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the four Incorporations of Leith (aggregate), £53, 16s. 7d.; the
Episcopal Clergy of Edinburgh, £8, 8s.; Magistrates of Haddington
(and collected by them), £28; Society of Periwigmakers in
Edinburgh, £24, 4s. 3d.; Inhabitants of Musselburgh, Inveresk, and
Fisherrow, £20; collected by Lady Grizel Cochrane, at Dumbarton,
£30; Colonel Charteris’s lady, £5, 7s. 6d.; collected by Lady Grizel
Cochrane, from sundry persons specified, £180.[487]
To do the government justice, the rebel 1716.
prisoners were treated mildly, not one of
them being done to death, though several were transported. An
attempt was made, two years later, by a commission of Oyer and
Terminer sent into Scotland, to bring a number of other Jacobite
delinquents to punishment. It sat at Perth, Dundee, and Kelso,
without being able to obtain true bills: only at Cupar was it so far
effective as to get bills against Lord George Murray, of the Athole
family; Sir James Sharpe, representative of the too famous
archbishop; Sir David Threipland of Fingask; and a son of Moir of
Stonywood; but it was to no purpose, for the trials of these
gentlemen were never proceeded with.[488]

Captain John Cayley (son of Cornelius Oct. 2.

Cayley of the city of York), one of the
commissioners of his majesty’s customs, was a conspicuous member
of that little corps of English officials whom the new arrangements
following on the Union had sent down to Scotland. He was a vain gay
young man, pursuing the bent of his irregular passions with little
prudence or discretion. Amongst his acquaintance in Edinburgh was
a pretty young married woman—the daughter of Colonel Charles
Straiton, well known as a highly trusted agent of the Jacobite party—
the wife of John M‘Farlane, Writer to the Signet, who appears to
have at one time been man of business to Lord Lovat. Cayley had
made himself notedly intimate with Mr and Mrs M‘Farlane, often
entertained them at his country-house, and was said to have made
some valuable presents to the lady. To what extent there was truth in
the scandals which connected the names of Commissioner Cayley
and Mrs M‘Farlane, we do not know; but it is understood that Cayley,
on one occasion, spoke of the lady in terms which, whether founded
in truth or otherwise, infinitely more condemned himself. Perhaps
drink made him rash; perhaps vanity made him assume a triumph
which was altogether imaginary; perhaps he desired to realise some
wild plan of his inflamed brain, and brought on his punishment in
self-defence. There were all sorts of theories on the subject, and little
positively known to give any of them much superiority over another
in point of plausibility. A gentleman,[489] writing from Edinburgh the
second day after, says: ‘I can hardly offer you anything but matter of
fact, which was—that upon Tuesday last he 1716.
came to her lodging after three o’clock,
where he had often been at tea and cards: she did not appear till she
had changed all her clothes to her very smock. Then she came into a
sort of drawing-room, and from that conveyed him into her own
bedchamber. After some conversation there, she left him in it; went
out to a closet which lay at some distance from the chamber; [thence]
she brought in a pair of charged pistols belonging to Mr Cayley
himself, which Mr M‘Farland, her husband, had borrowed from him
some days before, when he was about to ride to the country. What
further expressions there were on either side I know not; but she
fired one pistol, which only made a slight wound on the shackle-bone
of his left hand, and slanted down through the floor—which I saw.
The other she fired in aslant on his right breast, so as the bullet
pierced his heart, and stuck about his left shoulder-blade behind. She
went into the closet, [and] laid by the pistols, he having presently
fallen dead on the floor. She locked the door of her room upon the
dead body, [and] sent a servant for her husband, who was in a
change-house with company, being about four afternoon. He came,
and gave her what money he had in the house, and conducted her
away; and after he had absented himself for about a day, he
appeared, and afterwards declared before the Lords of Justiciary he
knew nothing about it till she sent for him.... I saw his corps after he
was cereclothed, and saw his blood where he lay on the floor for
twenty-four hours after he died, just as he fell, so as it was a difficulty
to straight him.’[490]
Miss Margaret Swinton, a grand-aunt of Sir Walter Scott, used to
relate to him and other listeners to her fireside-tales,[491] that, when
she was a little girl, being left at home at Swinton House by herself
one Sunday, indisposed, while all the rest of the family were at
church, she was drawn by curiosity into the dining-room, and there
saw a beautiful female, whom she took for ‘an enchanted queen,’
pouring out tea at a table. The lady seemed equally surprised as
herself, but presently recovering self-possession, addressed the little
intruder kindly, in particular desiring her to speak first to her mother
by herself of what she had seen. Margaret looked for a moment out
of the window, and, when she turned about, the enchanted queen
was gone! On the return of the family, she spoke to her mother of the
vision, was praised for her discretion, and desired to keep the matter
from all other persons—an injunction she 1716.
strictly followed. The stranger was Mrs
M‘Farlane, who, being a relative of the family, had here received a
temporary shelter after the slaughter of Captain Cayley. She had
vanished from Margaret Swinton’s sight through a panel-door into a
closet which had been arranged for her concealment. The family
always admired the sagacity shewn in asking Margaret to speak to
her mother of what she had seen, but to speak to her alone in the
first instance, as thus the child’s feelings found a safe vent. It will be
remembered that Scott has introduced the incident as part of his
fiction of Peveril of the Peak.
In the ensuing February, criminal letters were raised against Mrs
