Part 22
‘Heaven scarce believed the conquest it surveyed, And saints with wonder heard the vows I made.’
[Sidenote: 1650.]
On the very day that this was reported by the two ministers to the presbytery, the court, ‘hearing that of late the Marquis of Douglas and his lady had sent away one of their daughters to France, to a popish lady, to be bred with her in popery, without the knowledge of the presbytery, and without any warrant from the Estates, thought the fault intolerable, and so much the more, because they had sent away one of their sons before to the court of France.’ For some time after, the reverend presbytery dealt earnestly with the marquis for the withdrawal of his children from France, but without success. They also had occasion to lament that he and his lady rarely attended public worship, and failed to have private exercises at home. Of their own great error in forcing this noble family into hypocritical professions, and interfering so violently with their domestic arrangements, no suspicion seems ever once to have crossed their minds.[134]
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[Sidenote: MAR.]
At the same time that the presbytery of Lanark was driving on matters with the Marchioness of Douglas, it had another serious affair on its hands. Towards the close of the preceding year, the marquis had sent eleven women of his parish to Lanark, as accused of witchcraft by one Janet Couts, ‘a confessing witch,’ then in prison at Peebles. There was a difficulty about the case, for the burgh declined to maintain so many persons pending their trial. It was therefore necessary to send them back to Crawford Douglas under security. Afterwards, one George Cathie, ‘the pricker,’ being brought to Lanark, the women were brought forward again, when, ‘before famous witnesses--namely, Gideon Jack and Patrick Craig, bailies in Lanark, James Cunningham of Bonniton, &c., Mr Robert Birnie himself [the minister of Lanark] being also present, and by consent of the women, the said George did prick pins in every one of them, and in divers of them without pain the pin was put in, as the witnesses can testify.’ The women were accordingly detained in prison. As ‘it was not possible for the parish out of which they came to furnish watches night and day for them,’ the county ‘did ordain that each parish should, proportionally to their quantity, furnish twelve men every twenty-four hours; whereupon the presbytery did ordain that the minister of that parish out of which the watches shall come for their turn, shall come along with them, to wait upon the suspected persons, and to take pains, by prayer and exhortation, to bring them to a confession.’
[Sidenote: 1650.]
We next see the presbytery sending a deputation to the Council of State in Edinburgh, to urge that a commission should be appointed for the trial of the witches. While this was in preparation, they sent to the parish to collect evidence against the poor women. It might have been supposed that, when, after a sermon in the church, no one came forward to say a word against them, some doubts might have entered the minds of the presbytery. Such, however, was not the case. They sent again and again, till at length charges were made against three of the suspected. Meanwhile, one whom Janet Couts herself ‘cleansed,’ was liberated. Six more, against whom no charge was made, were allowed to go home on giving security that they would reappear if called upon. Finally, two, named Janet M‘Birnie and Marion Laidlaw, were at this date tried by the commission on various points delated against them; as that, ‘on a time Janet followed William Brown, a slater, to crave somewhat, and fell in evil words, after which time, within twenty-four hours, he fell off ane house and brake his neck; that Janet was the cause of the discord between [the laird of] Newton and his wife, and that she and others was the death of William Geddes;’ that ‘Marion and Jean Blacklaw differed in words for Marion’s hay, and, after that, Jean her kye died;’ and that she, the said Marion, ‘had her husband by unlawful means, and a beard!’ After most strictly examining the witnesses on their oaths, the commission could find nought proven against the two prisoners, and they were therefore dismissed on giving caution to appear again if called upon.
It does not appear that this result in any degree modified the views of the reverend presbytery regarding witchcraft. On the very day when this case was reported to them, they received a communication from Mr Richard Inglis, the chaplain or preceptor whom they had established in the Marquis of Douglas’s family, setting forth the confession of ‘ane warlock called Archibald Watt, alias _Sole the paitlet_, pointing out the way of his making covenant with the devil, as also many meetings since his covenant keeped with the devil, and other witches, in divers places.’ And immediately they sent a gentleman to Edinburgh for ‘a commission for ane assize to sit upon the foresaid warlock.’
The end of the prosecution of the eleven women is highly instructive. Janet Couts, before her death, which probably was by burning, withdrew the charge she had made against them. It is on the same day when the presbytery orders one of their number to go and read a paper to this effect in the church of Douglas, that they make the above arrangement for the prosecution of the warlock; shewing that they had not been in the least staggered on the general question, by finding the gross mistake they had made in this instance.--_R. P. L._
[Sidenote: 1650.
MAR.]
