Part 40

‘In Thomas Robertson his new land[238] near to the Parliament House,’ one James Row kept a coffee-house, probably the first such establishment known in Edinburgh. On Sunday the 28th of October 1677, he so far risked the wrath of his neighbours the Privy Councillors, as to have an unlawful preacher holding forth in his house during the time of ordinary service in the churches. Robert Johnston, town-major, who had authority from the Privy Council to see after such matters, came to the place with some of his myrmidons, and found the ‘turnpike’ or common stair filled with people, the overflowing of the congregation. Making his way to the ordinary door of Row’s house, and demanding admission, he was kept there for some time, during which he heard a great noise of furniture and of people within. On being admitted, he found that the minister and his auditors had been smuggled out by ‘a laigh or privat entry.’ Johnston then returned to the street, and was walking quietly at the Cross, when Row came up and ‘did upbraid, threaten, and abuse him for coming to his house, and told him that he durst not for his hanging come to his house again and do the like, or, if he came that gait, he should not win so weel away.’ Thus he railed at the town-major all the way ‘from the Cross Well to the Stane Shop, shouting and crying so loud as the people gathered in multitudes,’ though, seeing what sort of affair it was, they soon dispersed. Afterwards, Row went to the magistrates and told them ‘he could not get God worshipped in his own house for that officious fellow the town-major, thereby insinuating that the due execution of his majesty’s laws did prejudge the worship of God.’

Row was fined in five hundred merks, and obliged to ask Johnston’s pardon; and immediately after, his coffee-house was ordered to be shut up.--_P. C. R._

[Sidenote: 1673.]

People were already accustomed to go to coffee-houses in order to learn the news of the day. In 1680, there was an order of the Privy Council, that ‘the gazettes and news-letters read in coffee-houses, be first presented to the Bishop of Edinburgh, or any other privy councillor, that they may consider them, and thereby false and seditious news and slanders may be prevented.’--_Foun._ And not long after--namely, in January 1681--by order of the Privy Council, the magistrates of Edinburgh called all the masters of coffee-houses before them, and obliged them to come under a bond for five thousand merks to suffer no newspapers to be read in their houses but such as were approved of by the officers of state.[239]

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[Sidenote: DEC. 11.]

Mr Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, petitioned the Privy Council for liberty to print a translation, executed by himself, of the last hundred of the Psalms into the Irish tongue. The matter was referred to the approbation of the Earl of Argyle, and conferences were appointed about it, to take place at Inverary.

Mr Kirk’s translation of the Psalms into Gaelic was an important contribution to the means for establishing Protestant Christian worship in the Highlands. On account of the proficiency which he thus shewed himself to possess in the Gaelic language, he was sent for to London, to superintend the printing of the Irish translation of the Bible, prepared under the direction of Bishop Bedel, and published in 1685. He died in 1692, and was buried in the church-yard of Aberfoyle, under a stone bearing this inscription: ‘Robertus Kirk, A.M. _Linguæ Hiberniæ Lumen_.’

[Sidenote: 1673.]

‘To suppress the impudent and growing atheism of this age,’ Mr Kirk printed in 1691 a small treatise, ‘An Essay on the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the most part) Invisible People, heretofoir going under the Name of Elves, Faunes, and Fairies ... as they are described by those having the Second Sight, &c.,’ which certainly forms a curious illustration of the _quasi_ orthodox beliefs of a Highland minister of the seventeenth century. He describes the fairies as possessed of ‘light and changeable bodies of the nature of a condensed cloud,’ and living in little hillocks, where they are ‘sometimes heard to bake bread, strike hammers, and do such like services.’ Forced to shift their residences once a quarter, they are liable to be seen by second-sighted men on their travels at four seasons of the year; but are also often ‘seen to eat at funerals and banquets.’ At such festive meetings, each mortal guest is sometimes observed to have a double of himself ‘perfectly resembling him in all points,’ being one of these subterranean spirits. The ‘reflex-man’ or ‘co-walker’ haunts the original as his shadow, ‘whether to guard him from the secret assaults of some of its own folks, or only as ane apertful ape to counterfeit all his actions.’ ‘Being invited and earnestly required, these companions make themselves known and familiar to men; otherwise, being in a different state and element, they neither can nor will easily converse with them.’

