Francis Hindes Groome

“ To the fifth earl's lifetime belongs the ‘Ayrshire tragedy,’ the outcome of a long-standing feud between the house of Cassillis and the cadet line of Bargany. In 1601 young Gilbert Kennedy of Bargany, riding home from Ayr, was intercepted near Maybole by the Earl of Cassillis with five times his number of followers, and was fatally wounded. In 1602 Cassillis's old tutor, Sir Thomas Kennedy of Colzean, was murdered near Ayr by agents of Mure of Auchendrain. ”

“ Sir Thomas, according to the ‘Historie,’ was guilty of forgery and ravishment, as before he had been guilty of shooting one night at his brother the fourth earl's house, either to slay him or make the countess miscarry, or at best to feign to come to their assistance. ”

“ Next, in the war with Turkey, he earned promotion to general of infantry, and got a bullet in the knee at the storming of Otchakoff (July 1737) . ‘I had sooner,’ said the empress, ‘lose ten thousand of my best soldiers than Keith;’ but the wound took a bad turn and amputation was pronounced necessary. The Earl Marischal, however, who had hastened from Valencia to Keith's assistance, insisted on carrying him off to Paris, and on their way through Berlin the brothers visited Frederick William I and the Crown Prince Frederick. ”

“ The earl's cruel usage of the abbot of Crosraguel is described in detail by Richard Bannatyne, Knox's secretary, whose version is quoted by Scott in his notes to ‘Ivanhoe.’ It appears that after the death in 1564 of his uncle, Abbot Quintin Kennedy [q. v.] , the earl had seized on Crosraguel, of which on 10 Feb. 1566 he received from Mary and Darnley a nineteen years' lease, free of rent. But in this concession three other persons were interested—Allan Stewart, the ‘commendator;’ George Buchanan, pensioner of Crosraguel; and the Laird of Cardonald, surety to his brother, the commendator. ”

“ In May 1637, mounted on a ‘Gallowedian nagge,’ Lithgow started from Scotland, and after visiting the Bishops of Carlisle and Durham, and the Archbishop of York, came to London, and so to court. He was bound for Russia, but, finding the summer gone, merely crossed to Holland, and there witnessed the siege of Breda. In the spring of 1643 he came by sea from Prestonpans to London ”

“ Among Gilbert's ancestors were Sir James Kennedy, father of James Kennedy (1406?–1465) [q. v.] , and Gilbert, created first Lord Kennedy (c 1456) . David, his father, was created first Earl of Cassillis before 7 Feb. 1510 (Fraser, Montgomerie Earls of Eglintoun, ii. 71) , married Agnes, daughter of William, lord Borthwick, and fell at Flodden on 9 Sept. 1513. Gilbert must then have already come to man's estate, as in 1515 he was helping to besiege Queen Margaret in Stirling Castle, and in February 1516 was sent as ambassador to England. ”

“ In February 1558 he was sent with seven other commissioners to represent Scotland at the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the dauphin. Their refusal to send for the ‘honours’ or regalia of Scotland may well have incensed the Guises, but it is not true that three or four of the commissioners (among them the Earl of Cassillis) ‘died at Dieppe in one night on their homeward way, under strong suspicion of poison’ (cf. the epitaph by Buchanan ‘Occidit insidiis fallaci exceptus ab hoste’) . For Reid, bishop of Orkney, died there on 6 Sept., Cassillis on 18 Nov. ”

“ In 1519 he is found siding with Arran against Angus, and when, in May 1523, the regent Albany sailed for France, he was one of the four nobles to whom was committed the keeping of the boy-king, James V. He was sworn a privy councillor, on 4 Sept. 1524 concluded at Berwick a three months' truce with the Duke of Norfolk, and during the following winter was twice in London, endeavouring to negotiate a definite peace and a marriage between James and the Princess Mary. ”

“ He now struck southward for Ethiopia, but got lost in the desert, where he and his dragoman had for seven days to rely wholly on tobacco until, holding north-east by his compass-dial, he encountered nine hundred savage ‘Sabuncks,’ worshippers of garlic, and by one of them was guided back to Tunis. He returned to Naples over Malta and Sicily, ascending Etna, and at Syracuse burying the renegade, Sir Francis Verney; visited the Sibyl's Cave, and dared the perils of the Grotto di Cane, and then made his way by Rome, Venice, Pola, and Gradisca to Vienna. ”

“ The earl himself was outlawed for declining to give sureties against recusancy, and gained nothing by two journeys to London with the Duke of Hamilton [see Douglas, William, third Duke of Hamilton] . He joined in the revolution. ”

“ He was the only peer among the seven commissioners sent in March 1649 to confer with Charles II at the Hague, and in the summer of that year he was appointed lord justice-general, and admitted an extraordinary lord of session. In 1650 he opposed the appointment of fresh commissioners to treat with the king at Breda, but was himself appointed one of them, along with the Earl of Loudoun. ”

“ The king of Carrick, as the earl was widely called, was ‘ane particular man, and ane werry greedy man, and cared not how he got land, so that he could come by the same.’ He had been scheming for a few of the abbey lands of Glenluce when the abbot died. ”

“ Lithgow's second journey, undertaken ‘vpon some distaste, within a yeare’ (in September 1614) , took him first to the camps of Prince Maurice of Orange and Spinola (the latter had just captured Wesel) . For five weeks he had free intercourse with both camps, being respected by both generals. Spinola set him at his own table, and let him lie in his second tent. Thence he passed on to Cologne, Heidelberg, and Nuremberg (where he brought news of their death to the six Germans' kinsfolk, and was rewarded and feasted by them) ; thence through Switzerland and Italy to Sicily. ”

