1671, Jan 19
William Head and John Fergusson, who had ‘practised a lottery by authority
in the kingdom of England,’ were authorised by the Privy Council to set up
a similar adventure in any part of Scotland they pleased, ‘without let or
molestation, they behaving themselves as becometh.’—P. C. R.
Mar 2
During the early years of the reign of Charles II., a custom prevailed to
a great extent of obtaining from the Privy Council protections
against the diligence of creditors. Sometimes a Highland chief could not
come to Edinburgh on important affairs of his own, without this safeguard;
sometimes the Council could not otherwise be favoured with the company of
some man of local influence, whom it desired to see upon important public
business. Sir Mungo Murray was unable to attend the funeral of his cousin
and namesake, ‘late lieutenant of one of his majesty’s troops of guards,’
unless he got ‘protection against the rigidity of his creditors.’ At this
date, the Council received an application for a protection from James
Arnot, postmaster at Cockburnspath, an important station on the road from
Edinburgh to Berwick. James having involved himself in debt, not only was
his person ‘in hazard to be taken with captions, but the horses and
furniture reserved for the public use of the lieges upon the post-road are
threatened to be poindit.’ As the government owed him as much as would pay
his debts, it seemed but reasonable that they should save him from his
creditors, which they accordingly did by granting him and his horses
protection for a year.—P. C. R.
1671, May 14
A young woman named Elizabeth Low had an excrescence upon her forehead,
eleven inches long, and usually regarded as a horn. It was this day cut
out by Arthur Temple of Ravelrig, and deposited in the museum of the
Edinburgh University, with a silver plate attesting its history. Law notes
that the girl was alive in 1682, and had another horn growing out of the
same place.
June 1
Heriot’s Hospital having been for some years established, with sixty boys
as inmates, it was customary to hold the 1st of June as a holiday in
honour of the founder, one part of the formalities being a procession of
the magistrates to the Hospital at nine in the morning ‘to hear sermon.’
David Pringle, ‘nearest of kin to the founder,’ acted as surgeon and
barber to the boys, these two heterogeneous crafts being somehow combined
by our ancestors. To prepare the boys for appearance this morning before
the civic dignitaries, it was necessary that they should be, polled;
accordingly, about seven in the morning, Mr Pringle, his other servants
being absent about his business, sent a boy to the Hospital, desiring him
to take with him any person he could readily get to further the work. The
boy unluckily omitted to look for a barber free of the city corporation of
barber-chirurgeons, and took with him one William Wood, who was only free
of the suburban district of Portsburgh.
This coming to the ears of Archibald Temple, deacon of
the said city corporation, a court was speedily held, and David Pringle
summoned before it, to answer for the irregularity committed by his boy.
The medical officer of Heriot’s Hospital ingenuously confessed the error;
but represented his boy as having simply taken the readiest assistant he
could get, ‘without the least intention to give the calling offence:’ he
added his solemn promise that no such impropriety should ever again occur.
The court was disposed to pass over the matter as trivial; but the deacon,
having reason to believe that Pringle designedly employed Wood, pressed
for punishment, and solemnly vowed he would see it inflicted. He very soon
caused Wood to be put up in the Tolbooth. Pringle hereupon appealed to the
Town Council for the liberation of Wood, and so further incensed the
corporation against himself. By using influence with the magistrates, they
obtained a warrant for the apprehension of Pringle, by which he was
‘necessitat for some time to keep his house, and durst not come abroad,
they having officers both at the head and
foot of the close to watch and catch him.’
