From Martinmas of the preceding year to the end of January in the
present, there was a hard continuous frost, which, after a slight thaw,
was resumed, and lasted till the 23d of February. During this time,
‘eleven carts, with twenty-one puncheons of wine, came over upon the
ice from Dundee here.’--_Chron. Perth._
* * * * *
‘About the midst of Januar, four gentlemen of good credit, having gone
out of Stirling some two miles or thereby, to pass their time, heard
sensibly like the shots of many muskets, and after that, taking better
heed, like the beating upon drums, and playing upon piffers and the
sound of trumpets; and last of all, the shot of great cannons; so that
for fear they went back again to the town, and reported what they had
heard.’--_Cal._
* * * * *
[Sidenote: FEB. 18.]
[Sidenote: 1624.]
The Town Council of Aberdeen had occasion to consider an abuse which
had lately crept into their burgh, in the form of ‘costly banqueting
at the baptising of bairns,’ and the ‘convocating of great numbers of
people thereto.’ It is mentioned that, on these occasions, there were
‘all sorts of succours [sugars], confections, spiceries, and dessert,
brought from foreign parts, beside great superfluity of venison, and
wild meat of all sorts ... and withal, extraordinary drinking and
scolling [health-drinking] ... to the slander of the town, in sic a
calamitous time, when God is visiting the whole land with dearth and
famine, and mony poor anes [are] dying and starving at dykes and under
stairs for cauld and hunger.’
The Council ordained that hereafter no person of whatever degree should
have ‘mae than four gossips and four cummers at the maist’ at their
baptisms, that not more than six women be invited ‘to convoy the bairn
to and frae the kirk,’ and that twelve should be the utmost amount of
company present ‘at the dinner, supper, or afternoon’s drink.’ All
extravagances at table were at the same time strictly forbidden.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: MAY 25.]
The wappinshaw was a periodical muster of the irregular armed force of
the country; it got its name from the more immediate purpose of the
assembly--namely, an exhibition of weapons. At Dunfermline, on this
day, while a wappinshaw was going on, ‘William Anderson, son till John
Anderson, bailiff of the said town, and Charles Richeson, his servant,
being shooting a shot with some of their friends in a certain place of
the town, [a little piece of the lunt flieth upon a thack-house, which
easily kindled. The fire increased with the violency of the wind[412]],
and did flie from house to house, and sometimes wald flie over ane
house without doing it any harm, but wald burn the next house, till the
great admiration of all men; so that this fire burnt so meikle of the
town, that, excepted the abbey and the kirk thereof, the tenth part
were not free of it. This, by the judgment of all the beholders, was
thought till have been some divinity, or some witchcraft, rather nor
this foresaid accidental fire.’--_Jo. H._
‘The fire began at twelve hours, and burnt the whole town, some few
sclate houses excepted, before four afternoon; goods and geir within
houses, malt and victual in kilns and barns, were consumed.’--_Cal._
The town of Dunfermline consisted at this time of 120 houses,
containing 287 families.--_Bal._
There was a collection in the parish churches for ‘the support of the
town of Dunfermline, burnt with fire’ (_R. P. L._); and, in June 1625,
King Charles I. ordered £500 sterling to be added to the fund for the
relief of the poorer class of sufferers.--_P. C. R._
* * * * *
[Sidenote: MAY.]
[Sidenote: 1624.]
The Clan Chattan or MacIntosh, seated in the centre of Inverness-shire,
were dependents of the Earls of Moray. None had entered more heartily
into the revenge of the Bonny Earl’s death against the Marquis of
Huntly, and for this service they had obtained certain lands from
the Moray family. Now, that the Earl of Moray was reconciled with
Huntly, he did not see any occasion longer to patronise or favour the
MacIntoshes; so he attempted to remove them from the lands formerly
conferred upon them. ‘This the Clan Chattan could hardly endure,’ says
Sir Robert Gordon: about Whitsuntide, assembling five hundred men
under their infant chief’s uncle, Lachlan MacIntosh [afterwards, by
the by, a stout loyalist in the Civil War], ‘they keepit the fields
in their Highland weed upon foot, with swords, bows, arrows, targets,
hagbuts, pistols, and other Highland arms, and first began to rob
and spulyie the earl’s tenants (who laboured their possessions) of
their haill goods, geir, insight plenishing [household furniture],
horse, nolt, sheep, corns, and cattle, and left them nothing that they
could get within their bounds; syne fell in sorning throughout Moray,
Stratherrick, Urquhart, Ross, Sutherland, Brae of Mar, and divers other
parts, taking their meat and food perforce where they could not get
it willingly, frae friends as well as frae their foes, yet still kept
themselves from shedding of innocent blood.’
