Part 44

According to the provost and magistrates, in a complaint which they sent to the Privy Council, this peaceful measure did not suit the views of Sir Matthew Stewart and his friends. Accordingly, ‘knawing that, upon the twenty-three day of the month, whilk was the day preceding the appointit time of meeting, Sir George was to go to the archery, they made choice of that time and occasion, to work their turn.’ Sir Walter Stewart, son of Sir Matthew, with John and Alexander Stewarts, ‘lay in wait for him and his company, wha were but five in number, without ony kind of armour, saufing their bows; and perceiving them, about seven hours at even, come up the Dry-gate, of purpose to have passed to the _Castle butts_, and there to have endit their game, and James Forrat, ane of Sir George’s company, going to his awn house with his bow disbendit in his hand, to have fetchit some Bute arrows; Sir Walter thought meet to mak the first onset upon him, and thereby to draw Sir George back.’ The assault upon Forrat having caused a great cry to arise, Sir George returned through the Castle port to learn what was the matter, when, meeting young Minto in the act of pursuing the unarmed man, he remonstrated first in gentle words, and then in language more emphatic, finally commanding him in the king’s name to desist and go home. Hereupon a party of forty, all armed with steel bonnets, secrets, plait sleeves, ‘lang staffs,’ and other weapons, issued from the wynd-head, where they had been concealed, and, joining with young Minto, drove Sir George and his small party of friends back to the Castle port, where they were happily relieved from present danger. Being thus disappointed of their purpose, the rioters retired to the wynd-head, and presently sent off one of their number down the High Gait to rouse the other citizens. This man, James Braidwood, ran along crying, ‘Arm you! arm you! They are yokit!’ whereupon a great number of the seditious faction, including Sir Matthew Stewart of Minto himself, assembled in arms, and joining the other party at the wynd-head, came in full force, and in the most furious manner to the Castle, where, but for the interposition of the Earl of Wigton and two other privy-councillors, who were present, they would certainly have slain their provost. ‘Seeing they could not win towards Sir George with lang staffs and weapons, they despitefully cast stanes at him.’ Then, refusing to obey the commands of the privy-councillors to go peaceably home, ‘they past tumultuously down the gait to the Barras Yett, far beneath the Cross, and come up the gait again with three hundred persons, with drawn swords in their hands, some of the rascal multitude crying: “I sall have this buith, and thou sall have that buith!” and of new assailit the Castle port, with full purpose by force to have enterit within the same.’ It was alleged that, but for the courageous resistance of the three noble privy-councillors, they would have accomplished the destruction of Sir George Elphinstone on this occasion. As it was, they laid violent hands on three several magistrates who came to his help, altogether ‘committing manifest insolency and insurrection within the said city, to the great trouble and inquietation thereof, and ane evil example to others to do the like hereafter.’

[Sidenote: 1606.]

Such was the Elphinstone story regarding this tumult. It was, however, met by a counter-complaint from young Minto, to the following effect. He was, he said, ‘coming down the Rotton Raw, in peaceable and quiet maner to his awn lodging, accompanit only with twa servants,’ when ‘he perceivit Sir George Elphinstone with nine or ten persons in his company, coming up the Dry Gait.’ Although he was in the straight way for his lodging, ‘yet in respect of some dryness between Sir George and him, he left that gait, and past ane other way, of purpose to have eschewit all occasion of trouble and unquietness betwixt them.’ Here, however, ‘James Forrat, ane of Sir George’s company, cast him directly in the complainer’s way, and pressit to have stayit his passage.’ When young Minto ‘soberly found fault with him,’ Forrat ‘immediately bendit his bow, and had not failed to have shot and slain him, were not ane in company with the complainer cuttit the bow-string.’ Whereupon, according to the recital, Sir George Elphinstone and his servants fell upon young Minto and his servants in the most violent manner with their swords, and would certainly have slain them, if they had not by God’s providence escaped.--_P. C. R._

We learn from another source, that, after all, ‘the skaith was not great; only ane man callit Thomas Cloggy died, without ony wound, and sundry hurt with staves.’[317]

The government authorities must have felt puzzled by this local squabble, and hardly known how to apportion punishment amongst the parties. The Minto knights were ordered into ward in Dumbarton Castle, and Sir George Elphinstone in the castle of Glasgow, till his majesty’s pleasure should be known. The Privy Council afterwards absolved young Minto from the charge of being the aggressor in the conflict of the 23d July; but the two knights and their principal supporters were confined for some time in Linlithgow, on account of the general ‘insolency’ of which they had been guilty.

[Sidenote: 1606.

AUG.]