Mr Kirk informs us that these spiritual people live in fair well-lighted houses, where all the usual affairs of human life go on in an immaterial fashion. ‘Women are yet alive who tell that they were taken away to nurse fairy children,’ an image of themselves being left in their place. ‘When the child is weaned, the nurse dies, or is conveyed back, or gets it to her choice to stay there.’ One woman thus carried away returned after two years, was taken in by her husband, and had some children afterwards. In speech and apparel, the fairy folk resemble those under whose country they live; they ‘wear plaids and variegated garments in the Highlands, and suanochs in Ireland.’ Second-sighted men can invoke them at pleasure, but in general do not relish the sight of them, on account of the hideous spectacles they present, and their sullen and dismal looks. ‘They [the spirits] are said to have many pleasant toyish books,’ producing in them fits of corybantic jollity, ‘as if ravished by a new spirit entering them.’ Other books they have of abstruse science, but no Bibles.

Men of the second-sight do not necessarily discover strange things when requested; only by fits and starts, ‘as if inspired with some genius at that instant, which before did lurk in or about them.’ Mr Kirk knew one whose neighbours often observed him disappear at a certain place, and some time after reappear at another, a hostile encounter with the spiritual people being the cause of his disappearance. These seers know what will happen to their friends, by means of the spirits with whom they have intercourse.

[Sidenote: 1673.]

The people are said by Mr Kirk to believe that the souls of their ancestors dwell in the fairy hills, of which one was placed conveniently to each church-yard. He relates that, about the year 1676, ‘when there was some scarcity of grain, two women living at a distance from each other dreamed about a treasure hid in a certain fairy hillock. ‘The appearance of a treasure was first represented to the fancy, and then an audible voice named the place where it was to their waking senses. Whereupon both rose, and meeting accidentally at the place, discovered their design; and jointly digging, found a vessel as large as a Scottish peck, full of small pieces of good money, of ancient coin; which halving between them, they sold for dish-fulls of meal to the country people.’

Dr Grahame, the modern pastor of Aberfoyle, gives us[240] the traditionary account of the cessation of Mr Kirk’s life, in high keeping with the style of the mystic world which he endeavoured to expound. It is stated that, as Mr Kirk was one evening walking in his night-gown upon one of the fairy mounts above described in the vicinity of his manse, he sunk down in what seemed to be a fit of apoplexy, which the unenlightened took for death, while the more understanding knew it to be a swoon produced by the supernatural influence of the people whose precincts he had violated. After the ceremony of a seeming funeral, the form of Mr Kirk appeared to a relation, and commanded him to go to Graham of Duchray, who was the cousin of both, and tell him: ‘I am not dead, but a captive in Fairyland, and only one chance remains for my liberation. At the baptism of my posthumous child, I will appear in the room, when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the knife or durk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this opportunity is neglected, I am lost for ever.’ Duchray was apprised of what was to be done. The ceremony took place, and the apparition of Mr Kirk was seen while they were seated at table; but Duchray, in his astonishment, failed to perform the ceremony enjoined; consequently, Mr Kirk was left to ‘drie his weird’ in Fairyland.

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[Sidenote: DEC. 22.]

The death of the Rev. John Burnet, minister of Kilbride, is noted as arising from an extraordinary cause, though the immediate disease was jaundice. He ‘had a son lately dead before him, and seeing his son dissected, and the physicians finding fault with his noble [vital] parts, [the father] presently apprehends a faultiness in his own, which apprehension stuck with him even to his death, which physicians took to be the cause of his sickness; so strong is the power of apprehension.’--_Law._

[Sidenote: 1673.]

Died this year, by a fall from a horse, at Tangier in Morocco, John Earl of Middleton, governor of that establishment. Of a family of the minor gentry in Kincardineshire, he had entered life as a pikeman in Hepburn’s regiment in France, but soon was called to take part in the civil wars of his own country, serving first the English parliament and Scottish Estates, and afterwards proving an active and vigorous partisan of the king. His preferment after the Restoration as commissioner to the Scottish parliament, and his magnificent but drunken administration, with all the ills that flowed from it, are part of our national history. He is said by a contemporary to have been a man of ‘heroic aspect,’ of ‘manly eloquence,’ ‘happier in his wit than in his friends;’ of ‘natural courage and generosity;’ ‘more pitied in his fall than envied in his prosperity.’[241] Though disgraced, the king could not entirely desert one who had risked and done so much for him in his worst days; so he appointed him governor of Tangier--a civil kind of banishment, in which, we see, he died.

[Sidenote: 1673.]

