Robert Chambers

“ Such were the natural fruits of the earnestness, beautiful but terrible, with which men then seized and worked out principles which they found, or thought they found, in the Bible—arguing on the religion of peace and good-will to men, with swords in their hands, and laws as cruel as swords, till a sense of the inconsequentiality of such reasoning for any good at length came over most of them with the sickening effect of a wind from a field of battle, and disposed them to rest content with the sulky mutual protest in which they have since lived. ”

“ The first concealment of Sir Patrick was the family burial vault, under the east end of the parish church of Polwarth, a place where he had no fire, and only during the day light from an open slit in the wall. With the comfort of a bed and bed-clothes, he endured life in this singular Patmos for a whole winter month, supplied nightly with food by his daughter Grizzel, and having no sort of entertainment to beguile the tedium of the day but his own reflections, and the repetition of Buchanan’s Psalms, which had long been charged on his memory. ”

“ The prisoners were brought in a body to Edinburgh, and confined, like sheep in a fold, within the gloomy precincts of the Greyfriars’ Church-yard, where, for four months, they had no seat or couch but the bare ground, and no covering but the sky. Two clergymen, Kid and King, were executed. Of the rest, all were set at liberty who would own the insurrection to have been rebellion, and the slaughter of the archbishop murder, and promise never more to take up arms against the government. ”

“ Such was the Scotland of 1689—an improvement upon the Scotland of 1560, though to no great extent. Perhaps, after all, if we consider how surprisingly late are all the great discoveries, inventions, and social arrangements for convenience; how gaslight, steam-machinery, railways, and the electric-telegraph are of our own day; how lately it is that mankind learned that air and water are gaseous compounds, that gravitation arranges the worlds, that our own little earth passed through a long and wonderful history before man came upon it ”

“ He loved not to be in the law contending against any man, but loved rest and quietness with all his heart, and in time of peace he lived moderately and temperately in his diet, and fully set to building all curious devices. A good neighbour in his marches, disposed rather to give than to take a foot wrongously. He was heard to say he never drew sword in his own quarrel. In his youth, a prodigal spender; in his old age, more wise and worldly, yet never counted for cost in matters of credit and honour. ”

“ Early in this century, Scotland had produced one great philosopher—who had supplied his craft with the mathematical instrument by which complex problems, such as the movement of comets, were alone to be solved. It might have been expected that the country of Napier, seventy years after his time, would have had many sons capable of applying his key to such mysteries of nature. But not one had arisen—nor did any rise for fifty years onward, when at length Colin Maclaurin unfolded in the Edinburgh University the sublime philosophy of Newton. ”

“ Here—for the present, at least—ends our record of domestic occurrences and things in Scotland. It brings the life of the nation from the rudeness of the middle of the sixteenth century down to the comparative civilisation of the close of the seventeenth, when the existing political system was nearly settled. A strange phantasmagoria, beginning with the half mail-clad baron and his band of followers in swords and pistols, and ending in the silken and embroidered gallant in full periwig and a rapier for show. ”

“ But gentlemen have latterly rather fallen out of the custom of stabbing an enemy as he walked the High Street. They no longer go in force and in ‘effeir of weir’ to assail a neighbour in his house, or throw lighted brands into it, or drive off his horses and cattle, by way of making out a point of legal satisfaction from him. The maintenance of any form of peace in Aberdeenshire or Banffshire does not now wholly depend on the good-will of the head of the Gordon family, himself a constant offender against law in as far as he clung to the Romish religion. ”

“ This day commenced at Edinburgh the signing of that National Covenant which for some years exercised so strong an influence over the affairs of Scotland. Public feeling, as far as the great bulk of the people was concerned, had been wrought up to a paroxysm of anxiety and enthusiasm regarding the preservation of the Presbyterian model. An eternal interest was supposed to depend on their not allowing their religion to be assimilated to that of England, and, weighed against this, everything else looked mean and of no account. ”

“ The Earls of Huntly and Marischal had some mutual grudge of their own, perhaps little intelligible to southern men. So it was with others. The nobility being now assembled at a convention, James, who never could check outrages amongst them by the sword of justice, did what a good-natured weak man could to induce them to be reconciled to each other, and call it peace when there was no peace. Assembling them all at a banquet in Holyrood on a Sunday, he drank to them thrice, and solemnly called on them to maintain concord, threatening to be an enemy to him who should first disobey the injunction. ”

