Part 39

The broken dragoons retreated to Glasgow, which was then garrisoned by about eight hundred troops. The insurgents, flushed with their success, and thinking it safer to go on than to draw back, marched next morning to that city with considerably increased forces. The troops barricaded the streets, so that the country-people could make little impression upon them, while they were greatly exposed in their turn. Eight were slain in this needless encounter; the rest retreated in rather low spirits to Hamilton, where they formed a kind of camp.

Their numbers were here augmented in a short time to about five thousand, chiefly peasants and farmers of Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, and Galloway, but comprising also a few gentlemen of property, though none of any note. Hamilton continued to exercise a nominal command, though rather from his having been the leading man at the commencement, than from any idea of his fitness for the situation. All of them had arms, and many of them horses; but there was neither discipline, nor any attempt to impose it. The whole insurrection proceeded upon mere impulse. The unfortunate people acted, it would appear, simply from the pressure of immediate circumstances, glad to protect themselves, for a while, even at the risk of utter destruction, against an oppression they could no longer endure.

The Privy Council collected all its disposable forces at Edinburgh, and requested instructions from the court. It was speedily determined that the Duke of Monmouth should be sent down to take command of the army. This was the eldest natural son of the king; a youth of amiable character, anxious for popularity, and intimately connected with the English non-conformists, whom he expected to favour him in his views upon the succession. The duke arrived in Edinburgh on the 19th of June, and led forward the army to meet the insurgents. He marched very slowly, in order, as was supposed, to afford them an opportunity of dispersing; but they shewed no disposition to avail themselves of his kindness. They had spent the three weeks during which they had existed as an army, not in training themselves to arms, or arranging themselves into proper divisions, but in disputing about the spiritual objects for which they were in arms. One great cause of division was the Indulgence, which some were for condemning, and others for overlooking; they were also greatly divided as to the propriety of acknowledging their allegiance to the king. In these abstractions they lost all view of practical measures. They called such things ‘trusting in the arm of flesh,’ for which, of course, they could adduce an abundance of condemnatory texts.

On Sunday, the 22d of June, Monmouth had advanced to Bothwell, a village about a mile distant from the insurgent camp. The river Clyde ran between the two armies, and was only to be crossed by Bothwell Bridge, a long narrow pass, highly capable of defence. The non-conformists, who lay upon the ground beyond the bridge, were still, at this late moment, holding high disputes, and there was even a proposal for remodelling the army, and appointing new officers. The moderate party sent two gentlemen in disguise--Mr David Hume and the Laird of Kaitloch--to present a supplication to the duke, in which it was proposed to disperse, on the condition that their grievances should be redressed. But Monmouth was unable, from his instructions, to treat with them unless they should have first laid down their arms. He charged the two deputies with a message to that effect, threatening if they did not throw themselves upon his mercy within half an hour, that he should advance with his army. When these gentlemen returned, they found the army on the point of falling to pieces through dissension. In truth, many must have now been only seeking for occasion to withdraw themselves from an adventure which they saw to be ruinous. The most zealous and clamorous were the first to retire. The rest remained, unable either to take advantage of the duke’s proposal, or to prepare for giving him battle. At the time he had specified, he advanced his troops to the brink of the river, and sent a large party to force the passage of the bridge. That point was stoutly defended, for nearly an hour, by some men from Galloway and Stirlingshire, under Hackstoun of Rathillet. At length, when their ammunition ran short, they sent back to the main body for a supply, which was denied. They were of course obliged to retire, and leave a free passage to the royal troops. When the horse soon after rode off from the field, the foot, left defenceless, could not stand an instant against the charge of the enemy. Excepting twelve hundred, who laid down their arms, the whole body took to flight, without having made the least effort at resistance. About three hundred were cut down in the pursuit.

The prisoners were brought in a body to Edinburgh, and confined, like sheep in a fold, within the gloomy precincts of the Greyfriars’ Church-yard, where, for four months, they had no seat or couch but the bare ground, and no covering but the sky. Two clergymen, Kid and King, were executed. Of the rest, all were set at liberty who would own the insurrection to have been _rebellion_, and the slaughter of the archbishop _murder_, and promise never more to take up arms against the government. Those who refused were sent to the Plantations; a mode of disposing prisoners which had been introduced by Cromwell.

