The SEVENTEENTH Century

 

 

1600

PUNISHMENT FOR SUICIDES

(20 February) A contemporary chronicler recorded the following sad tale:

Thomas Dobbie drowned himself in the Quarry Holes, besyde the Abbey [at Holyrood]; and upon the morn he was harilt [hauled] through the town backward, and thereafter hangit on the gallows.

REIVER INSULTED BY EGG YOLKS ON HIS SWORD

Hearing that Sir John Carmichael, Warden of the West Marches, was about to hold a Warden’s Court in Lochmaben with the intention of doling out severe punishments for the recent forays and thefts committed by the Armstrongs, Alexander Armstrong (brother of Kinmont Willie, hero of the eponymous ballad) went to visit Carmichael, in the hope of coming to an amicable settlement. However, Carmichael soon made it clear that there was going to be no leniency. To add insult to injury, some of Carmichael’s retainers slipped Armstrong’s sword out of its scabbard and covered the blade with egg yolks, so that when sheathed it would not draw. Furious, Armstrong returned home and told his son Thomas what had transpired. Next day, 16 June 1600, Thomas and his brothers accosted Carmichael, and shot him with a hagbut. Thomas did not long evade justice. He was tried and convicted in Edinburgh on 14 November, and before he was hanged his right hand was cut off. His body was then hung in chains on the Borough Muir, the first recorded instance of a criminal suffering such a fate in Scotland.

WAR OF THE ONE-EYED WOMAN SPREADS ACROSS HEBRIDES

Donald Gorm Mor, chief of the MacDonalds of Sleat on Skye, returned his prospective wife Margaret MacLeod, to her brother, Rory Mor, chief of the MacLeods of Dunvegan. This was in accordance with the custom of the time, described by Martin Martin in his Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (1703):

It was an ancient custom in the islands that a man should take a maid to his wife, and keep her the space of a year without marrying her; and if she pleased him all the while, he married her at the end of the year, and legitimated these children; but if he did not love her, he returned her to her parents, and her portion also . . .

Margaret had, indeed, during her stay with Donald, not only failed to conceive a child, she had lost the sight in one of her eyes. Donald, considering her to be damaged goods, mounted her backwards on a one-eyed horse, and had her led back to Dunvegan by a one-eyed groom, accompanied by a one-eyed mongrel dog.

Margaret’s family were outraged by the insult, and so began the ‘War of the One-Eyed Woman’, which lasted for two years, caused much suffering, and spread as far as Trotternish, Harris and South Uist. It came to an end with a decisive MacDonald victory at the Battle of Coire Na Creiche on the northern flanks of the Black Cuillin. The Privy Council ordered the two chiefs to make peace, and, apart from a minor incident in 1603, that was the end of the bloodshed between the MacDonalds and MacLeods on Skye.

1603

A PROPHECY FULFILLED

At Drumelzier, near the supposed grave of Merlin, the River Tweed overflowed into the nearby River Powsail. Many centuries previously Thomas the Rhymer had prophesied that ‘When Tweed and Powsail meet at Merlin’s grave, England and Scotland shall one monarch have.’ And so it turned out. In this very year James VI of Scotland succeeded, on the death of Elizabeth I, to the throne of England.

KING OFFERS TO SHOW SUBJECTS HIS ARSE

After being crowned king of England, James was told that his new subjects wished to see his face. ‘God’s wounds!’ he declared, ‘I will pull down my breeches and they shall also see my arse!’

1609

COUNTESS GIVES HUSBAND CANCER

(8 April) Death of Mark Ker, 1st Earl of Lothian. It was said that his wife, Margaret Maxwell, had a hand in his demise, as described by Sir Robert Douglas in his Peerage of Scotland (1764):

That lady thereafter being vexed with a cancer in her breast, implored the help of a notable warlock called Playfair, who condescended to heal her, but with condition that the sore should fall on them she loved best; whereunto she agreeing did convalesce, but the Earl, her husband, found the cancer in his throat, of which he died shortly after.

1611

POLE BEHEADED FOR INSULTING SCOTTISH NATION

John Stercovius, a German resident in Poland, met an unfortunate and unforeseeable end. Some time previously he had visited Scotland wearing his native dress, but was so laughed at, mocked and reviled that he retreated back to Poland. Here he published a Legend of Reproaches, in which he vilified the entire Scottish nation. This libel being brought to the attention of James VI, the king mounted an action against Stercovius, via Patrick Gordon, a Scottish agent resident in Danzig. So much pressure was put upon the Polish government that Stercovius was arrested, tried, convicted and beheaded ‘by the sword’ in Rastenburg.

1612

COW GIVES BIRTH TO PUPPIES

In his Historie of the Kirk of Scotland (1646), David Calderwood records the following curious events taking place in this year:

In the month of March and April fell furth prodigious works and rare accidents. A cow brought forth fourteen great dog whelps instead of calves . . . One of the Earl of Argyle’s servants being sick, vomited two toads and a serpent, and so convalesced: but vomited after a number of little toads.

1616

GYPSIES BANISHED ON PAIN OF DEATH

Four gypsies – John Faa together with his son James and two others, namely Moses Baillie and Helen Brown – were put on trial in Edinburgh ‘as Egyptians lingering in the country, contrary to a statute which had banished their tribe forth of the realm on pain of death’. As the accused failed to provide assurances that they would leave the country, they were sentenced to be hanged on the Burgh Muir on the edge of Edinburgh. A similar fate met six more Faas and two other gypsies in 1624, while in 1636 a band of gypsies were rounded up and put into jail in Haddington. The Privy Council, realising that ‘the keeping of them longer there is troublesome and burdenable to the town’, decreed that the sheriff should pronounce a sentence of death against all the men and any of the women without children, the men to be hanged and the women drowned. Those women with children, the Council mercifully decreed, were to be ‘scourged through the burgh’.

1618

DEVIL DISGUISES HIMSELF AS LADY’S LAPDOG

Margaret Barclay, the young and spirited wife of Archibald Deane, a burgess of Irvine, had been accused of some act of theft by her brother-in-law, John Deane, and his wife, Janet Lyal. As a result, Margaret had conceived a loathing for the couple, which she did not care to disguise, even after the local kirk session urged a reconciliation. Shortly thereafter, the Gift of God, a ship belonging to John Deane, was lost off Padstow in Cornwall, taking Deane, together with the provost of Irvine and all but two of the crew, to the bottom of the sea. It was remembered by some that as the ship had embarked, Margaret Barclay had muttered prayers that neither sea nor salt water should bear the ship, and that crabs might eat the flesh of all on board at the bottom of the ocean. Suspicions were aroused, especially when one John Stewart, a wandering spaeman (soothsayer) who claimed to have contacts in Elfland, spoke of the loss of the ship before it was generally known in Irvine. When Stewart was confronted with accusations of sorcery, he confessed that he had been present on the shore when the Devil, in the guise of a lady’s lapdog, had taught Margaret Barclay the dark arts by which she might be revenged upon her slanderers. A model of the ship was made in clay, and, at night, cast into the sea, which promptly began to rage and roar and turn blood red. Another woman, Isobel Insh or Taylor, was implicated by Stewart in assisting Margaret, and Isobel, together with her eight-year-old daughter, who was Margaret’s servant girl, was terrorised into supporting Stewart’s accusations, the servant girl adding that the lapdog emitted flashes from its jaws and nostrils, enabling the witches to see what they were doing as they went about their work. Things went from bad to worse. Isobel tried to escape from her imprisonment in the church belfry, but, bound as she was in heavy chains, fell from the church roof, and died of her injuries a few days later. Stewart hanged himself while in custody. Margaret Barclay was subjected to what was regarded as ‘safe and gentle’ torture, great iron weights being laid upon her shins, causing great pain but failing to break the skin. She was thus induced to confess, urged on by the pious persuadings of several local ministers. As she made this confession after the weights had been removed, the jury considered that it was not forced upon her, even though she had subsequently withdrawn her confession. She was duly found guilty. As a benevolent gesture, she was strangled before she was burnt, ‘having died with many expressions of religion and penitence’.

1621

REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH

A law came into force prohibiting the playing of cards or dice in a house unless the master of the house was himself playing. Furthermore, should anyone win more than 100 merks betting on the horses, or on any other wagers within a 24-hour period, the excess should be distributed among the local poor.

1622

THERE WAS A FIERY DRAGON, BOTH GREAT AND LONG

In his Historie of the Kirk of Scotland (1646), David Calderwood records that in this year:

Upon Monday the 3rd of June, there was a fiery dragon, both great and long, appeared to come from the south to the north, spouting fire from her, half an hour after the going to of the sun.