Notwithstanding a petition from him to the Town Council, representing the
case, Temple and some of his colleagues persevered till they got Pringle
put up in jail, there to lie during the Council’s pleasure, and till he
should give satisfaction to ‘the calling.’ They also, during his
confinement, passed an ordinance depriving him of all the benefits of his
own connection with the corporation, till he should have made full
acknowledgment of his offence in writing, and submitted to appropriate
censure. In short, the affair, trivial at first, came to be a passionate
contention between the barber corporation and their delinquent member,
they determined to assert their privileges, and he resolute to make no
unworthy submission. After much altercation, the affair came before the
Privy Council, who employed the Earl of Argyle and the Earl of Linlithgow
to inquire into and report upon it, and it was not till the 11th of
January 1672 that the case was adjusted by Pringle making an apology, and
the corporation reponing him in his privileges.—P. C. B.
Sep 5
Donald M’Donald, commonly called the Halkit Stikc, had been
~ liberated from the Edinburgh Tolbooth in December 1660, on caution being
given by Donald M’Dona.ld, younger of Slate, to the extent of £1000
sterling, that the prisoner should present himself, when called upon, to
answer anything that could be laid to his charge. It being found that the
Halkit Stirk had ever since lived the life of a robber, and had committed
divers slaughters, the young Laird of Slate was now called upon to render
up the delinquent or forfeit his caution. The young laird accordingly
brought the Halkit Stirk before the Council, and got a discharge of his
bond. The robber was committed to the Tolbooth.
During this year, a great impulse seemed to be given to
Quakerism both in England and Scotland. It being found, says Law, that a
rejection of ordinances and the Scriptures were not taking with the
people, they began to have preaching and prayer at their meetings, and to
acknowledge the Bible as the rule of their life and judge of
controversies. The profession was found thus to be more ‘ensnaring.’ Some
men of note, and of parts and learning, such as Robert Barclay of Urie,
who afterwards wrote the Apology for the
Quakers, now joined the society.
In his dedication to the king, written in 1675, Mr
Barclay claimed credit for his sect, not only that they meddled with no
civil affairs, but that, in the times of most violent persecution, being
‘clothed in innocency, they have boldly stood to their testimony for God,
without creeping into holes or corners, or once hiding themselves, as all
other dissenters have done ‘—rather a severe taunt at the extreme
Presbyterians, who had been contenders for the political supremacy of
their church, and had now to comport themselves as rebels. The
Presbyterians, while themselves suffering, approved of the severities
against these most innocuous of all Christians; they only thought them not
severe enough. Wodrow speaks of the Council as, in 1666, ‘coming to some
good resolutions against Quakers,’ but complains generally of its
slackness concerning ‘that dangerous sect,’ which, he says, ‘spread
terribly during this reign.’
One William Napier, a seafaring man in Montrose, had
turned Quaker, and other Quakers began in consequence to draw towards that
place, keeping frequent meetings in Napier’s house, ‘to the great scandal
of religion and disturbance of the peace and quiet of the burgh.’ On the
12th of January 1672, ‘betwixt twenty and thretty persons did convene at
William Napier his house, where they had such pretendit devotion as they
pleased to devise, whereupon a great tumult and confusion was like to have
been made,’ and the magistrates, to settle matters as far as possible,
clapped up fifteen of the congregation in the Tolbooth. On a petition from
the magistrates, representing how by these doings the people were becoming
‘deboshed in their principles,’ the Council ordered that William Napier
should be sent to Edinburgh, and imprisoned during pleasure in the
Tolbooth there, while the rest of the prisoners should remain in durance
at Montrose. In this case the Council ultimately took a lenient course. On
a humble petition from Napier, representing the injury he would sustain in
his business from an intended voyage being stopped, he was ordered to be
set at liberty after about a fortnight’s confinement. Three of the company
were ordered, on petition, to be liberated eight months after, and on the
ensuing day a general order was issued for the liberation of any other
Quakers that might still remain in confinement at Montrose.—P.
C. B.
A general order was issued by the Council, in March
1672, to the magistrates of Aberdeen, commanding them to execute the laws
against a number of the citizens who had deserted the parish churches on
account of Quakerism, enjoining that these people should be strictly
punished according to act of parliament—that is, fined in the proportion
of a fourth of their means for the offence.
