At the same time there were not wanting amongst us pretenders to the
surgical art. In this very month, Robert Henderson attracted the
favourable notice of the town-council of Edinburgh by performing sundry
wonderful cures--namely, healing a man whose hands had been cut off,
a man and woman who had been run through the body with swords by the
French, and a woman understood to have been suffocated, and who had
lain two days in her grave. The council ordered Robert twenty merks as
a reward.[23] Two gentlemen became sureties in Edinburgh for Marion
Carruthers, co-heiress of Mousewald, in Dumfriesshire, ‘that she shall
not marry ane chief traitor nor other broken man of the country,’ under
pain of £1000 (_Pit_)--a large sum to stake upon a young lady’s will.
* * * * *
This was a year of dearth throughout Scotland; wheat being six pounds
the boll, oats fifty shillings, a draught-ox twenty merks, and a wedder
thirty shillings. ‘All things apperteining to the sustentation of man
in triple and more exceeded their accustomed prices.’ Knox, who notes
these facts, remarks that the famine was most severe in the north,
where the queen had travelled in the preceding autumn: many died there.
‘So did God, according to the threatening of his law, punish the
idolatry of our wicked queen, and our ingratitude, that suffered her to
defile the land with that abomination again [the mass].... The riotous
feasting used in court and country wherever that wicked woman repaired,
provoked God to strike the staff of breid, and to give his malediction
upon the fruits of the earth.’
It was of the frame of the reformer’s ideas, that a judgment would
be sent upon the poor for the errors of their ruler, and that this
judgment would be intensified in a particular district merely because
the ruler had given it her personal presence. He failed to observe, or
threw aside, the fact, that the same famine prevailed in England, where
a queen entirely agreeable to him and his friends was now reigning, and
certainly indulging in not a few banquetings. Theories of this kind
sometimes prove to be two-edged swords, that will strike either way. It
might have been replied to him: ‘Accepting your theory that nations,
besides suffering from the simple misgovernment of their rulers,
are punished for their personal offences, what shall we say of the
Protestant Elizabeth, whose people now suffer not merely under famine,
as the Scotch are doing, but are visited by a dreadful pestilence
besides,[24] from which Scotland is exempt?’
[Sidenote: 1563-4.