Part 34

Defoe revisited Scotland in the summer of 1708, on a mission the purpose of which has not been ascertained; and again in the summer of 1709. His stay on the last occasion extended to nearly two years, during part of which time, in addition to constant supplies of articles for his _Review_ in London, he acted as editor of the _Edinburgh Courant_ newspaper.[382] (See the next article).

[Sidenote: 1707. MAR. 6.]

In a folio published this day by Captain James Donaldson, under the title of the _Edinburgh Courant Reviewed_, we learn that the _Edinburgh Gazette_, which, as we have seen, was commenced in 1699, had now succumbed to fate: damaged by the persevering policy of Adam Boig of the _Courant_, the _Gazette_ ‘of late has been laid aside, as a thing that cannot be profitably carried on.’

Donaldson here reviews the charges made against his paper, as to partiality and staleness of news, defends it to some extent, but practically admits the latter fault, by stating that he was about to remedy it. He was going to recommence the _Edinburgh Gazette_ in a new series, in which he would ‘take a little more liberty, and give stories as they come,’ without waiting, as before, for their authentication, though taking care where they were doubtful to intimate as much. The _Gazette_ did, accordingly, resume its existence on the 25th of the same month, as a twice-a-week paper. The first number contains three advertisements, one of a sale of house-property, another of the wares of the Leith glass-work, and a third as follows: ‘There is a gentleman in town, who has an secret which was imparted to him by his father, an eminent physician in this kingdom, which by the blessing of God cures the Phrensie and Convulsion Fits. He takes no reward for his pains till the cure be perfyted. He will be found at the Caledonian Coffee-house.’

In a series of the _Gazette_ extending from the commencement to the 140th number, published on the 2d September 1708, there is a remarkable sterility of home-news, and anything that is [Sidenote: 1707.] told is told, in a dry and sententious way. The following alone seem worthy of transcription:

‘LEITH, _May 19_ [1707].—Last Saturday, about 50 merchant-ships, bound for Holland, sailed from our Road, under convoy of two Dutch men-of-war.’

‘EDINBURGH, _August 5_.—This day the Equivalent Money came in here from South Britain, in thirteen waggons drawn by six horses.’

_Sep. 30._—‘_Dyer’s Letter_ says: Daniel de Foe is believed by this time in the hands of justice at the complaint of the Swedish minister, and now a certain man of law may have an opportunity to reckon with him for a crime which made him trip to Scotland, and make him oblige the world with another _Hymn to the Pillory_.’

Strange to say, less than three years after this date, namely, in February 1710, the ‘unabashed Defoe’ was conducting the rival newspaper in Edinburgh—the _Courant_—succeeding in this office Adam Boig, who had died in the preceding month. The authority of Defoe for his editorship appears in the following decree of the Town Council:

‘Att Edinburgh the first day of February j^m. vij^c. and ten years:

‘The same day The Councill authorized Mr Daniel Defoe to print the _Edinburgh Currant_ in place of the deceast Adam Bog Discharging hereby any other person to print News under the name of the _Edinburgh Currant_.’

The advertisements are also very scanty, seldom above three or four, and most of these repeated frequently, as if they were reprinted gratuitously, in order to make an appearance of business in this line. The following are selected as curious:

_May 13, 1707._—‘This is to give notice to all who have occasion for a black hersse, murning-coach, and other coaches, just new, and in good order, with good horses well accoutred, that James Mouat, coachmaster in Lawrence Ord’s Land at the foot of the Canongate, will serve them thankfully at reasonable rates.’

‘Ralph Agutter of London, lately come to Edinburgh, Musical Instrument-maker, is to be found at Widow Pool’s, perfumer of gloves, at her house in Stonelaw’s Close, a little below the Steps; makes the Violin, Bass Violin, Tenor Violin, the Viol de Gambo, the Lute Quiver, the Trumpet Marine, the Harp; and mendeth and putteth in order and stringeth all those instruments as fine as any man whatsoever in the three kingdoms, or elsewhere, and [Sidenote: 1707.] mendeth the Virginal, Spinnat, and Harpsichord, all at reasonable rates.’

