“----Times
Whose echo rings through Scotland to this hour.”--WORDSWORTH.
[Sidenote: THE REFORMATION.]
Prior to the Reformation there were no fewer than six chapels in the
parish of Cromarty. The site of one of these, though it still retains
the name of the Old Kirk, is now a sand-bank, the haunt of the crab and
the sea-urchin, which is covered every larger tide by about ten feet of
water; the plough has passed over the foundations of two of the others;
of two more the only vestiges are a heap of loose stones, and a low
grassy mound; and a few broken fragments of wall form the sole remains
of the sixth and most entire. The very names of the first three have
shared the fate of the buildings themselves; two of the others were
dedicated to St. Duthac and St. Bennet; and two fine springs, on which
time himself has been unable to effect any change, come bubbling out
in the vicinity of the ruins, and bear the names of their respective
saints. It is not yet twenty years since a thorn-bush, which formed a
little canopy over the spring of St. Bennet, used to be covered anew
every season with little pieces of rag, left on it as offerings to
the saint, by sick people who came to drink of the water; and near
the chapel itself, which was perched like an eyry on a steep solitary
ridge that overlooks the Moray Firth, there was a stone trough,
famous, about eighty years before, for virtues derived also from the
saint, like those of the well. For if a child was carried away by the
fairies, and some mischievous unthriving imp left in its place, the
parents had only to lay the changeling in this trough, and, by some
invisible process, their child would be immediately restored to them.
It was termed the fairies’ cradle; and was destroyed shortly before
the rebellion of 1745, by Mr. Gordon, the minister of the parish, and
two of his elders. The last, and least dilapidated of the chapels,
was dedicated to St Regulus; and there is a tradition, that at the
Reformation a valuable historical record, which had belonged to it--the
work probably of some literary monk or hermit--was carried away to
France by the priest. I remember a very old woman who used to relate,
that when a little girl, she chanced, when playing one day among the
ruins with a boy a few years older than herself, to discover a small
square recess in the wall, in which there was a book; but that she
had only time to remark that the volume was a very tattered one, and
apparently very old, and that there were beautiful red letters in it,
when the boy, laying claim to it, forced it from her. What became of
it afterwards she did not know, and, unconscious of the interest which
might have attached to it, never thought of making any inquiry.
There does not survive a single tradition of the circumstances which,
in this part of the country, accompanied the great event that consigned
the six chapels to solitude and decay. One may amuse one’s-self,
however, in conceiving of the more interesting of these, and, with
history and a little knowledge of human nature for one’s guide, run
no great risk of conceiving amiss. The port of Cromarty was one of
considerable trade for the age and country, and the people of the
town were Lowland Scots. A more inquisitive race live nowhere. First
there would come to them wild vague reports, by means of the seamen
and merchants, of the strange doctrines which had begun to disturb
the Continent and the sister kingdom. Shreds of heretic sermons would
be whispered over their ale; and stories brought from abroad, of the
impositions of the priests, would be eked out, in some instances with
little corroborative anecdotes, the fruit of an experience acquired at
home. For there were Liberals even then, though under another name;--a
certain proportion of the people of Scotland being born such in every
age of its independence. Then would come the story of the burning of
good Patrick Hamilton, pensionary of the neighbouring abbey of Fearn;
and everybody would be exceedingly anxious to learn the particular
nature of his crime. Statements of new doctrines, and objections urged
against some of the old, would in consequence be eagerly listened
to, and as eagerly repeated. Then there would come among them two or
three serious, grave people, natives of the place, who would have
acquired, when pursuing their occupations in the south, as merchants or
mechanics, a knowledge, not merely speculative, of the new religion. A
traveller of a different cast would describe with much glee to groups
of the younger inhabitants, the rare shows he had seen acted on the
Castle-hill of Cupar; and producing a black-letter copy of “The Thrie
Estaites” of Davy Lindsay, he would set all his auditors a-laughing
at the expense of the Church. One of the graver individuals, though
less openly, and to a more staid audience, would also produce a book,
done into plain English, out of a very old tongue, by one Tyndale, and
still more severe on the poor priests than even “The Thrie Estaites.”