There is something affecting in the history of the families concerned in this tumult. A mural tablet in Glasgow cathedral commemorated the names of six or eight Stewarts of Minto in succession, ‘knights created under the banner,’ and men of great sway in the district. But when M‘Ure wrote his _History of Glasgow_ in 1736, the family was ‘mouldered so quite away, that the heir in our time was reduced to a state of penury little short of beggary.’ A memorandum of Paton, the antiquary, queried, ‘If true that the last of the family was a poor boy sent into Edinburgh barefooted with a letter to Stewart of Coltness, who [being] promising, was recommended to the Duke of Hamilton, got some education, and afterwards went abroad to Darien, where he died.’ Sir George Elphinstone, who had been the familiar servant and friend of King James, acquired a great estate at Glasgow, and after this time rose to be Lord Justice-clerk, nevertheless ‘died so poor, that his corpse was arrested by his creditors, and his friends buried him privately in his own chapel adjoining his house.’ His family went out in the second generation.

While the attention of the people was absorbed by the matter of the bishops and their robes and renewed dignity, the consequences of the continual neglect of those natural conditions on which their physical health depended were about to be once more and most severely felt. The _pest_ broke out and spread over the more populous districts with frightful rapidity. ‘It raged so extremely in all the corners of the kingdom, that neither burgh nor land in any part was free. The burghs of Ayr and Stirling were almost desolate; and all the judicatories of the land were deserted.’--_Bal._ It was not till the middle of winter that it sensibly declined.

The chancellor wrote to the king in October, that scarcely any part of the country was free of the scourge. ‘This calamity,’ he says, ‘hinders all meetings of Council, and all public functions for ministration of justice and maintenance of good rule and government, except sic as we tak at starts, with some few, at Edinburgh, or in sic other place for a day, to keep some countenance of order.’

The unconforming clergy now imprisoned at Blackness wrote a petition for mercy to the king (August 23), in which they describe the state of the country under its present affliction. They speak of ‘the destroying angel hewing down day and night continually, in sic a number in some of our congregations, that the like thereof has not been heard many years before.’ They add: ‘What is most lamentable, they live and die comfortless under the fearful judgment, filling the heaven and the earth with their sighs, sobs, and cries of their distressed souls, for being deprived not only of all outward comforts (whilk were great also), but also of all inward consolation, through the want of the ordinary means of their peace and life, to wit, the preaching of the word of our ministry.’[318]

[Sidenote: 1606.]

We have a remarkable trait of the treatment of the pest in outlying districts, in a bond granted on this occasion by some Aberdeenshire gentlemen to the burgh of Dundee for five hundred merks, as requital for their sending two professional _clengers_ from their town to the valley of the Dee, that they might deal with an infection which had fallen forth in the house of Mr Thomas Burnet, minister of Strathauchan, and in the house of John Burnet of Slowy--two places divided by the river, but both on the line of the great road leading from the south to the north of Scotland. The country gentlemen, on hearing of the infection in their district, had been obliged to convene and devise measures for meeting the calamity.

Their first step was to send for two _clengers_ a hundred miles off to come with all speed, although at a high cost, which the gentlemen, as we see, were obliged to pay in behalf of themselves and neighbours.[319]

Another trait of the public economy regarding this pestilence occurs in the record of the Privy Council. It was represented to that august body on the 2d of September, that ‘certain lodges’ had been ‘biggit by James Lawrieston and David and George Hamiltons, upon the common muir of Gogar, for the ease and relief of certain their tenants, infectit with the pest;’ but Thomas Majoribanks, portioner of Ratho, and other persons had cast down these lodges, apparently on the plea that the erecting of them was an intrusion on their property. The Council found that the muir was common property, and ordered the lodges to be rebuilt by those who had originally set them up, on the part of the muir nearest to their own grounds, ‘where they may have the best commodity of water,’ the other party being at the same time forbidden to interfere under heavy penalties.--_P. C. R._

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[Sidenote: SEP. 4.]

The Chancellor Dunfermline intimated to the king the pitiful case of the inhabitants of Dumbarton, their town being unable to defend themselves against ‘the surges and inundations of the sea, which is likely to destroy and tak away their haill town, and cannot be repulsit by nae moyen their poor ability and fortunes are able to furnish.’ Those who were appointed to inquire into the matter now reported that it would require at least thirty thousand pounds Scots to make a proper bulwark. It was proposed to defray this charge by a tax on the country.[320]

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[Sidenote: SEP.]

[Sidenote: 1606.]