_Oct. 16._—‘There is just now come to town the Excellent Scarburray Water, good for all diseases whatsomever except consumption; and this being the time of year for drinking the same, especially at the fall of the leaf and the bud, the price of each chopin bottle is fivepence, the bottle never required, or three shilling without the bottle. Any person who has a mind for the same may come to the Fountain Close within the Netherbow of Edinburgh, at William Mudie’s, where the Scarsburray woman sells the same.’

_August 12, 1708._—‘George Williamson, translator [_alias_ cobbler] in Edinburgh, commonly known by the name of Bowed Geordie, who swims on face, back, or any posture, forwards or backwards; plums, dowks, and performs all the antics that any swimmer can do, is willing to attend any gentleman, and to teach them to swim, or perform his antics for their divertisement: is to be found in Luckie Reid’s at the foot of Gray’s Close, on the south side of the street, Edinburgh.’

In September 1707, it is advertised that at the Meal Girnel of Primrose, oatmeal, the produce of the place, was sold at four pounds Scots the boll for the crop of 1706, while the crop of the preceding year was £3, 13_s._ 4_d._; in the one case, 6_s._ 8_d._; in the other, 6_s._ 4_d._ sterling.

[Sidenote: APR. 9.]

The Master of Burleigh—eldest son of Lord Balfour of Burleigh, a peer possessed of considerable estates in Fife—had fallen in love with a girl of humble rank, and was sent abroad by his friends, in the hope that time and change of scene would save him from making a low marriage. He was heard to declare before going, that if she married in his absence, he would take the life of her husband. The girl was, nevertheless, married to Henry Stenhouse, schoolmaster of Inverkeithing. The Master was one of those hot-headed persons whom it is scarcely safe to leave at large, and who yet do not in general manifest the symptoms that justify restraint. Learning that his mistress was married, and to whom, he came at this date with two or three mounted servants to the door of the poor schoolmaster, who, at his request, came forth from amongst his pupils to speak to the young gentleman.

‘Do you know me?’ said Balfour.

‘No.’

[Sidenote: 1707.]

‘I am the Master of Burleigh. You have spoken to my disadvantage, and I am come to fight you,’

‘I never saw you before,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘and I am sure I never said anything against you.’

‘I must nevertheless fight with you, and if you won’t, I will at once shoot you.’

‘It would be hard,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘to force a man who never injured you into a fight. I have neither horse nor arms, and it is against my principles to fight duels.’

‘You must nevertheless fight,’ said the Master, ‘or be shot instantly;’ and so saying, he held a pistol to Stenhouse’s breast.

The young man continuing to excuse himself, Balfour at length fired, and gave the schoolmaster a mortal wound in the shoulder, saying with savage cruelty: ‘Take that to be doing with.’ Then, seeing that an alarm had arisen among the neighbours, he rode off, brandishing a drawn sword, and calling out: ‘Hold the deserter!’ in order to divert the attention of the populace. The unfortunate schoolmaster died in a few days of his wound.

The Master for a time escaped pursuit, but at length he was brought to trial, July 28, 1709, and adjudged to be beheaded at the Cross of Edinburgh, on the ensuing 6th of January. During this unusually long interval, he escaped from the Tolbooth by changing clothes with his sister. He was not again heard of till May 1714, when he appeared amongst a number of Jacobite gentlemen at the Cross of Lochmaben, to drink the health of James VIII. The family title had by this time devolved on him by the death of his father; but his property had all been escheat by sentence of the Court of Justiciary. His appearance in the rebellion of 1715, completed by attainder the ruin of his family, and he died unmarried and in obscurity in 1757.[383]

[Sidenote: APR. 25.]