The church was now in the highest power--every vestige of episcopacy banished, popery treated as a crime, the doctrine of the headship of Christ in full paramountcy, and enabling the clergy to exercise an unlimited authority over the external religious practice and professions of the community. It was ruled that each head of a family should conduct worship and reading of the Scriptures daily in his house, catechise, reprove, and exhort amongst his children, servants, and dependents. On Sunday, after private devotions by the several members of the family, and a general service in the parlour, the master was to take care that all within his charge repaired to public worship. This being finished--in those days it lasted many hours--he was to exercise the family on what they had heard, and the remainder of the day was to be spent in ‘reading, meditation, and secret prayer.’ Diligence and ‘sincerity’ in these duties were strongly enjoined, and individuals were encouraged to confer with and prompt one another on religious subjects. But it was forbidden that families should meet together for religious exercises, as it had been found that such practices tended to schism.[135]
It may be remarked, that the ministrations of the parochial ministers were not then confined to two services on Sunday. In Edinburgh, after March 1650, there was ‘a lectorie’ every afternoon in the week at four o’clock, the ministers of the city taking the duty by turns. ‘Which did much good to the soul and body, the soul being edified and fed by the Word, and the body withhalden from unnecessar _bebbing_ [drinking], whilk at that hour of the day was in use and custom.’--_Nic._
[Sidenote: 1650.]
The morals of the flock were superintended with something beyond pastoral care. Promiscuous dancing was strictly prohibited. For ‘the downbearing of sin,’ women were not allowed to act as waiters in taverns, ‘but allenarly men-servands and boys.’[136] An elder had a certain little district assigned to him, which he carefully inspected once a month. Any scandalous sin which he discovered, or even the existence of any stranger without a certificate of character, he had to report to the kirk-session. The being drunk, or the utterance of a profane word, inferred kirk-discipline. The inspecting elder was also to take cognizance of how everybody spent his time on Sunday. For acts of a licentious character, both sexes were alike punished in the manner most likely to mortify persons of a sensitive nature. Whatever their quality, they had to stand three Sundays in sackcloth before the congregation. A second fault brought the same punishment for six Sundays; a third kept the delinquent on the seat of shame for half a year. That all this was done in honour and sincerity, and not primarily from the love of power, is shewn by the impartial severity which the clergy exercised upon each other; regarding not only moral aberrations, but such faults as that of conversing with ‘malignants’ (persons inclined to be loyal to the king without regard to the terms of the Solemn League and Covenant), and any shortcoming in efficiency either as preachers or as disciplinarians.
‘None of the clergy in those days,’ says one of their successors in the next age, ‘durst be scandalous in their conversation, or negligent in their office.... In many places the spirit seemed to be poured out with the word.... There were no fewer than sixty aged people, men and women, who went to school, that even then they might be able to read the Scripture with their own eyes. I have lived many years in a parish where I never heard an oath, and you might have rid many miles before you heard any.... You could not have lodged in a family where the Lord was not worshipped by reading, singing, and public prayer. Nobody complained more of our church-government than our taverners, whose ordinary lamentation was, their trade was broke, people were become so sober.’[137]
It is to be feared that Mr Kirkton wrote under the influence of that palliative spirit with which we are apt to look back upon a past age or upon the days of our youth, for, undoubtedly, strong evidences exist that the period now under review was not free from great vices and criminalities of a very deep shade. The diarist John Nicoll mentions, under February 1650, that ‘Much falset and cheating was detected at this time by the Lords of Session; for the whilk there was daily hanging, scourging, nailing of lugs [ears] and binding of people to the Tron [the public weighing-machine in Edinburgh], and boring of tongues; so that it was ane fatal year for false notars and witnesses, as daily experience did witness.’
[Sidenote: 1650.]
Nicoll enumerates many of the offenders. One was John Lawson, of Leith, who had taken a leading part in causing a house, left by one who died of the plague, to come by a false service to one who had no claim for it. ‘He was brought to the Tron betwixt eleven and twelve before noon, and fast bund thereto, with ane paper on his head declaring his fault.... His tongue was drawn out with ane turkes [pincers] by the common hangman, and laid on ane little buird, ... and run through with ane het iron or bodkin.’ Another delinquent was Thomas Hunter, a writer, guilty of perjury; for which he was declared incapable of ‘agenting ony business within the house and college of justice.’ William Blair, ‘messer,’ was hanged ‘for sundry falsets committed by him in his calling.’
[Sidenote: 1650.]