1623

THE PERILS OF PLACING A HEN UNDER A WOMAN’S ARMPIT

Thomas Grieve was brought before a court in Edinburgh, accused of having cured many people ‘of heavy sickness and grievous diseases, by various magical arts’. The court heard how he rid one woman in Leslie, Fife, of her sickness by transferring it to a cow, which then went mad and died. Another woman, the wife of one James Mudie, he treated for fever, affecting a cure

by causing ane great fire to be put on, and ane hole to be made in the north side of the house, and ane quick hen to be put furth thereat, at three several times, and ta’en in at the house-door withershins; thereafter taking the hen, and putting it under the sick woman’s oxter or arm, and therefra carrying it to the fire, where it was halden doun and burnt quick therein.

On the advice of various parish ministers, the court sentenced Grieve to be strangled, then burnt at the stake.

1629

MAN FINED FOR SPEWING

The baron court of the Campbells of Glenorchy fined a man for being sick on someone’s floor.

1630

A SHOCKING INSTANCE OF INCEST

Alexander Blair, a tailor from Currie, was beheaded for having married the daughter of the half-brother of his first wife.

1633

GENTLEMEN FIRE ON SLEEPING HIGHLANDERS

Whilst deer-stalking in the wild upper reaches of Strath Avon in Moray, Alexander Gordon of Dunkintie and his son ‘suddenly lighted upon a party of natives, believed to be of the Clan Chattan, who were sleeping upon the hillside. Suspecting these men to be rogues, the two gentlemen shot at them . . .’ One of the ‘natives’ was wounded, at which his fellows set upon Gordon and his son, killing both. During the skirmish two more ‘natives’ were killed, and Dunkintie’s servants fled to raise the alarm. Dunkintie’s second son, together with a party of retainers, soon arrived at the scene. He had the bodies of his father and brother taken to Elgin for burial, the procession being headed by a servant bearing the severed head of one of the Highlanders on an iron spike.

WITCH-PRICKER PROMISES NEVER TO PRICK AGAIN

John Kincaid, a notorious witchfinder, was tried before the Privy Council for fraud and deceit in his ‘work of pricking witches for the Devil’s mark’. His method involved searching for unusual blemishes on the skin of a suspect. Once located, he would insert a pin at the place, and if the subject did not feel anything, and there was no blood when the pin was withdrawn, the suspect was found to be guilty of witchcraft. By his own admission, Kincaid was responsible for the deaths of 220 people in Scotland and England. He was imprisoned for pricking without a magistrate’s warrant, but was released after nine weeks owing to his great age, and his promise that he would never prick again.

1634

DOGS AS INSTRUMENTS OF JUSTICE ‒ PART I

In Orkney, a youth of 18 years of age called William Garioch was bequeathed some land and some cattle by his late father. At the time the lad was living with his uncle, who coveted his nephew’s inheritance, and who kept him on such strict rations that the latter stole some two dozen pounds of barley to keep himself from hunger. The uncle reported the theft to the sheriff, and the youth was seized, put on trial, and sentenced to death. As he mounted the ladder to be hanged, young Garioch prayed loudly that God should visit justice upon his wicked uncle. Some time after the execution, his uncle was walking through the churchyard of Kirkwall, and, as he stood upon his nephew’s grave, ‘the bishop’s dog ran at him all of a sudden, and tore out his throat’.

DOGS AS INSTRUMENTS OF JUSTICE ‒ PART II

(14 December) Death in Stirling of John Erskine, 19th and 2nd Earl of Mar, Lord Treasurer of Scotland. Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit describes the circumstances of his death thus:

His chief delight was in hunting; and he procured by Acts of Parliament, that none should hunt within divers miles of the king’s house; yet often that which is most pleasant to a man is his overthrow; for, walking in his own hall, a dog cast him off his feet, and lamed his leg, of which he died; and at his burial, a hare having run through the company, his special chamberlain, Alexander Stirling, fell off his horse and broke his neck.

GREAT BLAZING STAR BODES ILL FOR SCOTLAND

The contemporary historian John Spalding recorded that ‘There was seen in Scotland a great blazing star, representing the shape of a crab or cancer, having long spraings spreading from it.’ Various dire circumstances followed. The winter was so cold that snow lay on the lowlands from 9 December 1634 to 9 March the following year. The River Tay was frozen over for 30 consecutive days, while the streets of Perth were buried under some seven feet of snow. With the waters frozen, millers were unable to grind the corn, and many starved. Even beer ran short. Through the first half of 1635 there was a notably virulent outbreak of smallpox, in which even those who had been previously infected contracted the disease for a second time.

1635

MER-PIG SNORTS AND BULLERS IN RIVER DON

In June, just as the smallpox epidemic grew less virulent, another sinister portent shook the northeast, as John Spalding recorded:

There was seen in the water of Don a monster-like beast, having the head like to ane great mastiff dog or swine, and hands, arms and paps like to a man. The paps seemed to be white. It had hair on the head, and the hinder parts, seen sometimes above the water, seemed clubbish, short-legged, and short-footed, with ane tail. This monster was seen swimming bodily above the water, about ten hours in the morning, and continued all day visible, swimming above and below the bridge without any fear. The town’s-people of both Aberdeens came out in great multitudes to see this monster. Some threw stones; some shot guns and pistols; and the salmon-fishers rowed cobbles with nets to catch it, but all in vain. It never shrinked nor feared, but would duck under the water, snorting and bullering, terrible to the hearers and beholders. It remained two days, and was seen no more.

1636

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF PATRICK ROY MACGREGOR

The cattle thief Patrick Roy MacGregor, known as Gilderoy (Gaelic Gille Ruadh, ‘the red-haired lad’), was hanged in Edinburgh on account of his numerous depredations. His career was subsequently romanticised by the balladeers, and over the following centuries the most improbable tales were being told about him: that he picked the purse of Cardinal Richelieu in sight of the French king; that he stole the valuable plate of the Duke of Medinaceli in Madrid; that he ambushed and robbed Oliver Cromwell himself, then tied him onto a donkey and sent him packing.

1637

PENALTIES IMPOSED FOR TRAVELLING TO IRELAND

A law was introduced stating that any person travelling to Ireland without a licence should be apprehended as a thief.

WOMEN HURL STOOLS AND BIBLES AT DEAN OF EDINBURGH

(23 July) The imposition of the Prayer Book upon the Church of Scotland by that distant king, Charles I, sparked a riot in the heart of his northern capital. Here is the account given by James Gordon in his History of Scots Affairs, from 1637 to 1641 of what happened when an attempt was made to use the book for the first time in St Giles, Edinburgh:

How soon as Dr George Hanna, Dean of Edinburgh, who was to officiate that day, had opened the service-book, a number of the meaner sort of people, most of them waiting-maids and women, who use in that town to keep places for the better sort, with clapping of their hands, cursings and outcries, raised such an uncouth noise and hubbub in the church, that not any one could either hear or be heard. The gentlewomen did fall a tearing and crying that the mass was entered amongst them, and Baal in the church. There was a gentleman standing behind a pew and answering ‘Amen’ to what the Dean was reading; a she-zealot, hearing him, starts up in choler: ‘Traitor,’ says she, ‘does thou say mass at my ear!’ and with that struck him on the face with her Bible in great fury.

The Bishop of Edinburgh, Mr David Lindsay, stepped into the pulpit, above the Dean, intending to appease the tumult, minding them of the place where they were, and entreating them to desist from profaning it. But he met with as little reverence (albeit with more violence) as the Dean had found; for they were more enraged, and began to throw at him stools, and their very Bibles . . . Nor were their tongues idler than their hands. Upon this, John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St Andrews, then Lord Chancellor, and some others, offering to assist the Bishop in quelling the multitude, were made partners of the suffering of all these curses and imprecations which they began to pray to the bishops and their abettors. The Archbishop, finding himself unable to prevail with the people, was forced to call down from their gallery the provost and bailies and others of the town council of Edinburgh, who at length, with much tumult and confusion, thrust the unruly rabble out of the church, and made fast the church doors.

The multitude being removed, the Dean falls again to read, in presence of the better sort who stayed behind; but all this while, those who had been turned out of doors, kept such a quarter with clamours without, and rapping at the church doors, and pelting the windows with stones, as that the Dean might once more be interrupted. This put the bailies once more to the pains to come down from their seat, and interpose with the clamorous multitude to make them quiet. In the midst of these clamours, the service was brought to an end; but the people’s fury was not a whit settled . . .

Tradition has identified the hurler of the first stool as one Jenny Geddes, although Robert Wodrow (1679–1734), in his unpublished Analecta, tells us that others believed it was a certain Mrs Mean, wife of a merchant, and that ‘many of the lasses that carried on the fray were prentices in disguise, for they threw stools to a great length’.