A great flock of the _Delphinus Deductor_, or Ca’ing Whale—a cete about twenty-five feet long—came into the Firth of Forth, ‘roaring, plunging, and threshing upon one another, to the great terror of all who heard the same.’ It is not uncommon for this denizen of the arctic seas to appear in considerable numbers on the coasts of Zetland; and occasionally they present themselves on the shores of Caithness and Sutherlandshire; but to come so far south as the Firth of Forth is very rare: hence the astonishment which the incident seems to have created. The contemporary [Sidenote: 1707.] chronicler goes on to state: ‘Thirty-five of them were run ashore upon the sands of Kirkcaldy, where they made yet a more dreadful roaring and tossing when they found themselves aground, insomuch that the earth trembled.’ ‘What the unusual appearance of so great a number of them at this juncture [the union of the kingdoms] may portend shall not be our business to inquire.’[384]

[Sidenote: AUG.]

The fifteenth article of the treaty of Union provided that England should pay to Scotland the sum of £398,085, 10_s._, because of the arrangement for the equality of trade between the two countries having necessitated that Scotland should henceforth pay equal taxes with England—a rule which would otherwise have been inequitable towards Scotland, considering that a part of the English revenue was required for payment of the interest on her seventeen millions of national debt. It was likewise provided by the act of Union, that out of this Equivalent Money, as it was called, the commissioners to be appointed for managing it should, in the first place, pay for any loss to be incurred by the renovation of the coin; in the second, should discharge the losses of the African Company, which thereupon was to cease; the overplus to be applied for payment of the comparatively trifling state-debts of Scotland, and to furnish premiums to the extent of £2000 a year for the improvement of the growth of wool for seven years—afterwards for the improvement of fisheries and other branches of the national industry.

Defoe, who was now living in Scotland, tells how those who hated the Union spoke and acted about the Equivalent. The money not being paid in Scotland on the very day of the incorporation of the two countries, the first talk was—the English have cheated us, and will never pay; they intended it all along. Then an idea got abroad, that by the non-payment the Union was dissolved; ‘and there was a discourse of some gentlemen who came up to the Cross of Edinburgh, and protested, in the name of the whole Scots nation, That, the conditions of the treaty not being complied with, and the terms performed, the whole was void.’ At length, in August, the money came in twelve wagons, guarded by a party of Scots dragoons, and was carried directly to the Castle. Then those who had formerly been loudest in denouncing the English for not forwarding the money, became furious because [Sidenote: 1707.] it was come. They hooted at the train as it moved along the street, cursing the soldiers who guarded it, and even the horses which drew it. One person of high station called out that those who brought that money deserved to be cut to pieces. The excitement increased so much before the money was secured in the Castle, that the mob pelted the carters and horses on their return into the streets, and several of the former were much hurt.

It was soon discovered that, after all, only £100,000 of the money was in specie, the rest being in Exchequer bills, which the Bank of England had ignorantly supposed to be welcome in all parts of her majesty’s dominions. This gave rise to new clamours. It was said the English had tricked them by sending paper instead of money. Bills, only payable four hundred miles off, and which, if lost or burned, would be irrecoverable, were a pretty price for the obligation Scotland had come under to pay English taxes. The impossibility of satisfying or pleasing a defeated party was never better exemplified.

The commissioners of the Equivalent soon settled themselves in one of Mr Robert Mylne’s houses in Mylne’s Court, and proceeded to apply the money in terms of the act. One of their first proceedings was to send to London for £50,000 in gold, in substitution for so much of paper-money, that they might, as far as possible, do away with the last clamour. ‘Nor had this been able to carry them through the payment, had they not very prudently taken all the Exchequer bills that any one brought them, and given bills of exchange for them payable in London.’[385] Defoe adverts to a noble individual—doubtless the Duke of Hamilton—who came for payment of his share of the African Company’s stock (£3000), with the interest, and who refused to take any of the Exchequer bills, probably thinking thus to create some embarrassment; but the commissioners instantly ordered the claim to be liquidated in gold.

Notwithstanding all the ravings and revilings about the Equivalent, Defoe assures us that, amongst the most malcontent persons he never found any who, having African stock, refused to take their share of the unhallowed money in exchange for it. Even the despised Exchequer bills were all despatched so quickly, that, in six months, not one was to be seen in the country.

