from the ancient Episcopal Palace of Kirkwall or from his lodge at
Dynrostness; but as a local habitation for his full-grown greatness, he
created at Birsa, the seat of the old Orkneyan Jarls, a large baronial
domain by special extirpation of the Odallers, and there, by the forced
labours of the natives, “without meat, drink or wages,” he built a
palace after the manner of Falkland, and inscribed it:
“=DOMINUS ROBERTUS STEWARTUS FILIUS JACOBI QUINTI REX SCOTORUM HOC OPUS
INSTRUXIT.=”
His vanity was mimicked at a humble distance by his brother and
villanous instrument, Cultmalindy, in his Zetland Castle of Muness, with
a doggrel motto of equal self-complacency—
“List ye to knaw this building wha began—
Laurence the Bruce he was that worthy man,
Quha ernestlie his ayres and afspring prayis
To help and not to hurt this wark alwayis.”
The ambition which is the infirmity of the noble, sometimes gives
boldness to the weak. To exchange the dependent and precarious
Possession of the Islands for Sovereignty, and restore in his own family
the ancient Jarldom, protected but not controlled by a nominal
dependence on a weak and distant Suzerain, was a prospect which might
almost have tempted a wiser, and excused a better man; and in 1572, Lord
Robert had made some progress in treason. The chances of success
warranted the risk. He was in possession of the field—besides a
considerable force of soldiers, he was sure of the support of a crowd of
followers and adventurers, dependent for their all on his favour and
success, and might even win the Islanders themselves to a war with
Scotland, by a pledge to restore those native laws and liberties, to the
abrogation of which they traced every grievance. On the other hand, the
Scottish King was an infant of five years old; the Government
precarious; the nation weakened and distracted by civil feuds; the only
power that could be sent against him, some one of the northern nobles,
all of dubious loyalty; and only one generation had passed since Orkney
had defied and defeated the whole available force of Scotland. Denmark
was as willing to countenance as Scotland was weak to oppose his
designs; and Lord Robert had every reason to hope that the revolution
would be effected by pens and treaties, not by swords and battles, if
his secret could be kept within his circle of stormy seas, prohibited
firths and guarded ferries.
But after all his precautions, one postern of his jealous fortress was
open, unguarded, and not commanded by himself. The larger Feudatories of
the Kirklands, Balfour of Munquhany, Bellenden and Mudy, owed him no
allegiance, and resented restrictions and encroachments from which they
suffered as well as the Odallers. It was probably by their influence
that the Articles of Indictment against the public enemy were enabled to
reach the ear of Morton the Regent. Heavy as was this catalogue of
oppressions, and those detailed in the Complaints of Sinclair of Aith
and other Zetlanders, they would probably have failed to rouse the
attention of the Scottish Government, had not Lord Robert’s dangerous
and treasonable practices with Denmark awakened the Regent’s cupidity by
the hopes of a profitable composition, or still more lucrative
confiscation of his grant and plunder. But the criminal was now summoned
to answer for his crimes, and warded in the Castle of Edinburgh, while
by Royal proclamation (31st January 1575–6), the ferries and Firth were
freed from his illegal restrictions; and during that year, a flood of
complaints and evidence from natives and Strangers poured in against
him. A Commission was issued (9th November 1576) to Mudy, the former
Chamberlain of Orkney, and Henderson, one of the King’s Pursuivants, to
examine witnesses on the spot as to his oppressions; and having finished
this portion of their examination during the month of February 1576–7,
they were further commissioned (24th April 1577) to inquire into the
charges of high treason, and it was only under a heavy Bailbond of
£10,000 by Lord Lyndsay, that Lord Robert was (5th August) removed from
the Castle of Edinburgh to a less strait prison in Linlithgow Palace. It
is easier to guess than to trace the secret influences by which he
escaped from such overwhelming evidence of treason and crime. Morton,
his enemy, was tottering to his fall—his friends Argyle and Lyndsay,
were rising into power and favour. On 30th January 1578–9, he was
allowed to revisit Orkney to prepare his defence, under heavy bail to
return for trial on 30th September, but no trial ensued; he probably
compounded for his head with his estate—his bailbond was cancelled by a
Royal Warrant, and the whole parade of Commissions and probations ended
in a temporary suspension of his powers in Orkney, without restitution
or redress to the aggrieved Odallers, who were again abandoned to the
ordinary misrule of the local collectors.
