Part 7

The Quakers residing at Glasgow gave in to the Privy Council a representation of the treatment they received at the hands of their neighbours. It was set forth, that the severe dealings with [Sidenote: 1691.] the consciences of men under the late government had brought about a revolution, and some very tragical doings. Now, when at last the people had wrestled out from beneath their grievances, ‘it was matter of surprise that those who had complained most thereupon should now be found acting the parts of their own persecutors against the petitioners [the Quakers].’ It were too tedious to detail ‘what they have suffered since the change of the government, through all parts of the nation, by beating, stoning, and other abuses,’ In Glasgow, however, ‘their usage had been liker French dragoons’ usage, and furious rabbling, than anything that dare own the title of Christianity.’ Even there they would have endured in silence ‘the beating, stoning, dragging, and the like which they received from the rabble,’ were it not that magistrates connived at and homologated these persecutions, and their continued silence might seem to justify such doings. They then proceeded to narrate that, on the 12th of November, ‘being met together in their hired house for no other end under heaven than to wait upon and worship their God,’ a company of Presbyterian church elders, ‘attended with the rude rabble of the town, haled them to James Sloss, bailie, who, for no other cause than their said meeting, dragged them to prison, where some of them were kept the space of eight days.’ During that time, undoubted bail was offered for them, but refused, ‘unless they should give it under their hand [that] they should never meet again there.’ At the same time, their meeting-house had been plundered, and even yet the restoration of their seats was refused. ‘This using of men that are free lieges would, in the case of others, be thought a very great riot,’ &c.

The feeling of the supreme administrative body in Scotland on this set of occurrences, is chiefly marked by what they did not do. They recommended to the Glasgow magistrates that, if any forms had been taken away from the Quakers, they should be given back![73]

There were no bounds to the horror with which sincere Presbyterians regarded Quakerism in those days. Even in their limited capacity as disowners of all church-politics, they were thought to be most unchristian. Patrick Walker gravely relates an anecdote of the seer-preacher, Peden, which powerfully proves this feeling. This person, being in Ireland, was indebted one night to a Quaker for lodging. Accompanying his host to the meeting, Peden [Sidenote: 1691.] observed a raven come down from the ceiling, and perch itself, to appearance, on a particular person’s head, who presently began to speak with great vehemence. From one man’s head, the appearance passed to another’s, and thence to a third. Peden told the man: ‘I always thought there was devilry amongst you, but I never thought he appeared visibly to you; but now I see it.’ The incident led to the conversion of the Quaker unto orthodox Christianity.[74]

On the 5th of April 1694, there was a petition to the Privy Council from a man named James Macrae, professing to be a Quaker, setting forth that he had been pressed as a soldier, but could not fight, as it was contrary to his principles and conscience; wherefore, if carried to the wars, he could only be miserable in himself, while useless to others. He was ordered to be liberated, provided he should leave a substitute in his place.[75]

It would have been interesting to see a contemporary Glasgow opinion on this case.

[Sidenote: 1692.]

Irregularities of the affections were not now punished with the furious severity which, in the reign of Charles I., ordained beheading to a tailor in Currie for wedding his _first wife’s half-brother’s daughter_.[76] But they were still visited with penalties much beyond what would now be thought fitting. For example, a woman of evil repute, named Margaret Paterson, having drawn aside from virtue two very young men, James and David Kennedy, sons of a late minister of the Trinity College Church, was adjudged to stand an hour in the jougs at the Tron, and then to be scourged from the Castle Hill to the Netherbow, after which a life of exile in the plantations was her portion. The two young men, having been bailed by their uncle, under assurance for five thousand merks, the entire amount of their patrimony, broke their bail rather than stand trial with their associate in guilt. There was afterwards a petition from the uncle setting forth the hardship of the case, and this was replied to with a recommendation from the lords of Justiciary to the lords of the treasury for a modification of the penalty, ‘if their lordships shall think fit.’ In the case of Alison Beaton, where the co-relative offender was a man who had married her mother’s sister, the poor woman was condemned to be scourged in like manner with [Sidenote: 1692.] Paterson, and then transported to the plantations. It was a superstitious feeling which dictated such penalties for this class of offences. The true aim of jurisprudence, to repress disorders which directly affect the interests of others, and these alone, was yet far from being understood.