Out of the Equivalent, the larger portion—namely, £229,611, 4_s._ 8_d._—went to replace the lost capital of the African Company, [Sidenote: 1707.] and so could not be considered as rendered to the nation at large. For ‘recoining the Scots and foreign money, and reducing it to the standard of the coin of England,’ £49,888, 14_s._ 11⅙_d._ was expended. There was likewise spent out of this fund, for the expenses of the commissioners and secretaries who had been engaged in carrying through the Union, £30,498, 12_s._ 2_d._ After making sundry other payments for public objects, there remained in 1713 but £16,575, 14_s._ 0½_d._ unexpended.[386]

We shall afterwards see further proceedings in the matter of the Equivalent.

[Sidenote: OCT. 3.]

Walter Scott of Raeburn, grandson of the Quaker Raeburn who suffered so long an imprisonment for his opinions in the reign of Charles II.,[387] fought a duel with Mark Pringle, youngest son of Andrew Pringle of Clifton. It arose from a quarrel the two gentlemen had the day before at the head-court of Selkirk. They were both of them young men, Scott being only twenty-four years of age, although already four years married, and a father. The contest was fought with swords in a field near the town, and Raeburn was killed. The scene of this melancholy tragedy has ever since been known as _Raeburn’s Meadow-spot_.

Pringle escaped abroad; became a merchant in Spain; and falling, on one occasion, into the hands of the Moors, underwent such a series of hardships, as, with the Scottish religious views of that age, he might well regard as a Heaven-directed retribution for his rash act. Eventually, however, realising a fortune, he returned with honour and credit to his native country, and purchased the estate of Crichton in Edinburghshire. He died in 1751, having survived the unhappy affair of Raeburn’s Meadow-spot for forty-four years; and his grandson, succeeding to the principal estate of the family, became Pringle of Clifton.

The sixteenth article of the act of Union, while decreeing that a separate mint should be kept up in Scotland ‘under the same rules as the mint in England’—an arrangement afterwards broken through—concluded that the money thereafter used should be of the same standard and fineness throughout the United Kingdom. It thus became necessary to call in all the existing coin of Scotland, and substitute for it money uniform with that of England. It was at the same time provided by the act of Union, that any [Sidenote: 1707.] loss incurred by the renewal of the coin of Scotland should be compensated out of the fund called the Equivalent.[388]

The business of the change of coinage being taken into consideration by the Privy Council of Scotland, several plans for effecting it were laid before that august body; but none seemed so suitable or expedient as one proposed by the Bank of Scotland, which was to this effect: ‘The Directors undertook to receive in all the species that were to be recoined, at such times as should be determined by the Privy Council, and to issue bank-notes or current money for the same, in the option of the ingiver of the old species, and the Privy Council allowing a half _per cent._ to the Bank for defraying charges;’[389] the old money to be taken to the mint and coined into new money, which should afterwards replace the notes.

Mr David Drummond, treasurer of the Bank, ‘a gentleman of primitive virtue and singular probity,’ according to Thomas Ruddiman—a hearty Jacobite, too, if his enemies did not belie him—had a chief hand in the business of the renovation of the coin, about which he communicated to Ruddiman some memoranda he had taken at the time.

‘There was brought into the Bank of Scotland in the year 1707:

Value in Sterling Money.

Of foreign silver money, £132,080 : 17 : 00

Milled Scottish coins [improved coinage subsequent to 1673], 96,856 : 13 : 00

Coins struck by hammer [the older Scottish coin], 142,180 : 00 : 00

English milled coin, 40,000 : 00 : 00

——————————————————

Total, £411,117 : 10 : 00

‘This sum, no doubt, made up by far the greatest part of the silver coined money current in Scotland at that time; but it was not to be expected that the whole money of that kind could be brought into the bank; for the folly of a few misers, or the fear that people might have of losing their money, or various other dangers and accidents, prevented very many of the old Scots coins from being brought in. A great part of these the goldsmiths, in aftertimes, consumed by melting them down; some of them have been exported to foreign countries; a few are yet [1738] in private hands.’[390]

[Sidenote: 1707.]

