CRIMES AND REMARKABLE TRIALS IN SCOTLAND. INCIDENTS OF THE EARLIER REIGNS--AN INQUIRY INTO THE CHARACTER OF MACBETH. The sunshine and the green leaves embrace not all that we should know of physical nature. Storm and darkness have their signs, which we do well to study; and in the tempests of the tropics, or the long winter darkness of the poles, we have types of the character of different sections of the globe, more marked than the varying warmth of the sun, or the character of the vegetation—but not perhaps so pleasing. Even so, the storm and darkness of the human soul—the criminal nature of man, provide their peculiar food for the thinker and inquirer. The annals of virtue have their own elevations and delights; but those of vice are no more to be passed over than the dark and stormy hours in the history of each revolution round the sun. "While some affect the sun, and some the shade," there may even be those whose most deeply cherished associations are with these unlit hours—who prefer the night thoughts to the day dreams. But to all, the crimes peculiar to different nations are a large part of the knowledge which man may profitably have of his race. In the history of its great criminals, a nation's character is drawn, as it were, colossally, with the broadest brush, and in the deepest shadows. National virtues have delicate and subtle tints, and exquisitely minute shadings, inviting to a nearer view—like Carlo Dolci's Madonnas, or Constable's forest landscapes: the crimes of a nation present the character of its people, as they rise from the dead in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment. The ordinary vices of men have a certain vulgar air of uniformity; but each great crime is a broad dash of the national character of the people among whom it was committed. The Cenci, and Joanna of Naples were of Italy. It was in Holland that two great and virtuous statesmen were torn to pieces by the mob. The dirk, long buried beyond the Grampians, has re-appeared across the Atlantic in the shape of the bowie-knife. The country of Woldemar and the sorrows of Werther produced that most amiable and sentimental of murderesses, Madame Zwanziger, who loved and was beloved wherever she went; so sensitive, so sympathising, so sedulous, so studious of the wants of those by whom she was surrounded, so disinterestedly patient; she had but one peculiarity to distinguish her from an angel of light—it was an unfortunate propensity to poison people! We read in the Causes CÉlÈbres, of a Bluebeard who slew a succession of wives by tickling them till they died in convulsions; and at once we are reminded of that populace who are said to partake of the natures of the ape and the tiger. The people who, for more centuries than are included in the events of European history, have been resolved into the mysterious classification of castes, produced those equally mysterious criminals the Thugs, for whose deeds our so utterly different habits and ideas are quite incapable of finding or conceiving a motive. Our own country produced the assassinations of Rizzio, Regent Murray, and Archbishop Sharpe—all pregnant with marked national characteristics; aristocratic pride, revenge of wrong, and fanatical fury. We propose to offer for the amusement or instruction—which he pleases—of our reader, a few more records of Scottish crimes, not probably all so conspicuously known to the general reader as the three we have just alluded to, yet not, we trust, without something to commend them to notice, as characteristic of the country and the age in which they were respectively enacted. The raw materials from which we propose to work out our little groups, are the records of our criminal trials; and yet we feel an insuperable inclination to begin with a name not certainly unknown, yet not to be found in the proceedings of the Court of Justiciary—Macbeth, King of Scotland. Perhaps we might consider it a sufficient reason for holding his case equivalent to a trial, that before a tribunal called the Public Opinion, he has been tried, and that at the instance The main question is, did Macbeth murder Duncan? It was an older story in Shakspeare's time than the murder of Darnley is now, and he may have taken a false view of it. We shall approach the question by an inquiry who Duncan and Macbeth were, and in what relation they stood to each other. About the end of the eleventh century, there reigned in Scotland a king called Kenneth III. Like all the other Scottish monarchs of the period, the chroniclers have given him his own peculiar tragic history, in this wise: he was induced to poison the young prince Malcolm Duff, who might possibly show a title to the throne enabling him to compete with Kenneth's own offspring. This troubled his conscience. He "ever dreaded in his mind," in the expressive words of old Bellenden, that it "should come some time to light: and was so full of suspicion, that he believed when any man rounded to his fellow, that they spake evil of him; for it is given by nature to ilk creature, when he is guilty of any horrible crime, by impulsion of his conscience, to interpret every thing that he sees to some terror of himself." He was one night appalled by a terrific vision, and next morning making his confession, he was sentenced to a pilgrimage to the tomb of St Palladius at Fordun. When the pilgrimage was over, he was invited to partake of the hospitalities of a lady named Fenella—a very neat name for a romance—at her fortalice of Fettercairn. In the civil conflicts or the administration of justice during his reign, some of the relations of this lady had been slain; among