In March 1673, there were eleven men in prison at Kelso
for attending a Quaker meeting; but the Council, unwilling to keep them
confined till the circuit court could try them, sent the Earl of Roxburgh
with a commission to judge whether they might be set at liberty or not.
The liberty of conscience which the Quakers asserted as
a principle made them unscrupulous in associating with papists, and this
formed one of the strongest grounds of prejudice against them. Law relates
a childish story of a gentleman Quaker at Montrose being induced by his
daughter to repent, and return to church, where he confessed that the
chief Quakers kept up a correspondence with the chief papists and with the
pope; as also that they ‘had converse with Satan.’
We are assured by Robert Law, that while Quakerism was
spreading with an alarming rapidity, there was also a startling abundance
of profanity and of abominable offences. Some propensities were indulged
with great licence; ‘drunkenness without any shame, men glorying in it;’
‘dreadful oppression; high contempt of the gospel; gross idolatry; a woman
in the south drinking the devil’s health and [that of] his servants;
self-murder; and witchcraft and sorceries very common; all which
threatened a sad stroke from God upon us.’
The woman here adverted to by Law seems to have been
one Marion M’CaIl, spouse to Adam Reid in Mauchline. She was tried, May 8,
1671, before the Court of Justiciary at Ayr, for ‘drinking the good health
of the devil,’ and judged to be taken on the first Wednesday of June to
the Market Cross of Edinburgh, ‘to be scourged by the hangman from thence
to the Nether Bow, and thereafter to be brought back to the Cross again
and have her tongue bored and [be] burnt on the cheek;’ further, she. was
not to return to the county of Ayr on pain of death.
Law elsewhere tells of a debauch, at which a similar
indecorum was committed, and which was the means of carrying off two
members of the Scottish peerage. It was the more remarkable as occurring
in January 1643, when the nation at large had certainly some most serious
concerns on hand, and the general tone was earnestly religious. It is
stated that the Earl of Kelly, the Lord Kerr, and David Sandilands,
‘Abercrombie’s brother,’ with other two gentlemen, being met one day, fell
a carousing, and, to encourage each other in drinking, began to give
healths. When they had drunk many healths, not knowing whose to give next,
‘one of them gives the devil’s health, and the rest pledges him.
Sandilands that night, going down stairs, fell and broke his neck; Kelly
and Kerr within a few days sickened of a fever and died; the fourth also
died shortly; and the fifth, being under some remorse, lived some time.’
It may be added that ‘ane great drink,’ as it was called in a chronicle of
the day, having thus carried off Lord Kerr, the titles of his father, the
Earl of Roxburgh, passed by his daughter into a branch of another family,
the Drummonds of Perth. This victim of the wine-cup had appeared for the
Covenant at Dunse Law, but afterwards became a royalist.
1672, Feb 26
From the commencement of the religious troubles in 1638, the Privy Council
Record gives comparatively few of those notices of new manufactures
attempted in Scotland, or proposed to be introduced by strangers, for
which the previous thirty years of peace were so remarkable. Amidst
endless notices of religious persecution, it gives an agreeable surprise,
at the date noted, to light upon an application from Philip Vander Straten,
a native of Bruges, for the benefit of naturalisation and freedom of
working and trafficking, while embarking a considerable sum of money in a
work at Kelso ‘for dressing and refining of wool.’ The
petition was at once complied with.—P. C. R.
Two years later (March 19, 1674), the commencement of a
humbler and less useful branch of industry is noted. At that date, Andrew
M’Kairter represented to the Privy Council that, being a young boy at the
schools of Dalmellington at the time of the Pentland insurrection in 1666,
he had joined in that affair, and after its conclusion, ‘out of a childish
fear did run away to Newcastle, and having there, and in London, and
Holland, served ane long appenticeship in spinning of tobacco,’ he was now
returned to his native country, and ‘hath set up the said trade at Leith.’
