Part 54
The usual rule of the government in the two last reigns against unlicensed printing, was now very rigorously enforced, in order to prevent the issue of controversial pamphlets against the Catholic religion. James Glen, bookseller in Edinburgh, was imprisoned by an order from the Chancellor, for publishing a brochure called _The Root of Romish Ceremonies_, designed ‘to prove popery to be only paganism revived.’ It was a remarkable step for the government to take, while an uncontrolled popish printer was at constant work in the palace. Perhaps Lord Perth, who had become a Catholic (some say to please his wife, some to please the king, no one to please himself), felt sore at a _bon mot_ of Glen, which Fountainhall has thought worthy of being preserved. The Council having (January 1686) issued an edict against the selling of books reflecting on popery, and their macer having brought this to Glen amongst others, he quietly remarked that ‘there was a book in his shop which condemned popery very directly--namely, the _Bible_--might he sell that?’
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[Sidenote: 1688.
JAN.]
At this time, so unpropitious to literature, an attempt was made to establish a periodical work of a kind which we only expect to see arising when the affairs of the learned republic are at a comparatively advanced stage. Mr John Cockburn, minister at Ormiston, in Haddingtonshire, printed the first number of a work containing ‘the monthly transactions and an account of books out of the Universal Bibliotheque and others.’ The Chancellor, finding in it some passages reflecting on the Roman Catholic Church, at once suppressed the publication.--_Foun. Dec._
[Sidenote: 1688.
JAN. 19.]
Copious periwigs, with curls flowing down to the shoulders, were now in vogue, both at home and abroad. There being an active exportation of hair for the foreign peruke-makers, the article was found to have become dear, and the native artists began to complain. On their petition, the Privy Council forbade the exporting of hair.--_Foun._
It may give some idea of circumstances attending this fashion, that at a date not long subsequent to the period under our attention, a female living in a town in the south of Scotland was accustomed to dispose of her crop of _yellow hair_ to a travelling merchant at fixed intervals, and always got a guinea for it.
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[Sidenote: FEB.]
Sir James Stanfield was one of the English manufacturers who had been induced to settle and practise their art at Newmills, in Haddingtonshire, in order that Scotch money should not need to be sent away for English-made goods. This respectable man was afflicted with a profligate eldest son, whom he at length saw fit to disinherit. He had become melancholy, probably in consequence of domestic troubles, and on a certain day in November, he was found drowned in a pool of water near his own house. It was debated whether he had been murdered or had drowned himself; and it was noted that the widow and son contended for the latter view of the case, and accordingly, without further ado, took measures for having the body immediately buried. A suspicion, however, arose that Sir James had met with foul play, and two surgeons were sent by the authorities in Edinburgh, to examine the body and report.
[Sidenote: 1688.]
The corpse was raised from the grave, after it had lain there two days; and the surgeons, having made an incision near the neck, became convinced that death had been induced by strangulation; so that the supposition of suicide was set aside. This inspection took place in the church. After the cut had been sewed up, and the body washed, and put into clean linen, James Row, a merchant of Edinburgh, and Philip Stanfield, eldest son of the deceased, took it up, one on each side, to deposit it in the coffin, when, behold, an effusion of blood was observed to take place on the side sustained by the son, so as to defile his hands. He instantly let the body fall, with the exclamation, ‘Lord, have mercy on me!’ and rushed, horror-struck, into the precentor’s desk, where he lay for some time groaning and in great agitation, utterly refusing to touch the corpse again. This incident was at once accepted in the light of a revelation of the young man’s guilt as his father’s murderer; and he was therefore taken into custody and brought to Edinburgh for trial.
The trial took place on the 7th of February, but brought out little evidence worthy of attention. Nevertheless, on the strength of the bleeding, and of his being known to have cursed his father, the unfortunate young man was found guilty, and sentenced to death, with sundry aggravations of punishment.
By pretending an inclination to turn papist, he got a brief respite, but, on the 24th of the month, was hanged, protesting his innocence to the last, and finally dying Protestant. By reason of a slip of the rope, he came down till his knees rested on the scaffold, and it was necessary to use more direct means of strangulation. Then his tongue was cut out, as a retribution for the cursing of his father, and his hand hacked off and sent to be put up on the east port of Haddington, as a memorial of the murder. The body was hung up in chains, but after a few days was stolen away, and found lying in a ditch among water. It was hung up again, but a second time taken down. Both in the strangulation on the scaffold and the being found in a ditch among water, the superstitious remarked something like a providential notice of the facts of the murder of which he was assumedly guilty.