Under all the severities of this reign, the spirit of English liberty was still kept alive. The king having been long married without any children, his brother, the Duke of York, was heir-presumptive. But this prince, besides various natural faults of character, had unfitted himself for governing a Protestant people by becoming an avowed convert to the Catholic faith. An attempt was made in the House of Commons to pass an act for excluding him from the succession; it was read a second time by a majority of 207 against 128; and the king only evaded the question by proroguing the parliament. The duke, seeing himself so unpopular in England, resolved to make friends, if possible, in Scotland; so that, in the event of any resistance to his succession in the former country, he might bring up an army of Scotch to his assistance. He therefore paid a visit to Edinburgh in October 1679, and revived the long dormant court of Holyroodhouse. As the persecution had been in a great measure a local affair, it operated little against his present views. The gentry, except in the western district, were chiefly Cavaliers; in the Highlands, altogether so. Among a people remote from a court, the mere presence of royalty--its slightest acts of condescension--are sure to communicate a favourable impression, although, perhaps, accompanied by but little merit or virtue in the royal person. We are not therefore to be surprised that the duke somewhat strengthened himself in Scotland on this occasion. He returned at the end of February 1680 to London.

The excitement of the time now gave rise to a new and more fanatical sect, who renounced their allegiance, and issued anathemas not only against their persecutors, but against the great mass of their brethren, who had submitted to the government. A minister named Cargill and his associate, Cameron, with about twenty armed men, appeared at Sanquhar on the 22d of June, and there affixed upon the market-cross a declaration, in which they disavowed all obedience to the king, and protested against the succession of the Duke of York. Cameron was soon after killed, with some of his friends, at Airdsmoss, and Hackstoun of Rathillet was seized and executed. Cargill, so far from being deterred, held a large conventicle at Torwood, where he formally delivered over the king, his brother, and ministers, to Satan, after the usual forms of excommunication. He was soon after taken prisoner and hanged. The whole proceedings of this sect were seriously injurious to the great body of Presbyterians; as the government, wilfully overlooking remonstrances to the contrary, held all that was done as criminating the whole body, and took occasion from that to exercise greater severities.

In October 1680, the Duke of York was again obliged, by the patriotic party in England, to take up his residence at Holyroodhouse. A bill for excluding him from the throne was now actually passed by the House of Commons, but was lost in the House of Lords by thirty-three against thirty. On Christmas Day, the spirit of the Scottish people against a Catholic successor was manifested by the students of the Edinburgh University, who, notwithstanding every effort to prevent them, publicly burnt the pope in effigy. A parliament, the first for nine years, sat down in July 1681, the duke acting as commissioner. A test oath was here framed, to be taken by all persons in public trusts, as an assurance of their loyalty; but it turned out to be such a jumble of contradictory obligations, that many persons, including eighty of the established clergy, refused to take it. The Earl of Argyle, son to the late marquis, and a faithful friend to the Protestant religion, would only receive it with an explanation, which was held to be an act of treason, and he was accordingly tried and condemned to death. The real object of this prosecution was to destroy a powerful Highland chief, who might be disposed to use his influence against the succession of the Duke of York. His lordship contrived to escape to Holland.

In the latter part of this year, the party left by Cargill and Cameron formed themselves into a secret society, and on the 12th of January 1682, published at Lanark a declaration of adherence to the transactions at Sanquhar, which they affected to consider as the work of a convention of estates. This, of course, only provoked new severities.

In March 1682, the Duke of York returned to England, in order to hold a conference with the king. Coming back in May for his family, his vessel was wrecked on a sandbank near Yarmouth, when a hundred and fifty persons perished, including some of the first quality. After spending about a week in Edinburgh, he returned to England.

The ancient Presbyterian spirit was now reduced so low, or so many of the clergy of that kind were destroyed and imprisoned, that there was not a single individual who preached in defiance of the king’s supremacy. The united societies, as the more unsubmissive termed themselves, were obliged to send a youth named Renwick to Groningen, in Belgium, in order to study divinity and receive ordination, as they could not in any other way obtain a preacher. A general disposition to emigration began to arise; and some gentlemen proposed to sell their property, and become settlers in the new colony of Carolina. While engaged at London in making the proper arrangements, they came in contact with the patriots of the House of Commons, who, defeated in the Exclusion Bill, were concerting measures for bringing about a change of government. Common desperation made them friends; and a correspondence was opened with the Earl of Argyle in Holland, for an invasion from that quarter, in connection with an insurrection in England. Some subordinate members of the conspiracy plotted the assassination of the king; and, being discovered, the whole affair was brought to light. Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney suffered death. Baillie of Jerviswood was sent to Scotland, and there, under the most iniquitous circumstances, consigned to the executioner. It was now hardly possible, by any course of conduct, to gain assurance of not being prosecuted. Masters were held liable for servants; landlords for their tenants; fathers for their wives and children; and to have the least intercourse with a proscribed person was the same as to be actually guilty. The soldiery were now permitted by an act of parliament to execute the laws without trial. If any one, therefore, refused to answer certain questions, or gave rise to suspicion by running away, he was shot. Numbers thus perished in the fields and on the highways. In short, the reign of Charles II. terminated, February 6, 1685, amidst a scene of oppression, bloodshed, and spoil, such as was never before witnessed in the country, even in the most barbarous times.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 1673.