‘George, Earl of Dunbar, his majesty’s commissioner for ordering the Borders, took such a course with the broken men and sorners [there], that, in two justiciary-courts halden by him, he condemned and caused hang above a hundred and forty of the nimblest and most powerful thieves in all the Borders ... and fully reduced the other inhabitants there to the obedience of his majesty’s laws.’--_Bal._ The chancellor told the king next month that the Borders were now ‘satled, far by onything that ever has been done there before.’[321]

It was declared a few months later (November 20), that one of the principal difficulties experienced by the emissaries of government in executing justice on the Borders lay in the strength of the houses in which the ‘thieves and limmers’ dwelt or took refuge, and particularly the ‘iron yetts’ with which these houses were furnished. The Privy Council therefore ordained that all iron yetts in houses belonging to persons below the rank of barons, should be ‘removit and turnit in plew irons or sic other necessar wark as to the awners sall seem expedient.’--_P. C. R._

These iron gates, of which many specimens still survive in ancient country-houses in Scotland, are composed grill-wise, the bars curiously interlacing with each other, and generally with huge staples and padlocks. Such a gate, made in 1568 for Kilravock Castle, Nairnshire, by George Robertson, smith in Elgin, weighed thirty-four stone three pounds, and cost ‘£34, 3s. 9d. usual money, together with three bolls meal, ane stane butter, and ane stane cheese.’[322]

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[Sidenote: NOV. 7.]

The six clergymen who had been tried for treason, on account of their refusal to break up the General Assembly at Aberdeen, and who had been condemned to banishment, were sent forth of the kingdom at Leith, after a long confinement in Blackness Castle. The punishment, it may be remarked, would have been remitted if they would have acknowledged their alleged offence and come in the king’s will.

[Sidenote: 1606.]

‘The 6 of November, about four afternoon, they were desired to come to the boat whilk was prepared for them by the water-bailie of Leith and Edinburgh; who, obeying, came, accompanied with some of their dearest friends and wives, to the pier, where there was a good number of people waiting on, to tak the guid-night at them, and to see them; but after their coming thither, Mr John Welch conceived a prayer, whilk bred great motion in the hearts of all the hearers. Prayers ended, they took guid-night of their friends, wives, and many other weel-wishers who were present, [and] entered into the boat, where they remained a guid space waiting on the skipper.’ The skipper not being ready to weigh that night, ‘they were desired by the water-bailie either to go aboard and lie in the ship that night, or else to go to their lodging, and be ready at the next call.

‘They, by God’s special providence, chused to go to their lodging; for that night came on a great storm, [so] that the ship was forced to save herself in Kinghorn road all that night. They were called again by two hours in the morning, who, obeying, came to the shore and pier, accompanied as the night before, no small concourse of people being with them, beyond expectation, so early to see them boat. Prayer conceived as before by Mr John Welch, they embarked, giving many exhortations to all to hold fast the truth of the doctrine whilk they had delivered; for the whilk they doubted nothing to lay down their lives, let be to suffer banishment; adding thereto, that whilk they suffered was the great joy of their conscience. In the meantime, the mariners hasted them away ... they departed out of our sight, making us hear the comfortable joy whilk they had in God, in singing a psalm.’[323]

[Sidenote: 1606.]

While Protestant clergymen of the puritan type were thus suffering, and evoking by their fortitude the deserved sympathy and admiration of large masses of their countrymen, they were so far from being alone in martyrdom, that suffering was inflicted upon another class of religionists, if not at their dictation, at least with their full approval. The Earl of Angus, one of the three Catholic lords whose correspondence with Spain caused so much trouble sixteen years before, had since lived at home in quietness and obedience. It was not many months after the embarkation of the six Presbyterian ministers at Leith, that we find his lordship pleading that, to avoid imprisonment for his religion, he might be allowed to go into exile--thus calling for the punishment inflicted upon the six clergymen, as a kind of relief from the more severe penalties demanded against him by the party to which these clergymen belonged. In a letter to the king, August 10, 1608, adverting to the fact of the General Assembly having given forth an act for his immediate excommunication, he says: ‘What grief and sorrow this brings to my heart, God knows; because my greatest care has ever been, and sall be, that I might end my days (whilk, I am persuaded, will not be many) at peace with God, and in your majesty’s obedience.... The permission whilk of grace only I crave (gif it please not your hieness to ease me with a better) is either to depart this country ... with surety not to return, or else that it wald please your majesty to confine me in ane of mine awn houses, and so mony miles about the same, where I am glad to live as ane private subject, and never to meddle me with public affairs, but by your majesty’s direction.’

The earl was compelled to leave his country, and he died at Paris three years after, aged fifty-seven. In his epitaph, he is made to say--‘jussus, religionis causâ, patriâ excedere aut in custodiam pergere, vitæ quietiori turbinibus averruncandis delegeram Galliam, caram alteram Scotis patriam.’

The utter unconsciousness of the persecuted Presbyterians of there being any harm in visiting the papists with the like severities might almost provoke a smile. While the six ministers lay in expectation of banishment, their brethren detained in England received a visit from Law, Bishop of Orkney. The conversation turned on the present state of the church in Scotland, and the bishop endeavoured to convince them that the royal policy was right, as the same Linlithgow convention which had condemned the six recusant ministers had ‘taken strait order with the papists.’ Seeing they appeared to have no great faith in that demonstration, the bishop endeavoured to reassure them. ‘_They shall call me a false knave_,’ said he, ‘_and never to be believed again, if the papists be not sae handled as they never were in Scotland._‘[324]

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[Sidenote: DEC. 23.]