In January 1694, there came before the notice of the Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, a case of curiously complicated wickedness. Daniel Nicolson, writer, and a widow named Mrs Pringle, had long carried on an infamous connection, with little effort at concealment. Out of a bad spirit towards the unoffending Jean Lands, his wife, Nicolson and Pringle, or one or other of them, caused to be forged a receipt as from her to Mr John Elliot, doctor of medicine, for some poison, designing to raise a charge against her and a sister of hers, of an attempt upon her husband’s life. The alleged facts were proved to the satisfaction of a jury, and the court, deeming the adultery aggravated by the forgery, adjudged the guilty pair to suffer in the Grassmarket—Nicolson by hanging, and Pringle by ‘having her head severed from her body.’

There were, however, curious discriminations in the judgments of the Justiciary Court. A Captain Douglas, of Sir William Douglas’s regiment, assisted by another officer and a corporal of the corps, was found guilty of a shocking assault upon a serving-maid in Glasgow, in 1697. A meaner man, or an equally important man opposed to the new government, would have, beyond a doubt, suffered the last penalty for this offence; Captain Douglas, being a gentleman, and one engaged in the king’s service, escaped with a fine of three hundred merks.[77]

[Sidenote: FEB. 13.]

King William felt impatient at the unsubmissiveness of the Jacobite clans, chiefly Macdonalds of Glengarry, Keppoch, and Glencoe, the Grants of Glenmoriston, and the Camerons of Locheil, because it caused troops to be kept in Scotland, which he much wanted for his army in Flanders. His Scottish ministers, and particularly Sir John Dalrymple, Master of Stair, the Secretary of State, carried towards those clans feelings of constantly growing irritation, as latterly the principal obstacle to a settlement of the country under the new system of things. At length, in August 1691, the king issued an indemnity, promising pardon to all that had been in arms against him [Sidenote: 1692.] before the 1st of June last, provided they should come in any time before the 1st of January next year, and swear and sign the oath of allegiance.

The letters of Sir John Dalrymple from the court at London during the remainder of the year, shew that he grudged these terms to the Highland Jacobites, and would have been happy to find that a refusal of them justified harsher measures. It never occurred to him that there was anything but obstinacy, or a hope of immediate assistance from France to enable them to set up King James again, in their hesitation to swear that they sincerely in their hearts accepted King William and Queen Mary as the sovereigns of the land equally by right and in fact. He really _hoped_ that at least the popish clan of the Macdonalds of Glencoe would hold out beyond the proper day, so as to enable the government to make an example of them. It was all the better that the time of grace expired in the depth of winter, for ‘that,’ said he (letter to Colonel Hamilton, December 3, 1691), ‘is the proper season to maul them, in the cold long nights.’ On the 9th of January, under misinformation about their having submitted, he says: ‘I am sorry that Keppoch and M‘Ian of Glencoe[78] are safe.’ It was the sigh of a savage at the escape of a long-watched foe. Still he understood Glengarry, Clanranald, and Glenmoriston to be holding out, and he gave orders for the troops proceeding against them, granting them at the utmost the terms of prisoners of war. In the midst of a letter on the subject, dated the 11th January,[79] he says: ‘Just now my Lord Argyle tells me that Glencoe hath not taken the oaths; at which _I rejoice_—it’s a great work of charity to be exact in _rooting out that damnable sect_, the worst in all the Highlands.’ Delighted with the intelligence—‘it is very good news here,’ he elsewhere says—he obtained that very day a letter from the king anent the Highland rebels, commanding the troops to cut them off ‘_by all manner of hostility_,’ and for this end to proclaim high penalties to all who should give them assistance or protection. Particular instructions subscribed by the king followed on the 16th, permitting terms to be offered to Glengarry, whose house was strong enough to give trouble, but adding: ‘_If M‘Ian of Glencoe and that tribe can be well separated from the rest, it will be a proper vindication of the public justice to extirpate that sect of thieves._’ On the same day, Dalrymple himself wrote to Colonel [Sidenote: 1692.] Hill, governor of Inverlochy, ‘I shall entreat you that, for a just vengeance and public example, the thieving tribe of Glencoe be _rooted out to purpose_. The Earls of Argyle and Breadalbane have promised they shall have no retreat in their bounds.’ He felt, however, that it must be ‘quietly done;’ otherwise they would make shift both for their cattle and themselves. There can be no doubt what he meant; merely to _harry_ the people, would make them worse thieves than before—they must be, he elsewhere says, ‘_rooted out and cut off_.’