It is scarcely wonderful that a man who went through such changes of fortune and so many strange adventures--taken prisoner at both Preston and Worcester, and escaping on both occasions from captivity--should have been the subject of some of the mystical speculations of his age. Aubrey relates: ‘Sir William Dugdale informed me that Major-general Middleton (since Lord) went into the Highlands of Scotland, to endeavour to make a party for King Charles the First. An old gentleman that was second-sighted, came and told him that his endeavour was good, but he would be unsuccessful, and, moreover, that they would put the king to death, and that several other attempts would be made, but all in vain: his son would come in, but not reign, but at last be restored.’ A second tale is told by Law and Wodrow,[242] and repeated by Aubrey, with slight variations, but to the following general purport: Being in the army of the Duke of Hamilton in 1648, he had for his comrade there a certain Laird of Balbegno, who seems to have been the neighbour of his family in Kincardineshire.[243] A few days before an expected battle, Middleton and Balbegno had a conversation about the risks they should run in fight, and agreed that, if one should die, leaving the other in life, he should return, if possible, and give the survivor some account of the other world. Balbegno fell in the battle. Middleton thought no more of the promise of his deceased friend, till some time after, when a prisoner in the Tower of London, and in some fear for his life, he one night was sitting alone in a room, ‘under three locks,’ and with two sentinels outside the door. Chancing to read a little in the Bible, he had no sooner closed the volume than, looking towards the door, he saw a human figure standing there in the shadow of his bed. ‘He called out: “Who is there?” The apparition answered: “Balbegno.” “That cannot be,” said Middleton, “for I saw him buried after he was slain in battle!” “Oh, Middleton,” said Balbegno, “do you not mind the promise I made to you when at such a place, such a night, on the Border?” and with that came forward and took him by the hand.’ Middleton, in narrating the circumstances, declared that Balbegno’s hand ‘was hot and soft, just as it used to be, and he in his ordinary likeness.’ Instead of giving him any intelligence regarding the dead, the spirit told him he should make his escape in three days--he should in time be a great man--but let him beware of his end! When Balbegno had delivered this message, he, according to Aubrey, gave a frisk, and said:

‘Givanni, Givanni, ’tis very strange In the world to see so sudden a change!‘[244]

and then vanished. In three days, accordingly, Middleton escaped in his wife’s clothes. He did afterwards become a great man, and his end was tragical, for, ‘upon a certain time, he proving a young horse, was cast off by him, and in the fall hurt himself exceedingly, so that he sickens and dies of it.’[245]--_Law._

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[Sidenote: 1674.

JAN.]

[Sidenote: 1674.]

At this time commenced a stormy period which was long memorable in Scotland. It opened with a tempest of east wind, which strewed the coasts of Northumberland and Berwickshire with wrecks. During February, the rough weather continued; and at length, on the 20th of the month, a heavy fall of snow, accompanied by vehement frost, set in, which lasted for thirteen days. This was afterwards remembered by the name of the _Thirteen Drifty Days_. There was no decided improvement of the weather till the 29th of March. ‘All fresh waters was frozen as if in the midst of winter; all ploughing and delving of the ground was marred till the aforesaid day; much loss of sheep by the snow, and of whole families in the moor country and highlands; much loss of cows everywhere, also of wild beasts, as doe and roe.’--_Law._ This storm seems to have fallen with greatest severity upon the Southern Highlands. It is stated in the council books of Peebles, that ‘the most part of the country lost the most part of their sheep and many of their nolt, and many all their sheep. It was universal, and many people were almost starved for want of fuel for fire.’

James Hogg has given a traditionary account of the calamity.[246] ‘It is said that for thirteen days and nights, the snow-drift never once abated: the ground was covered with frozen snow when it commenced, and during all that time the sheep never broke their fast. The cold was intense to a degree never before remembered; and about the fifth and sixth days of the storm, the young sheep began to fall into a sleepy and torpid state, and all that were affected in the evening died over-night. The intensity of the frost wind often cut them off when in that state quite instantaneously. About the ninth and tenth days, the shepherds began to build up huge semicircular walls of their dead, in order to afford some shelter for the remainder of the living; but they availed but little, for about the same time they were frequently seen tearing at one another’s wool with their teeth. When the storm abated on the fourteenth day from its commencement, there was, on many a high-lying farm, not a living sheep to be seen. Large mis-shapen walls of dead, surrounding a small prostrate flock, likewise all dead, and frozen stiff in their lairs, was all that remained to cheer the forlorn shepherd and his master; and though on low-lying farms, where the snow was not so hard before, numbers of sheep weathered the storm, yet their constitutions received such a shock that the greater part of them perished afterwards, and the final consequence was, that about nine-tenths of all the sheep in the south of Scotland were destroyed.

[Sidenote: 1674.]