M‘Farlane by the Lord Advocate, Sir David Dalrymple, and the father
and brother of the deceased, reciting that ‘John Cayley having, on the
2d of October last, come to the house of John M‘Farlane in order to
make a civil visit, she did then and there shoot a pistol at John
Cayley, and thereby mortally wounded him.’ Not appearing to stand
her trial, she was declared outlaw.[492] Sir Walter Scott states it as
certain, that she was afterwards enabled to return to Edinburgh,
where she lived and died;[493] but I must own that some good
evidence would be required to substantiate such a statement.
The romantic nature of the incident, and the fact of the sufferer
being an Englishman, caused the story of Mrs M‘Farlane to be famed
beyond the bounds of Scotland. Pope, writing about the time to Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, breaks out thus: ‘Let them say I am
romantic; so is every one said to be that either admires a fine thing or
does one. On my conscience, as the world goes, ’tis hardly worth
anybody’s while to do one for the honour of it. Glory, the only pay of
generous actions, is now as ill-paid as other just debts; and neither
Mrs Macfarland for immolating her lover, nor you for returning to
your lord, must ever hope to be compared to Lucretia or Portia.’[494]
 A newspaper which enjoyed a temporary Oct. 20.
[495]
existence in Edinburgh —each number
consisting of five small leaves—is vociferous with the celebrations of
the anniversary of King George’s coronation in Edinburgh, Glasgow,
Aberdeen, Perth, and other Scottish towns. Ten days later, it
proclaims with equal vehemence the 1716.
rejoicings in the same places in honour of
the birthday of the Prince of Wales. Paradings and firings of
musketry by the troops, drinkings of loyal toasts from covered tables
at the Cross, bonfires, ringings of bells, form the chief
demonstrations. And it is notable that in Dundee, Brechin, and
Aberdeen, which we know to have been in those days full of
Jacobites, the symptoms of loyalty to Hanover are by many degrees
the most ostentatious, there being the more need of course for the
friends of the reigning house to exert themselves. In Dundee (where
in reality the Jacobites were probably two to one), ‘everybody looked
cheerful, and vied who should outdo other in rejoicing, except some
few of our Jacobite neighbours, who, being like owls, loved darkness;
but care will be taken that they spared not their money by being
singular.’
Loyalty is altogether a paradox, appearances with it being usually
in the inverse ratio of its actual existence, and the actuality in the
inverse ratio of the deserving. No monarch ever enjoyed so much of
it as Charles I. Since the days of his sons, when the bulk of the people
of Scotland felt themselves under a civil and ecclesiastical tyranny,
the demonstrations at market-crosses on royal birthdays had not
been so violent as now, when a new family, about whom nobody
cared or could care, occupied the throne. Nor did these again become
equally loud till the time of George III., when Wilkes prosecutions,
losses of American colonies, and unjustifiable wars with French
reformers, made loyalty again a needful article, and king’s-health-
drinkings in the highest degree desirable. On the other hand, when
rulers are truly worthy of a faithful affection on the part of their
people—as in our happy age—one never hears the word loyalty
mentioned.
All through the reign of the first George and a great part of that of
his successor, the newspaper estimate of human character seems to
have had but one element—the attachment of the individual to ‘our
present happy establishment in church and state.’ At the end of every
paragraph announcing a choice of magistrates in Scotland, it is
pointedly stated that they are all friends of the Hanover succession.
Such things are, of course, simply the measure of the extent of hatred
and indifferency with which the happy establishment and dynasty
were regarded, as well as of the danger in which it was the fate of
both to exist, from the eagerness of many to get them destroyed.
The same newspaper, while telling us of such grave things as
Scottish nobles and gentlemen waiting in the Tower and in Carlisle
Castle for death or for life, as an incensed 1716.
government might please to dictate, gives us
other notices, reminding us of the affecting truism breathed from
every sheet of the kind in our own day, that all the affairs of human
life, the serious, the comic, the important, the trivial, are constantly
going on shoulder to shoulder together. We glance from a hard-
wrung pardon for a dozen rebels, or an account of the execution of
Sergeant Ainslie, hung over the wall of Edinburgh Castle for an
attempt to render the fortress up to the Jacobites—to the let of the
lands of Biggarshiels, which ‘sow above eighty bolls of oats,’ and have
a good ‘sheepgang’ besides—or to David Sibbald’s vessel, the Anne of
Kirkcaldy, which now lies in Leith harbour for the benefit of all who
wish to transport themselves or their goods to London, and is to sail
with all expedition—or to the fact that yesterday the Duke of
Hamilton left Edinburgh for his country-seat, attended by a retinue
of gentlemen—or to an announcement of Allan Ramsay’s
forthcoming poem of the Morning Interview—for all these things
come jostling along together in one month. Nor may the following
quaint advertisement be overlooked:
‘A young gentlewoman, lately come from London, cuts hair
extremely well, dresses in the newest fashion, has the newest
fashioned patterns for beads, ruffles, &c., and mends lace very fine,
and does all sort of plain work; also teaches young gentlewomen to
work, and young women for their work. She does all manner of
quilting and stitching. All the ladies that come to her on Monday and
Thursday, have their hair cut for sixpence; at any other time, as
reasonably as any in town; and dresses the beads on wires cheaper
than any one. She lodges in the Luckenbooths, over against the
Tolbooth, at one Mr Palmer’s, a periwig-maker, up one pair of
stairs.’[496]