1638

GHOSTLY DRUMMING HEARD IN ABERDEENSHIRE

Throughout the winter of 1637–8, numerous witnesses reported that the sound of drumming could be heard on many a night in the vicinity of Barmekin Hill and Loch Skene near Echt in Aberdeenshire. Not only drumming was heard; also the sounds of guards parading to and fro. And those with knowledge of these things swore that they could distinguish the different marches of Scotland, Ireland, England, France, Denmark and Holland. What is more, ‘Some gentlemen of known integrity and truth affirmed that, near these places, they heard as perfect shot of cannon go off as ever they heard at the Battle of Nordlingen, where themselves some years before had been present.’ All this, in retrospect, was held to foretell the civil wars that were to come.

1639

DOGS SLAIN FOR DISRESPECT

In March an army of 11,000 men under Montrose and Leslie entered Aberdeen to impose the Covenant on its reluctant citizens, who were more inclined to follow the Episcopal principles of the king. The Covenanters wore around their necks their badge of the blue ribbon, and in mockery some of the women of the city put blue ribbons around the necks of their lap dogs – ‘whereat the soldiers took offence, and killed all their dogs for this very cause’. The citizens took the hint and swore ‘by their uplifted hands to God that they did subscribe and swear this Covenant willingly, freely, and from their hearts, and not from any fear or dread that could happen.’

1640

PILLAR OF FIRE FORETELLS VAST MUNITIONS EXPLOSION

On 27 August watchers in Fife looking across the Firth of Forth saw, about eight o’clock in the evening, a great pillar of fire rising into the sky from somewhere to the northeast of Dunbar. The pillar gave off a light as bright as a full moon, and rose up to the roof of heaven. Then it slowly faded, and by eleven o’clock had entirely vanished. This strange phenomenon was taken in retrospect as a portent of the events of the following Sunday, when the vast munitions store in the vault of Dunglass Castle in Berwickshire exploded, killing the Earl of Haddington and a dozen other Covenanting commanders, together with more than 50 servants of both sexes. Thirty others were seriously injured. It was thought that the explosion was ignited – either by accident or by design – by an English page, one Edward Paris, whom the Earl had entrusted with a key to the vault. All that was found of this boy was ‘ane arm, holding ane iron spoon in his hand’. As for the Earl, King Charles remarked that ‘albeit Lord Haddington had been very ungrateful to him, yet he was sorry that he had not at his dying some time to repent’.

1642

MAN WITH TWO HEADS TOURS SCOTLAND

An Italian called Lazare Colloredon Genois toured through Scotland, accompanied by two servants. When he was settled into a lodging, one of the servants would blow a trumpet to summon the local populace, while the other collected money from the curious. When sufficient money had been collected, the Italian would part the voluminous cloak he habitually wore, revealing a twin brother growing out of his chest. This brother, who had been separately baptised under the name Jean-Baptiste, was barely sentient. His head drooped backwards and his eyes remained closed. He had two arms, two hands with three fingers on each, and one leg with six toes, the other leg being concealed within the flesh. Lazare himself appeared perfectly healthy, and was possessed of good manners and a vivacity only occasionally diminished when he dwelt upon his fate should his brother predecease him.

1643

LORDS DRINK A HEALTH TO THE DEVIL

(January) In his Memorials, the field preacher Robert Law (d. c.1686) recounts how one day a group of five gentlemen, including the Earl of Kelly, Lord Kerr and David Sandilands, brother to Lord Abercrombie, embarked on a marathon drinking session. Toast followed toast until they could not think whom next to toast, so, in Law’s words, ‘one of them gives the Devil’s health, and the rest pledges him’. Law goes on to spell out the consequences:

Sandilands that night, going downstairs, 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.

SERVANTS SUBJECTED TO TONSORIAL HUMILIATION

Death of George Sinclair, 5th Earl of Caithness, who turned out to be as unruly and vengeful as his grandfather, the 4th Earl (see 1567). Among his many feuds was one with the Earl of Orkney, whom he set out to slight in the following manner. During a terrible storm, a ship bearing some of the Earl of Orkney’s servants sought refuge on the coast of Caithness. But rather than offering shelter and hospitality, the Earl had the men taken into custody. They were then forced to drink large quantities of spirits, while having one side of their heads and one side of their beards shaven off. They were then bundled back onto their ship, and obliged to set to sea once more, even though the storm still raged with undiminished fury.

1644

COVENANTERS CRY JESUS AND NO QUARTER!

At the Battle of Tippermuir near Perth, the Covenanters went into action crying ‘Jesus and no quarter!’ Their prayer was apparently heard, but not in the way they might have wished. They were mercilessly slaughtered by their Royalist opponents under the Marquess of Montrose, who claimed ‘men might have walked upon dead corps to the town’. Between 1,300 and 2,000 Covenanters were slain.

1645

SCORCHED EARTH SMELLS SWEET IN THE NOSTRILS OF THE LORD

Dunnottar Castle, held by the Covenanters under William Keith, 7th Earl Marischal, was besieged by a Royalist force under the Marquess of Montrose. As the latter burnt the adjacent Keith lands, which were ‘utelrie spoilzeit, plunderit and undone’, a Presbyterian minister in the castle assured the Earl that ‘the reek will be a sweet-smelling incense in the nostrils of the Lord’.

1649

BESSIE GRAHAM CONVERSES WITH THE FOUL FIEND

One Bessie Graham, a poor woman from Kilwinning, had used some harsh words against a neighbour who had subsequently died. Bessie was thrown into prison on suspicion of witchcraft, a charge she denied. The local minister, James Fergusson, was sent to examine her, and was inclined to think her innocent. Until, that is, he went to the prison one evening. Fergusson picks up the story:

When I came to the stair-head, I resolved to halt a little to hear what she would say. Within a very short space, she begins to discourse, as if it had been to somebody with her. Her voice was so low, that I could not understand what she said, except one sentence, whereby I perceived she was speaking of somewhat I had been challenging her of and she had denied. After a little while, I heard another voice speaking and whispering as it were conferring with her, which presently I apprehended to be the Foul Fiend’s voice. She, having kept silence a time, began to speak again; and before she had well ended, the other voice speaketh as it were a long sentence, which, though I understood not what it was, yet it was so low and ghostly, that I was certainly persuaded that it was another voice than hers. Besides, her accent and manner of speaking was as if she had been speaking to some other; and that other voice, to the best of my remembrance, did begin before she had ended, so that two voices were to be heard at once.

This testimony was sufficient to see Bessie condemned and executed.

BANDIT CHIEF SHOT IN EAR WITH SILVER BULLET

At this time Caithness was being terrorised by a band of caterans led by a certain MacAllister. For some reason the bandit chief took a particular exception to the people of Thurso, who he imagined had given him some slight, and to avenge himself he decided to burn them all while they were in church. But news broke out of his intent, and the people determined to guard the seven doors of the kirk, to stop them being blockaded from the outside. An old woman wedged her prayer stool to keep one door open, while another door was defended by Sir James Sinclair of Murkle, who always came armed to Sunday service. When MacAllister tried to make entry, Sir James ran him through with his sword. This had no apparent effect, and so Sir James’s servant, believing MacAllister must be invulnerable to cold steel, snipped a silver button from the jacket of his master, loaded it into his pistol, and discharged it at the bandit chief. MacAllister fell, muttering (in Gaelic) words to the effect that, ‘Hoot toot! The bodach [old man] has deafened me.’ He had been fatally shot in the ear. This cheered the congregation no end, who fell on their attackers and overwhelmed them.

1650

NAILING OF LUGS AND BORING OF TONGUES

In a diary entry for February, John Nicholl noted that lying and deception were on the up amongst the population:

Much falset and cheating was detected at this time by the Lords of Session; for the whilk there was daily hanging, scourging, nailing of lugs [ears] and binding of people to the Tron [the public weighing-machine in Edinburgh], and boring of tongues; so that it was ane fatal year for false notars and witnesses, as daily experience did witness.

LADY BEATS GENERAL WITH LEG OF MUTTON

After his capture in Sutherland, the Royalist Marquess of Montrose was escorted south to face trial in Edinburgh by a force commanded by Major General James Holborne of Menstrie. His captors did their best to humiliate the Marquess, dressing him in rags and mounting him on an old nag. En route, the party spent a night at Skibo Castle, where their hostess was the Dowager Lady Gray, herself an ardent Royalist. Lady Gray requested that Montrose, as the guest of highest rank, be sat next to her at dinner. Holborne refused, insisting that the Marquess sit between himself and another officer. Furious at this breach of etiquette, Lady Gray seized a leg of mutton from the table and launched an attack against the person of the general, all the while reminding him and his fellow officers that when they were guests under her roof they would accord with her wishes as far as the seating plan was concerned. The point was taken, the Marquess re-seated, and civility restored. Only temporarily, as it turned out. In Edinburgh Montrose was sentenced to death, and on 21 May he was hanged on a gibbet 30 feet high. Thereafter his body was butchered: his head was placed on a spike on the Tolbooth, and his limbs sent to adorn the gates of Glasgow, Perth, Stirling and Aberdeen.