At the same time, gross offences connected with the affections never abounded more, if we can believe Nicoll, than they did at this time. Some of an indescribable kind appeared in an unheard-of frequency, and continued indeed to do so all through the time of the Interregnum. In Lamont’s _Diary_, the number of gentlemen in Fife who are stated as having broken the seventh commandment during the time of the Commonwealth, is surprisingly great. Even the sanctimonious Chancellor Loudon himself had to give satisfaction to the kirk in 1651. The writer of the Statistical Account of Melrose remarks the surprising number of penitents which he finds in the session-books during the seventeenth century--‘far exceeding the average of the present day, when the population is nearly trebled.’ The churchmen of that period themselves not merely admit, but loudly proclaim the extreme immorality of their people, the following being cited, for example, among the causes for a solemn fast in 1653: ‘the growth of sin of all sorts, particularly pride, uncleanness, contempt of ordinances, oppression, violence, fraudulent dealing--_maist part of the people growing worse and worse_.’ We might set this down in great measure as the effect of entertaining a high view of human duty, were it not for the many facts which have been reported by diarists and others. In short, it fully appears that human nature was not effectually restrained by the rigorous discipline now temporarily reigning, but only shewed a tendency to go into moral aberrations of an abnormal and horrible kind. At the same time, the land was full of persecution on account of merely sentimental offences--Catholic gentlemen forced to leave their native country; moderate Presbyterians obliged to do penance, or else thrust from their offices, for being concerned in the Duke of Hamilton’s final expedition in behalf of the late king; corpses denied Christian burial if their owners had not subscribed or adhered to the Covenant.[138] ‘There was ane honest man in Glasgow, called John Bryson, who, being at the Mercat Cross of that city, and hearing a proclamation there, and a declaration against the Marquis of Montrose, wherein he was styled traitor and excommunicate rebel, did cry out and called him as honest ane nobleman as was in this kingdom. The magistrates of that town, being informed of his speeches, was forced to take and apprehend him, and carried him to Edinburgh by ane guard of the town’s officers, presented him to the Committee of State then sitting there; wha, by their order, was casten into the Thieves’ Hole, wherein he lay in great misery by the space of many weeks.’--_Nic._
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[Sidenote: MAR.]
Throughout this and the ensuing two months, there ‘fell out much unseasonable weather, the like whereof was not usual, for weets, cold, frosts, and tempests.’--_Nic._
The same writer informs us that on the 28th of May, ‘there rained blood the space of three miles in the Earl of Buccleuch’s bounds, near the English Border; whilk was verified in presence of the Committee of State.’
In the ensuing month there was an epidemic called the _Irish Ague_, ‘which was a terrible sore pain in the head, some saying that their heads did open. The ordinary remedy was the hard tying up of their head. A disease not before this known to the inhabitants of this kingdom.’
Gerard Boate, physician to the parliamentary forces in Ireland, who wrote about this time his _Natural History of Ireland_, specifies agues among the _Endemii Morbi_ of that country, evidently alluding, in the opinion of a living medical authority,[139] to the well-known Irish typhoid fevers. This ailment, the flux, and plague, had prevailed to a deplorable extent in Ireland during the time of the civil war.
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[Sidenote: MAY 15.]
[Sidenote: 1650.]
‘The new Psalm-books were read and ordained to be sung through all the kingdom.’--_Nic._ This was the translation of the Psalms which is still used by the Church of Scotland and all Presbyterian congregations in the kingdom. It was based on a homely version produced originally in 1643, by Francis Rous, a member of the Long Parliament, who ultimately became provost of Eton, and died in 1658. What was rather odd, Rous was at this time joined to the sectaries, against whom the Scotch church entertained so bitter a feeling. It must be admitted that his version underwent great improvements in the hands of the committees of the General Assembly appointed for its revision. As now finally set forth, it was in many respects most felicitous. The general strain and metre is that of the old homely native ballad. It is occasionally harsh and obscure, has a few Scottish idioms, and sometimes requires an obsolete pronunciation to make out the prosody; yet, with all these obvious faults, it perhaps comes nearer to the simple archaic beauty of the original than any other metrical translation.[140]
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[Sidenote: MAY 21.]
[Sidenote: 1650.]