Since the Revolution, there had been a constant and eager

pressure towards commerce and manufactures as a means of saving
the nation from the wretched poverty with which it was afflicted. But
as yet there had been scarcely the slightest movement towards the
improvement of another great branch of the national economy—
namely, the culture of the ground. The country was unenclosed;
cultivation was only in patches near houses; farm establishments
were clusters of hovels; the rural people, among whom the
distinction of master and servant was little 1716.
marked, lived in the most wretched
manner. A large part of rent was paid in produce and by services. Old
systems of husbandry reigned without disturbance. Little had yet
been done to facilitate communications in the country by roads, as
indeed little was required, for all goods were carried on horseback.
The first notable attempt at planting was by Thomas, sixth Earl of
Haddington, about the time of the Union. From a love of common
country sports, this young nobleman was called away by his wife, a
sister of the first Earl of Hopetoun, who desired to see him engaged
in planting, for which she had somehow acquired a taste. The
domain they had to work upon was a tract of low ground
surrounding their mansion of Tyninghame, composing part of the
coast of the Firth of Forth between North Berwick and Dunbar. Their
first experiment was upon a tract of about three hundred acres,
where it was believed that no trees could grow on account of the sea-
air. To the marvel of all, Lord Haddington included, the Binning
Wood, as it was called, soon became a beautiful sylvan domain, as it
continues to this day. To pursue his lordship’s own recital: ‘I now
took pleasure in planting and improving; but, because I did not like
the husbandry practised in this country, I got some farmers from
Dorsetshire. This made me divide my ground; but, as I knew the
coldness of the climate, and the bad effects the winds had, I made
stripes of planting between every enclosure, some forty, fifty, or sixty
feet broad, as I thought best.... From these Englishmen we came to
the knowledge of sowing and the management of grass-seeds. After
making the enclosures, a piece of ground that carried nothing but
furze was planted; and my wife, seeing the unexpected success of her
former projects, went on to another.... There was a warren of four
hundred acres, vastly sandy [near the mouth of the Tyne]. A
gentleman who had lived some time at Hamburg, one day walking
with her, said that he had seen fine trees growing upon such a soil.
She took the hint, and planted about sixty or seventy acres of warren.
All who saw it at the time thought that labour and trees were thrown
away; but to their amazement, they saw them prosper as well as in
the best grounds. The whole field was dead sand, with scarce any
grass on it; nor was it only so poor on the surface, but continued so
some yards down.’[497] Such was the origin of the famous
Tyninghame Woods, which now present eight hundred acres of the
finest timber in the country. By means of 1716.
his Dorsetshire farmers, too, Lord
Haddington became the introducer of the practice of sowing clover
and other grass-seeds.
Another early improver of the surface was Sir Archibald Grant of
Monymusk (second baronet of the title), whose merits, moreover, are
the more remarkable, as his operations took place in a remote part of
the north. ‘In my early days,’ says he, ‘soon after the Union,
husbandry and manufactures were in low esteem. Turnips [raised] in
fields for cattle by the Earl of Rothes and very few others, were
wondered at. Wheat was almost confined to East Lothian. Enclosures
were few, and planting very little; no repair of roads, all bad, and
very few wheel-carriages. In 1720, I could not, in chariot, get my wife
from Aberdeen to Monymusk. Colonel Middleton [was] the first who
used carts or wagons there; and he and I [were] the first benorth Tay
who had hay, except very little at Gordon Castle. Mr Lockhart of
Carnwath, author of Memoirs, [was] the first that attempted raising
or feeding cattle to size.’[498]
‘By the indulgence of a very worthy father,’ says Sir Archibald, ‘I
was allowed [in] 1716, though then very young, to begin to enclose
and plant, and provide and prepare nurseries. At that time there was
not one acre upon the whole estate enclosed, nor any timber upon it
but a few elm, sycamore, and ash, about a small kitchen-garden
adjoining to the house [a very common arrangement about old
Scotch country mansion-houses], and some straggling trees at some
of the farmyards, with a small copsewood, not enclosed and
dwarfish, and browsed by sheep and cattle. All the farms [were] ill-
disposed and mixed, different persons having alternate ridges; not
one wheel-carriage on the estate, nor indeed any one road that would
allow it; and the rent about £600 sterling per annum, [when] grain
and services [were] converted into money. The house was an old
castle, with battlements and six different roofs of various heights and
directions, confusedly and inconveniently combined, and all rotten,
with two wings more modern of two stories only, the half of the
windows of the higher rising above the roofs; with granaries, stables,
and houses for all cattle and the vermin attending them close
adjoining; and with the heath and muir reaching in angles or gushets
to the gate, and much heath near. What land was in culture belonged
to the farms, by which their cattle and dung 1716.
were always at the door. The whole land
[was] raised and uneven, and full of stones, many of them very large,
of a hard iron quality, and all the ridges crooked in shape of an S, and
very high, and full of noxious weeds, and poor, being worn out by
culture, without proper manure or tillage. Much of the land and muir
near the house [was] poor and boggy; the rivulet that runs before the
house in pits and shallow streams, often varying channel, with banks
always ragged and broken. The people [were] poor, ignorant, and
slothful, and ingrained enemies to planting, enclosing, or any
improvements or cleanness; no keeping of sheep or cattle, or roads,
but four months, when oats and bear (which was the only sorts of
their grain) was on ground. The farmhouses, and even corn-mills,
and manse and school, [were] all poor, dirty huts, [occasionally]
pulled in pieces for manure, or [which] fell of themselves almost each
alternate year.’[499]
By Sir Archibald’s exertions, Monymusk became in due time a
beautiful domain, well cultivated and productive, checkered with fine
woods, in which are now some of the largest trees to be seen in that
part of Scotland.
There is reason to believe that the very first person who was
effective in introducing any agricultural improvements into Scotland
was an English lady. It was in 1706—the year before the Union—that
Elizabeth Mordaunt, daughter of the famous Earl of Peterborough,
married the eldest son of the Duke of Gordon, and came to reside in
Scotland. A spark of her father’s enterprising genius made her desire
to see her adopted country put on a better aspect, and she took some
trouble to effect the object, by bringing down to some of her father-
in-law’s estates English ploughs, with men to work them, and who
were acquainted with the business of fallowing—heretofore utterly
unknown in Scotland. Her ladyship instructed the people of her
neighbourhood in the proper way of making hay, of which they were
previously ignorant; and set an example in the planting of muirs and
the laying out of gardens. Urged by her counsels, during the first
twenty years of her residence in Scotland, two Morayland
proprietors, Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonston, and a gentleman
named Dunbar, and one Ross-shire laird, Sir William Gordon of
Invergordon, set about the draining and planting of their estates, and
the introduction of improved modes of culture, including the sowing
of French grasses.[500] It is rather 1716.
remarkable that Scotland should have
received her first impulse towards agricultural improvements from
England, which we have in recent times seen, as it were, sitting at her
feet as a pupil in all the various particulars of a superior rural
economy.