‘In the extensive pastoral district of Eskdale Moor, which maintains upwards of 20,000 sheep, it is said none were left alive but forty young wedders on one farm, and five old ewes on another. The farm of Phaup remained without a stock and without a tenant for twenty years subsequent to the storm. At length, one very honest and liberal-minded man ventured to take a lease of it, at the annual rent of a _gray coat and a pair of hose_. It is now rented at £500. An extensive glen in Tweedsmuir, belonging to Sir James Montgomery, became a common at that time to which any man drove his flocks that pleased, and it continued so for nearly a century. On one of Sir Patrick Scott of Thirlestane’s farms, that keeps upwards of 900 sheep, they all died save one black ewe, from which the farmer had high hopes of preserving a breed; but some unlucky dogs, that were all laid idle for want of sheep to run at, fell upon this poor solitary remnant of a good stock, and chased her into the lake, where she was drowned.’

The _Thirteen Drifty Days_ are the means of bringing the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth before us in an extraordinary relation of circumstances. He and his duchess, in December 1675, obtained a licence to import 4800 nolt of a year old, and 200 horses, ‘to be employed in stocking their waste lands in the south part of this kingdom,’ the bringing in of live-stock from Ireland being then forbidden by act of parliament. Walter Scott of Minto, sheriff-depute of Roxburghshire, became caution that the licence should not be exceeded. But 120 of the oxen were proved to have been above a year old; and the Council, accordingly (August 3, 1676), fined Scott in £200 sterling.--_P. C. R._

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[Sidenote: FEB. 19.]

[Sidenote: 1674.]

Agnes Johnston, of Airth in Stirlingshire, an unmarried woman about fifty years of age, was tried in Edinburgh for the murder of an infant named Lamb, her own grand-niece. Living with the parents of the deceased, she took an opportunity, when there was nobody in the house but herself and the child, to take the infant out of its cradle, lay it in a bed, and cut its throat. The confession of the wretched woman bore that, for some time before she committed the deed, she felt a spirit within her _that did draw her neck together_, and which frequently tempted her to make away with herself. Once she actually did attempt to drown herself in a well at Clackmannan; but she cried to a woman near by, who helped her out. She had never told any one of her temptations, _nor had she power to tell_; but, her fits being thought fictitious by her relatives, and they having consequently threatened to turn her out of their house, she had in revenge resolved to destroy their child. Agnes, who would now be regarded as a person under hallucinations, expiated her sad act two days after in the Grassmarket.[247]

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[Sidenote: FEB.]

Law, in noting the death of an eminent physician at this time, mentions the death, some time before, of another, Dr Purves, from _an extreme cold_, and because he ‘could not be kept in heat,’ ‘God letting us see that all means applied for our health without his blessing them, are ineffectual.’ Another writer of this age adverts to a Mr Dalgliesh, ‘curate’ of Parton, who ‘was so chilly, that he wore twenty fold of cloth on him all the year, and furs on his head day and night.’[248]

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[Sidenote: MAR. 4.]

An act of grace towards the Presbyterians, passed at this time with the hope of conciliating them, had the effect of encouraging that disposition to private religious meetings, or conventicles, which for some years had given the government so much trouble. ‘From that day Scotland broke loose with conventicles of all sorts, in houses, fields, and vacant churches.... In Merse, Teviotdale, the Borders, Annandale, Nithsdale, Clydesdale, Lothian, Stirlingshire, Perthshire, Lennox, Fife, they fixed so many posts in the fields, mosses, muirs, and mountains, where multitudes gathered almost every Sabbath,’ until the time of Bothwell Bridge. ‘At these meetings, many a soul was converted to Christ, but far more turned from the bishops to profess themselves Presbyterians. The parish churches of the curates [that is, the regular parish clergy] came to be like pest-houses; few went to any of them, none to some, so the doors were kept locked. The discourse up and down Scotland was the quality and success of last Sabbath’s conventicle, who the preachers were, what the number of the people was, what the affections of the people; how sometimes the soldiers assaulted them, and sometimes killed some of them; sometimes the soldiers were beaten, and some of them killed.’

[Sidenote: 1674.]

There appears to have been a band of about forty ministers who set the government at defiance in this manner, most of them young and active men. In the large towns, house conventicles prevailed; but in the country, ‘the people had a sort of affectation to the fields above houses.’ There came to be a regularity in these affairs; when the people in a rural district wished to have a conventicle minister, they sent to town to engage one. Danger made the congregations come armed. ‘Not many gentlemen of estates durst come, but many ladies, gentlewomen and commons, came in good multitudes. Wonderful conversions followed upon the sermons. People discovered their own secret scandals. Sometimes people of age bemoaned their want of baptism, and received it at these occasions. Sometimes a curate would come, and after the first sermon, stand up and profess his repentance, and afterwards would consecrate himself to that work by a solemn field-preaching. So the work of the gospel advanced in Scotland for several years.’--_Kir._

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[Sidenote: JUNE 4.]

[Sidenote: 1674.]