It will be acknowledged that, in the circumstances related, there is not a particle of valid evidence against the young man. The surgeon’s opinion as to the fact of strangulation is not entitled to much regard; but, granting its solidity, it does not prove the guilt of the accused. The horror of the young man on seeing his father’s blood, might be referred to painful recollections of that profligate conduct which he knew had distressed his parent and brought his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave--especially when we reflect that Stanfield would himself be impressed with the superstitious feelings of the age, and might accept the hæmorrhage as an accusation by heaven on account of the concern his conduct had had in shortening the life of his father. The whole case seems to be a lively illustration of the effect of superstitious feelings in blinding justice.
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[Sidenote: MAR. 6.]
[Sidenote: 1688.]
The Privy Council considered a legal case about a very small matter. The beautiful lake of Duddingston, under the southeast front of Arthur’s Seat, and adjoining to the royal park of Holyrood, had been graced by the late Duke of Lauderdale with a few swans. His too clever duchess--who had for years been carrying on terrible legal wars with his heirs--deemed herself entitled to take out five of these birds at her own pleasure. Sir James Dick, the proprietor of the lake, determined to recover the swans; so he caught three of them, and broke a lockfast place in order to get the remaining two; and then placed them all once more upon the loch. Hereupon the duchess raised a process, which was now decided in her favour, on the ground that the birds had been brought to the loch by the late duke, and that Sir James’s tolerance of them there did not make them his. The baronet, indignant at being thus balked, turned all the rest of the swans off his lake; but here he was met by the Duke of Hamilton, heritable keeper of the palace, alleging that, as the lake bounded the royal park, the wild animals upon it belonged to him. So he caused the swans to be once again restored to their haunt.--_Foun. Dec._
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[Sidenote: MAR.]
One Niven, a musician in Inverness, caused a girl of twelve years, his pupil, to marry him under basely deceptious pretences. To induce a minister to perform the ceremony, he suborned a youth to personate the girl’s brother, and convey the consent of the father, who was himself a clergyman. For this ‘abominable imposture and treachery,’ he was condemned to stand with his ear nailed to the pillory, and then banished.--_Foun. Dec._
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[Sidenote: JULY.]
For some time, we have heard little of witches; but now one appears. An old woman at Dunbar having threatened some people who refused to give her money, and ‘some evil accidents befalling them shortly after,’ she was seized and tried before a commission. She at first confessed, but afterwards retracted; nevertheless, the commission condemned her. Before proceeding to any greater extremity, they thought it well to bring her before the Council itself, who were at first inclined to ‘assoilzie’ her; but afterwards, ‘she was remitted back to Dunbar, _to be burnt there, if her judges pleased_.’--_Foun._
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[Sidenote: 1688.
JULY 22.]
The _girdle_--a round iron plate used for baking oaten cakes over a fire--a household article once universal among the middle and humbler classes in Scotland--was invented and first made at the little burgh of Culross, in Fife. In 1599, King James gave the Culrossians an exclusive privilege to make girdles, and this had been confirmed by a gift from Charles II. in 1666. Nevertheless, a neighbouring gentleman, Preston of Valleyfield, had kept girdle-makers (_craticularum fabros_) on his barony, for which he was now challenged at law by the burghers of Culross. He defended himself on various grounds; and the lords, before decision, ‘recommended to Drumcairn to take trial if the girdle-makers of Culross have any other trade or craft than that of making girdles, and at what prices they sell the same; and likewise to try if the men at Valleyfield do make sufficient girdles, and at what prices they make the same, and if they have any other trade than making of girdles, &c.’ How the matter ended we do not learn.--_Foun. Dec._
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About this time, an Englishman, apparently a military officer, described Scotland from personal observation, and so has preserved for us some general traits of the people.
‘Their drink,’ he says, ‘is beer, sometimes so new that it is scarce cold when brought to table. But their gentry are better provided, and give it age, yet think not so well of it as to let it go alone, and therefore add brandy, cherry brandy, or brandy and sugar, and [this] is the nectar of their country, at their feasts and entertainments, and carries with it a mark of great esteem and affection. Sometimes they have wine--a thin-bodied claret, at tenpence the mutchkin, which answers our quart.’
It is evident from this that whisky as yet formed no conspicuous indulgence among the Scottish people. They had come, however, to be much given to another stimulant, which has ever since had a great fascination for them. ‘They are fond of tobacco, but more from the sneesh-box [snuff-box] than the pipe. And they have made it so necessary, that I have heard some of them say, that, should their bread come in competition with it, they would rather fast than their _sneesh_ should be taken away. Yet mostly it consists of the coarsest tobacco, dried by the fire, and powdered in a little engine after the form of a _tap_, which they carry in their pockets, and is both a _mill_ to grind, and a _box_ to keep it in.’[320]
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[Sidenote: 1689.]