We are informed that, after the close of Nov.

the Rebellion, owing to the number of
people cast loose thereby from all the ordinary social bonds, ‘thefts,
robberies, rapines, and depredations became so common [in the
Highlands and their borders], that they began to be looked upon as
neither shameful nor dishonourable, and people of a station
somewhat above the vulgar, did sometimes countenance, encourage,
nay, head gangs of banditti in those detestable villanies.’ The tenants
of great landlords who had joined the Whig cause were particularly
liable to despoliation, and to this extent the system bore the
character of a kind of guerilla warfare. Such a landlord was the Duke
of Montrose, whose lands lying chiefly in the western parts of Perth,
Stirling, and Dumbarton shires, were peculiarly exposed to this kind
of rapine. His Grace, moreover, had so acted towards Rob Roy, as to
create in that personage a deep sense of injury, which the Highland
moral code called for being wreaked out in every available method.
Rob had now constituted himself the head of the broken men of his
district, and having great sagacity and address, he was by no means a
despicable enemy.
At the date noted, the duke’s factor, Mr Graham of Killearn, came
in the usual routine, to collect his Grace’s Martinmas rents at a place
called Chapel-eroch, about half-way between Buchanan House and
the village of Drymen. The farmers were gathered together, and had
paid in about two hundred and sixty pounds, when Rob Roy, with
twenty followers, descended upon the spot from the hills of
Buchanan. Having planted his people about the house, he coolly
entered, took Mr Graham prisoner, and possessed himself of the
money that had been collected, as well as the account-books, telling
the factor that he would answer for all to the duke, as soon as his
Grace should pay him three thousand four hundred merks, being the
amount of what he professed himself to have been wronged of by the
havoc committed by the duke upon his house at Craigrostan, and
subsequently by the burning of his house at 1716.
Auchinchisallen by the government troops.
Mr Graham was permitted to write to the duke, stating the case, and
telling that he was to remain a prisoner till his Grace should comply
with Rob’s demands, with ‘hard usage if any party are sent after him.’
Mr Graham was marched about by Rob Roy from place to place,
‘under a very uneasy kind of restraint,’ for a week, when at length the
outlaw, considering that he could not mend matters, but might only
provoke more hostility by keeping his prisoner any longer, liberated
him with his books and papers, but without the money.
Part of the duke’s rents being paid in kind, there were girnels or
grain stores near Chapel-eroch, into which the farmers of the district
used to render their quotas of victual, according to custom.
‘Whenever Rob and his followers were pressed with want, a party
was detached to execute an order of their commanders, for taking as
much victual out of these girnels as was necessary for them at the
time.’ In this district, ‘the value of the thefts and depredations
committed upon some lands were equal to the yearly rent of the
lands, and the persons of small heritors were taken, carried off, and
detained prisoners till they redeemed themselves for a sum of
money, especially if they had at elections for parliament voted for the
government man.’[501]
 The duke got his farmers armed, and was preparing for an inroad
on the freebooter’s quarters, when, in an unguarded moment, they
were beset by a party of Macgregors under Rob’s nephew, Gregor
Macgregor of Glengyle, and turned adrift without any of their
military accoutrements. The duke renewed the effort with better
success, for, marching into Balquhidder with some of his people, he
took Rob Roy prisoner. But here good-fortune and native craft
befriended the outlaw. Being carried along on horseback, bound by a
belt to the man who had him in charge, he contrived so to work on
the man’s feelings as to induce him to slip the bond, as they were
crossing a river, when, diving under the stream, he easily made his
escape. Sir Walter Scott heard this story recited by the grandson of
Rob’s friend, and worked it up with his usual skill in the novel
bearing the outlaw’s name.
While these operations were going on, the commissioners on the
Forfeited Estates were coolly reckoning up the little patrimony of
Rob Roy as part of the public spoil of the 1716.
late rebellion. It is felt as a strange and
uncouth association that Steele, of Tatler and Spectator memory—
kind-hearted, thoughtless Dicky Steele—should have been one of the
persons who administered in the affairs of the cateran of
Craigrostan. In the final report of the commissioners, we have the
pitiful account of the public gains from the ruin of poor Rob,
Inversnaid being described as of the yearly value of £53, 16s. 8½d.,
and the total realised from it of purchase-money and interest, £958,
10s. There is all possible reason to believe, that it would have been a
much more advantageous as well as humane arrangement for the
public, to allow these twelve miles of Highland mountains to remain
in the hands of their former owner.