“ In the autumn of 1550 he attended Mary of Lorraine to France, in October 1552 he agreed with Angus, Glencairn, and the sheriff of Ayr ‘to stand with the Dowager against the Governor’ (Arran) , in 1554 he was appointed lord high treasurer, and in 1557 he, Arran, Huntly, and Argyll refused to aid the queen regent in an invasion of England. ”

“ HAGGART, DAVID (1801–1821) , thief and homicide, was born at Golden Acre, near Edinburgh, 24 June 1801. A gamekeeper's son, he was taken twice as a gillie to the highlands, received a good plain education, but had already begun to commit petty thefts when, in July 1813, he enlisted as a drummer in the Norfolk militia, then stationed at Edinburgh Castle. ”

“ After a three months' stay at Constantinople he sailed to Smyrna, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Tripoli, whence, after an excursion to Lebanon, he journeyed to Aleppo. Having missed the Bagdad caravan, and failed to overtake it at ‘Beershacke’ (Birejik, on the Euphrates) , he returned to Aleppo, and, wintering there, set out with nine hundred Armenian pilgrims, six hundred Turkish merchants, and one hundred soldiers, and by way of Damascus, Cana, Nazareth, Tyre, and Beersheba, arrived at Jerusalem on Palm Sunday 1612. ”

“ Gondomar beate a Scottish man the other day openly with his fists, in the presence of the E. of Gwartzenberg and others, for saying that such a great man in Spayne (of whom the Sp. Ambr. and the Scott who had bin in the inquisition in Spayne were speaking) had not used him like a christian. ”

“ Here, in the course of four-and-forty years, he built the rectory and the village school, restored the fine old church, erected an organ, and rehung the bells. In 1858 he was appointed an honorary canon of Norwich, and from 1869 to 1887 was archdeacon of Suffolk. Failing eyesight forced him to resign that office, when 186 clergy of the diocese presented him with his portrait by Mr. W. R. Symonds. He died at Monk Soham on 19 March 1889.
Groome was a man of wide culture and of many friends. ”

“ Andrews, before James VI, some theses 'upon the power of kings and princes,' and in 1618 supported the 'king's articles' at Perth assembly. He advanced similar arguments in his 'Reasons of a Pastor's Resolution touching the reverendreceiving of the Holy Communion,' London, 1619, 12mo, and 'A true Narration of the Proceedings at Perth,' London, 1621, 4to. ”

“ It is a curious picture of criminal life, the best, and seemingly the most faithful, of its kind, and possesses also some linguistic value, as being mainly written in the Scottish thieves' cant, which contains a good many genuine Romany words. ”

“ He became master first of Montrose academy, and then in 1597 of Dundee grammar school, holding also from 1599 the ministry of Guthrie parish, and from 1605 of Dundee. Next year, however, he resigned his mastership, while petitioning the town council to 'take consideration of his estate, and that he may have ane sufficient moyan quhairupon he may lieve as ane honest man,' but it was not till 1620 that he obtained a full payment of the augmentation then voted to his stipend. ”

“ Master and pupil returned together to Scotland about 1535, and it was at Cassillis's seat in Ayrshire that Buchanan composed his ‘Somnium.’ Shortly after his return the earl was made one of the lords of secret council to James V, and on 14 Oct. ”

“ The Faws or Falls of Dunbar were real gipsies, kinsfolk of the Yetholm Faas. But the absurdity of this attempt to fix the date and to identify the personages of the ballad is patent; for Lady Jean Hamilton was born in February 1607, was married in 1621, and died in December 1642, the year before the Westminster Assembly. There are two letters extant from Cassillis to the Earl of Eglinton and the Rev. ”

“ He belonged to the quaker body, and although 'at some time disunited from the society was afterwards reinstated into membership.' His separation may have been due to his falling in 'love with a black-eyed gipsy girl' (Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. v. 386) ; but there is nothing to warrant Mr. Simson's conclusion 'that the quaker married the gipsy girl' (Simson, Hist. of the Gipsies, 1865, p. 380 n.) He died at Northampton 30 Aug. ”

“ Though the Scottish man tooke his blowes patientlie, yet he was after committed to prison, where he yet remayneth’ (State Papers, Dom., vol. cxxix. No. 50) . He lay for nine weeks in the Marshalsea, where for fellow-prisoner he had his ‘fellow-poet,’ George Wither, and where he received a letter from two papists taxing him with having communicated at Rome in 1605.
Lithgow seems, though of this he himself makes no mention, to have been recommitted to prison on 2 Feb. 1623 (ib. vol. cliii. No. xxvi.) ”

“ Leipzig, 1888) ; another shorter Life in German by Lieutenant von Paczynski-Tenczyn (Berlin, 1889, portrait) ; Sir J. Sinclair's Statistical Account of Scotland, 1795, xv. 152; Peter Buchan's Historical Account of the Family of Keith (Peterhead, 1820) , with a translation of the French éloge pronounced on Keith at Berlin by M. Formey; Carlyle's Frederick II; Memoir of Marshal Keith, with a Sketch of the Keith Family, by a Peterheadian (Peterhead, 1869) ; William Boyd's Old Inverugie (Peterhead, 1885) ; The Jacobite Rising of 1719, edited by John Russell for the Scottish History Society, 1892. ”