BLOOD RAINS DOWN ON BUCCLEUCH ESTATES

On 28 May it was noted that ‘there rained blood the space of three miles in the Earl of Buccleuch’s bounds, near the English Border; whilk was verified in presence of the Committee of State’.

1652

BIRDS FALL FROM SKY, PEOPLE FALL TO THEIR KNEES

On the morning of 29 March, between eight and eleven o’clock, a total eclipse of the sun plunged much of Scotland into ‘ane manifest darkness for the space of some moments’. The eclipse passed from the southwest to the northeast, spreading terror as it cut across the country. Birds fell from the sky, and likewise many people fell to their knees in prayer. ‘The like, as thought by astrologers, was not since the darkness at our Lord’s passion.’ Work in the fields ceased, in the expectation that the End of the World had come. It hadn’t, but the day was ever after remembered as ‘Murk Monday’.

WITCHCRAFT ACCUSATIONS: ‘MUCH MALICE AND LITTLE PROOF’

Cromwell appointed four English commissioners to administer justice in Scotland. Many cases were brought before them of persons who had confessed to crimes before the kirk rather than the civil authorities. Among these cases were two women accused of witchcraft, as reported by Mercurius Politicus, the semi-official newspaper of the Cromwellian regime:

The court demanding how they came to be proved witches, they declared they were forced to it by the exceeding torture they were put to, which was by tying their thumbs behind them, and then hanging them up by them: two Highlanders whipped them, after which they set lighted candles to the soles of their feet, and between their toes, then burned them by putting lighted candles in their mouths, and then burning them in the head: there were six of them accused in all, four whereof died of the torture . . . Another woman that was suspected, according to their thoughts, to be a witch, was twenty-eight days and nights with bread and water, being stripped stark naked, and laid upon a cold stone, with only a haircloth over her. Others had hair-shirts dipped in vinegar put on them, to fetch off the skin.

The commissioners resolved to put a stop to such cruelties, although further details of these particular cases are unknown. Another report of the time tells us that the commissioners had some 50 cases of alleged witchcraft brought before them, but ‘they found so much malice and so little proof against them, that none were condemned’.

1653

HANGED PERSON FOUND TO BE BOTH MAN AND WOMAN

On 11 February a certain Margaret Rannie was hanged ‘on account of some irregularities of conduct’. Margaret, it turned out, was ‘both man and woman, a thing not ordinar in this kingdom’, and when her cadaver was handed over to the anatomists, she ‘was found to be two every way, having two hearts, two livers, two every inward thing’.

SCOTLAND FOUND TO BE FULL OF WILD DISCONSOLATE HILLS

In London, James Howell published A German Diet, or, the balance of Europe wherein the power and weakness . . . of all the kingdoms and states of Christendom are impartially poised, at a solemn convention of some German princes. The book contains the following disobliging remarks about Scotland:

Good Lord, what a pitiful poor country is it! It were no petty kind of punishment to be banished thither, for it is a country only for those to dwell in that want a country, and have no part of the earth besides to dwell upon. In some parts the soil is such that it turns trees to stones, and wheat to oats; apples to crabs, and melons to pumpions [pumpkins]. In some places as you shall pass along, you shall see neither bird in the air, nor beast on the earth, nor worm creeping on the ground, nor scarce any vegetal, but black gorsy soil, a raw rheumatic air, or some scraggy and squalid wild disconsolate hills. And touching woods, groves and trees, as Stephen might have ’scaped stoning in Holland for want of stones, so if Judas had betrayed Christ in Scotland, he might (as one said) have repented before he could have found out a tree to have hanged himself upon.

A LANGUAGE WITH 11 DIFFERENT GENDERS

Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty published Logopandecteision, a work dedicated ‘To Nobody’. In this learned book Urquhart outlined an artificial language that he had created or intended to create. He claimed this language would be so simple that a ten-year-old could learn it in three months. Yet this language, he promised, would embrace 12 parts of speech, 11 genders, 11 cases, 11 tenses, seven moods, four numbers and four voices. In addition, it would contain words that could convey in seven syllables notions that other languages could only convey in 95 words. It is likely that Urquhart’s intentions were satirical.

1654

CLAN CHIEF BITES OUT THROAT OF ENGLISH OFFICER

During a skirmish near Inverlochy with General Monck’s troops, the Royalist clan chief Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, found himself engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an English officer of great size and strength. Lochiel managed to knock his enemy’s sword from his hand, but the man closed in on him and bore him to the ground, with his full weight upon him. As his would-be killer reached out for his sword, Lochiel grabbed the man’s collar and, ‘springing at his throat, seized it with his teeth, and gave so sure and effectual a bite that the officer died almost instantly’. ‘This,’ said Lochiel, ‘was the sweetest bite I ever had in my life.’

MUSICIAN EATEN BY VERMIN

(4 September) A musician called Andrew Hill was put on trial, charged with abducting his pupil, Marion Foulis, daughter of Foulis of Ravelston. The ancillary charge that he had used sorcery to steal the young lady’s affections was dismissed by the jury, although he was found guilty of abduction, and of being ‘a foolish boaster of his skill in herbs and roots for captivating women’. His sentence was to be pronounced two weeks later, but in the interval he was ‘eaten of vermin in prison, and so died’.

1656

WINE MIXED WITH MILK AND BRIMSTONE

Contemporaries complained about the adulteration of beverages practised by certain Edinburgh merchants. Wine was often mixed with milk and brimstone, while ale was made ‘strong and heavy’ by the addition of hemp seed, coriander seed, Turkish pepper, soot and salt.

1659

GOD DISPLEASED WITH TAX ON BEER

A tax of 8d. per pint was levied on beer in Edinburgh. The consequences were fearful, as described by the diarist John Nicoll:

This imposition upon the ale and beer seemed not to thrive, for at the same instant, viz., upon the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th days of September, God from the heavens declared His anger by sending thunder, fire and unheard tempest and storms and inundations of waters, which destroyed their common mills, dams and works, to the Town’s great charges and expense.

LORD FAKES OWN DEATH BY DROWNING

To the astonishment of many, Lord Belhaven returned to Scotland, having been thought to be dead some five or six years. In fact, having fallen badly into debt, he had fled from his creditors to England, arranging that his servant should take back his cloak and hat to his wife, along with the tragic news that he had drowned in the treacherous quicksands of the Solway Firth. Only his wife and servant knew the truth. Once in England, Belhaven disguised himself as a gardener, and hired himself out as such. Eventually, his debts having been settled, he felt safe enough to return to Scotland to ‘resume his rank’. However, while he was away his only son and heir died of a fever. ‘In this real death by God’s hand, who will not be mocked,’ observed the Reverend William Baillie, ‘the hope of that house perished.’

THE YOUTH WITH THE DEXTEROUS TOES

On 21 September John Nicoll reported in his diary that he had seen the most remarkable young man, a youth of 16 from Aberdeen, who had no power in his arms or hands, but who more than made up for this by the agility of his legs, feet and toes. He could write as swiftly and legibly as any notary, make his own pens, comb his hair, dress himself and thread a needle, ‘in such short time and space as any other person whatsomever was able to do with his hands’.

1660

TEA LEAVES FOUND UNSUITABLE FOR GARNISHING BEEF

A London merchant, Thomas Garway, offered a new luxury good, selling at an astonishing £10 per pound: tea. Sir Walter Scott relates in ‘The Life and Works of John Home’ (Quarterly Review, June 1827) how this valuable stuff was first received in Scotland:

The Scottish manners were, indeed, emerging from the Egyptian darkness of the preceding age, when a dame of no small quality, the worshipful Lady Pumphraston, buttered a pound of green tea sent her as an exquisite delicacy, dressed it as a condiment to a rump of salted beef, and complained that no degree of boiling would render these foreign greens tender.

1661

KING MIRACULOUSLY RESTORES PLENTY TO THE NATION

The Mercurius Caledonius, an organ of Royalist propaganda, noted how much better things had become since the Restoration of Charles II. The fishing grounds along the east coast, the paper reported, had been so barren since the king had been in exile, ‘that the poor men who subsisted by the trade, were reduced to go a-begging in the in-country. But now, blessed be God, since his majesty’s return, the seas are so plentiful, that in some places they are in a condition to dung the land with soles.’ What was more, the Mercurius claimed, the swans that had deserted Linlithgow Loch, and the fish called ‘the Cherry of Tay’, that had gone into exile with the king, had returned to their native waters.

The Presbyterian clergy took a different view. ‘Nothing to be seen but debauch and revelling,’ one minister muttered, ‘nothing heard but clamorous crimes, all flesh corrupted their way . . . They made the church their stews [brothel]; you might have found chambers filled with naked men and women; cursing, swearing, and blasphemy were as common as prayer and worship was rare.’

PREGNANT ALE-WIVES RACE UP ARTHUR’S SEAT

The Mercurius Caledonius reported that a dozen pregnant ale-wives had raced up Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh ‘for a groaning cheese of one hundred pound weight’. The second prize was ‘a budgell of Dunkeld aquavitae’. The following day, the paper announced, ‘sixteen fish-wives to trot from Musselburgh to the Canon Cross for twelve pair of lamb’s harrigals [viscera]’.

BLOOD STILL DRIPS FROM LONG-SEVERED HEAD

The ardent Presbyterian minister James Guthrie was tried for treason before Parliament, the main charge being that he had rejected the king’s authority over the kirk. The commissioner presiding over these proceedings was General John Middleton, who had joined Charles II on his return to Scotland in 1650, and whom Guthrie had shortly thereafter excommunicated, despite the pleas of the General Assembly. Guthrie was hanged on 1 June 1661, and his head displayed on the Nether Bow Port. In The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution (1721–2), Robert Wodrow recounts that a few months after Guthrie’s execution General Middleton was riding under the Nether Bow Port in a coach when a considerable number of drops of blood fell on the roof of the coach from Guthrie’s severed head. The resulting stain could not, however hard the servants scrubbed at it, be removed.

SCOTSWOMEN: UNCLEANLY AND SLUTTISH

The noted English naturalist John Ray visited Scotland, of which he had no great opinion, as he recorded in his Itineraries:

The women, generally, to us seemed none of the handsomest. They are not very cleanly in their houses, and but sluttish in dressing their meat. . . . The Scots cannot endure to hear their country or countrymen spoken against. They have neither good bread, cheese, or drink. They cannot make them, nor will they learn. Their butter is very indifferent, and one would wonder how they could contrive to make it so bad. . . . The people seem to be very lazy, at least the men . . .

1662

BLEEDING CORPSE PROVES GUILT

A maltman from Kirkcaldy called Grieve was found murdered. Suspicion fell on his son, as the two had quarrelled. The son denied he had had any hand in his father’s death. But when he was brought into the presence of his father’s corpse, and told to take his father’s hand in his, the corpse bled from the nose. This did not happen when the dead man’s wife touched the corpse. This proof of the son’s guilt being established, the young man confessed, and was hanged.

STONE FOUND IN HEART OF DEAD BOY

(October 15) Death of Colin Lindsay, 2nd Earl of Balcarres, aged only 12. While he was being prepared for embalming, ‘in his heart was found a notched stone, the bigness of one’s five fingers’. This was witnessed by a physician and an apothecary who were present.

1663

LIONESS SUCKLES LAMB

In March the diarist John Nicholl noted a curious example of interspecies adoption:

There was ane lioness brought to Edinburgh with ane lamb in its company, with whom she did feed and live; wha did embrace the lamb in her arms, as gif it had been her awn birth.

1664

EARL DIES AFTER DRINKING SEA WATER

(15 July) Death of Alexander Leslie, 2nd Earl of Leven, ‘of a high fever’. This apparently followed on from ‘a large carouse with the Earl of Dundee at Edinburgh and the Queensferry’. Some said that the two, while crossing the Forth, toasted each other with sea water, which they followed, when they made landfall, with sack (sweet white wine). It was to this fateful combination that some attributed the death of the young Earl, who was only 26 or 27 when he died.

DUTCH GIN GALORE

The Dutch ship Kennermerland foundered on the rocky shores of the Out Skerries, Shetland. On board was a cargo of strong spirits. It was many weeks before the locals returned to sobriety.

1669

MAD BRIDE FOUND IN SHIFT DABBLED IN GORE

(24 August) The Honourable Janet Dalrymple, daughter of the first Lord Stair, married David Dunbar of Baldoon in Wigtonshire. The bridegroom was not of her choosing; Janet had earlier fallen in love with Lord Rutherford, who had reciprocated her feelings, and the two had plighted their troths. But Janet’s forceful mother disapproved and had broken off the engagement in favour of Dunbar, despite the pleas of the rejected lover. The wedding went ahead, but throughout the proceedings ‘the bride remained like one lost in a reverie, and who only moves and acts mechanically’. When it came time for the couple to retire, Dunbar locked the door of the bridal chamber. Robert Chambers picks up the story in his Domestic Annals of Scotland:

. . . suddenly there was heard to proceed from the bridal-chamber a loud and piercing outcry, followed by dismal groans. On its being opened, the alarmed company found the bridegroom weltering in his blood on the threshold, and the bride cowering in a corner of the chimney, with no covering but her shift, and that dabbled in gore. She told them ‘to take up their bonny bridegroom’. It was evident she was insane, and the general belief was that she had franticly stabbed her husband. From that moment, she made no other rational communications, but pined away and died in less than three weeks. Young Baldoon recovered, but would never enter into explanations regarding the tragic occurrence.

The story provided Sir Walter Scott with the basis of his 1819 novel, The Bride of Lammermoor.

SEA CAPTAIN SUFFERS BITTER HOMECOMING

A certain Grizzel Jaffrey was executed at the Sea-gate of Dundee for witchcraft. The very day of her death, according to local tradition, her only son, the master of a vessel, sailed into Dundee harbour after a long absence. When he heard that all the commotion about the town was in consequence of his mother’s death, he immediately set sail once more, and was never again heard of in his native town.

1670

SCOTTISH AIR WHOLESOME BUT FOR STINKING PEOPLE THAT INHABIT IT

In London an anonymous pamphlet was published entitled A Perfect Description of the People and Country of Scotland. Among its many observations are the following:

First, for the Countrey, I must confess it is good for those that possess it, and too bad for others, to be at the charge, to conquer it. The Air might be wholesome, but for the stinking people that inhabit it. The ground might be fruitful had they wit to manure it. Their beasts be generally small, women only excepted, of which sort there are none greater in the whole world. There is great store of Fowl, too, as foul houses, foul sheets, foul dishes and pots, foul trenchers and napkins … For their Butter and Cheese, I will not speak withal at this time, nor no man else at any time that loves his life. They have great store of Deer, but they are so far from the place where I have been, that I had rather believe than go to disprove it: I confess, all the Deer I met withal, was dear Lodgings, dear Horse-meat, and dear Tobacco and English Beer. As for Fruit, for their Grandsire Adam’s sake, they never planted any.

1671

THE WOMAN WITH THE UNICORN HORN

(14 May) A young woman called Elizabeth Low underwent an operation at the hands of Arthur Temple of Ravelrig to excise an 11-inch ‘horn’ growing from her forehead. The item was subsequently deposited in the museum of Edinburgh University. Some years later, in 1682, it was noted that the unfortunate woman had another horn growing in the same place.

1674

A PREMATURE BURIAL

In Chirnside, Berwickshire, the death occurred of Marjorie Halcrow Erskine. She was buried in a shallow grave by the sexton, who intended to return later to steal her jewellery. When he attempted to put this plan into effect by cutting off her finger to obtain a ring, the unfortunate woman recovered consciousness. She went on to give birth to two sons.

1677

SERVANT BURNED AS WITCH AFTER COUNTING TO 59

A gentlewoman of Haddington, one Margaret Kirkwood, was found hanging in her own house one Sunday morning in June when the rest of the family returned from church. It had been noted that during the service one of the family’s servants, Lizzy Mudie, had made something of a disturbance by loudly counting out the numbers beginning with ‘One, two, three’ and continuing till she reached 59, upon which she cried ‘The turn is done!’ This appears to have coincided with the approximate time of Mistress Kirkwood’s self-destruction, and the fact that the deceased was aged 59 was taken as conclusive proof that Lizzy Mudie had had a hand in her death. Lizzy’s person was examined, and witch-marks were duly found upon her body. Lizzy confessed, and was burnt, but not before denouncing six other persons as witches. These were in turn examined by the official witch-pricker, whose proceedings were witnessed by the notable criminal advocate, Sir John Lauder. ‘I remained very dissatisfied with this way of trial, as most fallacious,’ wrote Lauder, ‘and the fellow could give me no account of the principles of his art, but seemed to be a drunken foolish rogue.’

1678

A PIOUS BEQUEST DIVERTED

A certain Thomas Moodie left 20,000 merks to the magistrates of Edinburgh to build a new church. The magistrates, however, declared they had ‘no use for a church’, and decided instead to build a new prison, to house the increasing numbers of people jailed for religious offences. The new tolbooth, in the West Port, duly bore the name and arms of its inadvertent benefactor.