They would learn from this book that what they were beginning to deem
a rational, but at the same time new religion, was in reality the old
one; and that Popery, with all its boasted antiquity, was by far the
more modern of the two. In the meantime, the priests of the chapels
would be the angriest men in the parish;--denouncing against all and
sundry the fire and fagots of this world, and the fire without fagots
of the next; but one of them, a good honest man, neither the son
of a churchman himself, nor yet burdened with a family of his own,
would set himself, before excommunicating any one, to study the old,
newly-translated book, that he might be better able to cope with the
maligners of his Church. Before half completing his studies, however,
his discourses would begin to assume a very questionable aspect. Little
would they contain regarding the Pope, and little concerning the
saints; and more and more would he press upon his hearers the doctrines
taught by the Apostles. Anon, however, he would assume a bolder style
of language; and sometimes conclude, after saying a great deal about
the spiritual Babylon, and the Man of sin, by praying for godly John
Knox, and all the other ministers of the Evangel. In short, the honest
priest would prove the rankest heretic in the whole parish. And thus
would matters go on from bad to worse. A few grey heads would be shaken
at the general defection, but these would be gradually dropping away;
and the young themselves would be growing old without changing their
newly-acquired opinions. They would not all be good Christians;--for
every one should know it is quite a possible thing to be a Protestant,
sound enough for all the purposes of party, without being a Christian
at all;--but they would almost all be reformers; and when the state
should at length set itself to annihilate root and branch of the old
establishment, and to build up a new one on the broad basis of the
kingdom, not a parish in the whole of it would enter more cordially
into the scheme than the parish of Cromarty.
But however readily the people might have closed with the doctrines of
the Reformation, they continued to retain a good deal of the spirit
of the old religion. Having made choice of a piece of land on the
edge of the ridge which rises behind the houses as a proper site for
their church, they began to collect the materials. It so chanced,
however, that the first few stones gathered for the purpose, being
thrown down too near the edge of the declivity, rolled to the bottom;
the circumstance was deemed supernaturally admonitory; and the church,
after due deliberation, was built at the base instead of the top of
the ridge, on exactly the spot where the stones had rested. The first
Protestant minister of the parish was a Mr. Robert Williamson. His
name occurs oftener than once in Calderwood’s Church History; and
his initials, with those of his wife, are still to be seen on a flat
triangular stone in the eastern part of the town, which bears date
1593. It is stated by Calderwood, that “Jesuits having libertie to
passe thorough the countrey in 1583, during the time of the Earle
of Huntlie’s lieutenantrie, great coldness of religion entered in
Ross;” and by an act of council passed five years after, this Robert
Williamson, and “John Urquhart, tutor of Cromartie,” were among the
number empowered to urge matters to an extremity against them.
[Sidenote: OUTBREAKING AT ROSEMARKIE.]
There awaited Scotland a series of no light evils in the short-sighted
policy which attempted to force upon her a religion which she abhorred.
The surplice and the service-book were introduced into her churches;
and the people, who would scarcely have bestirred themselves had
merely their civil rights been invaded, began to dread that they could
not, without being unhappy in more than the present world, conform to
the religion of the state. And so they set themselves seriously to
inquire whether the power of kings be not restricted to the present
world only. They learned, in consequence, that not merely is such
the case, but that it has yet other limitations; and the more they
sought to determine these, the more questionable did its grounds
become. The spirit manifested on this occasion by the people of this
part of the country, is happily exemplified by Spalding’s narrative
of a riot which took place at the neighbouring Chanonry of Ross, in
the spring of 1638. The service-book had been quietly established by
the bishop two years before; but the more thoroughly the people grew
acquainted with it, the more unpopular it became. At length, on the
second Sunday of March, just as the first bell had rung for sermon,
but before the ringing of the second, a numerous party of schoolboys
broke into the cathedral, and stripped it in a twinkling of all the
service books. Out they rushed in triumph, and, procuring a lighted
coal and some brushwood, they marched off in a body to the low sandy
promontory beneath the town, to make a bonfire of the whole set. But
a sudden shower extinguishing the coal, instead of burning they tore
the books into shreds, and flung the fragments into the sea. The bishop
went on with his sermon; but it was more than usually brief; and such
were the feelings exhibited at its close by the people, that, taking
hastily to his horse, he quitted the kingdom. “A very busy man was he
esteemed,” says the annalist, “in the bringing in of the service-book,
and therefore durst he not, for fear of his life, return again to
Scotland.” In short, the country was fully awakened; and before the
close of the following month, the National Covenant was subscribed in
the shires of Ross, Cromarty, and Nairn.