In the meantime, the Crown had given every encouragement to Scottish
settlers in Orkney by large and liberal feus of Kirklands and Earldom
(without any scrupulous reservation of Odal rights which might be
involved in the grants), on a Reddendo of the accumulated burdens
“according to the Rentale,” but often at a commutation temptingly
illusory. On the disgrace of Lord Robert, it seems to have been designed
to lure the Odallers, by similar terms, to accept of feudal confirmation
of their rights; for such a charter was granted to William Sinclair of
the (5th March 1578–9), for the expressed purpose, “_dare inhabitantibus
intra dictas patrias de Orkney et Shetland, bonam occasionem et exemplum
cognoscere et accipere suas securitates de nobis in simili modo_.” But
either the Odallers were jealous of such security—the Court unwilling to
spoil so promising a field of plunder—or Lord Robert had already
exhausted it by his exactions, suits and escheits; for few or none of
the Odal lands were at this time feued according to the Rentale.
On 18th January 1581, we find Lord Robert engaged in the congenial work
of safely insulting a fallen foe, and paying court to a rising
favourite, by assisting to convey the ex-Regent to his prison at
Dumbarton—and on 28th October 1581 he had his reward in a new
confirmation of his former grant of Orkney and Zetland erected into an
Earldom, with all those additional powers of Justiciary, Admiralty, &c.,
which he had been formerly charged with usurping without a warrant, and
(9th June 1585) another confirmation of the transaction with Bishop
Adam. Armed with these despotic powers, he returned to Orkney to
practise the lesson of his late escape, by finding some safer mode of
possessing himself of the Odal lands than the casualties and escheits of
a feudal Superior. In the quaint language of Bishop Graham, “Erle Robert
obteynit a feu of Orkney and Shetland, and yairupone intendit to stres
the Udillaris and augment a rental on these thair landis. He ceasit fra
it and found out ane uthir way to doe his turne. He was abbot of
Halyroodhouse, and Adame Bothwell then Bischope of Orknay. They made ane
excambione, and Erle Robert in these dayis was Bischope _in omnibus_,
and set his Rentale of teynds upon these Vdillandis above the availe,
yea triple above the availe.” As Justiciar he had instituted courts of
Perambulation to examine all titles in the Islands, and reduce all which
seemed feudally defective, including many Odal lands and undocumented
accessories, such as Quoys, Commons, &c., the use of which he punished
as encroachment on the rights of Crown or Mitre, united in himself. As
Bishop _in commendam_, he was titular of all teynds, untrammelled by any
fixed standard of collection, commutation or proportion, and thus he
menaced the harassed Odallers on all sides, till they gave up the
contest in despair. He set or feued the vacant lands to his own
dependents—but cultivation ceased, and the lessened produce warned him
that it was not his interest to pauperize or depopulate the Islands, and
he retraced his steps. Perhaps the change was but the completion of his
scheme for driving the Odallers into feudalism, and giving the sanction
of a new bargain to his multiplied and aggravated exactions. The
Perambulations being no longer useful, were abolished as illegal, and he
made a merit of renouncing the lands and pertinents of every Odaller who
should accept, in confirmation of his right, a feudal grant, paying
therefor all the accumulated burdens of Skatt, teind, &c., according to
the Rentale. So effectually had Earl Robert _stressed_ them, that most
of them accepted such feudal investitures, and the few who adhered to
their Odal tenure, had henceforth neither rights to defend, strength to
resist, nor wealth to tempt cupidity.