In reality, the old chief of the Glencoe Macdonalds had sped to Inverlochy or Fort William before the end of the year, and offered his oath to the governor there, but, to his dismay, found he had come to the wrong officer. It was necessary he should go to Inverary, many miles distant, and there give in his submission to the sheriff. In great anxiety, the old man toiled his way through the wintry wild to Inverary. He had to pass within a mile of his own house, yet stopped not to enter it. After all his exertions, the sheriff being absent for two days after his arrival, it was not till the 6th of January that his oath was taken and registered. The register duly went thereafter to the Privy Council at Edinburgh; but the name of Macdonald of Glencoe was not found in it: it was afterwards discovered to have been by special pains obliterated, though still traceable.

Here, then, was that ‘sect of thieves’ _formally_ liable to the vengeance which the secretary of state meditated against them. The commander, Livingstone, on the 23d January, wrote to Colonel Hamilton of Inverlochy garrison to proceed with his work against the Glencoe men. A detachment of the Earl of Argyle’s regiment—Campbells, hereditary enemies of the Macdonalds of Glencoe—under the command of Campbell of Glenlyon, proceeded to the valley, affecting nothing but friendly intentions, and were hospitably received. Glenlyon himself, as uncle to the wife of one of the chief’s sons, was hailed as a friend. Each morning, he called at the humble dwelling of the chief, and took his morning-draught of usquebaugh. On the evening of the 12th of February, he played at cards with the chief’s family. The final orders for the onslaught, written on the 12th at Ballachulish by Major Robert Duncanson (a Campbell also), were now in Glenlyon’s hands. They bore—‘You are to put all to the sword under seventy. You are to have a special care that the old fox and his son do on no account escape your hands. You’re to secure all avenues, that none escape; this you are to put in execution at five o’clock [Sidenote: 1692.] precisely, and by that time, or very shortly after it, I’ll strive to be at you with a stronger party. If I do not come to you at five, you are not to tarry for me, but to fall on.’

Glenlyon was but too faithful to his instructions. His soldiers had their orders the night before. John Macdonald, the chief’s eldest son, observing an unusual bustle among the soldiers, took an alarm, and inquired what was meant. Glenlyon soothed his fears with a story about a movement against Glengarry, and the lad went to bed. Meanwhile, efforts were making to plant guards at all the outlets of that alpine glen; but the deep snow on the ground prevented the duty from being fully accomplished. At five, Lieutenant Lindsay came with his men to the house of the chief, who, hearing of his arrival, got out of bed to receive him. He was shot dead as he was dressing himself. Two of his people in the house shared his fate, and his wife, shamefully treated by the soldiers, died next day. At another hamlet called Auchnaion, the tacksman and his family received a volley of shot as they were sitting by their fireside, and all but one were laid dead or dying on the floor. The survivor entreated to be killed in the open air, and there succeeded in making his escape. There were similar scenes at all the other inhabited places in the glen, and before daylight, thirty-eight persons had been murdered. The rest of the people, including the chief’s eldest son, fled to the mountains, where many of them are believed to have perished. When Colonel Hamilton came at breakfast-time, he found one old man alive mourning over the bodies of the dead; and this person, though he might have been even formally exempted as above seventy, was slain on the spot. The only remaining duty of the soldiers was to burn the houses and harry the country. This was relentlessly done, two hundred horses, nine hundred cattle, and many sheep and goats being driven away.

A letter of Dalrymple, dated from London the 5th March, makes us aware that the Massacre of Glencoe was already making a sensation there. It was said that the people had been murdered in their beds, after the chief had made the required submission. The secretary professed to have known nothing of the last fact, but he was far from regretting the bloodshed. ‘All I regret is that any of the sect got away.’ When the particulars became fully known—when it was ascertained that the Campbells had gone into the glen as friends, and fallen upon the people when they were in a defenceless state and when all suspicion was lulled asleep—the transaction assumed the character which it has ever [Sidenote: 1692.] since borne in the public estimation, as one of the foulest in modern history.

The Jacobites trumpeted it as an offset against the imputed severities of the late reigns. Its whole details were given in the French gazettes, as an example of the paternal government now planted in Britain. The government was compelled, in self-defence, to order an inquiry into the affair, and the report presented in 1695 fully brought out the facts as here detailed, leaving the principal odium to rest with Dalrymple. The king himself, whose signature follows close below the savage sentence, ‘If M‘Ian of Glencoe,’ &c., did not escape reproach. True it is, that so far from punishing his secretary, he soon after this report gave him a full remission, and conferred on him the teinds of the parish in which lay his principal estates.[80]

[Sidenote: FEB. 16.]

The Privy Council had before them a petition from Lieutenant Brisbane of Sir Robert Douglas’s regiment, regarding one Archibald Baird, an Irish refugee, imprisoned at Paisley for housebreaking. The sheriff thought the probation ‘scrimp’ (scanty), and besides, was convinced that ‘extreme poverty had been a great temptation to him to commit the said crime.’ Seeing he was, moreover, ‘a proper young man fit for service,’ and ‘willing and forward to go over to Flanders to fight against the French,’ the sheriff had hitherto delayed to pronounce sentence upon him. Without any ceremony, the Council ordered that Baird be delivered to Brisbane, that he might be transported to Flanders as a soldier.

The reader will probably be amused by the sheriff’s process of ideas—first, that the crime was not proved; and, second, that it had been committed under extenuating circumstances. The leniency of the Privy Council towards such a culprit, in ordering him out of the country as a soldier, is scarcely less characteristic. The truth is, the exigencies of the government for additional military force were now greater than ever, so that scruples about methods of recruiting had come to be scarcely recognisable. Poor people confined in jail on suspicion of disaffection, were in many instances brought to a purchase of liberty by taking on as soldiers; criminals, who had pined there for months or years, half-starved, were glad to take soldiering as their punishment. Sturdy vagrants [Sidenote: 1692.] were first gathered into the jails for the offence of begging, and then made to know that, only by taking their majesties’ pay, could they regain their freedom. But freedom was not to be instantly gained even in this way. The recruits were kept in jail, as well as the criminals and the disaffected—little distinction, we may well believe, observed between them. Not till ready to go on board for Flanders, were these gallant Britons permitted to breathe the fresh air.

An appearance of regard for the liberty of the subject was indeed kept up, and on the 23d February 1692, a committee of the Privy Council was appointed to go to the prisons of Edinburgh and Canongate, and inspect the recruits kept there, so as to ascertain if there were any who were unjustly detained against their will. But this was really little more than an appearance for decency’s sake, the instances of disregard for individual rights being too numerous even in their own proceedings to allow any different conclusion being arrived at.[81]

[Sidenote: FEB.]

Two ministers at Dumfries, who had been ‘preachers before prelacy was abolished,’ gave displeasure to the populace by using the Book of Common Prayer. On a Sunday, early in this month, a party of about sixteen ‘mean country persons living about four or five miles from Dumfries, who disowned both Presbyterian and Episcopal ministers, and acknowledged none but Mr Houston,’ came and dragged these two clergymen out of the town, took from each his prayer-book, and gave them a good beating, after which they were liberated, and allowed to return home. At an early hour next morning, the same party came into the town and burned one of the books at the Cross, on which they affixed a placard, containing, we may presume, a declaration of their sentiments. The Privy Council indignantly called the provost of Dumfries before them, and while censuring him for allowing such a riot to take place, enjoined him to take care ‘that there be no occasions given for the like disorders in time coming.’ That is to say, the Privy Council did not desire the Dumfries magistrates to take any measures for preventing the attacks of ‘mean country persons’ upon unoffending clergymen using the forms of prayer sanctioned in another and connected kingdom not thirty miles distant, but to see that such clergymen were not allowed to give provocations of that kind to ‘mean country persons.’