The Earl of Moray first brought a band of Monteith Highlanders against
these marauders; but the expedition seems to have failed. Another
enterprise of the same kind was no more successful. It was not till he
went to London, and procured a power of lieutenancy in the north from
the king, that he brought the MacIntoshes to subjection. The affair
had a very characteristic ending. ‘Some slight loons [poor fellows],
followers of the Clan Chattan, were execute; but the principal
outbreakers and malefactors were spared and never troubled.’ Further,
the ‘honest men’ who had disobeyed the order for refusing all supply to
the MacIntoshes, being put to trial, the odd scene was presented of the
criminals standing as witnesses against them; and while these culprits
obtained pardon, their humane resetters ‘were soundly fined in as great
sums as their estates might bear, and some above their estates were
fined, and every one warded within the Tolbooth of Elgin, till the last
mite was paid.’--_Spal._ ‘The fines were granted by his majesty to the
Earl of Moray, as the fines for resetting the Clan Gregor were given to
the Earl of Argyle; but these fines did not much advantage either of
these two earls.’--_G. H. S._
* * * * *
[Sidenote: JUNE 10.]
[Sidenote: 1624.]
Dissent from the ‘comely order’ of church matters was still making
itself apparent. We hear at this time of many people in Edinburgh
holding private meetings for religious exercises, in contempt of the
ordinary services of their regular pastors in the parish churches.
‘Like as they have assumed to these their seditious conventicles the
name of Congregations, and done what in them lies falsely to impress
on the hearts of his majesty’s people a persuasion that his majesty
persecutes the sincere professors of true religion, and introduces
corruption in the church-government.’ Considering how such practices
‘brought forth damnable sects of Anabaptists, Families of Love,
Brownists, Arminians, Illuminati, and mony such pests, enemies to
religion, authority, and peace, and occasions the murder of millions
of people,’ the Privy Council thought proper to issue a proclamation,
strictly forbidding all such meetings.
The Council had at the same time before them a set of Edinburgh
citizens, partly the same as those whom the king had proposed to
banish a few years before[413]--namely, William Rig of Aitherny, one
of the bailies, John Hamilton, apothecary, John Mean, merchant, and
John Dickson, ‘flesher’--who had again come into collision with the
ecclesiastical authorities. At the usual congregational meeting before
the celebration of the communion, Rig--‘puffed up,’ says Spottiswoode,
‘by a conceit of his own abilities’--took it upon him to challenge Dr
Forbes ‘for sundry points of doctrine delivered by him in his sermons.’
Dr Forbes was a man of remarkable learning and dignity of character,
for which reasons he was in time appointed bishop of Edinburgh by
Charles I. It did not seem to him proper that he should be liable to
the censure of a lay citizen, and he therefore declined to listen to
the bailie. Rig then openly threatened the clergy, ‘that, unless they
returned to the old form of administering the holy communion, the
whole people would forsake them;’ and in this he was supported by his
friends Mean, Hamilton, and Dickson. The Council took the affair up as
an attempt to produce a schism in the church and a violation of the
law. They answered, however--if we are to believe one of their own
party--‘so wisely, punctually, and modestly, that the Council admired
them.’ They were, nevertheless, to satisfy the king, sent to various
prisons, as guilty of a misdemeanour. They ‘remained there, till by
great dealing, pains, and moyen, they were relieved again.’--_Row._
[Sidenote: 1624.]
William Rig and John Mean appear, from the report of their
contemporary and friend, Mr John Livingstone, to have been earnest
Christians of the evangelical type. Rig was ‘much exercised in spirit,
and of great experience in the ways of God. I have been several times
with him in private meetings, and observed that when he prayed, he
began with bitter and heavy complaints and confession beyond any. He
spent his income chiefly on pious uses.’ Mean ‘used both summer and
winter to rise about three o’clock in the morning, and always, as he
put on his clothes, he used to sing some part of a psalm, and then
went to his closet, where he was employed in religious exercises till
six. By that time, the rest of his family being got up, he worshipped
with them, and then went to his shop. He was so much master of the
Scripture, [that] though he had been half sleeping, he could have
corrected readers if they miscalled or wrong cited ony scripture.’[414]
During the time when the king was pressing on the innovations in the
church, dissentients of this kind were rising everywhere throughout
the southern districts of Scotland, many of them lairds, a few of them
nobles, but most of them belonging to the middle classes of society.
Of the lairds, Livingstone enumerates Halhill (Fife), Crosshill
(Lanarkshire), Cunningham-head, Cessnock, and Rowallan (Ayrshire).
There was also a number of ladies, some of them of noble birth, who
embraced and strongly held fast the evangelical views. Such were
Margaret Countess of Wigton, Anne Marchioness of Hamilton, the Countess
of Eglintoun, and Lady Loudon. For the time, these people, as well as
the more earnest of the clergy, were kept silent under the frown of
an imperious government, or made themselves but little heard; but the
fire burned not the less intensely for being covered up; and when the
time for resistance came, it was ready to break forth with the greater
violence that it had been so long suppressed.
[Sidenote: 1624.