But the very profits of such rapacity at once prompted and justified the
resumption of a Grant so valuable and so abused. The Crown’s revenue
from the Orkneys had risen progressively within a century, from Lord
Sinclair’s Tack duty of £366, to Oliver Sinclair’s of £2000, which also
continued to be Lord Robert’s Feu-duty; but the Crown was too poor to
give away such an appanage without a larger share of the profits, and
James VI. on his majority, resolved to add to his revenue by resuming
the Islands, and to his popularity by affecting to commiserate their
misrule. By three Acts of Revocation, Annexation, and Dissolution (29th
July 1587), he annexed the Bishopric to the Crown, resumed the Earldom,
and re-granted it at a Duty of £4000 to his Chancellor Maitland and
Justice-Clerk Bellenden, whom (16th December) he commissioned to inquire
into the oppressions of “Lord Robert Stewart, lait Erle of Orknay.”
The result of their inquiry is not recorded, and it was probably dropped
when it had served its purpose of cloaking the transfer of a lucrative
grant from one courtier to another. There was probably as little
sincerity of motive in the renunciation of it by the new Donataries,
whose character forbids us to believe that they were sufferers from an
honest system of fair dealing with the natives. Probably their two
years’ experiment proved, that such a complex machinery of extortion
could only be kept in working order by the master hand of Lord Robert,
and to him, at a diminished duty of £2075, it was again committed by a
new charter (1st April 1589), renewed to him and his heir (11th March,
1591–2), and ratified by Parliament, to Patrick, Master of Orkney (5th
June) when Earl Robert had passed to his account—a master in the art of
extortion under colour of law.
In a quarter of a century he had raised his revenue from the Crown
estate from £6366, 10s. to £9016, and that of the Bishopric from £4381,
2s. 6d. to £9000, at conversions which doubled the total burden of
Orkney, besides what he could extract from the scatholds, rocks, and
seas of Zetland, and a large income from customs, tolls, wrecks, fines,
grassums, and other sources, which could not safely or conveniently be
entered in the rental. But this enormous increase of revenue bespoke no
improvement of the wealth or resources of the Islands. Their whole legal
burden at the Impignoration had been under £600, and the large balance
of produce was the lawful property of the Odallers or tenants. This
increase of rental, therefore, was but the stealthy transfer of this
balance from the subject to the ruler, even to the point of
confiscation, with a minimum of bare subsistence to the Ryot
cultivator—skatts, males and duties, were aggravated in weight, measure
and value, till the land could no longer produce enough to pay them, and
exorbitant conversions were charged for each deficiency, till the
accumulated debt gave pretext for seizure and eviction. The modern
improver of the waste finds in every furrow the traces of an earlier
tillage and the homes of a dense population; and contemporary rentals
testify, that even while the Donatary was exulting in such universal
appropriation, whole Districts, once tilled and enclosed, had been again
abandoned to the rush, the heather, or the sand flood, overwhelmed by
his new and intolerable burdens.
If any thing could have made more bitter the Orkneyan’s sense of
oppression, it must have been the baseness of the oppressor. Unlike his
brother Moray, whose public aims were lofty, and whose private life was
decorous, Earl Robert crawled and wriggled through desperate mazes of
legal difficulty, and through political storms which swept away
contemporaries more daring or less cowardly—his highest aim to steal
estates for his bastards, his boldest achievement to _stress_ an
Odaller. Both Earls were reputed sons of James V., but Moray’s mother
was the dark proud lady of Lochleven—the dam of Lord Robert, after his
birth, found a fitting mate in the Guidman of Cultmalindy, and in their
son, Lawrence Bruce, we find the worthy brother and accomplice of Earl
Robert, and with poetical justice, the victim of his successor. The
structure of his fortunes, reared by the Earl—wrong upon wrong, iniquity
upon iniquity—out of the ruins of hundreds, in twenty years of cool,
cautious, calculating system, was overthrown as speedily by the
spendthrift folly of a son worthy of such a father, the heir of all his
vices, with superadded contrasts of his own—crafty but headstrong—mean
but vain—rapacious but extravagant—luxurious but cruel to ferocity—an
unjust judge, an imperious ruler, and a traitorous subject—a faithless
husband and a heartless parent; but relieving the darkness of his
father’s memory by the deeper detestation of his own.