Some of the minor events which took place in the sheriffdom of
Cromarty, on the triumph of Presbyterianism, have been detailed,
as recorded by Sir Thomas, in the foregoing chapter. Even on his
own testimony, most men of the present day will not feel disposed
to censure very severely the churchmen of his district. It must be
confessed, however, that the principles of liberty, either civil or
ecclesiastical, were but little understood in Scotland in the middle
of the seventeenth century; the parties which divided it deeming
themselves too exclusively in the right to learn from the persecutions
to which they were in turn subjected, that the good old rule of doing
as we would be done by, should influence the conduct of politicians
as certainly as that of private men. And there is a simple fact which
ought to convince us, however zealous for the honour of our church,
that the Presbyterian synod of Ross, which Sir Thomas has termed “a
promiscuous knot of unjust men,” was by no means a very exemplary body.
Five-sixths of its members conformed at the Restoration, and became
curates; and as they were notoriously intolerant as Episcopalians,
it is not at all probable that they should have been strongly
characterized by liberality during the previous period, when they had
found it their interest to be Presbyterians.
[Sidenote: SIR JOHN URQUHART OF CRAIGFINTRIE.]
The restoration of Charles, and the appointment of Middleton as his
commissioner for Scotland, were followed by the fatal act which
overturned Presbyterianism, and set up Episcopacy in its place. It
is stated by Wodrow, that Middleton, previous to the bringing in of
this act, had been strengthened in the resolution which led to it, by
Mackenzie of Tarbat, and Urquhart of Cromarty; and that the latter,
who had lately “counterfeited the Protestor,” ended miserably some
time after. In what manner he ended, however, is not stated by the
historian, but tradition is more explicit. On the death of Sir Thomas,
he was succeeded by his brother Alexander, who survived him only a
year, and dying without male issue, the estate passed to Sir John
Urquhart of Craigfintrie, the head of a branch of the family which
had sprung from the main stock about a century before. This Sir John
was the friend and counsellor of Middleton. About eleven years after
the passing of the act, he fell into a deep melancholy, and destroyed
himself with his own sword in one of the apartments of the old castle.
The sword, it is said, was flung into a neighbouring draw-well by one
of the domestics, and the stain left by his blood on the walls and
floor of the apartment, was distinctly visible at the time the building
was pulled down.
[Sidenote: THE OUSTED MINISTERS.]
So well was the deprecated act received by the time-serving Synod of
Ross, that they urged it into effect against one of their own body,
more than a year before the ejection of the other nonconforming
clergymen. In a meeting of the Synod which took place in 1661,
the person chosen as moderator was one Murdoch Mackenzie;--a man
so strong in his attachments that he had previously sworn to the
National Covenant no fewer than fourteen times, and he had now fallen
desperately in love with the Bishopric of Moray. One of his brethren,
however, an unmanageable, dangerous person, for he was uncompromisingly
honest, and possessed of very considerable talent, stood directly in
the way of his preferment. This member, the celebrated Mr. Hogg of
Kiltearn, had not sworn to the Covenant half so often as his superior,
the Moderator, but then so wrong-headed was he as to regard his few
oaths as binding; and he could not bring himself to like Prelacy any
the better for its being espoused by the king. And so his expulsion
was evidently a matter of necessity. The Moderator had nothing to urge
against his practice,--for no one could excel him in the art of living
well; but his opinions lay more within his reach; and no sooner had
the Synod met, than, singling him out, he demanded what his thoughts
were of the Protestors--the party of Presbyterians who, about ten years
before, had not taken part with the king against the Republicans. Mr.