the rest her son. Having got the king into her toils, she resolved to put him to death; and the method which the chroniclers make her adopt, shows a superfluous ingenuity ridiculous enough to strip a murder of all its horrors. Kenneth was taken to see a tower of the castle "quhilk was theeket with copper, and hewn with maist subtle mouldry of sundry flowers and imageries, the werk so curious, that it exceeded all the stuff thereof." In the middle of this tower stood an image of Kenneth himself, in brass, holding in his hand a golden apple studded with costly gems. "That image," said the lady, "is set up in honour of thee, to show the world how much I honour my king; the precious apple is intended for a gift for the king, who will honour his poor subject by taking it from the hand of the image." Now matters were so arranged, that the removal of the apple caused certain springs to touch the triggers of a series of bent cross-bows pointed to the spot, and so, when the unsuspecting monarch went to take the gift, a whole sheaf of arrows penetrated to his heart. On the death of this king, though he left a son called Malcolm, the succession went to a rival line. His immediate successor was Constantine, who was killed by another Kenneth, called IV., who in his turn was killed by Malcolm, who thus regained the throne his father had filled. "The gracious Duncan" was the son of a daughter of this Malcolm. His father, strangely enough, appears to have been a priest; he is called in the old dry chronicles, which are the only ones to be depended on, Duncan the son of Trini, or Trivi, abbot of Dunkeld. Now the Kenneth IV. of the rival line, who had been slain by Let us now look to the manner in which the death of Duncan is spoken of by the most ancient authorities. Old Andrew Wyntoun, Prior of St Serfs on Lochleven, who has never yet, to our great wonder, been upheld as one of the greatest poets of his own or any other age,—perhaps we may undertake the task some day, let our readers judge by the extracts on the present occasion with what prospect of success:—Wyntoun narrates the event with the true simplicity of genius, in these two lines:— This is distinct enough, in all truth: there is no ambiguity, or room for critical doubt; nor is his fellow annalist, Fordun, less distinct, for he speaks of the slain monarch as occisus scelere. But these chroniclers wrote between three and four centuries after the event they commemorate, standing chronologically almost as near our own day as Macbeth's; and when we look into those far older, if not contemporary, annals, which narrate successive events in the briefest possible shape, we find that they contain nothing to indicate that Duncan's death took place in any more atrocious manner than the multitudinous slaughters of kings, with which their narratives are often as crowded as a Peninsular campaign gazette with killed officers. Thus, the register of the Priory of St Andrews simply states, that Duncan interfectus est. It is true that the Latin language is deficient in any word to express murder as distinguished from other kinds of slaughter. Trucido is the verb we have been accustomed to associate most nearly with the idea of assassination; but in one of the most circumspect and prosaic of the old annals, that of Tighernac, this very word is applied to the death of Macbeth himself. Blackstone notices the circumstance that the English lawyers had to coin, for their own special use, the substantive murdrum and the verb murdrare; equally creditable to their good taste in Latinity and to the social condition of their country. In fact, the Romans looked upon death, in any form, as so bad a business, that they cared little for making nice distinctions about the motive that had occasioned it, or the manner in which it was effected; and it was a condition so generally disliked, that, if any man was absurd enough voluntarily to place himself in it, neither the law nor public opinion troubled itself to express disapproval, either by driving a stake through the body or in any other way. Undoubtedly there were justifiable Having so disposed of this question, we are inclined to amuse our readers with some further notices—real and unreal—about Macbeth. Wyntoun gives us a strange wild legend of his supernatural parentage, beginning "Bot, as we fynd be some stories, Gotten he was in fairly wys; His modyr to woods made oft repaire, For the delyte of halesome air; Swa sho passed upon a day 'Til a wood her for to play, Scho met of cas with a fair man (Never nane so fair as sho thought than Before than had sho seen with sight) Of beauty pleasand, and of hycht Proportioned wele in all measure, Of limb and lyth a fair figure." Such is the description of the putative father of Macbeth. In the sententious explanation of Wyntoun, who scorned expletives, "he the devil was;" and so he told the wandering damsel— "And bade her nought fleyed to be of that, But said that her son should be A man of great state and bounty; And na man sould be born of wife Of power to reve him of his life. And of that deed in taknyng, He gave his leman then a ring, And bade her that sho sould keep that wele, And hald for his love that jewel." Wyntoun's melodious verses were lying in a dusty parchment manuscript when Shakspeare wrote; we know not if he had access to the volume, nor have we any strong reason for presuming that he would have perused it if he had. It would be too adventurous to predict whether, knowing the legend, he would have considered any reference to it as consistent with the character of his drama; but it is curious to observe, that the tale appears