Most probably, the carriages proposed to be set up in 1610 by Henry
Anderson the Pomeranian, to run between Edinburgh and Leith with a
charge of two shillings Scots for each person,[233] were either not
realised or quickly withdrawn, for nothing more is heard of them, and
we find in 1702 one Robert Miller getting an exclusive privilege of
putting coaches on that brief but important route, implying of course
that no other such conveyances then existed. Street-carriages, which
had been set up in London in the reign of Charles I., did not come into
use in Scotland till after the Restoration. On the occasion of the
unfortunate duel in 1667 between William Douglas of Whittingham and Sir
John Home of Eccles,[234] we hear of the parties going to the ground in
a hackney-coach. Six years later, regular arrangements were made by the
Edinburgh magistrates for a system of street-carriages, and the number
then in service appears to have been twenty. It was ordered that they
should be numbered 1, 2, 3, &c., with a view to ready reference in case
of any complaint from a passenger, and that they should have a fixed
place on the High Street between the heads of Niddry’s and Blackfriars’
Wynds. The fare to Leith for two or three persons in summer was to be
1s. sterling, or for four persons, 1s. 4d.; the fare to the Abbey, 9d.,
and as much back again.[235]
It is pretty certain that this system of street-carriages maintained
its ground, as in _A Short Account of Scotland_, written by an
Englishman in 1688, the author tells us that, while there were no
stage-coaches in Scotland, ‘there are a few hackneys at Edinburgh,
which they may hire into the country on urgent occasions.’ It is to
be remarked, however, that Edinburgh, being all packed within a space
of a mile in length by half a mile in breadth, upon irregular ground,
and with very few streets fit for the passage of wheeled vehicles, was
a discouraging field for this kind of conveyance. Sedans maintained a
preference over coaches till the extension of the city in the reign of
George III. Arnot tells us that while there were, in 1778, only nine
hackney-carriages in our city, there were a hundred and eighty-eight
public chairs, besides about fifty kept by private families.[236]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: SEP. 5.]
During several by-past years, licences had been given in frequent
succession to vessels, to carry off idle, vagrant, and criminal people
to the plantations in Virginia and elsewhere. One ship engaged in
this kidnapping service, and which bore the hypocritical appellative
of _The Ewe and Lamb_, seems to have been particularly active. We now
find complaints made that ‘the master and merchants of the ship called
the _Hercules_, bound for the plantations, have apprehended some free
persons and put them aboard the said ship, upon pretext that they
are vagabonds, or given their consent thereto.’ The Lords therefore
commissioned two of their number to go aboard and inquire, and to
liberate any persons improperly detained.--_P. C. R._
* * * * *
[Sidenote: OCT. 11.]
[Sidenote: 1673.]
That indispensable conveniency of modern times, _the
coffee-house_--which had taken its rise in London during the
Commonwealth[237] --made its way into Scotland during the ensuing
reign. The first time we hear of it north of the Tweed is when Colonel
Walter Whiteford--are we to suppose some reduced soldier of the
Scottish army of 1651?--was, on application, allowed by the magistrates
of Glasgow to set up a house in that city ‘for making, selling, and
topping of coffee.’--_M. of G._
Under the date noted, the Privy Council Record tells us a note-worthy
tale of an Edinburgh coffee-house.
‘In Thomas Robertson his new land[238] near to the Parliament
House,’ one James Row kept a coffee-house, probably the first such
establishment known in Edinburgh. On Sunday the 28th of October 1677,
he so far risked the wrath of his neighbours the Privy Councillors, as
to have an unlawful preacher holding forth in his house during the time
of ordinary service in the churches. Robert Johnston, town-major, who
had authority from the Privy Council to see after such matters, came
to the place with some of his myrmidons, and found the ‘turnpike’ or
common stair filled with people, the overflowing of the congregation.
Making his way to the ordinary door of Row’s house, and demanding
admission, he was kept there for some time, during which he heard a
great noise of furniture and of people within. On being admitted, he
found that the minister and his auditors had been smuggled out by ‘a
laigh or privat entry.’ Johnston then returned to the street, and
was walking quietly at the Cross, when Row came up and ‘did upbraid,
threaten, and abuse him for coming to his house, and told him that he
durst not for his hanging come to his house again and do the like, or,
if he came that gait, he should not win so weel away.’ Thus he railed
at the town-major all the way ‘from the Cross Well to the Stane Shop,
shouting and crying so loud as the people gathered in multitudes,’
though, seeing what sort of affair it was, they soon dispersed.
Afterwards, Row went to the magistrates and told them ‘he could not
get God worshipped in his own house for that officious fellow the
town-major, thereby insinuating that the due execution of his majesty’s
laws did prejudge the worship of God.’
Row was fined in five hundred merks, and obliged to ask Johnston’s
pardon; and immediately after, his coffee-house was ordered to be shut
up.--_P. C. R._
[Sidenote: 1673.]