Earl Patrick succeeded to a fair inheritance, however heavily the
malison of a plundered people might lie upon his father’s soul. Within
the bounds of Orkney and Zetland the King was a name and not a power. As
Justiciar and Admiral, Donatary of the Crown Duties, Skatts, Males, and
Grassums, Tolls and Customs, Feuar of the Earldom, and Commendator of
the Bishopric, the Earl was master of all by land or sea. To an income
of about £56,000 (equal to the Royal Pension which nearly provoked a war
between James of Scotland and the stingy vixen of England), he added the
jointure of a wealthy bride, the widow of Sir Lewis Bellenden, his
father’s enemy; but all was not sufficient for his expenditure. His new
palace in Kirkwall, and Castle at Scalloway, were reared by the same
cheap oppression as his father’s residences of Birsa and Dunrossness;
but the lavish maintenance of four such establishments, his life of
riot, his retinue, body guard and trumpeters, and other affectations of
Sovereign state—his petty suits and petty wars, with damages and loss in
both, and his desperate struggles to support or redeem his credit at the
Scottish Court, plunged him into debts and difficulties inextricable
unless he could find another fortune where his father had found it.
There was not much to glean after the sweeping harvest of Earl Robert;
but if necessity could invent few new forms of exaction, it could
augment the old. His favourite adviser Harry Colville, the titular
Parson of Orphir, had been hunted by wild justice to a savage death on
the Noup of Nesting (1596), but the obsequious ingenuity of Dishington,
the Sheriff and Commissary, might suggest new bargains of convenient
dubiety, or discover some flaw or overlooked advantage in bygone
transactions. Higher land males and grassums were demanded from tenants
and tacksmen—Teinds were arbitrarily raised, or so collected, that all
were glad to compound or redeem at his own terms—Burdens already
commuted and paid under the general name of Feu-duties, were reimposed
and superadded to the amount of composition—Owners of Odal lands had
incurred non-entry or purpresture—the native Odaller, in unwitting
ignorance of casualties whose very names were new to him—Scottish
purchasers, like Lawrence Bruce and his co-Supplicants, in blind trust
of the Odal immunities which he had assisted to annul. The Earl
threatened both with fines or confiscation; and if we smile to find
Lawrence Bruce, in the disguise of an Odaller, pleading for Odal rights,
in total ignorance of Odal terms or traditions, and complaining of
falsehood, meanness, and tyranny so like his own, we can neither wonder
nor regret that such a representation did not avert the fate which he
deprecated. By a stringent exercise of his powers under the new
ratification by Parliament (5th June 1592), the Earl brought into his
mercy the Odallers, real and pretended; but fearing the consequences to
himself of excessive depopulation, he consented to suspend the dreaded
casualties, and renew the tenures by a mutual recognition as Superior
and Vassal. _The Uthell Buik of Orkney_ (16th March 1601–2) records
every Odal land as “feuit to the Udallers paying their Scatts and
Dewties according to the Rentale, with dew service usit and wount”—and
how profitable these new bargains were to the Earl’s revenue, is shown
by the important “Rentale pro Rege et Episcopo,” compiled about this
time by Dishington.
By the subserviency of the Sheriff and his subordinate staff of Things
(no longer composed of Odallers, but of Servants and Tenants), and by
the abuse or perversion of the Law Book, the Justiciar had no difficulty
in multiplying enactments, penalties and convictions for the most
trivial causes or impossible crimes. If evidence was insufficient, and
bodily torture had failed, confession was extorted by the agonies of the
victim’s dearest objects of affection, and the judicial murder was
consummated by gibbet, fire or water, on Thieves holm, or before the
window of the Earl’s hall. Confiscation for his benefit was the object
and consequence of every such conviction, and the Law Book when it had
served, and could no longer serve his purpose, disappeared for ever. His
droits and jurisdiction as Admiral were made equally profitable by means
equally nefarious. As Patron he appropriated all vacant benefices, or
sold them to his dependents, and as Lord Paramount, he claimed the sole
disposal of the commons, harbours, ferries and fisheries, even in the
ocean, and every other right not feudally secured.