Wonder-seekers were at this time regaled 1717. Jan.

with a brochure stating how Mr John
Gardner, minister near Elgin, fell into a trance, and lay as dead for
two days, in the sight of many; and how, being put into a coffin, and
carried to his parish church in order to be buried, he was heard at the
last moment to make a noise in the coffin; which being opened, he
was found alive, ‘to the astonishment of all present.’ Being then
carried home, and put into a warm bed, he in a little time coming to
himself, ‘related many strange things which he had seen in the other
world.’ In the same publication was a sermon which the worthy man
had preached after his recovery.

Mr Gordon of Ellon, a rich merchant of Apr. 29.

Edinburgh, lived in a villa to the north of
the city, with a family composed of a wife, two sons, and a daughter,
the children being all of tender age.[502] He had for a tutor to his two
boys a licentiate of the church, named Robert Irvine, who was
considered of respectable attainments, but remarked for a somewhat
melancholic disposition. A gloomy view of predestination, derived
from a work by Flavel, had taken hold of Irvine’s mind, which,
perhaps, had some native infirmity, ready to be acted upon by
external circumstances to dismal results.
The tutor, having cast eyes of affection upon a servant-girl in his
employer’s house, was tempted, one day, to take some liberties with
her, which were observed and reported by 1717.
his two pupils. He was reprimanded by Mr
Gordon for this breach of decorum, which, on an apology from him,
was forgiven. The incident sunk into the man’s sensitive nature, and
he brooded upon it till it assumed proportions beyond the reality,
and raised in his heart an insane thirst for revenge. For three days
did the wretch revolve the idea of cutting off Mr Gordon’s three
children, and on the day here noted he found an opportunity of
partially accomplishing his morbid desire. It was Sunday, and Mr
and Mrs Gordon went to spend the latter part of the day with a friend
in the city, taking their little daughter along with them. Irvine, left
with the two boys, took them out for a walk along the then broomy
slope where St Andrew Square and York Place are now situated. The
children ran about gathering flowers and pursuing butterflies, while
this fiend-transformed man sat whetting a knife wherewith to cut
short their days. Calling the two boys to him, he upbraided them with
their informing upon him, and told them that they must suffer for it.
They ran off, but he easily overtook and seized them. Then keeping
one down upon the grass with his knee, he cut the other’s throat;
after which he despatched in like manner the remaining one.
The insane nature of the action was shewn by its being committed
in daylight in an open place, exposed to the view of multitudes who
might chance to look that way from the adjacent city. A gentleman,
enjoying his evening walk upon the Castle Hill, did obtain a tolerably
perfect view of the incident, and immediately gave an alarm. Irvine,
who had already attempted to cut his own throat, but unsuccessfully,
ran from his pursuers to the Water of Leith, thinking to drown
himself there; but he was taken, and brought in a cart to prison, and
there chained down to the floor, as if he had been a wild beast.
There was a summary process of law for murderers taken as he
was with the red hand. It was only necessary to bring him next day
before the judge of the district, and have sentence passed upon him.
In this case, the judge was the Baron Bailie of Broughton, a hamlet
now overwhelmed in the spreading streets of the New Town of
Edinburgh, but whose court-house existed so lately as 1827.[503] Till
the abolition of heritable jurisdictions in 1747, the bailie of the Baron
of Broughton could arraign a criminal 1717.
before a jury of his own people, and do the
highest judgment upon him. Irvine was tried by the bailie upon the
30th of April, and received sentence of death. During the brief
interval before execution, which was but a day, the unhappy wretch
was addressed by several clergymen on the heinousness of his crime,
and the need of repentance, and, after a time, he began to exhibit
signs of contrition. The bloody clothes of the poor children being
then exhibited before him, he broke out in tears and groans, as if a
new light was shed upon his mind, and he had been able to see his
offence in its true character. He then sent a message to the bereaved
parents, beseeching their Christian forgiveness to a dying man; and
this they very kindly gave.
Irvine was next day hanged at Greenside, having first had his
hands hacked off, and stuck upon the gibbet by the knife with which
he had committed the murder. His body was thrown into a
neighbouring quarry-hole.[504]

Occurred this day at Edinburgh a June 10.

thunder-storm, attended with such
remarkable effects, that an account of it was published on a
broadside. It was little, perhaps, that it frightened the people off the
streets, caused the garrison at the Castle to look well to the powder-
magazine, and killed a man and a woman at Lasswade. What
attracted particular attention was the fate of a tavern company at
Canonmills, where two barbers from the Lawnmarket had come to
celebrate the Pretender’s birthday over a bottle of ale. They had just
drunk to the health of their assumed monarch—one of the company
had remarked with a curse how the bells were not rung or the Castle
guns fired on ‘the king’s’ birthday—when a great thunder-clap broke
over the house. ‘The people on earth,’ cried one of the party, ‘will not
adore their king; but you hear the Almighty is complimenting him
with a volley from heaven.’ At that moment came a second stroke,
which instantaneously killed one of the barbers and a woman, and
scorched a gentleman so severely that he died in a few hours. The
rest of the company, being amazed, sent to Edinburgh for doctors to
take blood of the gentleman; but the doctors told them they could do
no good. They tried to let blood of him, but found none. ‘Their bodies
were as soft as wool.’
‘There is none more blind than them that 1717.
will not see: these men may see, if they
wilfully will not shut their eyes, that Providence many times hath
blasted their enterprises.... These men were contending for that
which did not concern them; they were drinking, cursing, and
passing reflections—which in all probability hath offended the King
of Heaven to throw down his thunder, &c., a warning to all
blasphemers, drunkards, swearers, licentious livers, and others.’[505]
It is a little awkward for this theory, that among the killed was but
one of the Jacobite barbers, the other and equally guilty one
escaping.

The capture of the fugitate Rob Roy June.

seeming now an object worthy of the regard
of the Duke of Athole, a negotiation took place between them, which
ended in Rob being taken into custody of a strong party at Logierait,
the place where his Grace usually exercised his justiciary functions,
and where his prison accordingly was situated. The outlaw felt he
had been deceived, but it did not appear that he could help himself.
Meanwhile, the duke sent intelligence of the capture of Rob to
Edinburgh, desiring a company of troops to be sent to receive him.
Ultimately, however, the duke countermanded the military, finding
he could send a sufficiently strong party of his own people to hand
over the outlaw to justice.
While preparations were making for his transmission to the
Lowlands, Rob entertained his guards with whisky, and easily gained
their confidence. One day, when they were all very hearty, he made a
business to go to the door to deliver a letter for his wife to a man who
was waiting for it, and to whom he pretended he had some private
instructions to give. One of the guard languidly accompanied him, as
it were for form’s sake, having no fear of his breaking off. Macgregor
was thus allowed to lounge about outside for a few minutes, till at
last getting near his horse, he suddenly mounted, and was off to
Stirlingshire like the wind.[506]
To have set two dukes upon thief-catching within a twelvemonth
or so, and escaped out of the clutches of both, was certainly a curious
fate for a Highland cateran, partisan 1717.
warrior, or whatever name he may be called
by.

Sir Richard Steele appears not to have Nov.