Hogg declined to answer; and on being removed, that the Synod might
deliberate, the Moderator rose and addressed them. Their brother of
Kiltearn, he said, was certainly a great man--a very great man--but
as certainly were the Protestors opposed to the king; and if any
member of Synod took part with them, whatever his character, it was
evidently the duty of the other members to have him expelled. Mr. Hogg
was then called in, and having refused, as was anticipated, judicially
to disown the Protestors, sentence of deposition was passed against
him. But the consciences of the men who thus dealt with him, betrayed
in a very remarkable manner their real estimate of his conduct. It is
stated by Wodrow, on the authority of an eye-witness, that sentence was
passed with a peculiar air of veneration, as if they were ordaining
him to some higher office; and that the Moderator was so deprived of
his self-possession as to remind him, in a consolatory speech, that
“our Lord Jesus Christ had suffered great wrong from the Scribes and
Pharisees.”
Mackenzie received the reward of his zeal shortly after in an
appointment to the Bishopric of Moray; and one Paterson, a man of
similar character, was ordained Bishop of Ross. On the order of
council, issued in the autumn of 1662, for all ministers of parishes
to attend the diocesan meetings, and take the newly-framed oaths, while
in some of the southern districts of the kingdom only a few ministers
attended, in the diocese of Ross there were but four absent, exclusive
of Mr. Hogg. These four were, Mr. Hugh Anderson of Cromarty, Mr. John
Mackilligen of Alness, Mr. Andrew Ross of Tain, and a Mr. Thomas Ross,
whose parish is not named in the list. And they were all in consequence
ejected from their charges. Mr. Anderson, a nephew of Sir Thomas’s
opponent, Mr. Gilbert, who was now dead, retired to Moray, accompanied
by his _bedral_, who had resolved on sharing the fortunes of his
pastor; and they returned together a few years after to a small estate,
the property of Mr. Anderson, situated in the western extremity of the
parish. Mr. Mackilligen remained at Alness, despite of the council and
the bishops, who had enacted that no nonconforming minister should take
up his abode within twenty miles of his former church. Mr. Ross of
Tain resided within the bounds of the same Presbytery; and Mr. Fraser
of Brea, a young gentleman of Cromartyshire, who was ordained to the
ministry about ten years after the expulsion of the others, had his
seat in the parish of Resolis. In short, as remarked by Wodrow, there
was more genuine Presbyterianism to be found on the shores of the Bay
of Cromarty, notwithstanding the general defection, than in any other
part of the kingdom north of the Tay.
And the current of popular feeling seems to have set in strongly
in its favour about the year 1666. Towards the close of this year,
Paterson the bishop, in a letter to his son, describes the temper of
the country about him as very cloudy; and complains of a change in
the sentiments of many who had previously professed an attachment
to Prelacy. Mr. Mackilligen, a faithful and active preacher of the
forbidden doctrines, seems to have given him so much trouble, that he
even threatened to excommunicate him, but the minister regarding his
threat in the proper light, replied to it by comparing him to Balaam
the wicked prophet, who went forth to curse Israel, and to Shimei the
son of Gera, who cursed David. The joke spread, for as such was it
regarded, and Paterson, who had only the sanctity of his office to
oppose to the personal sanctity of his opponent, deemed it prudent to
urge the threat no further: he had the mortification of being laughed
at for having urged it so far. There is a little hollow among the
hills, about three miles from the house of Fowlis, and not much farther
from Alness, in the gorge of which the eye commands a wide prospect
of the lower lands, and the whole Firth of Cromarty. It lies, too, on
the extreme edge of the cultivated part of the country, for beyond
there stretches only a brown uninhabited desert; and in this hollow the
neighbouring Presbyterians used to meet for the purpose of religious
worship. On some occasions they were even bold enough to assemble in
the villages. In the summer of 1675, Mr. Mackilligen, assisted by his
brethren of Tain and Cromarty, and the Laird of Brea, celebrated the
Communion at Obsdale, in the house of the Lady Dowager of Fowlis. There
was an immense concourse of people; and “so plentiful was the effusion
of the Spirit,” says the historian whom I have so often had occasion to
quote, “that the oldest Christians present never witnessed the like.”
