to attend on his wife, who chanced to be in the same delicate condition as Mrs Mean. After all, ‘the pest raged not; few houses were infected with it; so that it appeared the chief end wherefore the Lord had sent it, was to disappoint the king by scattering the people.’—Cal.
Amidst the alarms regarding the pest, people heard of a strange case of personal quarrel and vindictiveness. One William Hamilton, a soldier, son of the deceased William Hamilton, ‘called of Inchmachan,’ was lately come from the Low Countries, avowing ‘a settled purpose and resolution to appeal Captain Harie Bruce to the single combat, or otherwise to watch the opportunity to bereave him of his life.’ The Privy Council was obliged to take means for preventing a hostile collision.—P. C. R.
The Privy Council readily apprehended that the prosecution of ‘this damnable and cruel intention’ would both breed danger to the parties and produce great trouble and controversy among their friends, to the disturbance of his majesty’s peace, if timous remeed be not provided. They therefore summoned the parties before them to give assurance of their good behaviour.
Deeming, as was formerly remarked, anything that illustrates the progress of the arts as worthy of notice in this record, though perhaps trifling in itself, we may advert to Mr Alexander Hamilton, brother to the secretary Earl of Melrose, as having now obtained a patent of twenty-one years for a new cart invented by him, ‘wherein greater weight and burdens may with far less force be drawn, and conveniently carried, than hath been done with ony other kind of cart hitherto known or heretofore used.’419
‘Sandy Hamilton,’ or ‘Dear Sandy,’ as he was called, was a man of note on account of his skill in some of the useful arts, particularly in those connected with the munitions of war. He practised these arts for some time in Germany, whence he was recalled to England, where the king granted him pensions and allowances to the amount of £800 sterling per annum. When the Civil War broke out, he joined his countrymen, and helped to fit out the Covenanting army of 1640 with a species of short but effective gun, which was carried slung between two horses, and the serviceableness of which was proved at the battle of Newburn-ford, when the Scots crossed the Tyne in the face of the enemy and became masters of Newcastle.
In this year we have the latest known notice of a woman of extraordinary attainments who had lived for many years in Edinburgh, practising an art in which she was long after pronounced to have never been excelled. Caligraphy, or the art of beautiful writing, was in greater vogue in the seventeenth century than in our more utilitarian days. Under what circumstances Esther Inglis, a Frenchwoman residing in the Scottish capital, came to give her days to so laborious an art, we do not learn. Neither are we aware how it was that Esther came to live in the Scottish capital. There, however, we find her, so early as 1599, writing one of the little manuscript volumes which have given her celebrity. This book, preserved in the Bodleian Library, is entitled Les Proverbes de Salomon, escrites en diverses sortes de Lettres, par Esther Anglois, Françoise. A Lislesbourg en Ecosse. 1599. ‘This delicate performance,’ says Ballard,420 ‘gains the admiration of all who see it; every chapter is wrote in a different hand; as is the dedication, and some other things at the beginning of the book, which makes near forty several sorts of hands. The beginnings and endings of the chapters are adorned with most beautiful head and tail pieces, and the margins are elegantly decorated with the pen, in imitation, I suppose, of the beautiful old manuscripts. The book is dedicated to the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s great favourite. At the beginning are his arms, neatly drawn, with all its quarterings—in number fifty-six. In the fifth leaf is her own picture, done with the pen, in the habit of that time. In her right hand, a pen, the left resting upon a book opened; in one of the leaves of which is written De l’Eternel le bien: de moi le mal, ou rien. On the table before her there is likewise a music-book lying open, which perhaps intimates that she had some skill in that art. Under the picture is an epigram in Latin, made by Andrew Melvin; and on the next page another, composed by the same author, which is as follows:
Thus translated into English: