Darnell UniwrHttg Sitbrarg Hiljaca. 5Jem tyatk BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE FISKE ENDOWMENT FUND THE BEQUESTOF WILLARD FISKE LIBRARIAN OF THE UNIVERSITY 1868-1883 • 1905 Cornell University Library DA 880.F4M15 History of Fife and Kinross 3 1924 028 083 602 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028083602 The County Histories of Scotland FIFE AND KINROSS "All the country between the Forth and the Tay grows narrow like a wedge eastward, even to the sea, and it is called Fife, a district provided within its own bounds with all things necessary for the use of life." — George Buchanan, ' History of Scotland,' 1582. A HISTORY OF Fife and Kinross M. J. G. MACKAY SHERIFF OF THESE COUNTIES WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCXCVI PREFACE. The aim of the writer has been to tell in brief compass and popular language the history of Scotland so far as transacted within the bounds of the old Kingdom, which includes the two modern counties of Fife and Kinross, or in a few cases by their natives, though beyond these bounds. It will be readily seen that the book is only a sketch, and that there is no intention to compete with the learned and exhaustive form of County History which gives a complete survey of every part of a county. Mr A. H. Millar's comprehensive work of this nature on Fife was published after the present volume was in type ; but the writer has taken advantage of all other sources of information known to him. He is greatly indebted to the earlier historians of Fife, and not less to many of the natives whose patriotic interest in its past as well as its present has led them generously to give vi PREFACE. him the benefit of their valuable local knowledge. The attempt has been made, though the phrase is too ambitious, to catch the spirit rather than to follow the letter of the History of Fife. This will be found to include a good deal of the spirit of the history of Scotland. Special attention has been given to what- ever portrays Character, to Biography when it contains illustrations of History, and to Proverbs and Songs, the prose and poetry of the life of the people. A List of the chief contributions to the History of Fife, or of particular places in it, has been printed as an Appendix. The List will not satisfy the high require- ments of the exact bibliographer, but may perhaps aid any reader who desires fuller and more special know- ledge. The Map by James Gordon, parson of Rothiemay, published in the Atlas of the World by John Blaeu of Amsterdam, and the modern Map by Mr J. G. Bar- tholomew of Edinburgh, may, it is hoped, be found useful guides to the geography of the district, which always forms, but in this case perhaps more than in some other districts, an element of its History. The former repre- sents Fife as it was at the close of the first half of the seventeenth century, when the modern age had begun, but the medieval still left its reflex on the map, and some shadows of ancient Scotland are still visible. Its conception as well as its publication were due to Sir PREFACE. vii John Scot of Scotstarvit, a country gentleman of Fife. The latter, taken from the Ordnance Survey, presents a picture of the advance which this portion of Scotland has made since the Union, and suggests the progress the future may have in store. 7 Aleyn Place, Edinburgh, Christmas Vacation, 1895. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PACE Fife not within the Roman province in Scotland — An ancient Pictish kingdom — Old descriptions of Fife included Kinross — The old and new shires of Kinross — Present area and population of Fife and Kinross — Legends of the Saints the earliest history — St Serf's legend — The Culdees of Lochleven, Abernethy, St Andrews or Kilrymont, and Markinch — Legend of St Andrew — Legends of St Adrian, St Monan, and St Fillan — The Danish raids — Death of Constantine MacKenneth near Crail — Bishops of the Scots at Abernethy — Transfer of see to St Andrews — Dunfermline and Queen Margaret — Adoption of Roman ritual — Decline of Celtic Church — Fate of the relics of St Margaret, the last Scottish Saint I CHAPTER II. The Saxon interlude in Scottish history, 1057-1093 — The disuse of Gaelic in Fife — Norman feudalism introduced by David I. and his successors, 1093-1286 — Macduff, descendant of the Celtic chief or king, becomes feudal Earl of Fife — Privileges of the clan Mac- duff — Macduff's cross near Newburgh — The early burghs of Fife — Death of Alexander III. at Kinghorn, 1286 — War of Independ- ence — Edward I. at Dunfermline, 1305 — Robert Bruce at dedica- tion of Cathedral of St Andrews, 1318 — His tomb at Dunfermline — Exploits of Wallace in Fife — Parliament of Dairsie, 1335 — Murder of Duke of Rothesay at Falkland, 1399 — Foundation of University of St Andrews by Bishop Wardlaw, 141 1 ... 28 CHAPTER III. Bishops of St Andrews prior to the Reformation — Kennedy, Graham first archbishop, Schevez, James Stewart Duke of Ross, Alex- CONTENTS. ander Stewart, son of James IV., Foreman, and the two Beatons — Their influence on the progress of Fife— The first three Jameses little in Fife— Sir Andrew Wood of Largo and the origin of the Scots navy— Defeat of Stephen Bull off the May, 1499— The Bartons in the reigns of James IV. and V. — Origin of linen manu- facture in Fife — Castles of Fife — Dunbar and Blind Harry at Court of James IV.— Falkland, the pleasure palace of the kings — Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount Groom of the Chamber to James V. as a boy — His praise of Falkland — The comic vein of his short poems and the satiric vein of his dramas characteristic of Fife 43 CHAPTER IV. Why Scotland has no native theatre — Beginnings of national drama checked after the Reformation — Sir D. Lyndsay a dramatist and reformer — Lyndsay's " Three Estates " acted in the play-field at Cupar, 1552 — Its plot — Its effect on James V. and the commons — Prosecution of heretics — Martyrdom of George Wishart, 1st March 1546, at St Andrews —Tragedy of " The Cardinal," 28th May 1546 — Description of it by John Knox — The Church in Scotland, which rejected the reforms of Lollards, Hussites, and Lutherans, reformed after the model of Calvin ... 54 CHAPTER V John Knox and Mary Stuart in Fife — Knox preaches at St Andrews, June 8, 1547 — Disputation between Knox and Wynram in St Leonard's yard — The pulpit becomes a power in Scotland— Knox in the French galleys off the coast of Fife, June 1548 — Knox again preaches at St Andrews, June 1559— Encounter of the troops of Mary of Guise and of the reformers at Cupar Muir— Mary of Guise and Knox— Mary Stuart and Chastellard at Burntisland, 1563— Darnley and Mary at Wemyss Castle, 1565— Mary prisoner in Lochleven Castle, June 17, 1567— Interview with Knox— Her escape, May 2, 1568— Knox's last visit to St Andrews, July 1571 to August 17, 1572 ..... CHAPTER VI. James VI.— Residence at Falkland— Visit of Du Bartas— The king takes him to St Andrews, June 1 587— Andrew Melville's lesson- Ships of the Spanish Armada at Anstruthev, 15SS— fames Melville and the Spanish captains— Murder of the Bonnie Earl of Moray at Donibristle— Andrew Melville at Falkland calls the king " God's silly vassal," September 1596— Fife adventurers and the 65 CONTENTS. xi Lewes, I597 - Failure of their attempt — Children of James VI. born at Dunfermline — The nurse's tale of the devil's cloak cast on Charles I. — James VI. revisits Fife in 1617 — Dunfermline, Cul- ross, Falkland, St Andrews — Charles II. in Fife, 1650 — No royal visit for 200 years — Effect of absence of royalty — Contrast of medieval and modern history ....... 94 CHAPTER VII. Revolutions of seventeenth century — Alexander Henderson of Leuchars — His sermon at the Glasgow Assembly, 1638 — Alex- ander Leslie the general and Alexander Henderson the minister, both men of Fife, leaders at Dunse Law, 1639 — Gibson of Durie and Hope of Craighall command the lawyers' company — Hender- son at Edinburgh Assembly, 1639 — At St Antholins's in London, 1640 — Moderator of Edinburgh Assembly, 1641 — Chaplain to Charles I. at Holyrood — Drafts the Solemn League and Covenant, 1643 — At St Margaret's, Westminster, when English sign the Covenant — Meets Charles at Uxbridge, 1645 — Samuel Rutherford at St Andrews, 1639 — His 'Lex Rex' burnt by the hangman at St Andrews after the Restoration — George Gillespie, "the thundering preacher" of Kirkcaldy — Patrick Gillespie supports Cromwell, and made Principal of Glasgow University — Battle of Pitreavie, Sunday, 20th July 1651, last battle in Fife — Cromwell at Burntisland — The protest of St Andrews — Rise of middle classes — -Fife losses at Kilsyth — Castles no longer fortified — Learned Scottish gentry in Fife — Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit — Scotland in Blaeu's atlas — ' Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum' — Sir James Bal- four of Denmyln and his brother Sir Robert Balfour, M. D. — Sir Robert Sibbald of Gibliston 114 CHAPTER VIII. Effect of the Union on Fife — Old Fife laird on new fashions — The Jacobite rebellions, 17 15 and 1745 — The West of Fife the native country of the Seceders — The Seceders claimed descent from the Protesters — Ebenezer Erskine of Portmoak, 1703 — His doctrine and preaching — Open-air communions — Sermon at the Perth Synod, 1732 — The act of secession at Gairney Bridge, November I: i 1733 — Ralph Erskine of Dunfermline — Wilson's robbery of the custom-house, Pittenweem — Deposition of Ebenezer Erskine, 1740 — Popularity of the Secession — Quarrel of Seceders with Whitfield — Burghers and Anti-burghers — Old and New Lights — Gillespie of Carnock and the Relief Kirk — Unions of Seceders between 1820 and 1852 — Absence of political interest and pre- dominance of ecclesiastical — Glas, son of minister of Auchter- muchty, and the Glassites — Edward Irving at Kirkcaldy . . 154 CONTENTS. CHAPTER IX. Travellers in Fife in eighteenth century— Daniel Defoe shortly before the Union visits Inverkeithing, Dunfermline, Aberdour, Kinross, Falkland, Burntisland, Kinghorn, Kirkcaldy, Dysart— Ascribes detay of Fife to removal of Court— Advises industry and manufac- tures—Visits towns of east coast, St Andrews, Cupar, and Balmer- ino— Pococke, Bishop of Meath, in 1760, at Abernethy, Newburgh, and Gairneybridge— Remarks on the Seceders— Visits Lindores, Cupar, St Andrews— The East Neuk to Largo Bay, Balgonie, Kelty, and Lundie, Leven coal-field, Leslie, Melville, Falkland and Kinross, Inverkeithing and Dunfermline — Dr Johnson, in 1773, at Inchkeith, Cupar, St Andrews — Observations on its decay — Thomas Carlyle schoolmaster at Kirkcaldy — His pictures of Kirkcaldy beach, the West Lomond, Falkland and Inchkeith — His character of Fife natives . . . . . . . 173 CHAPTER X. Fife revives by improved agriculture and progress of manufactures in eighteenth century — Beginnings of agriculture by the monks — • Societies for improvement of agriculture after the Union — Thom- son's survey of the agriculture of Fife — Castles and mansions in Fife — Moral from the ruins of old castles — A small farm in 1792 — Small versus large farms — Rise of rents during French war — Improvement of farm implements — Rotation of crops — Introduc- tion of potatoes and turnips — Cultivation of flax — Introduction of artificial grasses — Plantations — Drainage — Fife black cattle- Improvement in breeding stock — Rabbit-warrens, doocots, and beehives — Wages — Budget of a small farm — Obstacles to im- provement ...... . . . iSS CHAPTER XI. Progress of manufactures— Spinning, weaving, and waulking— Origin of linen trade — The Linen Corporation, 1693 — System of bounties —New machinery for spinning and weaving— Present trade at Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy— Oil-cloth trade of Kirkcaldy intro- duced by Michael Nairn — Collieries— Coal-pit of the monks of Dunfermline— Coal-mine of Sir George Bruce near Culross— Serf- dom of colliers abolished— Increase of miners' wages— The fishers of Fife—Their origin and customs— Shipbuilding— Salt, glass, and tile works— Breweries and Distilleries— Education— University of St Andrews — High and parish schools — The printing-press in Fife— Golf links 20 g CONTENTS. Xlll CHAPTER XII. Biography more interesting than statistics — Five Fife characters — Adam Smith — Sir David Wilkie — Thomas Chalmers — Lord Camp- bell — Bishop Low — Smith born at Kirkcaldy 1723, died 1790 — Sketch of his life — 'The Wealth of Nations,' 1776— David Wilkie born at Cults 1785, died off Gibraltar 1841 — Sketch of his life — Fife character in his pictures — Thomas Chalmers born at Anstruther 1780, died 1847 — Sketch of his life and character — John Campbell, Lord Chancellor, born at Cupar 1779, died 1861 — His life — Character as a lawyer, politician, and author — David Low, minister of Episcopal congregation at Pittenweem, 1790-1856 — Bishop of Moray and Ross, Argyle and the Isles — His character . . . 