Indisputably, even from natural causes, the time must have been one of
much excitement; and who that believes the Bible, will dare affirm that
God cannot comfort his people by extraordinary manifestations, when
deprived of the common comforts of earth for their adherence to him?
One poor man, who had gone to Obsdale merely out of curiosity, was so
affected by what he heard, that when some of his neighbours blamed him
for his temerity, and told him that the bishop would punish him for it
by taking away his horse and cow, he assured them that in such a cause
he was content to lose not merely all his worldly goods, but his head
also. A party had been despatched, at the instance of the bishop, to
take Mackilligen prisoner; but, misinformed regarding the place where
the meeting was held, they proceeded to his house at Alness, and spent
so much time in pillaging his garden, that before they reached Obsdale
he had got out of their way. But he fell into the hands of his enemy,
the bishop, in the following year, and during his long imprisonment on
the Bass Rock--for to such punishment was he subjected--he contracted
a disease of which he died. Mr. Ross of Tain, and Mr. Fraser of Brea,
were apprehended shortly after, and disposed of in the same manner.
Nor was it only a few clergymen that suffered in this part of the
country for their adherence to the church. Among the names of the
individuals who, in the shires of Ross and Cromarty, were subjected
to the iniquitous fine imposed by Middleton on the more rigid
Presbyterians, I find the name of Sir Robert Munro of Fowlis, the head
of a family which ranks among the most ancient and honourable in the
kingdom. Sir John Munro, son of Sir Robert, succeeded to the barony
in 1668. His virtues, and the persecutions to which he was subjected,
are recorded by the pen of Doddridge:--“The eminent piety of this
excellent person exposed him,” says this writer, “to great sufferings
in the cause of religion in those unhappy and infamous days, when the
best friends to their country were treated as the worst friends to the
government. His person was doomed to long imprisonment for no pretended
cause but what was found against him in the matters of his God; and his
estate, which was before considerable, was harassed by severe fines and
confiscations, which reduced it to a diminution much more honourable,
indeed, than any augmentation could have been, but from which it has
not recovered to this day.”
[Sidenote: MR. FRASER OF BREA.]
But, perhaps, a brief narrative of the sufferings of a single
individual may make a stronger impression on the reader than any
general detail of those of the party. Mr. James Fraser of Brea was
born in the western part of the shire of Cromarty, in the year 1639.
On the death of his father, whom he lost while in his infancy, he
succeeded to the little property of about £100 per annum, of which
the name, according to the fashion of Scotland, is attached to his
own. His childhood was passed much like the childhood of most other
people; but with this difference, that those little attempts at crime
which serve to identify the moral nature of children with that of
men, and which, in our riper years, are commonly either forgotten
altogether, or regarded with an interest which owes nought of its
intensity to remorse, were considered by him as the acts of a creature
accountable to the Great Judge for even its earliest derelictions from
virtue. But this trait belongs properly to his subsequent character.
