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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 1671.]
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 be 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. R._
* * * * *
[Sidenote: SEP. 5.]
Donald M‘Donald, commonly called the _Halkit Stirk_,[227] had been
liberated from the Edinburgh Tolbooth in December 1660, on caution
being given by Donald M‘Donald, 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1671.]
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. R._
[Sidenote: 1671.]
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,[228] 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‘Call,
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.[229]
[Sidenote: 1671.]
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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1672.