His desire was to make his peace with the government by signing the bond
for the public peace. The Council entertained the petition graciously, and
Andrew became, we may suppose, the first practitioner of tobacco-spinning
in Leith.
Apr
At this time, and for six mouths previously, the small-pox raged in
Glasgow. Hardly a family escaped the infection, and eight hundred deaths
and upwards occurred.—Law.
Some sensation was excited by the rumour that in a ship
lying at Newcastle, called the Cape of Good Hope of London, the
devil had appeared in bodily shape, in the habit of a seaman, with a blue
cravat about his neck, and desired the master of the ship to remove out of
her; which he did not obey till sic time as she began to sink in the
ocean. Then he, with his company, took his cock-boat, who were saved by
another ship coming by. This was testified by the oaths of them that were
in her.’—Law. It is seldom that the devil is found so obliging as
he seems to have been in this case.
It may serve to verify the possibility of such a rumour
in the reign of Charles II., that, in March 1682, the Privy Council was
informed that ‘one Margaret Dougall is imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Ayr,
as alleged guilty of raising and consulting the devil;’ and an order was
given that she be transported from sheriff to sheriff until brought to and
placed in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, that she might be brought to a legal
trial—P. C. B.
May 27
Joannes Michael Philo, physician, and ‘sworn operator to his majesty,’
was, on petition, allowed to erect a public stage in Edinburgh for the
practice of his profession, but ‘discharged to have any rope-dancing.’—P.
C. R. It was some time after stated regarding this personage, that
he did erect a stage in Edinburgh, and ‘thereon has cured thretteen blind
persons, several lame, and cut several cancers, and done many other
notable cures, as is notourly known, and that out of mere charity.’ He was
therefore invested by the Council, on petition, with a warrant to go and
do likewise in all the other burghs of the kingdom, up till February next;
the Council further recommending him to the magistrates of these burghs,
that they may give him due help and countenance.
His stage was then taken down by the magistrates of
Edinburgh, ‘before he could have time to complete many considerable
cures,’ which he had had on hand. There also came to him from remote parts
of the country ‘five or six poor blind people, and as many with cancers,
whose poverty will not admit the same to be done otherwise than upon the
public stage, where they have their cure gratis and their entertainment in
the meantime upon [the operator’s] charges.’ He therefore petitioned to
have his stage re-erected in Edinburgh for a time; which was complied
with.
June 12
On the parliament sitting down to-day, under the Duke of Lauderdale as
commissioner, his ‘lady, with the number of thirty or forty more ladies,
accompanies the duke to the parliament in coaches, and are set down in the
Parliament House, and sat there to hear the commissioner’s speech.’—Law.
‘A practice so new and extraordinary, that it raised the indignation
of the people very much against her; they hating to find that aspired to
by her, which none of our queens had ever attempted.’ It ‘set them to
inquire into her origin and faults, and to rail against the lowness of the
one, and the suspicions of the other. . . . This
malice grew daily against her.’
The duke, at fifty-seven, and, it is said, only six
weeks a widower, had married the duchess in the preceding February in
London, all their friends in Edinburgh making feasts on their
marriage-day, while ‘the Castle shot as many guns as on his majesty’s
birthday.’ Her grace, now forty-five years of age, was in her personal
qualities and history a most remarkable woman. Her wit and cleverness were
something singular; ‘nor had the extraordinary beauty she possessed while
she was young, ceded at the age at which she was then arrived.’ The
daughter of one who had been minister of Dysart, she was Countess of
Dysart in her own right, and by Sir Lionel Tollemache had had a large
family, which is still represented in the peerage. There was something
romantic in her union with the now all-powerful Lauderdale. He had owed to
her his life, through her influence with Cromwell, and in his marriage,
which was discommended by all his friends, ‘he really yielded to his
gratitude." For the next ten years, it might be said that Lauderdale and
his clever duchess were all but nominally king and queen of Scotland.