JUNE.]

[Sidenote: 1673.]

Died Sir Robert Murray of Craigie, Justice-clerk, and an eminent councillor; memorable above all as one of a small group of learned and thoughtful men who, in 1662, founded the Royal Society, of which illustrious body Sir Robert was the first president, and for a time ‘the life and soul.’ For the last six years of his life, he bore a leading part in the government of Scotland. Not a Whig had been fined, tortured, or banished; not a commission against ‘the horrid crime of witchcraft’ had been issued; but the act was sanctioned by this gentleman, ‘the most universally beloved and esteemed by men of all sides and sorts, of any man I have ever known in my whole life,’ and who ‘knew the history of nature beyond any man I ever yet knew;’ who ‘had a most diffused love to all mankind, and delighted in every occasion of doing good;’ and who ‘had a superiority of genius and comprehension to most men.’--_Burnet._ Sir Robert’s father was a younger son of a distinguished Perthshire family, Murray of Abercairney. He himself had been the friend of Charles I. and of Richelieu, and latterly he was a favourite of Charles II. When the daughter of Sir Robert was married in London to Lord Yester, eldest son of the Earl of Tweeddale, ‘the king himself led the bride uncovered to church.’--_Kir._

To find two such amiable men as the Earl of Tweeddale and Sir Robert Murray taking part for many years in the severe measures against the Scottish Presbyterians--though, it must be admitted, with the effect of infusing a certain mildness--and to find day after day the bloody edicts of the Privy Council sanctioned by not only their names, but by those of the Duke of Hamilton and the Earl of Argyle, the latter of whom was to die the death of a martyred patriot, while the former was to preside in the convention which settled the Stuarts’ forfeited crown on William and Mary, certainly presents a striking view of the mixed nature of human tendencies. As regards, too, the philosophical character of the founder of the Royal Society, it can never be forgotten that one of his contributions to the Transactions of that sage body was an account of _the development of barnacles into sea-birds_--a most noted example of the power of preconceived notions to blind the perceptions of even a faithful and intelligent observer. His testimony on this subject was thus presented in the _Philosophical Transactions_:

[Sidenote: 1673.]

‘Being in the isle of East [Uist], I saw lying upon the shore a cut of a large fir-tree, of about 2-1/2 foot diameter, and nine or ten foot long; which had lain so long out of the water that it was very dry; and most of the shells that formerly covered it were worn or rubbed off. Only on the parts that lay next the ground there still hung multitudes of little shells, having within them little birds perfectly shaped, supposed to be barnacles. These shells hang at the tree by a neck longer than the shell, of a kind of filmy substance, round and hollow, and creased, not unlike the windpipe of a chicken, spreading out broadest where it is fastened to the tree, from which it seems to draw and convey the matter, which serves for the growth and vegetation of the shell and the little bird within it. This bird, in every shell that I opened, as well the least as the biggest, I found so curiously and completely formed, that there appeared nothing wanting as to the external parts, for making up a perfect sea-fowl; every little part appearing so distinctly, that the whole looked like a large bird seen through a concave or diminishing glass, colour and features being everywhere so clear and neat. The little bill like that of a goose, the eyes marked, the head, neck, breast, wing, tail, and feet formed; the feathers everywhere perfectly shaped and blackish coloured; and the feet like those of other water-fowl, to my best remembrance. All being dead and dry, I did not look after the inward parts of them. But having nipped off and broken a great many of them, I carried about twenty or twenty-four away with me.... Nor did I ever see any of the little birds alive, nor met with anybody that did. Only, some credible persons have assured me they have seen some as big as their fist.’

After all, it must be acknowledged there is something very perplexing about these cirripeds, and calculated to excuse the mistake which so long existed regarding them, since it was not till about 1840 that naturalists could determine whether they belonged to the articulate or the molluscan division of the animal kingdom. It is scarcely necessary to remark that they are now concluded to be articulates, of the crustacean class. Even Cuvier had placed them under the mollusca, though regarding them as intermediate between these and the articulata. As to the eyes spoken of by Sir Robert Murray, it may be observed that the barnacle has latterly been found to have visual organs in an early period of its existence, and to lose them when at full growth. When Mr Thomson of Cork, about 1830, described the actual characters of the animal, many naturalists for a long time refused to believe in his statements.

* * * * *

A sumptuary law was passed in the parliament in 1672, ‘discharging the wearing of silver lace and silk stuffs, upon a design to encourage the making of fine stuffs within the kingdom, and to repress the excessive use of these commodies.’[231]

[Sidenote: JULY 3.]