1679

THE WHITE LADY OF CORSTORPHINE

(26 August) The famous Corstorphine Sycamore on Corstorphine Hill (now within the bounds of Edinburgh) witnessed a notorious crime, when the elderly James, Lord Forrester, owner of Corstorphine Castle, was murdered by his young mistress, Christian Nimmo, the beautiful if highly strung wife of an Edinburgh merchant. She had heard that Forrester had, while drunk, ‘spoken of her opprobriously’, and, blinded with fury, she rushed to Corstorphine to upbraid him. Forrester was later found run through with his own sword. She herself sought to take refuge in a garret of the castle, but had dropped a slipper, which betrayed her whereabouts. Christian said that Forrester, in a drunken fury, had rushed at her with his sword, which she had seized, and upon which he then inadvertently impaled himself. The court before which she was brought did not accept her plea of self-defence, and she was sentenced to die. Imprisoned in the Tolbooth, she managed to escape disguised as a man, but was recaptured. On 12 November she was brought to the Mercat Cross, dressed all in black. The crowd gasped as she drew aside a long black veil to expose her white neck to the executioner. It was said that after her beheading her ghost would, on nights of the full moon, haunt the paths around the Corstorphine Sycamore, dressed all in white and carrying a bloody sword.

1680

SCOTLAND’S FIRST SIGHT OF AN ELEPHANT

In November of this year Scotland was visited for the first time by an elephant. Robert Law’s Memorials includes his impressions of this novelty:

. . . a great beast, with a great body and a great head, small eyes and dull, lugs like two skates lying close to its head; having a large trunk coming down from the nether end of the forehead, of length a yard and a half, in the undermost part small, with a nostril; by which trunk it breathed and drank, casting up its meat and drink in its mouth below it; having two large and long bones or teeth, of a yard length, coming from the upper jaw of it, and at the far end of it inclining one to another, by which it digs the earth for roots . . . it was backed like a sow, the tail of it like a cow’s; the legs were big, like pillars or great posts, and broad feet with toes like round lumps of flesh . . . It was taught to flourish the colours with the trunk of it, and to shoot a gun, and to bow the knees of it, and to make reverence with its big head. They also rode upon it. Let this great creature on earth and the whale at sea be compared with a midge or minnow, and behold what great wisdom and power is with the great God, the creator and preserver of both!

MEIKLE JOHN AND THE QUEEN OF SHEBA

Hearing of his imminent arrest, the preacher John Gibb (whom even the radical Covenanters regarded as a fanatic ‘with demented and enthusiastical delusions’), fled to the moors between the Pentland Hills and Tweedale, convinced that the City of Edinburgh would soon be destroyed by fire and tempest. He and his two dozen followers rejected private property, earthly authority and manual labour, which they regarded as the Devil’s work, and instead spent the time praying, fasting and chanting the Psalms with doleful voices – earning them the ironical nickname of ‘the Sweet Singers’. Gibb, known as ‘Meikle John’, seems to have exerted a particular magnetism over the opposite sex, who comprised the vast majority of his following, and to whom he gave biblical names such as Deborah, Lidiah and the Queen of Sheba. When some of the husbands of these women turned up to reclaim their wives, Gibb repelled them at pistol point. Gibb’s Kingdom did not last long, however. In May 1681 he and his followers were seized by government troops, and Gibb appears to have suffered a breakdown – or at least a rejection of his former ‘disloyal principals’. The Duke of York, Charles II’s viceroy in Scotland, declared that Gibb rather deserved bedlam than the gallows. Accordingly, he was transported to America, where he died around 1720.

1681

LORD CHANCELLOR ALWAYS EITHER DRUNK OR SICK

Death of John Leslie, Duke of Rothes, Lord Chancellor of Scotland. In his History of My Own Time, Bishop Gilbert Burnet gave the following verdict on His Grace:

He delivered himself without either restraint or decency to all the pleasures of wine and women. He had but one maxim, to which he adhered firmly, that he was to do everything, and deny himself in nothing, that might maintain his greatness, or gratify his appetites.

‘The Duke of Rothes,’ Burnet continues, ‘was unhappily made for drunkenness.’ He not only got himself drunk, but was also the cause of drunkenness in others, who were less able to take hard drink than he himself:

This had a terrible conclusion; for, after he had killed all his friends, he fell at last under such a weakness of stomach that he had perpetual colics, when he was not hot within and full of strong liquor, of which he was presently seized; so that he was always either drunk or sick.

He died, without male heir, of jaundice, and with him the dukedom was extinguished.

1682

HANGMAN HANGED

(16 January) A certain Alexander Cockburn was put on trial for the murder in his own house in Edinburgh of a Bluegown (licensed) beggar called Adamson. The evidence was largely circumstantial: although others swore that it was so, Cockburn had denied that the beggar had been in his house the day of his death. However, on that day groans had been heard, and bloody clothes found in the house, and Cockburn was condemned to the gallows on the basis of this slender evidence. But as Cockburn was himself the hangman of Edinburgh, a substitute had to be found to carry out the office. The vacancy was gladly filled by one Mackenzie, whom, Sir John Lauder tells us, ‘Cockburn had caused to lose his place of hangman at Stirling’.

VISCOUNTESS ADMINISTERS PUNNING PUT-DOWN

John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, nicknamed ‘Bluidy Clavers’, was appointed sheriff of Wigtonshire, in which capacity he carried on a ruthless persecution of the local Covenanters. A staunch Episcopalian, he often inveighed against John Knox, the great Presbyterian reformer of the previous century. This provoked the formidable Margaret Dalrymple, Viscountess Stair, to make the following rebuke. ‘Why are you so severe on the character of John Knox?’ she asked him. ‘You are both reformers: he gained his point by clavers [talk]; you attempt to gain yours by knocks.’ When she died in 1692, Viscountess Stair ‘desired that she might not be put under ground, but that her coffin should stand upright on one end of it, promising that, while she remained in that situation, the Dalrymples should continue to flourish’. This unorthodox request confirmed the opinion of many that she was in league with the Devil.

DOG FOUND GUILTY OF TREASON

The Test Acts of 1673 and 1678 – which were designed to exclude Catholics and Non-conformists (such as Presbyterians) from public office – were long subject to ridicule. In 1682 the boys of Heriot’s Hospital in Edinburgh decided that the dog that guarded their schoolyard was the holder of a public office, and must therefore be subject to the Test. So they offered him the paper on which the required oath was written. Sir John Lauder, the contemporary chronicler, picks up the story:

But he, loving a bone better than it, absolutely refused it. They then rubbed it over with butter, which they called an Explication of the Test . . . and he licked off the butter, but did spit out the paper; for which they held a jury upon him, and . . . they found the dog guilty of treason, and actually hanged him.

1683

MINISTER DRESSES IN UNDERGARMENTS OF HIS BELOVED

John McQueen, a minister in Edinburgh, became besotted with a Mrs Euphame Scott. She, however, treated him with disdain. In pursuance of his suit, McQueen somehow got hold of ‘one of her undergarments, out of which he made a waistcoat and pair of drawers, by wearing which he believed the lady would infallibly be induced to give him her affections’. This turned out not to be the case, and McQueen was temporarily suspended from his clerical duties.

1684

A TAILOR TRIMMED

James Gavin, a tailor in the village of Douglas, suffered a severe punishment for his Covenanting beliefs. He had his ears cut off with his own scissors, and was subsequently transported to work in the plantations of the West Indies.

DEATH ON STAGE

A German quack doctor called Cornelius Tilberg (or Tilborg, or Tilbury, or à Tilbourne) was granted a licence to erect a stage in Edinburgh to demonstrate his skills. He had conducted demonstrations in London before the king in which physicians had dosed him with various poisons, whose deleterious effects he counteracted by the consumption of considerable quantities of oil. However, when he repeated the experiment in Edinburgh upon his manservant, the unfortunate subject died.

KING WILLIAM TRIES ON THE THUMBIKINS

A new instrument of torture was introduced to Scotland by the Privy Council, at the recommendation of General Tam Dalyell (aka Bluidy Tam, aka the Muscovy Beast), who had witnessed its efficacy while serving in Russia. This was the thumbikins – a device we now know as the thumbscrew. One of the first persons to suffer the thumbikins was William Spence, an agent of the Earl of Argyll. For some weeks Spence had been subjected to various tortures to persuade him to reveal what he knew of the rebellious plans of his master. Although kept awake for five nights in a row, and subjected to the Scotch Boot (a device that crushes the shin bone), Spence had kept firm. But after suffering the exquisite pain of having his thumbs crushed, Spence’s resistance evaporated.

Another victim was the Whig politician William Carstairs, who was subjected to the thumbikins before the Privy Council. After the Glorious Revolution, Carstairs became an important adviser to William of Orange. With his star in the ascendant, Carstairs was presented by the Privy Council with the very thumbikins with which he had been tortured. After King William enquired what sort of instrument it was, Carstairs brought the thumbikens to their next meeting. ‘I must try it,’ said the king; ‘I must put in my thumbs here. Now, Carstairs, turn the screw. Oh not so gently – another turn – another. Stop, stop! No more! Another turn, I am afraid, would make me confess anything.’