But by his assumption of a more than kingly prerogative of arbitrary and
general Taxation, to the extent of 20,000 marks in 1594, and £40,000 in
1595–6, and by the addition of a third to every Standard of weight and
measure, and consequently to every Teind and Duty, he touched the
interests, and roused the active opposition of a class less patient and
more powerful than the Odaller, whom he had learned to coerce or crush
at pleasure—the larger Feuars of the Kirk lands, the old opponents of
his father. Confident in their Island strongholds and in their Crown
Charters, titulars of their own Teinds, with independent jurisdictions
and other rights as well defined as his own, and less precarious, they
opposed his usurpations, defied his power, retorted his injuries, and
even protected his victims. One after another he had long waged against
them a desultory war of law and violence. For the siege and capture of
Noltland Castle, and imprisonment of the Laird of Monquhannie (1592),
the Court of Session had punished him with escheit and heavy damages;
and in defiance of his edicts against suing in any Court beyond the
bounds of Orkney and Zetland, Mudy of Breckness, Bellenden of Evie, the
Goodman of Eday, and even his own brothers, had carried to the Supreme
Court similar complaints with similar results; and the Earl could only
vent his rage upon the servants who had convoyed their masters beyond
reach of his jurisdiction.
He had, however, influence to obtain another renewal of his grant (1st
March 1601), with powers and rights even more extensive, and in spite of
unanswerable evidence, Court favour had quashed at least one alarming
Bill of Indictment against him (1606). But even the unjust Judges of
Scotland were at last wearied by the continual coming of Complainers of
every kind, nation and degree, and at this crisis of his fate, he
provoked another powerful enemy to join in the combined attack which
ended in his ruin.
Earl Patrick had enjoyed the temporalities of the Bishopric for many
years undisturbed, but the appointment of James Law to the long vacant
See (28th February 1605–6), alarmed him for his possession, and he
hastened to secure it by new contracts with the Bishop, sanctioned by
the King as a temporary arrangement till he should redeem the Bishopric
by a rental of £3000 in England (17th November 1606). The Earl had never
shown much regard to an obligation, and now overwhelmed with debts, and
pressed by Creditors, he was unable, if willing, to fulfil his contract.
By unpunctuality, evasion, and insolent refusals, he drove the Bishop to
throw his great talents and commanding influence into the common cause
of his many enemies, and Law’s rank and character necessarily placed him
at their head. Even the Anglo-Scottish Court of James VI. could not
resist the Bishop’s just claims, well supported charges, and
representations of treason, misrule and inhuman oppression, and on 27th
December 1608, Earl Patrick was summoned to Edinburgh, to compear on 2nd
March “to answer to the Complaintis of the puir distressed people of
Orknay.” It is possible that Bishop Law was sincere in his sympathy for
the Earl’s victims; but his Rental of 1614 is as grasping as the worst
of its predecessors, and his own day of unlimited power was marked by no
redress or relaxation of the bonds of iniquity.
Earl Patrick’s subsequent fate, his long imprisonment, his base
repudiation of the son who had risked and lost life and all to serve and
save him, and his trials and execution for treason as a subject, not for
tyranny as a ruler, have been too amply illustrated elsewhere to need
notice here. The consequent forfeiture of the Earldom and annexation of
all the lands and rights in the Islands—the excambion and redistribution
of Orkney and Zetland into Earldom, Bishopric and Lordship, and the
final abrogation of the native laws—might give interest to this Sketch,
but would extend beyond its limits of time or subject. The demands of
Denmark, and evasions of Scotland, relative to the redemption and
restitution of the Islands, would also be a curious and cognate inquiry,
which, with many others of this unexhausted theme, must be left for a
future time and another hand. Each subsequent century has had its
characteristic type of oppressors, wrongs and victims, feudal, fiscal or
judicial. By no course of action, resistance or submission, could the
Islanders escape from legalized extortion. They gave Montrose 2000 men
and £40,000, and the Commonwealth exacted 300 Horse and £60,000 (1650).
Again, they raised another Regiment and Contribution for Charles II.
(1651); and he rewarded their loyalty and their sufferings by a further
exaction of £182,000, in 1662, and then surrendered the Islands to the
tender mercies of the Earl of Morton, the worst King Stork of all the
Donataries.