The Marquis of Montrose, taken in an unsuccessful attempt to restore the king without the ceremony of the Covenant, was hanged in Edinburgh on a gibbet thirty feet high. The heroic firmness displayed at his death harmonised well with the gallantry exhibited in his short but brilliant career. It affords a striking idea of the taste of men of the highest rank in that age, that the Marquis of Argyle appeared on a balcony to see him driven on the hangman’s hurdle to the prison from which he was two days after to walk to the gallows, and that Lord Lorn took post at a window near the scaffold, to see the body cut to pieces after death. The head being stuck on the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, and the limbs sent for exhibition over the ports of Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, and Aberdeen, Charles II. was compelled to behold those ghastly relics of the most loyal of his subjects, when, less than a month after, he progressed through the country. If Montrose had died free of excommunication, his body would have been given to his friends; as matters stood, it was inhumed beneath a gibbet at the Burgh-moor. There was, however, a female heart that secretly wept for the untimely end of the great marquis. His niece, Lady Napier, sent men by night who dug up the body, and stole away the heart; and this relic she consigned to a steel case made out of the hero’s sword, which again she enclosed in a gold filagree box, which had been presented by a doge of Venice to her husband’s grandfather, the inventor of the logarithms. It will be found that, after the Restoration, when it became the fate of Argyle and others to atone by their blood for the severities inflicted on Montrose, the remains of the culprit of 1650 were gathered together and treated with a funeral that might have been honourable to a king. The heart and its case were, however, retained in the possession of the Napier family for several generations, and only were lost sight of amidst the confusions of the French Revolution.[141]
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[Sidenote: JULY.]
Cromwell having crossed the Tweed with his army on the 22d of this month, a large body of troops assembled on Leith Links to oppose him, all animated with a good spirit in behalf of their king and country, but unluckily not all equally sound in the faith of the Solemn League and Covenant. Thousands were sent back, ‘to the discontentment of much people.’ The leaders thought it safer to meet Cromwell with twenty thousand who were of right principles, than with thirty thousand of whom a third were merely patriotic and loyal. While the army, as honest John Nicoll remarks, ‘stood daily in purging upon the Links,’ the young king came to review them, and doubtless was right sorry to see so many hearty soldiers turned away from his banners.
[Sidenote: 1650.]
A Glasgow citizen, full of zeal against the English army, as a type of the abomination of toleration, came to this singular leaguer, but even after all its purgation, did not find the service satisfactory. ‘While Oliver Cromwell,’ he says, ‘is reported to be come over the Border with his army, at my first hearing of it, I was so stirred in my spirit at the evil of toleration, that I never remember that I attained to the like again; and while I am pouring out my heart before the Lord on that account, there is a thought darted in upon my heart, that I should be healed of an impurity in my stomach which I had been under for several years ... and it really proved so, as since that time I was never troubled therewith.... That same morning, while I am casting up the Bible, that place came first to my hand and eye which saith, “Though Noah, Job, and Daniel would pray, yet would I not hear them.” Whereupon I was exceedingly confounded in reference to our present case, and some weeks thereafter, having gone to Leith to join myself to the forces there, I dried up in my prayers so as I would pray none at all, and was glad to take the first opportunity that offered to retire.... When Dunbar was foughten, and the news thereof came to Glasgow within a day or two thereafter, while I am thinking thereupon, it is borne in upon my mind, that our way in that business was not what it ought to have been; and after some getting it laid to heart, I was challenged for my implicit engaging therein; whilk came to that height that I resolved never more to follow any course upon the opinion of any person whatsomever, which accordingly the Lord has helped me to mind in some weak measure....’--_Spreull._
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[Sidenote: AUG.]
While the two hostile armies lay about Edinburgh, ‘there was such great scarcity, that all sorts of vivres, meat and drink, could hardly be had for money, and such as was gotten was fuisted [musty], and sald at a double price. The haill inhabitants were forced to contribute and provide for the [Scottish] army, notwithstanding of this scarcity; as also to furnish feather beds, bowsters, cods, blankets, sheets ... for the hurt soldiers to lie upon, with pots and pans for making ready their meat; and to collect money for providing honest entertainment to the hurt soldiers that lay in the [Heriot’s] Hospital and Paul’s Wark.’--_Nic._
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[Sidenote: SEP.]
The bellman was accustomed to intimate the death of a citizen through the streets, and in the same way give invitations to the funeral. At this time the Edinburgh official was ordered to give up the phrase, ‘faithful brother or sister,’ and retain brother or sister only.[142]--_Nic._
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[Sidenote: OCT.]
[Sidenote: 1650.]
This was a sore time for the southern counties of Scotland. Owing to the futile opposition presented to Cromwell by the ultra-Presbyterians in the west, a large detachment of the English army had to parade through the country. ‘Much corns destroyed by them and their horses ... the kirks and kirk-yards made stables and sentries for their guards and horses.... The corns of the field were not only destroyed by this foreign enemy, and by the Scots armies at home, wha rampit and raged through the land, eating and destroying wherever they went, but also the Lord from the heavens destroyed much of the rest by storms and tempests of weet and wind. The seas also were closed up by the enemy, whase ships enclosed us on every side, so that no man was able to travel by sea, neither yet by land without a pass.’--_Nic._