to have been in the eye of Sir Walter Scott, when he wrote the history of Brian the Hermit, in the Lady of the Lake, beginning— "Of Brian's birth strange tales were told: His mother watch'd a midnight fold." We shall now indulge our readers with a glance at a totally different feature in the career of Macbeth. It appears that he was a very able financier. We presume that he was his own First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer: yet in his days there was no pressure on the money-market; there was no drain of gold; there was no restriction of "All his time was great plentÉ, Abundant both by land and sea." What more is necessary? It is true, that on another occasion we have repudiated Wyntoun as an authority; but it is the privilege of the antiquarian speculator to found on an author when he is right, and repudiate him when he is wrong. We now come to a subject on which really, jocularity apart, we stand upon firm and secure ground—the spot where Macbeth fell. All the chroniclers with one voice state that it was at a place called Lunfanan. Even Raphael Hollinshed, whose version, it is universally admitted, was the one perused by Shakspeare,—after he tells how the beleaguered fugitive beheld the miraculous forest with which his doom was involved approaching him, continues to say—"Nevertheless, he brought his men in order of battle, and exhorted them to do valiantly: howbeit, his enemies had scarcely cast from them their boughs, when Macbeth, perceiving their numbers, betook him straight to flight, whom Macduff pursued with great hatred, even till he came to Lunfannane." Perhaps Shakspeare, not knowing precisely where Lunfanan lay, supposed that it was some spot close to Dunsinane, and did not wish to burden his action with the particularity of an unimportant movement. Lunfanan is, however, north of the Dee, and distant full fifty miles in a straight line from Dunsinane, the rough mountains of the Braes of Angus lying between the two places; so that the two parties must have had a pretty long running fight, and Macbeth stood out even harder game than he has generally credit for. Our favourite poet describes the chase across the broad valley of Strathmore, through the rocky glens of Clova, over the Isla and the Esk, down through the hoary forest of Glentanner, across the raging Dee, and up again through mountain and forest, in this sententious and emphatic couplet, "And our the Month they chaised him than 'Till the wood of Lunfanan." When the victory was completed, we are told that they cut off his head, and bore it to King Malcolm at Kincardine—a pleasant village on the banks of the Dee, about ten miles from Lunfanan. This same Lunfanan is a spot which it requires particular taste to love, and yet we have perambulated it not without interest. The Chroniclers speak of it as a forest, but the highest elevations are now generally bare of trees, save where in a few sheltered hollows the birches cling to the rocks. The hills are of considerable height, but round and bare, with few precipices, and little character of outline; but the glens between the hills are sheltered and well cultivated, each is enlivened by a small stream, and still more enlivened by the scanty population seeking the shelter of the recesses of the glen, and making it populous amid the waste. But we shall afford a better description than our own, in a few lines from "The Fortunate Shepherdess," by a poet who lived in a glen not far distant—Alexander Ross. It will be admitted, by the way, that our poetical quotations to-day are not of a hackneyed kind, whatever other censure they may incur. "The water keely on a level sleed, Wi' little din, but couthy what it made: On ilka side the trees grew thick and strang, And wi' the birds they a' were in a sang; On ev'ry side, a full bow-shot and mair, The green was even, gowany, and fair; With easy sklent, on ev'ry hand, the braes, To right well up, wi' scattered busses raise, Wi' goats and sheep aboon, and ky below, The bonny braes a' in a swarm did go." In one of the narrow glens, near the old parish-church, there is an oblong solid turf bank, or mound, of considerable height, and regular construction, as clean and sharp in its outline as the glacis of a modern fortification. A neighbouring stream has been diverted round it, or rather the waters have been divided and distributed on either side, so as to surround it with a fosse. This curious antiquity is called "the Peel Bog," or Castle Bog. "The course," says the author of the statistical account of the parish, "by which the water was conveyed from the burn of Lunphanan may still be traced; the measure of the circumvallation by which the water was confined may still be made; the situation of the drawbridge is still discernible; the path leading from the fosse to the top of the mound may still be trodden; and the sluice by which the water issued from the moat, was laid bare by the flood of 1829." "The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements." The timber edifice on such an eminence as the Peel Bog—probably, as the sagacious Lord Hailes imagines, the true character of the edifices possessed by Macbeth—would no more fill up the true architectural wants of the drama, than a marble Grecian temple, or a Canadian settler's log-house. Crimes briefly told without details have no interest, unless they can be put in the shape of statistics—some people will be inclined to deny that the exception is the reverse of the rule. We are not writing history, and if we were, the historical details which go no further than that A stabbed B, and C poisoned D, and E mutilated F, are