attended the business of the Forfeited
Estates Commission in Edinburgh during the year 1716, but given his
time, as usual, to literary and political pursuits in London, and to a
project in which he had become concerned for bringing fish ‘alive
and in good health’ to the metropolis. It was reported that he would
get no pay for the first year, as having performed no duty; but those
who raised this rumour must have had a very wrong notion of the
way that public affairs were then administered. He tells his wife, May
22, 1717, in one of those most amorous of marital letters of his which
Leigh Hunt has praised so much, that ‘five hundred pounds for the
time the commission was in Scotland is already ordered me.’ It is
strange to reflect that payment of coach-horses, which he, as a man
of study, rarely used, and condemned as vain superfluities, was
among the things on which was spent the property wrung out of the
vitals of the poor Scotch Jacobites.
When the second year’s session of the commissioners was about to
commence in September 1717, Sir Harry Houghton appears to have
proposed that Steele should go at the first, in which case the baronet
proposed to relieve him in November; in case he did not go now, he
would have to go in November, and stay till the end of January. He
dallied on in London, only scheming about his journey, which, it
must be admitted, was not an easy one in 1717. He informs his wife:
‘I alter the manner of taking my journey every time I think of it. My
present disposition is to borrow what they call a post-chaise of the
Duke of Roxburgh [Secretary of State for Scotland]. It is drawn by
one horse, runs on two wheels, and is led by a servant riding by. This
rider and leader is to be Mr Willmot, formerly a carrier, who answers
for managing on a road to perfection, by keeping tracks, and the like.’
Next it was: ‘I may possibly join with two or three gentlemen, and
hire a coach for ourselves.’ On the 30th of September, he tells Lady
Steele: ‘The commission in Scotland stands still for want of me at
Edinburgh. It is necessary there should be four there, and there are
now but two; three others halt on the road, and will not go forward
till I have passed by York. I have therefore taken places in the York
coach for Monday next.’ On the 20th of October: ‘After many
resolutions and irresolutions concerning my way of going, I go, God
willing, to-morrow morning, by the 1717.
Wakefield coach, on my way to York and
Edinburgh.’ And now he did go, for his next letter is dated on the 23d
from Stamford, to which place two days’ coaching had brought him.
An odd but very characteristic circumstance connected with
Steele’s first journey to Scotland was, that he took a French master
with him, in order that the long idle days and evenings of travelling
might be turned to some account in his acquisition of that language,
which he believed would be useful to him on his return. ‘He lies in
the same room with me; and the loquacity which is usual at his age,
and inseparable from his nation, at once contributes to my purpose,
and makes him very agreeable.’
Steele was in Edinburgh on the 5th of November, and we know
that about the 9th he set out on his return to London, because on the
11th he writes to his wife from Ayton on the third day of his journey,
one (a Sunday) having been spent in inaction on the road. ‘I hope,’
says he, ‘God willing, to be at London, Saturday come se’ennight:’
that is to say, the journey was to take a fortnight. In accordance with
this view of the matter, we find him writing on Friday the 15th from
Pearce Bridge, in the county of Durham, ‘with my limbs much better
than usual after my seven days’ journey from Edinburgh towards
London.’ He tells on this occasion: ‘You cannot imagine the civilities
and honours I had done me there, and [I] never lay better, ate or
drank better, or conversed with men of better sense, than there.’[507]
Brief as his visit had been, he was evidently pleased with the men
he met with in the Scottish capital. All besides officials must have felt
that he came about a business of malign aspect towards their
country; but his name was an illustrious one in British literature, he
was personally good-natured, and they could separate the great
essayist from the Whig partisan and servant of the ministry. Allan
Ramsay would be delighted to see him in his shop ‘opposite to
Niddry’s Wynd head.’ Thomson, then a youth at college, would steal
a respectful look at him as he stood amongst his friends at the Cross.
From ‘Alexander Pennecuik, gentleman,’ a bard little known to fame,
he received a set of complimentary verses,[508] ending thus:
‘Scotia....
Grief more than age hath furrowèd her brow,
She sobs her sorrows, yet she smiles on you;
Tears from her crystal lambics do distil,
With throbbing breast she dreads th’ approaching ill,
Yet still she loves you, though you come to kill,
In midst of fears and wounds, which she doth feel,
Kisses the hurting hand, smiles on the wounding Steele.’

Sir Richard spent part of the summer of 1718.

1718 in Edinburgh, in attendance upon the
business of the commission. We find him taking a furnished house
for the half-year beginning on the 15th of May (the Whitsunday term
in Scotland), from Mr James Anderson, the editor of the Diplomata
Scotiæ. But on the 29th July he had not come to take possession:
neither could he say when he would arrive, till his ‘great affair’ was
finished. He promised immediately thereupon to take his horses for
Scotland, ‘though I do not bring my coach, by reason of my wife’s
inability to go with me.’ ‘I shall,’ he adds, ‘want the four-horse stable
for my saddle-horses.’
He appears to have taken the same house for the same period in
1719, and to have revisited Scotland in the same manner in 1720,
when he occupied the house of Mr William Scott, professor of Greek
in the Edinburgh University.[509] There is a letter to him from Mr
James Anderson in February 1721, thanking him for the interest he
had taken in forwarding a scheme of the writer, to induce the
government to purchase his collection of historical books. Steele was
again residing in Edinburgh in October 1721, when we find him in
friendly intercourse with Mr Anderson. ‘Just before I received yours,’
he says on one occasion, ‘I sent a written message to Mr
Montgomery, advising that I designed the coach [Steele’s own
carriage?] should go to your house, to take in your galaxy, and
afterwards call for his star:’ pleasant allusions these probably to
some party of pleasure in which the female members of Mr
Anderson’s and Mr Montgomery’s families were to be concerned. In
the ensuing month, he writes to Mr Anderson from the York
Buildings Office in London, regarding an application he had had
from a poor woman named Margaret Gow. He could not help her
with her petition; but he sent a small bill representing money of his
own for her relief. ‘This trifle,’ he says, ‘in her housewifely hands, will
make cheerful her numerous family at Collingtown.’[510]
These are meagre particulars regarding Steele’s visits to Scotland,
but at least serviceable in illustrating his 1718.
noted kind-heartedness.
‘Kind Richy Spec, the friend of a’ distressed,’

as he is called by Allan Ramsay, who doubtless made his personal

acquaintance at this time.
There is a traditionary anecdote of Steele’s visits to Scotland,
which has enough of truth-likeness to be entitled to preservation. It
is stated that, in one of his journeys northward, soon after he had
crossed the Border, near Annan, he observed a shepherd resting on a
hillside and reading a book. He and his companions rode up, and one
of them asked the man what he was reading. It proved to be the
Bible. ‘And what do you learn from this book?’ asked Sir Richard. ‘I
learn from it the way to heaven.’ ‘Very well,’ replied the knight, ‘we
are desirous of going to the same place, and wish you would shew us
the way.’ Then the shepherd, turning about, pointed to a tall and
conspicuous object on an eminence at some miles’ distance, and
said: ‘Weel, gentlemen, ye maun just gang by that tower.’ The party,
surprised and amused, demanded to know how the tower was called.
The shepherd answered: ‘It is the Tower of Repentance.’
It was so in verity. Some centuries ago, a Border cavalier, in a fit of
remorse, had built a tower, to which he gave the name of
Repentance. It lies near Hoddam House, in the parish of
Cummertrees, rendered by its eminent situation a conspicuous
object to all the country round.
We are informed by Richard Shiels that Steele, while in Scotland,
had interviews with a considerable number of the Presbyterian
clergy, with the view of inducing them to agree to a union of the
Presbyterian and Episcopal churches—a ‘devout imagination,’ which
one would have thought a very few such interviews would have been
required to dispel. He was particularly struck with the singular and
original character of James Hart, one of the ministers of Edinburgh,
who is universally admitted to have been an excellent man, as he was
a most attractive preacher. That strange enthusiast, Mrs Elizabeth
West, speaks of a discourse she once heard from him on a passage in
Canticles: ‘The king hath brought me into his chambers; we will be
glad,’ where he held forth, she says, ‘on the sweet fellowship Christ
and believers have together.’ ‘Oh,’ she adds, ‘but this was a soul-
refreshing sermon to me!’ What had most impressed the English
moralist was the contrast between the good-humour and
benevolence of Hart in his private 1718.
character, and the severe style in which he
launched forth in the pulpit on the subject of human nature, and on
the frightful punishments awaiting the great mass of mankind in
another state of existence. Steele called him on this account ‘the
Hangman of the Gospel.’[511]
The only other recollection of Steele in Edinburgh which has ever
come under the notice of the author, represents him,
characteristically, as assembling all the eccentric-looking mendicants
of the Scottish capital in a tavern in Lady Stair’s Close, and there
pleasing the whimsical taste of himself and one or two friends by
witnessing their happiness in the enjoyment of an abundant feast,
and observing all their various humours and oddities. Shiels also
relates this circumstance, and adds that Steele afterwards confessed
he had drunk in enough of native drollery to compose a comedy.
 Lord Grange tells us, in his Diary, of a 1717. Nov.
woman in humble life, residing in the
Potterrow in Edinburgh, who had religious experiences reminding us
of those of St Theresa and Antonia Bourignon, but consonant with
orthodox Presbyterianism. Being taken, along with Mr Logan, the
minister of Culross, to see her at ‘Lady Aytoun’s, at the back of the
College,’ he found her a woman between thirty and forty. At the
communion in Leith, a month ago, she had striven to dwell upon the
thought of Christ, and came to have ‘clear uptakings of his
sufferings.’ She saw him on the cross, and his deserted sepulchre, ‘as
plainly as if she had been actually present when these things
happened, though there was not any visible representation thereof
made to her bodily eyes. She also got liberty to speak to him, and ask
several questions at him, to which she got answers, as if one had
spoken to her audibly, though there was no audible voice.’ Lord
Grange admits that all this was apt to look like enthusiasm or
delusion; but ‘far be it from me to say it is delusion.’ Being once at a
communion in Kirkcaldy, ‘it was born in upon her—“Arise and eat,
for thou hast a journey to make, a Jordan to pass through.”’ In
passing across the Firth of Forth that afternoon, she was upset into
the water, but sustained till a boat came to her rescue.
The pious judge seems to have desired much to keep up
acquaintance with Jean Brown—for such was her name—and he
went several times to see her at her little shop; but the place was so
much crowded with ‘children and people 1717.
coming in to buy such things as she sells,’
that his wish was frustrated. ‘Afterwards,’ he tells us, ‘I employed her
husband [a shoemaker] to make some little things for me, mostly to
give them business, and that I might thereby get opportunity now
and then to talk with such as, I hope, are acquainted with the ways of
God.’

Immediately after the Union, the shrewd- 1718.

witted people of Glasgow saw the
opportunity which was afforded them of making a profitable trade
with the American colonies. They had as yet no vessels of their own,
and little means of purchasing cargoes; but diligence, frugality, and
patience made up for all deficiencies. There is scarcely anything in