banished. Confinement in prison for ten months broke the health of Robert Robert Trail Trail, who, after compearing before Parliament and making a manly answer to his libel, was permitted liberty to live in the city, from which in December 1662 he was banished out of the kingdom on pain of death. For even corresponding with him, his wife, Jean Annan, was sent to prison in June 1665. martyr. James Kirko, laird of Sundaywell, Dunscore, after lying four James Kirko, months in jail was discharged, soon to find himself on Middleton's list of fines for £360, then plundered for years into beggary by Sir James Turner and other soldiers, who had free quarters on his estate. He became a wanderer, and with Maxwell of Monreith went to Ireland, after Rullion Green. Probably it was he who returned to get the martyr's crown, being shot on the White Sands of Dumfries in 1685.2 Chiesley. The case of Sir John Chiesley of Kerswell, a staunch Covenanter, Sir John knighted by Charles I., Secretary to the Commissioners in 1646, and to Parliament, who had suffered for his fidelity to the King, was discreditable to the Government. He was charged with invading Drumlanrig in 1650 and with treason, fined £2400 and committed to one prison after another for ten years, till the King ordered his release in 1670.3 Wariston. The process against Wariston, who had evaded arrest and escaped Judgment on to Holland, was followed up on 1st February by a summons for him to compear like his associates and answer to the charge of treason. In his case they were careful to take depositions from witnesses and to prove the indictment framed. It specified in detail his treasonable acts, compassing the subversion of the Government, aiding and abetting the rebels against, and murderers of, the late King, associating with the usurpers, rising in arms against Charles II., 1 Row, Blair, 364, 416, 430. He sailed for Holland in March 1663, and returned to Edinburgh, where he died in 1678. Memoirs of Veitch and Bryson, 49, 50, 400, 403. His house and its inscription, ‘J. K. and S. W. [S. Welsh] 1651,' remain. For his epitaph, cf. Thomson, Martyr Graves, 472, 474. The Earl of Traquair, a beggar. tyrannising over the lieges, murdering some, notably Montrose, endeavouring to destroy the King's majesty after deserting him, and many other felonious acts punishable with death. On 15th May, Parliament found the fugitive guilty, and recorded a 'Decreit of Forfaltour' against him, stripping him of everything, and ordaining him to suffer the doom of traitors at the Cross of Edinburgh. A subsequent judgment honoured his head with a place on the Netherbow Port beside that of Guthrie.1 The Government, satisfied that they had made a good beginning of the reign of law and order, concluded it best meantime to stay the headsman's hand, and they left Judge Swinton, twice forfeited of life, lands, and estate, languishing in the Tolbooth, banished Simson of Airth, held a few suspects in jail, while allowing others out on bail, such as John Livingstone, and Nevay-the grim councillor at Dunaverty-whose hour had not yet come.2 ་ At this time a melancholy sight might have given Middleton pause in his wild career, had he seen it. It was none other than one of his predecessors in viceregal office-the Earl of Traquair— standing on the streets of the Capital soliciting alms from passers-by. Fraser, in his Diary, thus records the fact: I saw him (anno 1661) begging in the streetes of Edinburgh. He was in an antick garb, wore a broad old hat, short clock, and pannien breeches; and I contributed in my quarters in the Canongate at that time, which amounted to a noble which we gave him, and his hat off, the Master of Lovat, Culbocky, Glenmoriston, and myselfe; which piece of money he received from my hand as humbly and thankfully as the poorest supplicant. It is said that at a time he had not to pay for cobling his bootes, and died as we hear (1668) in a poor coblers house; so that of him we may say with the poet, who describes him well 1 Act. Parl. Scot., vii. App. 7-11, 66, 69, 95. 2 Row, Blair, 388. Simson died in Holland. Sharp declared to Primrose, Lord Register, that he begged the lives of Guthrie and Gillespie, 'which his Majesty denied'; but that he was successful in his request for a mitigation of the charge against Simson: Wodrow, i. 197 note. "Fortunae speculum, Tracuerus scandit in altum ; Ut casu graviore ruat, regisque favore After these tragedies were over, Tweeddale, with a light heart, entertained the Commissioner to a sumptuous banquet, and the only return which the Commissioner thought that this friendliness deserved was an accusation conveyed in his report to the King, to the effect that Tweeddale endeavoured to frustrate the work in Parliament which Middleton had been sent to see accomplished. Such were the 'gentlemen' for whom Charles II. declared that Episcopacy was most suitable! 