not such as we are inclined to believe our readers would thank us for. It is very clear that the death of Duncan, if we had no more than authentic annals to deal with—if it had been a question merely of history, and not in some measure incidentally connected with the highest rank of human intellectual effort—would have formed a very meagre object of comment. The society of antiquaries might have endured a paper on it—for such endurance is the martyrdom they have chosen—but no other person would. In looking, then, down through Scottish history from the accession of Macbeth's successor, we find little that can be noticed with any applicability to our particular purpose, until we reach the time when the records provide us with some of the details. Yet there is one very early tragic incident, which appears to us to have considerable interest, as one of the first striking instances where the fierce spirit of clan animosity—the burning desire to avenge the wrongs of the chief—was exhibited by the Highlanders. It occurred about the year 1242. A tournament was held on the English Border, at which two young knights, Patrick Earl of Athole, and Walter de Bysset, a cadet of the family who were lords of the great northern districts, subsequently the patrimony of Lord Lovat, encountered each other. Bysset was unhorsed. Not long afterwards, the building in which the Earl of Athole lived, in Haddington, was burned to the ground, and he, with several of his followers, died in the flames. By "Whether it was of recklessness, Or it of forethought felony was, Into the Inns, lang ere day, Quhare that the Earl of Athole lay A fell fire him to coals brynt, Thus suddenly was that Earl tynt. And with him mony ma There houses and men were brunt alswa." Some Highland gillies from Bysset's country had been seen in the neighbourhood, and suspicion immediately fell upon the head of that house. He tried to prove an alibi—that he was, at the time of the tragedy, in Forfar, some eighty miles distant from Haddington, doing the honours of hospitality to the Queen. As our historical poet says: "But this Sir William at Forfar That night was late at the supper With the Queen, and her to chamber led, And in his own chamber yhed till his bed," like a good old country gentleman. But an alibi went for little in a Highland feud. "To purge him for this the Queen Profered her to swear bodily, But that assythed not the party, That was stout and of great might, They said—Wherever he was that night Bathe his armouries and his men Intil Haddington were seen then, When this earl was brynt with fire: They said the Byssets in their ire Of auld feud and great discord That was between them and that lord, Did that in forethought felony." It was still the age of ordeals. The hot ploughshares were, perhaps, obsolete, but single combat was in full practice; and even jury trial was considered a species of ordeal rather than a deliberate judgment upon evidence. The accused party in the one case appealed to the chances of war—or, taking the reference in its more solemn aspect, he left his cause to be vindicated by the God of battles: in the other, he threw himself upon the suffrages of his peers. Both ordeals were considered about equally reasonable and fair; and if the man who preferred the ordeal of battle were a gigantic warrior, unconquered, and terrible in the lists, he was, to the true believer in ordeals, not more formidable than the feeblest of his contemporaries, for a just Deity might wither his uplifted arm; and if he retained the physical superiority he had previously indicated, it was because the All-seeing Eye knew of the justice of his cause. Now Bysset, who seems to have been somewhat of a sceptic in ordeals, had no objection to trust the issue to single combat, and challenged whomsoever would dare to stand forth against him. But he would not submit to an assize or jury, for he said the whole country had prejudged him. His opponents had, somehow or other, greater faith in the ordeal of an assize than that of battle, and would not accept his challenge. In the meantime, to show his sincerity, he requested the northern clergy to curse and excommunicate the perpetrators of the deed. "Sir William Bysset gert for thi, His chaplain in his chapel, Denounce cursed with book and bell, All they that had part Of that brynnin, or any art. The Bishop of Aberdeen alswa, He gart cursed denounce all tha That either by art or part, or swike, Gart burn this time that Earl Patricke, In all the kirks halely Of Aberdeen's diocesy. Sir William Bysset this process Gart be done." Wild justice began to be enforced in the country of the Byssets, which was overrun by their enemies: in the pathetic language of our poet— "His landis quite, Was for that burning all herryet, Bathe of nowt, and sheap, and kye, And all other goods halely." At length, the Byssets agreed "to come into the king's will," or abide by his arbitration. They came under an obligation to depart to the Holy Land, and there for the remainder of their days pray for the soul of the murdered man. Their broad estates were forfeited, and a portion of them coming into the hands of a family named Frezelier or Frazer, they planted the roof-tree of the great chiefship of that name in the northern Highlands. There is little doubt that the murder of Athole was a piece of clannish vengeance over which the chief had no control. His wild Highland followers saw him unhorsed: it was enough. Into such puerile refinements The banishment of Bysset was connected with important historical results. Instead of going to Palestine, per agreement, to pray for the soul of the slaughtered Earl of Athole, he went, according to Matthew Paris, to a nearer and more agreeable place, the court of England. There he fostered in Henry III., those notions of the feudal vassalage of the Scottish kings to England, which produced the invasion of his successor, Edward I. Bysset had a considerable personal interest in this question; for, if the king of England had a paramount superiority over Scotland, his banishment and forfeiture might be reversed. Such conduct shocks all historical notions of patriotism; but what better claim had Scottish nationality on the Norman adventurer, than the respectability of Juggernaut has on a member of the supreme council of Calcutta? The ancestors of the house probably came over with William, a century and a half earlier; the banished lord was perhaps brought over from England with his father or grandfather, to accept the chiefship of a portion of the Highland wastes, over which the King of Scots professed to hold sovereignty. Aggrandisement was the sole object among the barbarians of the north; and when they ceased to derive a territorial revenue within Scotland, their connexion with the country where they lived was as completely closed, as that of the governor of a colony when he is recalled. The subsequent history of this race was as strange and eventful as their first appearance in the Scottish annals. They became great lords in Ulster; and early in the fifteenth century they were again represented by a Scotsman, Donald Balloch, the hero of the battle of Inverlochy, whose mother was the heiress of the Byssets. For some time after this, we might trace their descent, like the track of a wild beast, by the marks of rapine and disorder; and at a later period we finally lose sight of the pedigree of the Byssets, in Montrose's celebrated ally, Kilkittoch. Few of the incidental notices connected with those minor offences which mark the general character of the people, can be found anterior to the commencement of the criminal records. Hector Boece and our friend the poet occasionally tell wondrous incidents; but they are not to be depended on, and few of them have enough of dramatic spirit to be interesting as fables. We are inclined, however, to mention, in passing, the judicial feats of stout old Regent Randolph, whom the poet maintains to have been the greatest of law reformers; in testimony whereof, he adduces a case in point, far beyond the nicety of modern juridical philosophy. The regent hanged a man for stealing his own property. There was a law, that the community should make good every theft, "A gready earl soon after was, Burnin' in sik greediness, That his plough irons himself stall, And hid them in a peet pot all. He playned to the sheriff sare, That stolen his plough irons were; The sheriff than paid him shillings twa, And after that he done had sa, Soon a great court he gart set, Wytting of that stelth to get." The fraud was discovered, and the perpetrator of it hanged. The murder of James I. is one of the few crimes anterior to the commencement of the records, of which a contemporary account, circumstantial and truthlike, has been preserved. There are, on the other hand, among the early criminal records, two instances of conspiracy against the life of the monarch, of which the particulars are not sufficiently ample to give them the interest of mystery. To excite curiosity, we must see a certain way, while we are unable to see so far as we desire: but in these cases we have little more than the accusation and the condemnation. One of the sufferers was Janet Lady Glammis, condemned to be burned on the 17th of July 1537; we find her name in the criminal record five years earlier, charged with "art and part of the intoxication of John Lord Glammis her husband." The charge has not a very formidable sound, but it doubtless meant either poisoning or sorcery or both; for they were then held to be one concern, as the Romans showed that they deemed them by the title they conferred on the witch, "venefica." This trial is remarkable from the circumstance of a number of gentlemen having preferred paying a penalty to acting on the jury. Perhaps they were inclined, as a later bulwark of our constitution is said to have done, to find a verdict of 'sarved him right.' It was through the instrumentality of poison that the unfortunate lady was charged with intending to effect her design against the life of the king; but of her motive, or ultimate object there is no indication, beyond her relationship to the Douglas family, and probable connexion with their intrigues. The other charge of treason occurred so closely at the same juncture, that for this reason alone historians have supposed that they had both some untraced connexion with a common plot. The culprit in this instance was John Master of Forbes, who was charged with a design to shoot the king as he passed through the town of Aberdeen. It was a service which he was likely to have performed as successfully as Bothwellhaugh, for he had already shown his abilities in the murder of his neighbour, Seton of Meldrum. In those days, the people who took upon them to fire at kings—very different from the maudlin wretches whose diseased brains conceive such horrid projects in a civilised age—knew what they were about, and were generally successful. They were well accustomed to "break into the bloody house of life;" and the attempt on a crowned monarch was merely a higher range of practice, tasking their best abilities. The simple truth is this: that in the present age we are not accustomed to shooting people, and The earliest of the Scottish criminal records that