In his seventeenth year, after a youth spent unhappily, in a series
of conflicts with himself, for he was imbued with a love of forbidden
pleasures, and possessed of a conscience exquisitely tender, a change
came over him, and he became one of the excellent few who live less
for the present world than for the future. As he was not wedded by
the prejudices of education to any set of religious opinions, he had,
with only the Scriptures for his guide, to frame a creed for himself;
and having come in contact, in Edinburgh, with some Quakers, he was
well-nigh induced to join with them. But on more serious consideration,
he deemed some of their tenets not quite in unison with those of
the Bible. He attended, for some time after the Restoration, the
preaching of the curates; but, profiting little by their doctrines, he
deliberated whether he did right in hearing them, and concluded in the
negative, in the very year in which all such conclusions were declared
treason by act of Parliament. In short, by dint of reasoning and
reading, he landed full in Presbyterianism, at a time when there was
nothing to be gained by it, and a great deal to be lost. And not merely
did he embrace it for himself, but deeming it the cause of God, he came
forward in this season of wrong and suffering, when the bad opposed it,
and the timid shrunk from it, to preach it to the people. He believed
himself called to the ministerial office in a peculiar manner, by the
Great Being who had fitted him for it; and the simple fact that he did
not, in Scotland at least, gain a single sixpence by all his preaching
until after the Revolution, ought surely to convince the most sceptical
that he did not mistake on this occasion the suggestions of interest
for those of duty. He began to preach the forbidden doctrines in the
year 1672; and he was married shortly after to a lady to whom he had
been long attached.
The sufferings to which he had been subjected prior to his marriage
affected only himself. He had been fined and exposed to ridicule;
and he had had to submit to loss and imposition, out of a despair of
finding redress from corrupt judges, whose decisions would have been
prompted rather by the feelings with which they regarded his principles
than by any consideration of the merits of his cause. No sooner,
however, had he married, and become a preacher, than he was visited by
evils greater in themselves, and which he felt all the more deeply from
the circumstance that their effects were no longer confined to himself.
He was summoned before councils for preaching without authority, and
in the fields, and denounced and outlawed for not daring to appear.
But he persevered, notwithstanding, wandering under hiding from place
to place, and preaching twice or thrice every week to all such as had
courage enough to hear him. He was among the number intercommuned by
public writ; all the people of Scotland, even his own friends and
relatives, being charged, under the severest penalties, not to speak to
him, or receive him into their houses, or minister even the slightest
comfort to his person. And yet still did he persevere on the strength
of the argument urged by St. Peter before the Jewish Sanhedrim. The
lady he married was a person every way worthy of such a husband. “In
her,” I use his own simple and expressive language, “did I behold as
in a glass the Lord’s love to me; and so effectually did she sweeten
the sorrows of my pilgrimage, that I have often been too nearly led
to exclaim, It is good for me to be here!” But she was lent him only
for a short season. Four years after his marriage, when under hiding,
word was brought him that she lay sick of a fever; and hurrying home
in “great horror and darkness of mind,” he reached her bedside only to
find that she had departed, and that he was left alone.
His sorrow at the bereavement oppressed, but it could not overwhelm
him; for, with an energy rendered more intense by a sense of
desolateness, and a feeling that the world had become as nothing
to him, he applied afresh to what he deemed his bounden duty, the
preaching of the Word. He was diligent in ministering to the comfort of
many who were less afflicted than himself; and enveloped in the very
flames of persecution, he confirmed, by his exhortations, such as were
shrinking from their approach. So well was his character understood by
the prelates, that he was one of three expressly named in an act of
council as peculiarly obnoxious, and a large sum of money was offered
to any who would apprehend him. Great rewards, too, were promised on
the same account by the Archbishop of St. Andrews, out of his private
purse; and after a series of hair-breadth escapes, he at length fell
into his hands through the treachery of a servant. The questions put to
him on his trial, with his replies to them, are given at full length
by Wodrow. Without in the least compromising his principles, he yet
availed himself of every legal argument which the circumstances of his
case admitted; and such was the ingenuity of his defence, that he was
repeatedly complimented on the score of ability by the noblemen on the
bench. He was charged, however, with a breach of good manners; for,
while he addressed his other judges with due respect, he replied to the
accusations of the archbishop as if they had been urged against him
by merely a private individual. In answer to the charge, he confessed
that he was but a rude man, and hinted, with some humour, that he
had surely been brought before their lordships for some other purpose
than simply to make proof of his breeding. And, after all, there was
little courtesy lost between himself and the archbishop. He had been
apprehended near midnight, and before sunrise next morning, the servant
of the latter was seen standing at the prison gate, instructing the
jailer that the prisoner should be confined apart, and none suffered
to have access to him. When the court met, the archbishop strove to
entrap him, with an eagerness which only served to defeat its object,
into an avowal of the sentiments with which he regarded the king and
his ministers; and failing to elicit these, for the preacher was shrewd
and sagacious, he represented him to the other members of council as a
person singularly odious and criminal, and an enemy to every principle
of civil government. He was a schismatic too, he affirmed--a render
asunder of the Church of Christ! To the charge that he was a preacher
of sedition, Mr. Fraser replied with apostolic fervour, that in “none
of his discourses had he urged aught disloyal or traitorous; but that
as the Spirit enabled him, had he preached repentance towards God, and
faith towards Jesus Christ, and no other thing but what was contained
in the Prophets and the New Testament. And so far,” he added, “was he
from being terrified or ashamed to own himself a minister of Christ,
that although of no despicable extraction, yet did he glory most to
serve God in the gospel of His Son, and deem it the greatest honour to
which he had ever attained.” After trial he was remanded to prison, and
awakened next morning by the jailer, for he had slept soundly, that he
might prepare for a journey to the Bass. He was escorted by the way by
a party of twelve horsemen and thirty foot, and delivered up on landing
in the island to the custody of the governor.