1685

SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD DISCOVERED

George Sinclair, mathematician, engineer and professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow, published Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, or, A Choice Collection of Modern Relations, proving evidently against the Saducees and Atheists of this present age, that there are Devils, Spirits, Witches, and Apparitions, from Authentick Records, Attestations of Famous Witnesses, and undoubted Verity. Among other things, Sinclair speculates on the origin of the ‘second sight’, a faculty supposed to be particularly common among the Highlanders:

I am undoubtedly informed, that men and women in the Highlands can discern fatality approaching others, by seeing them in waters, or with winding sheets about them . . . It is not improbable, but that such preternatural knowledge comes first by a compact with the Devil, and is derived downward by succession to their posterity, many of such I suppose are innocent, and have this sight against their will and inclination.

In discussing the fate of the so-called Witch of Lauder, who was executed in 1649, Sinclair demonstrates how impossible it was to escape the Satanic Dispensation. Just before she was to die, she made an announcement to the crowd, as recorded by Sinclair:

Now all you that did see me this day know that I am now to die as a witch by my own confession, and I free all men, especially the ministers and magistrates, of the guilt of my blood. I take it wholly upon myself: my blood be upon my own head. And as I must make answer to the God of Heaven presently, I declare that I am as free of witchcraft as any child: but being delated by a malicious woman, and put in prison under that name of a witch, disowned by my husband and friends, and seeing no ground of hope of my coming out of prison nor ever coming in credit again, through the temptation of the Devil I made up that confession on purpose to destroy my own life, being weary of it, and choosing rather to die than to live.

Sinclair draws the obvious conclusion:

Which lamentable story, as it did then astonish all the spectators, none of which could restrain themselves from tears, so it may be to all a demonstration of Satan’s subtlety, whose design is to destroy all, partly by tempting many to presumption, and some others to despair.

DEAD FOR A DOG

Walking down the High Street of Edinburgh one day, the Hon. George Douglas recognised one of his family’s dogs, which had been stolen from the house of his father, the Earl of Morton, shortly before. The dog was following the Laird of Chatto, whom Douglas accosted, informing him of the animal’s ownership. Chatto happily surrendered the dog to its rightful owner, but some days later, as Douglas walked through the town with the dog at his heels, a footman of Chatto’s called John Corsehill attempted to seize the animal. Douglas’s complaint was met with a tirade of abuse. Insults were exchanged, each calling the other a rascal, and as Douglas attempted to draw his sword Corsehill struck him twice on the head with his cudgel. The assault continued, and Douglas attempted to parry the blows. But, a contemporary tells us, ‘the footman was so furious, that he run himself upon the point of the sword, and so was killed’. It appears that Douglas’s plea of selfdefence, and that ‘no gentleman could endure publicly to be called a rascal without resentment’, was accepted.

DEVIL HURLS TABLE AT BLUIDY TAM

Death of General Tam Dalyell, aka Bluidy Tam, scourge of the Covenanters. His enemies told how Dalyell had been playing cards with the Devil one night at the Binns, his ancestral home. Such was Dalyell’s cunning that he succeeded in outsmarting the Prince of Darkness, who flew into a fury and hurled a marble table at his opponent. It missed its mark, but carried on through the window before landing in Sergeant’s Pond. The table is now back in the house, having been retrieved from the pond in 1878. As for the Devil, he threatened to blow down Dalyell’s house, prompting Dalyell to declare that ‘I will build me a turret at every corner to pin down my walls.’

1686

THE GHOSTLY ARMIES OF CLYDE

In his memoirs (published as Biographia Presbyteriana in 1827), the Covenanting rebel Patrick Walker recalls visions seen by many in the Clyde Valley:

In the year 1686, especially in the months of June and July, about Crossford-boat, two miles below Lanark, especially at the Mains on the Water of Clyde, many people gathered together for several afternoons, where there were showers of bonnets, hats, guns, and swords, which covered the trees and ground; companies of men in arms marching along the waterside; companies meeting companies all through other, and then all falling to the ground, and disappearing, and other companies appearing the same way. I went there three afternoons together, and, as I could observe, there were two of the people that were together saw, and a third that saw not; and though I could see nothing, yet there was such a fright and trembling upon those that did see, that was discernible to all from those that saw not. There was a gentleman standing next to me who spoke as too many gentlemen and others speak. He said: ‘A pack of damned witches and warlocks that have the second-sight! De’il haet do I see!’ And immediately there was a discernible change in his countenance, with as much fear and trembling as any woman I saw there; who cried out: ‘Oh, all ye that do not see, say nothing; for I persuade you it is matter of fact, and discernible to all that is not stone-blind!’ Those that did see, told what works the guns had, and their length and wideness; and what handles the swords had, whether small, or three-barred, or Highland guards; and the closing knots of the bonnets, black and blue; and these who did see them there, wherever they went abroad, saw a bonnet and a sword drop in the way. I have been at a loss ever since, what to make of this last. However a profane age may mock, disdain and make sport of these extraordinary things, yet these are no new things, but some such things have been in former times . . .

SKIPPER THROWN OVERBOARD FOR SMOKING

Around this time, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun was in political exile in the Netherlands. Mrs Calderwood of Polton met him there on her travels, and told a story about the irascible Scottish patriot, who, she said, ‘could not endure the smoke of toback’. Finding himself aboard a Dutch ship whose master would not desist from smoking, he sought relief on deck.

The skipper was so contentious that he followed him, and on whatever side Saltoun sat, he put his pipe in the cheek next him, and whiffed in his face. Saltoun went down several times and brought up stones in his pocket from the ballast, and slipped them into the skipper’s pocket that was next the water, and when he found he had loadened him as much as would sink him, he gives him a shove, so that over he hirsled [i.e. slithered overboard]. The boat went on, and Saltoun came down among the rest of the passengers, who probably were asleep, and fell asleep among the rest. In a little time, bump came the scoot [boat] against the side, on which they all damned the skipper but, behold, when they called, there was no skipper; which would breed no great amazement in a Dutch company.

Another story about Fletcher concerns his footman. The latter, tired of his master’s rages, handed in his notice. ‘Why do you desire to leave my service?’ Fletcher asked.

‘Because, sir, to tell the truth, I cannot bear your temper,’ the man said.

‘To be sure,’ Fletcher replied, ‘I am passionate, but my anger is no sooner on than it’s off.’

‘Aye, that’s true, sir, but it’s no sooner off than it’s on again.’

1688

BAN ON THE EXPORT OF HAIR

With the fashion for lavish periwigs with curls cascading down over the shoulders, there was a huge demand among foreign wig-makers for human hair. There were reports that some Scottish women had come to an arrangement with travelling merchants to harvest their heads at regular intervals, at a charge of a guinea a crop. As a consequence of such activities, the wig-makers of Scotland complained to the Privy Council that there was no Scottish hair to be had to supply the native industry. In response, in January 1688 the Privy Council issued an edict against the export of hair.

CORPSE BLEEDS ON SON’S HANDS

Sir James Stanfield, an English manufacturer who had set up business in East Lothian, was found dead in a pool of water near his house at New Mills. It was known that he had suffered from melancholy, perhaps as a result of domestic unhappiness – he had recently disinherited his son Patrick, whom he had accused of profligacy. Both Patrick and Sir James’s widow asserted that Sir James had taken his own life, and hastened to bury him. However, suspicions were aroused, not least by the haste of the burial. An exhumation was ordered, and the corpse examined by two surgeons from Edinburgh. The surgeons made an incision in the neck, and thereby established (to their own satisfaction at least) that death had been by strangulation. The incision having been sewn up and the body washed and put in clean linen, the corpse was carried to its coffin by James Row, an Edinburgh merchant, on one side, and Patrick Stanfield on the other. Those present were shocked when the corpse began to bleed copiously on Patrick’s side, staining his hands with blood. Horrified, Patrick cried to God for mercy, and collapsed on the ground groaning. This was taken as proof of his guilt, and he was sent to trial on 7 February 1688. Little further evidence was offered, apart from the fact that Patrick had cursed his father, but this was enough to find him guilty. He was hanged on 24 February, but the rope slipped and Patrick ended up on his knees. The hangmen finished the botched job by means of strangulation, after which Patrick’s tongue was cut out as punishment for having cursed his father, and his hand amputated and placed on the East Port of Haddington. The body was suspended in chains, but was secretly removed and later found in a ditch. The pious pointed out the hand of Providence in the fact that the son had, like the father, been strangled, and his corpse found in a pool of water.

MUSICIAN NAILED TO PILLORY BY HIS EAR

In Inverness, a musician called Niven had persuaded a minister to marry him to his 12-year-old pupil by recruiting a youth to impersonate the girl’s brother and to convey the apparent permission of the girl’s father, also a minister. This ‘abominable imposture and treachery’ resulted in Niven being nailed to the pillory by his ear. He was subsequently banished.