have been preserved begin in the reign of James IV., about the year 1488. Mr Pitcairn, who has generously laid these early records before the public, not at the expense of the record commission but at his own, says of them,—"The books of adjournal and minute books of the supreme criminal tribunal of Scotland, as well as the records of the Justice Aires, &c. at these remote periods, were kept in an obscure forensic Latin. This circumstance, added to the well-known difficulty of deciphering the ordinary MSS. of these centuries, and the fact of the books now preserved being generally mere scrolls and memoranda, written with many contractions and evidently during the hurry of the court proceedings, have hitherto rendered the task of examining them, and presenting the public with the more important cases, a labour of a peculiarly irksome and repulsive kind." We do not doubt it, and hence our gratitude to Mr Pitcairn, for not only deciphering these discouraging manuscripts, but translating the Latin into English. Those indeed who, like ourselves, have perused his volumes—if any other person has perused them—owe a double debt of gratitude to Mr Pitcairn; for he has enabled us to read, in excellent type, what we would otherwise have had to decipher in distressing MS., and he has given us the means of pursuing the task of research by our own fireside, instead of in the interior of the Register House; while we have the satisfaction to feel, in perusing his quartos, that the number of people to whom, in common with ourselves, they have laid the field open, is a very limited one indeed—so limited, that we shall consider every quotation we make from his volumes as select and valuable as if we were able to subjoin MS. penes auct. to it. The earliest of these translations from the old Latin records contain the minutes of circuit courts on the Borders. The entries are as like each other as those of a police charge book. Plunder of cattle is the perpetual theme, and the quantity of business done by individuals is sometimes startling. Here is an ordinary specimen:— "Walter Scott of Howpaslot, allowed to compound for treasonably bringing in William Scott, called Gyde, John his brother, and other traitors of Levyn, to the Hereship of Harehede. Item, for theftuously and treasonably resetting of Henry Scott and other traitors of Levyn: item, for the treasonable stouthrief of forty oxen and cows, and two hundred sheep, from the tenants of Harehede, at the same time. Robert Scott of Quhitchester became surety for his entry at the next Justice Aire." Such were the gentry who, in the words of the namesake of Howpaslot, "Drove the beeves that made their broth, From England and from Scotland both." Another entry like the former, containing more names that will sound not unfamiliar, may be given as a further specimen. The two, from their similarity, will satisfy the reader that it would tend little to edification to make a more extensive selection. "John Scott of Dalloraine, allowed to compound for art and part of the resetting of John Rede and John Scott in Tushielaw in his theftuous deeds; and especially the time that the said John Scott stole a 'drift' of sheep from Thomas Johnson forth of Quhithop. Item, for treasonably resetting Hector Armstrong, a traitor of Levyn, in his theftuous deeds and treasons, &c., &c. Item, for common oppression of the lieges, in taking and plundering them of their horses and goods by his own authority. Item, for intercommuning with the English in treasonable manner. Item, for common reset of the thieves of Liddesdaile, Eskdale, and Ewesdale. Item, for slaughter of one called Colthride, &c., &c. Robert Scott of Quhitchester became surety to satisfy the parties." The reader of Scottish history knows that, in the year 1530, James V., finding that by Circuit Courts of Justiciary he produced little more effect upon these Border depredators than if he had made a gratuitous distribution of Cicero de Officiis among them, made During the same reign, outbreaks in the Highlands assumed a somewhat similar character to those of the Border rievers; but the Celts conducted their operations on a much larger scale, and we intend to devote to them a separate paper. The disturbances connected with the Reformation are essentially a part of the history of the kingdom, and in that shape too well known to have a place here: but a considerable time before these great convulsions, some smaller offences occasionally connected themselves with the priesthood, and their relation to the rest of the community. Even in the days when the church of Rome was so far Catholic as to be almost co-extensive with Christianity, Scotland was not without occasional ebullitions, in which the savage nature burst the spiritual bonds that, in its ordinary moments, held it in subjection. Boece relates an affair of this sort, and its consequences, with a rapidity almost unmatched, when we consider the quantity and the serious character of the business transacted. It was in the reign of Alexander III. that, according to his translator, "The men of Caithness burnt Adam, their bishop, after that he had cursed them for non-payment of their teinds. King Alexander hearing sic terrible cruelty done to this noble prelate, ceased not till four hundred of the principal doers thereof were hanged." "King Alexander," continues the chronicler, "for this punition was gretumly beloved by the Pope." No wonder! Nearly contemporary with the crusade of James V. against the Border rievers, was the murder of James Inglis, abbot of Culross, by Blacater baron of Tullyallan, and William Lothian, a priest, both of whom