“ The people—who, for the most part, were passionately attached to the simple fabric of their national church, and dreamt of no rivalship or enmity to it except in episcopacy—how they must have felt at the novel sight of a group of men who, in declaring against bishops, also found fault with sessions and synods, with indeed all ecclesiastical action whatever, considering each congregation independent in itself, and no member of it less entitled to pray and preach than the pastor! ”

“ The nobles, alarmed for their property, began to lean towards the middle and humbler classes, who objected to a hierarchy on religious grounds solely. While all was smooth on the surface, while the lords of the Privy Council were full of expressions of servile obedience, while they, as well as all judges and magistrates, gave most loyal and regular attendance at church, and duly knelt at the communion—a strong spirit of discontent ran through society. The more zealous Presbyterians formed the habit of meeting in private houses for prayer and worship. ”

“ The first transactions of any note were those arising from the condemnation and forfeiture of Stuart, Earl of Bothwell, an illegitimate cousin of the king, and nephew by his mother to the noted Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the murderer of Darnley. Conceiving himself to be simply a victim of the jealousy of the Chancellor Maitland, this vivacious noble was indisposed to submit to his doom; he thought, if he could reach the king’s ear, he might regain lost power and place. ”

“ Patrick Walker speaks emphatically of this frost, and says: ‘Even before the snow fell, when the earth was as iron, how many graves were in the west of Scotland in desert places, in ones, twos, threes, fours, fives together, which was no imaginary thing! Many yet alive, who measured them with their staves, [found them] exactly the deepness, breadth, and length of other graves, and the lump of earth lying whole together at their sides, which they set their feet upon and handled with their hands. ”

“ Above all, the errors of Popery must be unsparingly put down. The mass is idolatry: God, in his Book, says that idolatry is a sin to be visited with the severest judgments; therefore, if you wish to avoid judgments, you must extinguish the mass. Even modified forms and rituals which have been preserved by English Protestantism, as calculated to raise or favour a spirit of devotion, and maintain a decency in worship, are here regarded as but the rags of Rome, and spurned with nearly the same vehemence as the mass itself. Scotland will have nothing but a preacher to expound, and say a prayer. ”

“ All the vantage that he had before us was to win the house, and shut that door behind him, which chanced well for both parties; for if we could have entered the house with him, we should have killed every one another, for we were in great fury to be revenged of them, and they could do no less than defend themselves, selling their lives at the dearest rate they could, as men in despair should do. ”

“ The execution of the king, among its other bad effects, put enmity between the ruling powers of Scotland and England. A set of Scottish commissioners protested against it before the English parliament—were slighted, and turned out of the country under a guard. The leaders at Edinburgh, notwithstanding their condemnation of the late ‘Engagement,’ upheld monarchy in principle; and therefore, while England was declaring itself a commonwealth or republic, Scotland proclaimed the late king’s son—a youth of nineteen, living in exile—as Charles II., King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland. ”

“ The City of Edinburgh surrounded the Cross at the proclamation of the first parliament with twelve hundred men in arms. When the Earl of Middleton came on the last day of the year to open the parliament next day, sixteen hundred persons met him on horseback a few miles from town—‘there was seldom the like shaw.’ ‘All the nobles at this time, as also the barons and burgesses, were metamorphosed like guisers,267 their apparel rich, full of ribbons, feathers, and costly lace, to the admiration of many.’ It was all from joy at the idea of the troubles of the country being now brought to an end. ”

“ In the best Scottish houses, even the king’s palaces, the windows are not glazed throughout, but the upper part only, the lower have two wooden shuts or folds to open at pleasure and admit the fresh air. 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. ”

“ Then was seen the remarkable spectacle of the head of the church in Scotland—he whom Jerome Cardan travelled from London to Scotland only to cure of some trifling ailments—dragged with but little ceremony to a scaffold and put to a dog’s death—a victim of the frightful passions excited by civil war. In answer to a dittay which George Buchanan assisted in bringing against him at Stirling, he denied everything but a foreknowledge of and participation in the death of Moray, ‘of whilk he repentit, and askit God mercy. ”

“ Thus perished an ex-chancellor of Scotland, one who had been permitted for a time to treat the world as if it had only been made for his own aggrandisement, who had governed a king, struck down a regent, and made the greatest of the old nobility of the country tremble. ”

“ The racking concentration of attention on one subject during a long course of years, to the neglect of all other healthy objects—the constant temptation to dissimulation under a constraint which left no choice between avowed profession and moral and legal outlawry—the effects of an ultra-austere code of morals, which allowed no excuse for natural impulses—the confounding effect of a system which subordinated all the really weighty matters of the law to the mechanical fact of a signature—produced results on the general surface of society of a kind by no means pleasant to contemplate. ”

“ Ayrshire alone suffered losses to the amount of £12,000 sterling, which, in those days, was a very large sum.
A deep spirit of resentment against the Council, and especially the prelatic part of it, was the natural result of all these occurrences. The worst passions of human nature mingled themselves with the purest and noblest aspirations; and men appealed, in language of bitterness, from the iniquity of their earthly rulers to the justice of God. The wisest and best natures were perverted by feelings which had become morbid by extreme excitement. ”

“ He seems to have been a singular example of a paradox in human nature far from uncommon, and which may well make us all humble—an exalted strain of moral sentiment, refining overmuch, in coexistence with secret and inexpressibly degrading propensities. The poor man seems to have been at length unable any longer to endure the sense of secret guilt and hypocrisy; he sent to the public authorities to come and take him up. Unable to believe in the turpitude of one externally so well reputed, they sent physicians of his own religious party to see if he were not speaking from a disordered mind ”

“ Andrew Kerr, a boy of nine years of age, welcomed him at the gate in ‘ane Hebrew speech.’ At the banquet in the great hall, the English and Scottish nobility and the magistracy of Edinburgh met in the utmost amity and satisfaction. By the desire of the king, who wished to advance his native country in the eyes of the English, the wives and children of the Scottish nobility appeared in their finest dresses, shining with jewels, and were treated with great distinction. ”

“ Lady Crimond, a daughter of Johnston of Warriston; a sister-in-law of the Laird of Dundas and a sister of the Earl of Melville; the rest being generally the wives of Edinburgh citizens. Seeing it was dangerous for men to appear in the form of remonstrants, these ladies had volunteered to undertake the duty. The singularity of the occasion had brought together a crowd, which filled the close, and which is said to have comprised a large proportion of the fair sex. The press was so great and so tumultuous around the councillors, that they could scarcely make their way to the council-house. ”

“ Robert Lord Boyd entered this day into a bond of manred with William Fairly, brother of David Fairly of that Ilk. Manred, properly, is a service of allegiance; but in Scotland it had come, in the course of time, to be an agreement, sometimes between a great man and a less, sometimes between two or more equally great men, to stand by each other in all contingencies of war and law, excepting only (and perhaps it was but a hypocritical exception) where the king’s majesty and his commands were concerned. ”

“ While, then, we shall see great occasion to admire the hardy valour with which this people achieved their deliverance from bondage, we must also be prepared for finding them full of vehement intolerance towards all challenge of their own dogmas and all adherence to alien forms of faith. We shall find them utterly incapable of imagining a conscientious dissent, much less of allowing for and respecting it. ”

“ This day, John Ray, the eminent naturalist, entered Scotland for a short excursion. In the Itineraries which he has left, he gives, besides zoological observations, some notes on general matters. ‘The Scots, generally (that is, the poorer sort) , wear, the men blue bonnets on their heads, and some russet; the women only white linen, which hangs down their backs as if a napkin were pinned about them. When they go abroad, none of them wear hats, but a party-coloured blanket which they call a plaid, over their heads and shoulders. The women, generally, to us seemed none of the handsomest. ”

“ While the generality of the Lowland people of Scotland were wrought up to the highest pitch of enthusiasm in favour of Presbyterianism, the inhabitants of Aberdeen and the surrounding district remained faithful to a moderate Episcopacy, and therefore disinclined to accept the Covenant. It was a crisis to make men impatient of dissent in a milder age than the seventeenth century. As men then felt about religion—perfectly assured that they themselves were right, and that dissent was perdition—this Aberdonian recusancy could look for no gentle treatment ”