PUPPIES HANGED ON DOCTRINAL GROUNDS

In Aberdeen, Peter Gibbs, the father of the architect James Gibbs and a devout Roman Catholic, named his two young dogs Calvin and Luther, the two pillars of the Protestant faith. The local magistrates took umbrage, and ordered the innocent puppies to be hanged at the Cross ‘as a terror to evil-doers’.

1689

VIOLENT REACTION TO CHILD SUPPORT RULING

John Chiesley of Dalry was incensed when Sir George Lockhart, President of the Court of Session, ruled that he should pay ‘an alimentary provision of about £93 in favour of his wife and child’. Nursing his grievance, Chiesley pursued the judge with a hidden pistol, first intending to assassinate him in church, ‘but was diverted by some feeling concerning the sanctity of the place’. At the end of the service he trailed Sir George up the Lawnmarket, and shot him dead outside his own house. The assassin would not flee, instead proclaiming, ‘I have taught the President how to do justice.’ The authorities took a dim view of both deed and claim, and Chiesley was tried before the Lord Provost of Edinburgh. The latter handed down an exemplary sentence, which was carried out on 3 April. The guilty man was dragged on a hurdle to the place of execution, where his right hand was struck off while he still lived. He was then hanged on the gallows with the offending pistol tied round his neck.

THE HANDKERCHIEF SPY

Following the Glorious Revolution, supporters of the exiled James II held Edinburgh Castle. Several Edinburgh citizens were confined in the Tolbooth, accused of signalling to the besieged garrison. One of those imprisoned, Alexander Ormiston, had been arrested for waving his handkerchief as he walked through the Grassmarket. However, he claimed that he had merely been wiping his eyes, which had caused him irritation and pain since infancy. He obtained his release after 12 days.

THE COLONEL WHO WOULD NOT BE BURIED

While government troops burnt his castle at Inverey in Deeside, the hot-tempered Jacobite Colonel John Farquharson was obliged to take refuge in ‘the Colonel’s Bed’ – a rocky ledge in the depths of the gorge of the Ey Burn. Here his mistress Annie Ban, the great love of his life, brought him food. Before his death in around 1698 Farquharson had left instructions that he should be buried beside Annie Ban at Inverey. However, his wishes were ignored, and he was buried at Braemar. The next morning his coffin was seen to have found its way back to the surface of the earth. It was re-buried, but reappeared, re-buried again, and reappeared again. Having thus made his wishes abundantly clear, Farquharson was duly interred as he had requested, beside his beloved Annie Ban at Inverey.

1690

TORTURE JUDGED CONSISTENT WITH HUMANITY

Henry Neville Payne, an English Catholic agent of the exiled King James, was arrested in Dumfriesshire and taken to Edinburgh, where in December the Privy Council put him to the torture – despite the fact that the Declaration or Claim of Rights had declared torture unlawful. The Earl of Crawford presided over the interrogation of Payne, which involved the application of both thumbscrews and the boot. Crawford left an account of the proceedings:

About six this evening, we inflicted [the torture] on both thumbs and one of his legs, with all the severity that was consistent with humanity, even unto that pitch that we could not preserve life and have gone further, but without the least success. He was so manly and resolute under his suffering, that such of the Council as were not acquainted with all the evidences, were brangled and began to give him charity, that he might be innocent. It was surprising to me and others, that flesh and blood could, without fainting, and in contradiction to the grounds we had insinuat of our knowledge of his accession in matters, endure the heavy penance he was in for two hours. My stomach is truly so far out of tune, by being a witness to an act so far cross to my natural temper, that I am fitter for rest than anything else.

Again in contradiction of the Claim of Rights, Payne was kept in prison without trial for many years, and was not released until 1701.

1691

THE COUNTRY’S GONE TO THE DOGS ‒ AGAIN

The General Assembly, in declaring a national fast to be held on the second Thursday of January, bemoaned the moral state of Scotland:

There hath been a great neglect of the worship of God in public, but especially in families and in secret. The wonted care of sanctifying the Lord’s day is gone . . . [The] cities full of violence . . . so that blood touched blood. Yea, Sodom’s sins have abounded amongst us, pride, fullness of blood, idleness, vanities of apparel, and shameful sensuality . . . Few are turned to the Lord; the wicked go on doing wickedly, and there is found among us to this day shameful ingratitude for our mercies [and] horrid impenitency under our sins . . . There is great want of piety towards God and love towards man, with a woeful selfishness, everyone seeking their own things, few the public good or ane other’s welfare

With a singular lack of self-awareness, the document ends by decrying the fact that the vast majority are ‘more ready to censure the sins of others, than to repent of their own’.

1692

A PRAYER FOR FOOLS

A Mr Erskine was recorded in Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence as having offered up the following prayer in Edinburgh’s Tron Church:

Lord, have mercy on all fools and idiots, and particularly on the magistrates of Edinburgh.

1694

A DUPLICATING MACHINE

A man called James Young claimed to have invented ‘ane engine for writing, whereby five copies may be done at the same time, which it is thought may prove not unuseful to the nation’. The Privy Council granted Young a 19-year patent on this device, but no more was heard of it.

1695

RUM BANNED AS A DANGEROUS DRUG

Parliament banned the sale of rum, as it competed with the domestic production of ‘strong waters made of malt’, i.e. whisky. Parliament also decreed that rum was ‘rather a drug than a liquor, and highly prejudicial to the health of all who drink it’. Only eight years later, however, the Privy Council awarded certain merchants the right to establish a ‘stillarie for distilling rum’ in Leith, on the grounds that ‘in this time of war, when commodities of that nature, how necessary soever, can hardly be got from abroad’, such an operation would be ‘necessary and beneficial to the country, and for the general use and advantage of the lieges’.

1697

MIRACLES DENOUNCED AS PRANKS

(8 January) Death of Thomas Aikenhead, the last person in Britain to be executed for blasphemy. In 1696, while in his third year at Edinburgh University, Aikenhead (the son of an apothecary) was summoned before the Privy Council, accused of uttering religious opinions so heterodox as to be blasphemous, and sent for trial. The prosecution was conducted by the Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart, and the charges against Aikenhead asserted that ‘the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras’. Furthermore, the indictment continued, Aikenhead had ‘ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra’s fables’, and had ‘railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magic in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles’. In addition, ‘he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ . . . said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Mahomet to Christ’. What was more, he claimed that ‘the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them’. Finally, he was said to have maintained that Christianity would ‘be utterly extirpat’ within 100 years or so.

Despite the fact that Aikenhead had made a full recantation before his trial, which took place on 23 December 1696, the Lord Advocate demanded that he ‘ought to be punished with death . . . to the example and terror of others’, Aikenhead having shaken off ‘all fear of God’ and vented ‘wicked blasphemies against God and our Saviour Jesus Christ’. Aikenhead was found guilty and sentenced to hang, but appealed to the Privy Council, pleading his ‘deplorable circumstances and tender years’. The Privy Council ruled that they would only offer him a reprieve if the Church interceded on his behalf. In a spirit of Christian charity, the General Assembly considered that only a ‘vigorous execution’ of the sentence could curtail ‘the abounding of impiety and profanity in this land’. Following his public hanging, one minister declared that ‘God was glorified by such ane awful & exemplary punishment’.

1699

SCOT INVENTS FIREPROOF WOOD

A cabinetmaker called Robert Logan claimed to have invented a new method of making cauldrons and kettles out of wood. What was unusual about his vessels was, he claimed, that they could ‘abide the strongest fire’, and so could be used for boiling water, cooking stews, etc. The Earl of Leven vouchsafed for Logan’s invention, and the Privy Council awarded him a monopoly for ‘two nineteen years’.

ON THE LIMITED SHELF-LIFE OF CHRISTIANITY

Publication in London of Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica by the Scottish mathematician John Craig. In this work, Craig used Newtonian fluxional calculus to deduce that belief in the Christian religion would finally disappear in AD 3153. Contemporary critics found his position ‘scandalous and prophane’, but David Hume thought that Craig had a point.

THE THRASHER THRASHED

(July) In Moffat, a schoolboy called John Douglas was so severely beaten by his teacher, one Robert Carmichael, that he died. Carmichael fled, but after a few weeks he was apprehended. In January of the following year he was put on trial in Edinburgh, and, being found guilty, was sentenced

to be taken from the Tolbooth of Edinburgh by the hangman under a sure guard to the middle of the Lawn-market, and there lashed by seven severe stripes; then to be carried down to the Cross, and there severely lashed by six sharp stripes; and then to be carried to the Fountain Well, to be severely lashed by five stripes; and then to be carried back by the hangman to the Tolbooth. Like as, the Lords banish the said Mr Robert furth of this kingdom, never to return thereto under all highest pains.