were found guilty and beheaded, while others were acquitted. The trial seems to have excited much interest, for Bishop Leslie tells us that the ceremony of the degradation of the priest, previously to his being handed over to the civil power, took place upon "ane public scaffold in the toun of Edinburgh," "the King, the Queen, and a great multitude of people being present." A year or two afterwards we find the somewhat singular circumstance of a whole list of priests charged with an act of violence;—"John Roull, prior of Pittenweem; Patrick and Bartholomew Forman, and six other canons; Mr Alexander Ramsay, rector of Muckart; Sir John Ramsay, and three other chaplains, and John Blackadder, parish clerk of Sawling." They were re-pledged to be tried by their own ecclesiastical court. It appears that, in the course of a dispute regarding the right to the produce of the land of Pittenweem, an officer of the court was appointed to reap the crop. When he repaired to the spot, the sub-prior and an assemblage of followers threatened him with violence. He found himself placed in a very curious position, and made an equally curious request. When a messenger is deforced, those who have used violence are liable to damages. The messenger on this occasion, being a shrewd and calculating man, surveyed The same Spartan brevity that characterises the early portions of the criminal records, sometimes reduces the history of bloody family feuds, the particulars of which might fill volumes of romance, to the most tantalising dimensions. They are rather inventoried or enumerated by head-mark, than even recorded, and generally present no more satisfactory detail than the following:—
That one of the parties might be a magistrate administering the law, was no impediment to the prosecution of a feud, but rather served to give solemnity and importance to the perpetration of some act of vengeance: thus—
The meagreness of these entries whets one's appetite for some detail of the stirring and tragical events of which they form the bare indexes. With the exception of the great Highland feuds, which burned on so large a scale as to be in a manner historical, the earliest detailed account of a crime arising in family animosity is connected with the feud between the Drummonds and the Blairs in the year 1554. The crime which brought the feud within the notice of the law, was the murder of George Drummond of Leadcrieff and William his son. The perpetrators, besides a long list of Blairs, include several other names still known in the Braes of Perthshire—such as Chalmers, Butter, Smyth, and Robertson. They were charged with assembling to the number of eighty, "with jacks, coats of mail, steel bonnets, lance-staffs, long culverings with lighted lints, and other weapons invasive." The day on which this tumultuous assembly proceeded to their work of vengeance was a Sunday, and the place chosen for the perpetration was the church of Blair. Being apparently afraid of the number of friends and retainers by whom their victims happened to be surrounded during the performance of divine worship, it is stated that they were obliged to postpone their purpose, and that "they passed to the Laird of Gormok's place, and their dyned with him:" a pretty large dinner-party, certainly. Leaving spies to watch the enemy's motions, they were soon afterwards summoned The retribution on the offenders is certainly not the least curious part of the affair. That eighty armed men should seize, and put to death, two individuals, either in or out of a church, appears to have been a matter with which the law and the public were under no obligation to interfere, if the parties immediately interested could come to terms. Accordingly, we find on the record some fragments of a negotiation between the head of the Drummonds and the murderers. Some of them, among other more substantial offers, agree "to gang, or cause to gang," the four head pilgrimages of Scotland; to do penance for the souls of the dead for any reasonable number of years; and, thirdly, "to do honour to the kin and friends" by kneeling and offering the handle of a naked sword held by the point. These offers are treated with some disdain, as too "general and simple" to require an answer. A further offer of a thousand merks is treated with more attention; but the kin declare that it is far too small a fine "for the committing of so high, cruell, and abominable slaughters and mutilations of set purpose." To heighten the picture, the deed of the murderers is set in contrast with the peaceable and inoffensive conduct of the deceased, whose great merit was his "never offending them, neither by drawing of blood, taking kirks, tacks, steadings, or rooms, over any of their heads, or their friends'." Thus the murder would have been considered less unjustifiable, if the victim had ever been concerned in ejecting his assailants from their holdings, or offering to take them "over their head:" a doctrine of the sixteenth century in Scotland, which events of the nineteenth, in other parts of the empire, have made only too intelligible. The negotiation was not quite successful, for some of the parties were beheaded. One of them, Chalmers of Drumlochie, along with an offer to let his son marry Drummond's daughter, and his cousin marry his sister, "without any tocher,"—an arrangement which he seems to have thought might be equivalent to "lands, goods, or money," of none of which was he possessed,—proclaimed himself "ready to do any other thing quhilk is possible to him, as please my lord and friends to lay to his charge, except his life and heritage." He bound himself to