[Sidenote: 1699. MAR.]

Dumfries had at this time another trouble on its hands. Marion Dickson in Blackshaw, Isobel Dickson in Locherwood, Agnes Dickson (daughter of Isobel), and Marion Herbertson in Mousewaldbank, had for a long time been ‘suspected of the abominable and horrid crime of witchcraft,’ and were believed to have ‘committed many grievous malefices upon several persons their neighbours and others.’ It was declared to be damnifying ‘to all good men and women living in the country thereabouts, who cannot assure themselves of safety of their lives by such frequent malefices as they commit.’

Under these circumstances, James Fraid, John Martin, William Nicolson, and Thomas Jaffrey in Blackshaw, John Dickson in Slop of Locherwoods, John Dickson in Locherwoods, and John Dickson in Overton of Locherwoods, took it upon them to apprehend the women, and carried them to be imprisoned at Dumfries by the sheriff, which, however, the sheriff did not consent to till after the six men had granted a bond engaging to prosecute. Fortified with a certificate from the presbytery of Dumfries, who were ‘fully convinced of the guilt [of the women] and of the many malefices committed by them,’ the men applied to the Privy Council for a commission to try the delinquents.

The Lords ordered the women to be transported to Edinburgh for trial.[82]

[Sidenote: MAR. 29.]

The government beginning to relax a little the severity it had hitherto exercised towards captive Jacobites, the Earl of Perth, on a showing of the injury his health was suffering from long imprisonment in Stirling Castle, was liberated on a caution for five thousand pounds sterling, being a sum equal to the annual income of the highest nobles of the land.

William Livingstone, brother to the Viscount Kilsyth, and husband of Dundee’s widow, had been a prisoner in the Edinburgh Tolbooth from June 1689 till November 1690—seventeen months—thereafter, had lived in a chamber in Edinburgh under a sentry for a year—afterwards was allowed to live in a better lodging, and to go forth for a walk each day, but still under a guard. In this condition he now continued. The consequence of his being thus treated, and of his rents being all the time sequestrated, was a great confusion of his affairs, threatening the entire ruin of his [Sidenote: 1692.] fortune. On his petition, the Council now allowed him ‘to go abroad under a sentinel each day from morning to evening furth of the house of Andrew Smith, periwig-maker, at the head of Niddry’s Wynd, in Edinburgh, to which he is confined,’ he finding caution under fifteen hundred pounds sterling to continue a true prisoner as heretofore; at the same time, the sequestration of his rents was departed from.

On the 19th April, Mr Livingstone was allowed to visit Kilsyth under a guard of dragoons, in order to arrange some affairs. But this leniency was of short duration. We soon after find him again in strict confinement in Edinburgh Castle; nor was it till September 1693, that, on an earnest petition setting forth his declining health, he was allowed to be confined to ‘a chamber in the house of Mistress Lyell, in the Parliament Close,’ he giving large bail for his peaceable behaviour. This, again, came to a speedy end, for, being soon after ordered to re-enter his strait confinement in the Castle, he petitioned to be allowed the Canongate Jail instead, and was permitted, as something a shade less wretched than the Castle, to become a prisoner in the Edinburgh Tolbooth. On the 4th of January 1693, he was again allowed the room in the Parliament Close, but on the 8th of February this was exchanged for Stirling Castle. In the course of the first five years of British liberty, Mr Livingstone must have acquired a tolerably extensive acquaintance with the various forms and modes of imprisonment, so far as these existed in the northern section of the island.