The infatuated king had fled to France, the ministers of his will had dispersed in terror, and a convention was about to meet and settle the crown upon William and Mary, when a singular instance of private revenge, recalling the rougher days of a century earlier, took place in Edinburgh.
[Sidenote: 1689.]
Sir George Lockhart, long the most eminent counsel at the Scottish bar--‘the most learned lawyer and the best pleader,’ says Burnet, ‘I have ever known of any nation’--and now President of the Court of Session, had had occasion, in the routine of judicial business, to give an award in favour of the unhappy wife and children of Chiesley of Dalry, near Edinburgh--a profligate man of violent passions, the descendant of a noted fanatic of the time of the Civil War. The sum assigned them from the husband and father’s estate was only ninety-three pounds a year. Chiesley openly avowed a resolution to be avenged on the judge; nay, he wrote to him, saying: ‘You have taken the government of my family from me--I desire a remedy at your hands; otherwise, I will not scruple to attack you at kirk or market;’ or using words to that effect.
[Sidenote: 1689.]
On Sunday, the 31st of March--while the town was under the excitement of the siege of the Castle by the troops of the new government--Sir George Lockhart attended worship, as usual, in the New Church, a portion of St Giles’s cathedral. Chiesley came armed, and endeavoured, by money offered to the _bedral_, to get into Lord Castlehill’s seat, which was just behind that of the President, being resolved there to wreak out his vengeance, although certain to lose his own life in consequence. Not succeeding in getting into this seat, he flitted restlessly about the church till the conclusion of the service, when he walked out, and preceded the Lord President to the head of the close near by,[321] in which the latter had his residence. The President came along, attended by Lord Castlehill and Mr Daniel Lockhart, and as he entered the close saluted Chiesley, who gloomily returned his greeting. To pursue the narrative of a contemporary: ‘My Lord Castlehill and Daniel Lockhart convoyed him a piece down the close, and talked a while with him, after which they both departed. The President called back the last, and whilst Daniel was returning, Dalry approached, to whom Daniel said: “I thought you had been at London,” without any other answer than that he was there [that is, here] now. Daniel offered to take him by the hand; but the other shuffled by him, and coming close to the President’s back, discharged his pistol before that any suspected his design. The bullet going in beneath the right shoulder and out at the left pap, was battered on the wall. The President immediately turned about, looked the murderer grievously in the face, and then finding himself beginning to fail, he leant to the wall, and said to Daniel: “Hold me, Daniel, hold me.” These were his last words. He was carried immediately to his own house, and was almost dead before he could reach it. Daniel and the President’s chaplain apprehended in the meanwhile Dalry, who owned the fact, and never offered to flee. He was carried to the guard, kept in the Weigh-house, and afterwards taken to prison. The President’s lady, hearing the shot and a cry in the close, got in her smock out of bed, and took the dead body in her arms; at which sight, swooning, she was taken to her chamber. The corpse were laid in the same room where he used to consult.’--_Father Hay._
The murderer was tortured, but confessed nothing, and in three days he was hanging in chains at Drumsheuch; whence, however, his body was stolen away by his friends. Within the present century, on enlarging a cellar in Dalry house, a skeleton with some rusty irons about it was found in the earth, and concluded to be the remains of Chiesley.
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Here--for the present, at least--ends our record of domestic occurrences and things in Scotland. It brings the life of the nation from the rudeness of the middle of the sixteenth century down to the comparative civilisation of the close of the seventeenth, when the existing political system was nearly settled. A strange phantasmagoria, beginning with the half mail-clad baron and his band of followers in swords and pistols, and ending in the silken and embroidered gallant in full periwig and a rapier for show. We have seen in the earlier years of the period little regard for law amongst the people, and no power in the government to enforce it. But gentlemen have latterly rather fallen out of the custom of stabbing an enemy as he walked the High Street. They no longer go in force and in ‘effeir of weir’ to assail a neighbour in his house, or throw lighted brands into it, or drive off his horses and cattle, by way of making out a point of legal satisfaction from him. The maintenance of any form of peace in Aberdeenshire or Banffshire does not now wholly depend on the good-will of the head of the Gordon family, himself a constant offender against law in as far as he clung to the Romish religion. As regards the protection of life and property, a great improvement has evidently been effected. It is evident from many circumstances that, during the whole time, there was a pressing tendency to improvement--partly to be accounted for, doubtless, by the near neighbourhood of England. But it was impeded by the almost incessant civil strife that was kept up in consequence of the contention between two principles of ecclesiastical polity--an assertion of infallibility and independence in the church on the one hand, and an effort to bend this to supposed state necessities on the other: men, in trying to make each other Episcopalians and Presbyterians, almost ceasing to be Christians. Throughout this broil, some fine traits of earnestness and self-devotion were evoked; but so absorbing a concentration of the general mind on certain theological or _quasi_-theological doctrines could not be healthful, could not be favourable even to a sound spirit of religion, could not but check any enlightened desire for material improvements. Hence, the population was yet small and generally poor, and little had yet been done to advance the arts of life. There had never yet been beyond the most feeble attempts in any kind of manufactures: even such articles as paper and woollen cloth had to be imported. No movement had yet been even thought of for advancing any branch of rural economy. Scotland had sent forth no voice in either literature or science; her universities could not train either the lawyer or the physician. She had not a bank, and there was not perhaps above half a million of coin in circulation. No news-sheet had yet taken root in the country. A post system had only existed on a small scale during the last twenty-five years. No stage-coaches were yet permanently established between our towns, or between Edinburgh and London. The most delicate lady, under noble rank, had to perform journeys on horseback, and if she had not strength or health to ride, she could not travel. No system of police existed in any city of the realm.