Lord Drummond as a personal vassal and follower, by a "band of man-rent:" an instrument well-known in old Scottish jurisprudence, and perpetually cropping out in connexion with any historical events—such as the murder of Rizzio,—in which many persons united themselves together for the perpetration of a great crime. It was a curious feature of national character,—the form of law running down through every thing, even to the very document framed for setting law at defiance. Chalmers' bond was merely one of general partisanship and following, and he bound himself to the Drummonds, and their heirs, to "take their true and one-fold part, in all and sundry their actions and causes, and ride and gang with them therein upon their expenses, when they require me or my heirs thereto, against all and sundry persons, our sovereign lady and the authority of this realm alanerly excepted. And hereto I bind and oblige me and my heirs to the said noble and mighty lord and his heirs in the straitest form and sicker stile of band of manrent that can be devised, no remeid nor exception of law to be proponed nor alleged in the contrair." It might be no small consolation to the chief who had lost a vassal to get a slave in his stead; but the public peace would not be much benefited by this method of settlement. Some of the precautions against turbulent offences are not less curious than this method of dealing with them when they were committed. An heiress might be compelled to find security, or enter into recognisances that she shall not give her hand and fortune to an outlaw or scapegrace. Thus, on the 13th of September 1563, Mariene Carruthers, being "ane of Whatever it may have been in England, there was little divinity hedging a Scottish king of the sixteenth century. Perhaps, as a rich peer and a poor peer are very different things in popular estimation, though equal in the Lord Chamberlain's list of precedence, so it may have been with kings. The Scottish king was poor, ill-housed, parsimoniously served, meagerly guarded. His pulse might beat with the blood of a hundred monarchs; but the far-stretching palaces, the long gorgeous trains of attendants, the wealth at command, were wanting, and divine right was but a theory, that could neither give parasites rich offices, nor dazzle the eyes of worshippers. Thus it happens that, side by side with the most magnificent theoretical assumptions of regal prerogative, stand the most ludicrous instances of the crown's weakness and smallness. On the 11th July 1526, Robert Bruce of Airth and others are respited for having committed a highway robbery on his Majesty's artillery—"for art and part of the stouthrief of certain manganels and artillery coming from the castle of Stirling to the king's Majesty, at his burgh of Edinburgh, for the defence of his person; and for art and part of the stouthrief of the king's letters from his officers, and laying violent hands on them." We have not far to wander for like instances, making the monarch a simple human being, against whom one commits, not the majestic crime of high treason, but the vulgar offences of theft and robbery. Thus, in the very next entry, we find "Walter Drummond acquitted by an assize of art and part of the theft and concealment of the king's crown from his crown-room, with the precious stones therein contained, forth of the palace and monastery of Holyrood." Every petty laird dined and slept within the walls of his thick square tower; isolated by moat or precipice, by long dark passages and iron grated door. In an age when individuals thus protected themselves, it naturally astonishes one to observe how accessible the royal person generally appears to have been—how slightly protected from contact with the people, how easily approached by the assassin. One man was able to remove all the impediments which stood in the way of the Highland band who slew James I. at Perth. The murder of Rizzio, with all its circumstances of cool premeditation, and calm, steady, bitter insult, need not be recalled to the reader, among the other incidents, which show how thin a partition separated the sovereign from rude violence. The various forms in which that turbulent and most pertinacious of rebels, Francis Earl of Bothwell, assailed King James, are fraught with a ludicrous versatility in the art of haunting and tormenting a king. The official act of forfeiture characterised it as "invading, assieging, and persuing of his Majesty's most noble person, by fire and sword, breaking up his chalmer doors with fore hammers, and cruelly slaying his Highness' servants coming to his Majesty's rescue." "Ane treason and cruelty," continues the indignant document, "not heard nor seen committed by subjects so highly obliged to their native king and prince." The contemporary chronicler, Birrel, characterised the outrage as "a stoure," which the rebel created by striking "with ane hammer at his Majesty's chamber door." In his more renowned and successful attempt, the pathway to the person of royalty was so completely cleared for him by a courageous female, the Duchess of Athole, whose house was next door to the palace, that the weapons of the guard were removed; the queen's bed-room, to which the beleaguered monarch might have fled, was locked; and the prime conspirator and his assistant were comfortably lodged behind the arras of the ante-room to the king's sleeping apartment. What might not a boy Jones have accomplished in those days? Should we, however, pursue this subject further, we would be trespassing on that ground of established history which it is our desire on the present occasion to avoid. |