People were already accustomed to go to coffee-houses in order to
learn the news of the day. In 1680, there was an order of the Privy
Council, that ‘the gazettes and news-letters read in coffee-houses,
be first presented to the Bishop of Edinburgh, or any other privy
councillor, that they may consider them, and thereby false and
seditious news and slanders may be prevented.’--_Foun._ And not long
after--namely, in January 1681--by order of the Privy Council, the
magistrates of Edinburgh called all the masters of coffee-houses before
them, and obliged them to come under a bond for five thousand merks
to suffer no newspapers to be read in their houses but such as were
approved of by the officers of state.[239]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: DEC. 11.]
Mr Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, petitioned the Privy Council
for liberty to print a translation, executed by himself, of the last
hundred of the Psalms into the Irish tongue. The matter was referred to
the approbation of the Earl of Argyle, and conferences were appointed
about it, to take place at Inverary.
Mr Kirk’s translation of the Psalms into Gaelic was an important
contribution to the means for establishing Protestant Christian worship
in the Highlands. On account of the proficiency which he thus shewed
himself to possess in the Gaelic language, he was sent for to London,
to superintend the printing of the Irish translation of the Bible,
prepared under the direction of Bishop Bedel, and published in 1685. He
died in 1692, and was buried in the church-yard of Aberfoyle, under a
stone bearing this inscription: ‘Robertus Kirk, A.M. _Linguæ Hiberniæ
Lumen_.’
[Sidenote: 1673.]
‘To suppress the impudent and growing atheism of this age,’ Mr
Kirk printed in 1691 a small treatise, ‘An Essay on the Nature and
Actions of the Subterranean (and for the most part) Invisible People,
heretofoir going under the Name of Elves, Faunes, and Fairies ...
as they are described by those having the Second Sight, &c.,’ which
certainly forms a curious illustration of the _quasi_ orthodox beliefs
of a Highland minister of the seventeenth century. He describes the
fairies as possessed of ‘light and changeable bodies of the nature
of a condensed cloud,’ and living in little hillocks, where they are
‘sometimes heard to bake bread, strike hammers, and do such like
services.’ Forced to shift their residences once a quarter, they are
liable to be seen by second-sighted men on their travels at four
seasons of the year; but are also often ‘seen to eat at funerals and
banquets.’ At such festive meetings, each mortal guest is sometimes
observed to have a double of himself ‘perfectly resembling him in all
points,’ being one of these subterranean spirits. The ‘reflex-man’
or ‘co-walker’ haunts the original as his shadow, ‘whether to guard
him from the secret assaults of some of its own folks, or only as
ane apertful ape to counterfeit all his actions.’ ‘Being invited and
earnestly required, these companions make themselves known and familiar
to men; otherwise, being in a different state and element, they neither
can nor will easily converse with them.’
Mr Kirk informs us that these spiritual people live in fair
well-lighted houses, where all the usual affairs of human life go on
in an immaterial fashion. ‘Women are yet alive who tell that they were
taken away to nurse fairy children,’ an image of themselves being
left in their place. ‘When the child is weaned, the nurse dies, or is
conveyed back, or gets it to her choice to stay there.’ One woman thus
carried away returned after two years, was taken in by her husband,
and had some children afterwards. In speech and apparel, the fairy
folk resemble those under whose country they live; they ‘wear plaids
and variegated garments in the Highlands, and suanochs in Ireland.’
Second-sighted men can invoke them at pleasure, but in general do not
relish the sight of them, on account of the hideous spectacles they
present, and their sullen and dismal looks. ‘They [the spirits] are
said to have many pleasant toyish books,’ producing in them fits of
corybantic jollity, ‘as if ravished by a new spirit entering them.’
Other books they have of abstruse science, but no Bibles.
Men of the second-sight do not necessarily discover strange things when
requested; only by fits and starts, ‘as if inspired with some genius
at that instant, which before did lurk in or about them.’ Mr Kirk knew
one whose neighbours often observed him disappear at a certain place,
and some time after reappear at another, a hostile encounter with the
spiritual people being the cause of his disappearance. These seers know
what will happen to their friends, by means of the spirits with whom
they have intercourse.
[Sidenote: 1673.]
The people are said by Mr Kirk to believe that the souls of their
ancestors dwell in the fairy hills, of which one was placed
conveniently to each church-yard. He relates that, about the year
1676, ‘when there was some scarcity of grain, two women living at a
distance from each other dreamed about a treasure hid in a certain
fairy hillock. ‘The appearance of a treasure was first represented to
the fancy, and then an audible voice named the place where it was to
their waking senses. Whereupon both rose, and meeting accidentally at
the place, discovered their design; and jointly digging, found a vessel
as large as a Scottish peck, full of small pieces of good money, of
ancient coin; which halving between them, they sold for dish-fulls of
meal to the country people.’