In certain intellectual and moral respects, the country was in no better state. The judge was understood to be accessible to private persuasions; and even direct bribes were suspected. The people believed as firmly in witchcraft as in the first principles of their religion, and we are not yet come within thirty years of the last example of a poor wretch burnt for mishaps that chanced to follow her evil wishes. Gentlemen of ancient family and good account were not above using the basest tricks or the grossest violence, in order to secure, by marriage, the fortune of some hapless young heiress of eleven years of age. Fallacies about markets and marketings were rife; monopolies and patents over-rode the people and kept them in poverty, no man being yet quite able to believe that there was room in the world for anybody but himself. Having concluded about any matter of opinion, men could bear with no dissent from that. It seemed to them the highest of earthly duties, that the thing each felt as a religious error should be rooted out, even though that could only be done by the extirpation of the persons entertaining it. This was to be doing God service and saving men from destruction; no one perceiving that the object aimed at was never attained, or that, if attainable, it was an immorality to attempt its attainment. Even the Claim of Rights, in which the sufferings of Presbytery since 1660 were enumerated, and its claims asserted, set forth among its demands that no popish book should henceforth be allowed to be printed.
Such was the Scotland of 1689--an improvement upon the Scotland of 1560, though to no great extent. Perhaps, after all, if we consider how surprisingly late are all the great discoveries, inventions, and social arrangements for convenience; how gaslight, steam-machinery, railways, and the electric-telegraph are of our own day; how lately it is that mankind learned that air and water are gaseous compounds, that gravitation arranges the worlds, that our own little earth passed through a long and wonderful history before man came upon it; how it is but as yesterday that the British people led the way in universal liberation of industry, and unhappily have yet many obvious social evils to be cured; we shall not greatly wonder that this land of mountain and flood, seated far northward and off at a side, was no better than it was at the close of the reign of the last James. We may at least view congratulatingly one thing which has been made out--that the bulk of the people shall be allowed to have, under sanction of law, the style of external Christianity which they prefer; so that, anyhow, it shall not be the majority which is persecuted. That attained--and only smaller denominations treated with harshness--behold, the country begins to make a real, though at first slow advance. In five years from the settlement of its religious troubles, it has its first bank; in a few years more, it has native newspapers. Other troubles or chances of trouble being removed by a union with England, and the suppression of all hopes in favour of a discrowned dynasty, commerce becomes active; an improved agriculture commences; and nearly every kind of manufacture for which England is distinguished, takes hearty root with us. Scotsmen, frugally reared, and endowed with the elements of learning at their parish-schools, go forth into every realm to take leading positions. Literature and science are cultivated at home with the most brilliant success. And the short period of a century sees nearly every disadvantageous contrast between our country and her neighbours obliterated.
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ARTICLE OMITTED.
[Sidenote: 1688.
DEC.]
The break-down of King James’s power in this month let loose a popular feeling which had been long under the restraint of terror. The proceedings of an Edinburgh mob on the 10th of December, when the Catholic chapel and college at Holyrood were rifled and destroyed, and the books, trinkets, and images burned in the court-yard, are detailed in Wodrow. At that time, according to the honest confession of Patrick Walker, the extreme Presbyterians, regarding the Revolution as a _surprising, unexpected, merciful dispensation_, ‘thought it someway belonged to us to go to all the popish houses and destroy their monuments of idolatry, with their priests’ robes, and put in prison [the priests] themselves.’