Here a new series of sufferings awaited him, not perhaps so harassing
in themselves as those to which he had recently been subjected--for
punishment in such cases is often less severe than the train of
persecution which leads to it; but he felt them all the more deeply,
because he could no longer, from his situation, exert that energy of
mind which had enabled him to divest, on former occasions, an evil
of more than half its strength, by meeting it, as it were, more than
half-way. He had now to wait in passive expectation until the evil
came. There were a number of other prisoners confined to the Bass for
their attachment to Presbyterianism; and the governor, a little-minded,
capricious man, who loved to display the extent of his authority, by
showing how many he could render unhappy, would sometimes deny them
all intercourse with each other, by closely confining them to their
separate cells. At times, too, when permitted to associate together,
some of the profaner officers would break in upon them, and annoy them
with the fashionable wit and blasphemy of the period. A dissolute woman
was appointed to wait upon them, and scandalous stories circulated at
their expense; all the letters brought them from the land were broken
open and made sport of by the garrison; they were neither allowed to
eat nor to worship together; and though their provisions and water were
generally of the worst kind, they had sometimes to purchase them--even
the latter--at an exorbitant price. But there were times at which the
preacher could escape from all his petty vexations. In the higher part
of the island there are solitary walks, which skirt the edge of the
precipices, and command an extensive view of the neighbouring headlands
and the ocean. On these, when his jailers were in their more tolerant
moods, would he be permitted to saunter for whole hours; indulging, as
the waves were breaking more than a hundred yards beneath him, and the
sea-fowl screaming over him, in a not unpleasing melancholy--musing
much on the future, with all its doubtful probabilities, or “looking
back on the days of old, when he joyed with the wife of his youth.” And
there was a considerable part of his time profitably spent in the study
of Greek and Hebrew. He besides read divinity, and wrote a treatise
on faith, with several other miscellanies: and at length, after an
imprisonment of two years and a half, during which period his old enemy
the archbishop had suffered the punishment which there was no law to
inflict upon him, he was set at liberty; and he quitted his prison with
not less zeal, and with more learning than he had brought into it.
He still deemed preaching as much his duty as before, and the state
regarded it as decidedly a crime; and so he had to resume his
wandering, unsettled life of peril and hardship; “labouring to be
of some use to every family he visited.” Falling sick of an ague,
contracted through this mode of living, he was cited before the
council, at the instance of some of his old friends the bishops; who,
reckoning on his inability to appear on the day named, took this way
of having him outlawed a second time. But they had miscalculated; for
no sooner had he received the citation, than dragging himself from
his bed, he set out on his journey to Edinburgh. Legal oppression he
respected as little as he had done six years before; but he was now
differently circumstanced--one of his friends, on his liberation from
the Bass, having bound himself as his surety; and sooner would he have
died by the way than have subjected him to any loss. When the day
arrived, he presented himself at the bar of the council; and defended
himself with such ability and spirit, that his lay judges were on the
eve of acquitting him. Not so the bishops; and the matter, after some
debate, being wholly referred to their judgment, he was sentenced to
be imprisoned at Blackness until he had paid a fine of five thousand
merks, and given security that he should not again preach in Scotland.