Ruddiman, finding that, during the time between December 1602 and April 1613, there was rather more estimated value of gold than of silver coined in the Scottish mint, arrived at the conclusion (though not without great hesitation), that there was more value of gold coin in Scotland in 1707 than of silver, and that the sum-total of gold and silver money together, at the time of the Union, was consequently ‘not less than nine hundred thousand pounds sterling.’ We are told, however, in the _History of the Bank of Scotland_, under 1699, that ‘nothing answers among the common people but silver-money, _even gold being little known amongst them_;’ and Defoe more explicitly says, ‘there was at this time _no Scots gold coin current, or to be seen, except a few preserved for antiquity_.’[391] It therefore seems quite inadmissible that the Scottish gold coin in 1707 amounted to nearly so much as Ruddiman conjectures. More probably, it was not £30,000.

It would appear that the Scottish copper-money was not called in at the Union, and Ruddiman speaks of it in 1738 as nearly worn out of existence, ‘so that the scarcity of copper-money does now occasion frequent complaints.’

If the outstanding silver-money be reckoned at £60,000, the gold at £30,000, and the copper at £60,000, the entire metallic money in use in Scotland in 1707 would be under six hundred thousand pounds sterling in value. It is not unworthy of observation, as an illustration of the advance of wealth in the country since that time, that a private gentlewoman died in 1841, with a nearly equal sum at her account in the banks, besides other property to at least an equal amount.

In March 1708, while the renovation of the coinage was going on, the French fleet, with the Chevalier de St George on board, appeared at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, designing to invade the country. The Bank got a great alarm, for it ‘had a very large sum lying in the mint in ingots,’ and a considerable sum of the old coin in its own coffers, ‘besides a large sum in current species; all of which could not have easily been carried off and concealed.’[392] The danger, however, soon blew over. ‘Those in power at the time, fearing lest, all our silver-money having been brought into our treasury, or into the Bank, a little before, there should be a want of money for the expenses of the war, ordered the [Sidenote: 1707.] forty-shilling pieces to be again issued out of the banks; of which sort of coin there was great plenty at that time in Scotland, and commanded these to be distributed for pay to the soldiers and other exigencies of the public; but when that disturbance was settled, they ordered that kind of money also to be brought into the bank; and on a computation being made, it was found that the quantity of that kind, brought in the second time, exceeded that which was brought in the first time [by] at least four thousand pounds sterling.’[393]

We are told by the historian of the Bank, that ‘the whole nation was most sensible of the great benefit that did redound from the Bank’s undertaking and effectuating the recoinage, and in the meantime keeping up an uninterrupted circulation of money.’ Its good service was represented to the queen, considered by the Lords of the Treasury and Barons of Exchequer, and reported on favourably. ‘But her majesty’s death intervening, and a variety of public affairs on that occasion and since occurring, the directors have not found a convenient opportunity for prosecuting their just claim on the government’s favour and reward for that seasonable and very useful service.’

[Sidenote: NOV. 3.]

Mr John Strahan, Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, was at this time owner of Craigcrook, a romantically situated old manor-house under the lee of Corstorphine Hill—afterwards for many years the residence of Lord Jeffrey. Strahan had also a house in the High Street of Edinburgh. He was the owner of considerable wealth, the bulk of which he ultimately ‘mortified’ for the support of poor old men, women, and orphans; a charity which still flourishes.

Strahan had a servant named Helen Bell to keep his town mansion, and probably she was left a good deal by herself. As other young women in her situation will do, she admitted young men to see her in her master’s house. On Hallowe’en night this year, she received a visit from two young artisans, William Thomson and John Robertson, whom she happened to inform that on Monday morning—that is, the second morning thereafter—she was to go out to Craigcrook, leaving the town-house of course empty.

About five o’clock on Monday morning, accordingly, this innocent young woman locked up her master’s house, and set forth on [Sidenote: 1707.] her brief journey, little recking that it was the last she would ever undertake in this world. As she was proceeding through the silent streets, her two male friends joined her, telling her they were going part of her way; and she gave them a couple of bottles and the key of the house to carry, in order to lighten her burden. On coming to a difficult part of the way, called the _Three Steps_, at the foot of the Castle Rock, the two men threw her down and killed her with a hammer. They then returned to town, with the design of searching Mr Strahan’s house for money.