The Privy Council had some time ago issued a proclamation, forbidding what was called the _backing of pairties to the bar_--that is, each party in a lawsuit coming into court with a number of friends and favourers behind him, with a view to exercising some influence over the course of justice. Finding that the former denouncement of ‘this indecent and unseemly custom’ had not been attended with any effect, partly through the public being unacquainted with it, and partly through the negligence of the officers of the law, the Council now renewed their proclamation, with assurance that their orders would in future be strictly acted upon. The reader will find that the practice continued in force some years later.--_P. C. R._

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[Sidenote: 1607.

JAN. 20.]

[Sidenote: 1606.]

At this time, Gordon of Gight, Forbes of Corsindae, and some others, formed themselves into what they called the SOCIETY OF THE BOYS--much after the manner perhaps of the White Boys of Ireland, in more recent times. They bound themselves by oath to consider all quarrels as common amongst them, and are accused of having committed ‘open and avowed reifs, herships, and other enormities, in all parts where they be maisters and commanders.’ All this appears from a letter of the Privy Council, of date January 20, 1607, to the Marquis of Huntly, commanding him to take order for their suppression, ‘as your lordship wald eschew that hard censure and construction which his majesty maun mak of your behaviour in this point.’

It will be remembered that Gight was a Catholic, and the probability is that this fraternity of the Boys was simply a desperate effort on his part and that of his co-religionists to repel, as far as they could, the persecutions to which they were subjected.

However this might be, we soon after (April 2) find the Council engaged in trying to bring George Gordon of Gight to justice for sundry popish practices of which he was alleged to have been guilty. It was charged against him that, at the burial of his mother, Isobel Ochterlony, on a particular day in the year 1604, he had caused his tenant, David Wilson, to ‘carry ane crucifix upon ane speir immediately before the corpse;’ in like manner, at the burial of the late William Gordon of Gight in 1605, he had caused George Crawford, his servant, to ‘bear ane crucifix upon ane speir the haill way before the body;’ he being personally present on both occasions: ‘whereby, as he has offendit God, slanderit his kirk and haly ministry, sae he has committit a very great contempt against his majesty, and has violate his hieness’ laws and acts of parliament.’ The laird and his two dependents having failed to appear on several former occasions, the officers of justice were now directed to go to them, and command them to enter as prisoners in Edinburgh Castle within fifteen days, on pain of rebellion.--_P. C. R._

The immediate results of these measures do not appear. Seven years after (February 1614), we learn that the Lairds of Gight and Newton, both Gordons, and both Catholics, were sentenced by the Privy Council to perpetual banishment, and ‘never to set foot in Scotland under pain of death, unless they submit themselves to the orders of the church;’ that is, embrace the Protestant faith as professed in Scotland.

However it was as to their faith, the Gight Gordons are found in their usual place in Aberdeenshire only two years after this time. See under December 1615.

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[Sidenote: APR.]

[Sidenote: 1607.

JUNE 2.]

The pest broke out again in Dundee, Perth, and other parts of the country.--_Ab. C. R._

The Privy Council refer to ‘a very ancient and lovable custom,’ of giving a blue gown, purse, and as many Scotch shillings as agreed with the years of the king’s age, to as many ‘auld puir men’ as likewise agreed with the king’s years; and seeing it to be ‘very necessary and expedient that the said custom should be continuit,’ they give orders accordingly.--_P. C. R._

The ‘auld puir men’ so favoured were called the King’s Bedesmen, and were privileged to go about the country as beggars, notwithstanding any general enactments that might exist against mendicancy. Their blue cloak bore a pewter badge which assured them of this right. They were expected to requite the king’s bounty by their prayers; and, doubtless, as they had such an interest in the increase of his years, their intercessions for his prolonged life must have been sincere. The distribution of their cloaks and purses used to take place on the king’s birthday, at the end of the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, till a time not long gone by.

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[Sidenote: JUNE 30.]

A sad account is given of the country of Athole. This province, ‘whilk of auld was maist quiet and peaceable, and inhabit be a number of civil and answerable gentlemen, professed and avowed enemies to thieves, robbers, and oppressors,’ is described as having ‘now become very louss and broken,’ ‘ane ordinary resett for the thieves and broken men of the north and south Hielands;’ moreover, a great number of the native people, ‘sic as John Dow M’Gillicallum and his complices,’ shaking off all fear of God and reverence for his majesty and the laws, ‘are become maist insolent, committing wild and detestable murders, open reifs, privy stouthrie, barbarous houghing and goring of oxen, and other enormities,’ without hinderance or challenge.

[Sidenote: AUG.]