To Blackness he was accordingly sent; and there he remained in close
confinement, and subjected, as he had been at the Bass, to the caprice
of a tyrannical governor, for about seven weeks; when he was set at
liberty on condition that he should immediately quit the kingdom. He
passed therefore into England; and he soon found--for the Christian
is a genuine cosmopolite--“that a good Englishman was more truly
his countryman than a wicked Scot.” He was much esteemed by English
people of his own persuasion; and though he had at first resolved to
forbear preaching out of the dread of being reckoned a “barbarian,”
for he could not divest himself of his Scotticisms, he yielded to the
solicitations of his newly-acquired friends; and soon attained among
them, as he had done at home, the character of being a powerful and
useful preacher. But bonds and imprisonment awaited him even there. On
the execution of Russell and Sydney, he was arrested on the suspicion
of being one of their confederates; and on refusing to take what was
termed the Oxford Oath, he was committed to Newgate, where he was kept
for six months. But from his previous experience of the prisons of
Scotland, he seems, with Goldsmith’s sailor, to have deemed Newgate a
much better sort of place than it is usually esteemed;--his apartment
was large and lightsome, and the jailers were all very kind. Resuming,
on his release, his old mode of living, he continued to preach and
study by turns, until the Revolution; when, returning to Scotland, he
was invited by the people of Culross to preside over them as their
pastor;--a fit pastor for a parish which, during the reign of Prelacy,
had suffered and resisted more than almost any other in the kingdom. In
this place he continued until his death; grateful for all the mercies
bestowed upon him, and few men could reckon them better; but peculiarly
grateful that, in a season of hot persecution, he had been enabled to
take part with God.
Nor were strong-minded men, like Fraser of Brea, the only persons who
espoused this cause in the day of trouble, and dared to suffer for
it. There is a quiet passive fortitude in the better kind of women,
which lies concealed, as it ought, under a cover of real gentleness
and seeming timidity, until called forth by some occasion which
renders it a duty to resist; and this excellent spirit was exhibited
during this period by at least one lady of Cromarty. She was a Mrs.
Gordon, the wife of the parish minister;--a lady who, at an extreme
old age, retained much of the beauty of youth--a smooth unwrinkled
forehead, shaded by a profusion of black glossy hair without the
slightest tinge of grey: and it was said of her, so exquisite was her
complexion, that, when drinking a glass of wine, her neck and throat
would assume the ruddy hue of the liquid--an imaginary circumstance,
deemed characteristic at one time, by the common people of Scotland, of
the higher order of beauties, and which is happily introduced by Allan
Cunningham into one of the most pleasing of his ballads:--
“Fu’ white white was her bonny neck,
Twist wi’ the satin twine;
But ruddie ruddie grew her hawse,
While she sipp’d the bluid-red wine.”
[Sidenote: LUGGIE.]
Mrs. Gordon could scarcely have attained to her eighteenth year at the
Revolution; and yet she had been exposed to suffering on the score of
religion, in the previous troubles. There was a story among the people,
that her ears had been cut off; it was even observed, that her tresses
were always so arranged as to conceal the supposed mutilation; and
some of the wilder spirits of the place used to call her _Luggie_, in
allusion to the story; but she was too highly respected for the name
to take. When a very old woman, she was one day combing her hair in
the presence of a little girl, who was employed in dressing up the
apartment in which she sat, and who threw at her from time to time
a very inquisitive glance. “Come here, Maggie,” said the lady, who
guessed the cause of her solicitude; “you are a curious little girl,
and have heard that I have lost my ears--have you not? Here they are,
however,” she continued, shading back her hair as she spoke, and
displaying two very pretty ones; “wicked men once threatened to cut
them off, and a knife was sharpened for the purpose, but God permitted
them not.”