Dr Grahame, the modern pastor of Aberfoyle, gives us[240] the
traditionary account of the cessation of Mr Kirk’s life, in high
keeping with the style of the mystic world which he endeavoured to
expound. It is stated that, as Mr Kirk was one evening walking in his
night-gown upon one of the fairy mounts above described in the vicinity
of his manse, he sunk down in what seemed to be a fit of apoplexy,
which the unenlightened took for death, while the more understanding
knew it to be a swoon produced by the supernatural influence of the
people whose precincts he had violated. After the ceremony of a seeming
funeral, the form of Mr Kirk appeared to a relation, and commanded
him to go to Graham of Duchray, who was the cousin of both, and tell
him: ‘I am not dead, but a captive in Fairyland, and only one chance
remains for my liberation. At the baptism of my posthumous child, I
will appear in the room, when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the
knife or durk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society;
but if this opportunity is neglected, I am lost for ever.’ Duchray
was apprised of what was to be done. The ceremony took place, and the
apparition of Mr Kirk was seen while they were seated at table; but
Duchray, in his astonishment, failed to perform the ceremony enjoined;
consequently, Mr Kirk was left to ‘drie his weird’ in Fairyland.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: DEC. 22.]
The death of the Rev. John Burnet, minister of Kilbride, is noted as
arising from an extraordinary cause, though the immediate disease was
jaundice. He ‘had a son lately dead before him, and seeing his son
dissected, and the physicians finding fault with his noble [vital]
parts, [the father] presently apprehends a faultiness in his own,
which apprehension stuck with him even to his death, which physicians
took to be the cause of his sickness; so strong is the power of
apprehension.’--_Law._
[Sidenote: 1673.]
Died this year, by a fall from a horse, at Tangier in Morocco, John
Earl of Middleton, governor of that establishment. Of a family of the
minor gentry in Kincardineshire, he had entered life as a pikeman
in Hepburn’s regiment in France, but soon was called to take part
in the civil wars of his own country, serving first the English
parliament and Scottish Estates, and afterwards proving an active and
vigorous partisan of the king. His preferment after the Restoration
as commissioner to the Scottish parliament, and his magnificent but
drunken administration, with all the ills that flowed from it, are part
of our national history. He is said by a contemporary to have been a
man of ‘heroic aspect,’ of ‘manly eloquence,’ ‘happier in his wit than
in his friends;’ of ‘natural courage and generosity;’ ‘more pitied in
his fall than envied in his prosperity.’[241] Though disgraced, the
king could not entirely desert one who had risked and done so much for
him in his worst days; so he appointed him governor of Tangier--a civil
kind of banishment, in which, we see, he died.
[Sidenote: 1673.]
It is scarcely wonderful that a man who went through such changes of
fortune and so many strange adventures--taken prisoner at both Preston
and Worcester, and escaping on both occasions from captivity--should
have been the subject of some of the mystical speculations of his age.
Aubrey relates: ‘Sir William Dugdale informed me that Major-general
Middleton (since Lord) went into the Highlands of Scotland, to
endeavour to make a party for King Charles the First. An old gentleman
that was second-sighted, came and told him that his endeavour was
good, but he would be unsuccessful, and, moreover, that they would
put the king to death, and that several other attempts would be made,
but all in vain: his son would come in, but not reign, but at last be
restored.’ A second tale is told by Law and Wodrow,[242] and repeated
by Aubrey, with slight variations, but to the following general
purport: Being in the army of the Duke of Hamilton in 1648, he had for
his comrade there a certain Laird of Balbegno, who seems to have been
the neighbour of his family in Kincardineshire.[243] A few days before
an expected battle, Middleton and Balbegno had a conversation about the
risks they should run in fight, and agreed that, if one should die,
leaving the other in life, he should return, if possible, and give the
survivor some account of the other world. Balbegno fell in the battle.
Middleton thought no more of the promise of his deceased friend, till
some time after, when a prisoner in the Tower of London, and in some
fear for his life, he one night was sitting alone in a room, ‘under
three locks,’ and with two sentinels outside the door. Chancing to read
a little in the Bible, he had no sooner closed the volume than, looking
towards the door, he saw a human figure standing there in the shadow
of his bed. ‘He called out: “Who is there?” The apparition answered:
“Balbegno.” “That cannot be,” said Middleton, “for I saw him buried
after he was slain in battle!” “Oh, Middleton,” said Balbegno, “do you
not mind the promise I made to you when at such a place, such a night,
on the Border?” and with that came forward and took him by the hand.’
Middleton, in narrating the circumstances, declared that Balbegno’s
hand ‘was hot and soft, just as it used to be, and he in his ordinary
likeness.’ Instead of giving him any intelligence regarding the dead,
the spirit told him he should make his escape in three days--he should
in time be a great man--but let him beware of his end! When Balbegno
had delivered this message, he, according to Aubrey, gave a frisk, and
said:
‘Givanni, Givanni, ’tis very strange
In the world to see so sudden a change!‘[244]
and then vanished. In three days, accordingly, Middleton escaped in
his wife’s clothes. He did afterwards become a great man, and his end
was tragical, for, ‘upon a certain time, he proving a young horse, was
cast off by him, and in the fall hurt himself exceedingly, so that he
sickens and dies of it.’[245]--_Law._
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1674.