[Sidenote: 1673.]

An effort was made to carry this law into force. On information from Alexander Milne, collector of his majesty’s customs in Edinburgh, the Council had up before them Sir John Colquhoun of Luss, who, in breach of a late act of parliament forbidding the lieges to wear clothes ornamented with ‘silk-lace, gimp-lace, or any other lace or embroidering or silk,’ had appeared, during the bypast month, wearing ‘a black _justicat_,[232] whereupon there was black silk or gimp-lace.’ Sir John was condemned, in terms of the act of parliament, to pay a fine of five hundred merks, ‘one half to his majesty’s cash-keeper for his majesty’s use, and the other half to Alexander Milne.’--_P. C. R._

Nearly about the same time, Manna Kinloch, wife of James Charteris, writer, was arraigned before the Privy Council for wearing fine apparel contrary to the same sumptuary act, but was discharged for lack of proof. Two legal questions arose in connection with this case. The first was: If a woman be convicted and punished for such an offence, ought her husband to be liable to make good the fine, or should she alone be punished by imprisonment? Obviously, if the husband be made liable, ‘many wives, to affront their husbands, or otherwise be avenged on them, would break the law of purpose.’ The second point was: How shall the offence, in most instances, be proved, if the evidence of women be rejected--as it seems to have then been in all except certain special cases--for it must often be that none but women have an opportunity of observing the offence?--_Foun._

* * * * *

The summer of this year was exceedingly wet, and the harvest thereby much endangered.--_Law._

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 1673.

AUG. 20.]

Most probably, the carriages proposed to be set up in 1610 by Henry Anderson the Pomeranian, to run between Edinburgh and Leith with a charge of two shillings Scots for each person,[233] were either not realised or quickly withdrawn, for nothing more is heard of them, and we find in 1702 one Robert Miller getting an exclusive privilege of putting coaches on that brief but important route, implying of course that no other such conveyances then existed. Street-carriages, which had been set up in London in the reign of Charles I., did not come into use in Scotland till after the Restoration. On the occasion of the unfortunate duel in 1667 between William Douglas of Whittingham and Sir John Home of Eccles,[234] we hear of the parties going to the ground in a hackney-coach. Six years later, regular arrangements were made by the Edinburgh magistrates for a system of street-carriages, and the number then in service appears to have been twenty. It was ordered that they should be numbered 1, 2, 3, &c., with a view to ready reference in case of any complaint from a passenger, and that they should have a fixed place on the High Street between the heads of Niddry’s and Blackfriars’ Wynds. The fare to Leith for two or three persons in summer was to be 1s. sterling, or for four persons, 1s. 4d.; the fare to the Abbey, 9d., and as much back again.[235]

It is pretty certain that this system of street-carriages maintained its ground, as in _A Short Account of Scotland_, written by an Englishman in 1688, the author tells us that, while there were no stage-coaches in Scotland, ‘there are a few hackneys at Edinburgh, which they may hire into the country on urgent occasions.’ It is to be remarked, however, that Edinburgh, being all packed within a space of a mile in length by half a mile in breadth, upon irregular ground, and with very few streets fit for the passage of wheeled vehicles, was a discouraging field for this kind of conveyance. Sedans maintained a preference over coaches till the extension of the city in the reign of George III. Arnot tells us that while there were, in 1778, only nine hackney-carriages in our city, there were a hundred and eighty-eight public chairs, besides about fifty kept by private families.[236]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: SEP. 5.]

During several by-past years, licences had been given in frequent succession to vessels, to carry off idle, vagrant, and criminal people to the plantations in Virginia and elsewhere. One ship engaged in this kidnapping service, and which bore the hypocritical appellative of _The Ewe and Lamb_, seems to have been particularly active. We now find complaints made that ‘the master and merchants of the ship called the _Hercules_, bound for the plantations, have apprehended some free persons and put them aboard the said ship, upon pretext that they are vagabonds, or given their consent thereto.’ The Lords therefore commissioned two of their number to go aboard and inquire, and to liberate any persons improperly detained.--_P. C. R._

* * * * *

[Sidenote: OCT. 11.]

[Sidenote: 1673.]

That indispensable conveniency of modern times, _the coffee-house_--which had taken its rise in London during the Commonwealth[237] --made its way into Scotland during the ensuing reign. The first time we hear of it north of the Tweed is when Colonel Walter Whiteford--are we to suppose some reduced soldier of the Scottish army of 1651?--was, on application, allowed by the magistrates of Glasgow to set up a house in that city ‘for making, selling, and topping of coffee.’--_M. of G._

Under the date noted, the Privy Council Record tells us a note-worthy tale of an Edinburgh coffee-house.