2 1 Chron. of the Frasers (Wardlaw MS.), 476 (Scot. Hist. Soc., edit. 1905). The Lauderdale-Tweeddale Correspondence, in the possession of the Marquis of Tweeddale, was not available for consultation, having temporarily gone amissing. The volume has been restored to Yester House. CHAPTER XXI of the CONDITION OF THE COUNTRY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY-THE Buckle's libel THE bitterest indictment ever penned against the Presbyterian Covenanters. system as it existed in the middle of the seventeenth century will be found in Buckle's History of Civilisation in England. He expressed his conclusion thus: I will not be deterred from letting this age see the real character of a system which aimed at destroying all human happiness, exciting slavish and abject fear, and turning this glorious world into one vast theatre of woe.' In another passage he wrote: 'Whatever was natural was wrong. The clergy deprived the people of their holidays, their amusements, their shows, their games, and their sports: they repressed every appearance of joy; they forbade all merriment; they stopped all festivities; they choked up every avenue by which pleasure could enter; and they spread over the country an universal gloom.' Of their sermons he declared: 'There is in these productions a hardness of heart, an austerity of temper, a want of sympathy with human nature, such as have rarely been exhibited in any age, and I rejoice to think, have never been exhibited in any other Protestant country.' The Scots preachers 'sought to destroy not only human pleasures but also human affections. A Christian had no business with love or sympathy.' No more jaundiced critic ever essayed the measurement of the Scottish intellect or showed himself so incompetent to gauge it. Aliens, ill-informed and inclined to bias, should have a care when they emerge from their own cave to find themselves in light that confuses the untried eye. The following facts will serve as a corrective of Buckle's erroneous views of Scottish civilisation, at least in the Dalgety. The student, keeping in view the fact that the Covenanters had high ideals and noble aims, namely, to make every individual recognise his own responsibility for the temporal and eternal welfare of himself and his neighbours, in accordance with the law of love in Jesus Christ, has a key to unlock all the mysteries of the distracted age of the Covenants. If he turns to the Life of Andrew Donaldson, Donaldson, minister of Dalgety, he will find these ideals and aims largely pastor of realised in one man, who may be accepted as the type of the true Presbyterian, and also made practical in that Fifeshire parish where the minister laboured to elevate peer and peasant alike, to educate all the children, to feed, clothe, and protect the poor, to assist the indigent at home and the unfortunate abroad, to act the soldier in the hour of peril, and to repress vice. It can be demonstrated that the Covenanters practised what they preached; purity of life, truthfulness, and honesty; and further, that nearly every one of those repressive measures inspired by the Church for the curbing of vice and mitigating disease, drunkenness, profanity, Sabbath-breaking, have been, or are being, in our own day, re-enacted by intelligent governments, so that, for the good of the many, the suspect, the unsavoury, and the undesirable, whether alien or not, are being constantly policed. The most enlightened republics to-day ask from emigrants the same certificate of respectability and ability to work which kirk-sessions two centuries and a half ago demanded from incomers. Nor is it to be forgotten that these sessions were virtually magisterial courts with one educated cleric presiding over many laymen judging petty offences-surely as good a system of local government and magistracy as our present rural and burghal system, whereby many an ill-informed justice of the peace disposes of trivial cases to the best of his judgment. 2 Dean Stanley, in Lectures on the History of the Church of Scotland, 97, pointed out the incorrectness of Buckle's 'frightful picture.' * Cf. a very striking instance of policing, Glasgow Herald, 21st August 1905. |