234 CHAPTER XIII. Proverbs of Fife — David Ferguson's collection the first made in Scot- land — Bacon's advice followed in the selection — The making of proverbs — Fife a good soil for proverbs — The Kingdom — The natives — Cupar the capital — Auchtermuchty — Blebo — Springfield — The beadle of Cults — The Lang Toon — Pathhead — Dunfermline — Weavers' proverbs — Proverbs of Falkland — Dysart — Kinghom — Buckhaven — Crail — Proverbs of the sea — Weather proverbs — Rhymes of places — Cracks or flams — Sir David Lyndsay's proverbs — Royal sayings — Queen Mary's mottoes or devices — Ploughmen's sayings — Family characteristics — Poets' proverbs — The best pro- verb of Fife and its reverse 259 CHAPTER XIV. Distinct character of songs and ballads of Fife — Some of them amongst the best Scottish songs — Blind Harry the Minstrel at Falkland — William Dunbar in Fife— Oldest ballads, " The Wyf of Auchter- muchty," "The Wowing of Jok and Jenny," " How the Dumb Wyf was taught to Speak," " Christ's Kirk on the Green," "Falk- land on the Green" — Henryson of Dunfermline's moral ballads, "The Garniture of Gude Ladyis," "The Bluidy Serk,"— "Lam- mikin," a tragic ballad by unknown author — The Bannatyne, Maitland, and Asloan MSS. preserved the ballads during the Reformation period — The press of the Reformers printed satires, not ballads or songs, except ' The Gude and Godlie Ballates ' — James Watson, 1706, followed by Allan Ramsay, 1724, first printed the older ballads — The " Rowstie " rhyme of Edinburgh Castle attributed to Kirkaldy of Grange— Sir R. Ayton of Kinaldy's version of " Auld Lang Syne "—" Sir Patrick Spens," "Hardy- knute," "The last dying words of Bonny Heck," "Maggie v CONTENTS. Lauder," "The Auld Man's Mare's Deid," "Jenny's Bawbee," " Auld Robin Gray "—Modern Fife ballads, romantic and pathetic, humorous and historical — Hymns and poems of the Secession Kirk 2 99 CHAPTER XV. Illustrations of Fife character in the professions. Fife generals : Sir William Kirkaldy of Grange— Alexander Leslie of Balgonie, Earl ofLeven— David Leslie of Pitcairlie, Lord Newark. Fife admirals: Sir Michael of Wemyss — Andrew Wood of Largo— Samuel Greig of Inverkeithing — Philip Durham Wood of Largo — Alexander Selkirk of Lower Largo, original of Robinson Crusoe. Fife doctors : John of Kinghorn — Sir Andrew Balfour — Sir Robert Sibbald — James Syme the surgeon — John Goodsir the anatomist, and his father the Anstruther doctor. Fife lawyers : Sir James Balfour — Henry Balnaves of Halhill — John Wood of Tilliedavy — Alexander Seton, Earl of Dunfermline — James Elphinstone, Lord Balmerino — Sir Alexander Gibson of Durie — Sir Thomas Hope of Craighall — Sir James Learmont of Balcarres — Sir John Wemyss of Wemyss — Boswell of Balmuto — Monypenny of Pitmilly — Mon- creiff of Tullibole. Fife architecture : Celtic crosses — Churches and towers — Norman abbeys and cathedrals — Feudal castles. Modern architects : Sir William Bruce of Culross — The Brothers Adam — John Playfair — The cottages of Fife. Fife painters : David Martin — Sir David Wilkie — Charles Lees — Sir Noel Paton. The poets of Fife : Henryson — Lyndsay — Sir William Alexander, and Sir Robert Ayton — Michael Bruce of Kinnesswood — Hugh Haliburton, the poet of the Ochils. The songs of Fife, its best poems — Philosophy cultivated — Theology neglected — Men of science — Historians — Antiquaries — General character of natives of Kinross and of Fife ........ I-IST OF BOOKS RELATING TO FIFE AND KINROSS . . . 361 THE CUPAR PRESS OF R. TULLIS, G. S. TULLIS, A. WESTWOOD, AND MESSRS A. WESTWOOD & SON 3S4 LIST OF MAPS OF FIFE AND KINROSS 3S9 INDEX , 9 ! FIFE AND KINROSS. CHAPTER I. FIFE NOT WITHIN THF. ROMAN PROVINCE IN SCOTLAND — AN ANCIENT PICTISH KINGDOM— OLD DESCRIPTIONS OF FIFE INCLUDED KINROSS— THE OLD AND NEW SHIRES OF KINROSS — PRESENT AREA AND POPULATION OF FIFE AND KINROSS— LEGENDS OF THE SAINTS THE EARLIEST HIS- TORY — ST SERF'S LEGEND — THE CULDEES OF LOCHLEVEN, ABERNETHY, ST ANDREWS OR KILRYHONT, AND MARKINCH — LEGEND OF ST ANDREW — LEGENDS OF ST ADRIAN, ST MONAN, AND ST FILLAN— THE DANISH RAIDS — DEATH OF CONSTANTINE MACKENNETH NEAR CRAIL — BISHOPS OF THE SCOTS AT ABERNETHY — TRANSFER OF SEE TO ST ANDREWS — DUNFERMLINE AND QUEEN MARGARET — ADOPTION OF ROMAN RITUAL — DECLINE OF CELTIC CHURCH— FATE OF THE RELICS OF ST MARGARET, THE LAST SCOTTISH SAINT. The History of Fife, a district of Scotland which formerly included and in this sketch includes Kinross, begins with the introduction of Christianity into Scotland as it is told in the Legends of the Saints. Prior to Christianity only its geography is known. This district embraced all the country between the estuaries of the Forth and Tay, and is treated as a distinct division in the earliest descriptions of Scotland. It formed along with Gowrie the most im- portant portion of the kingdom, of which Scone became the capital when in the middle of the ninth century Kenneth Macalpine subdued the Picts. Its physical geography con- 2 FIFE A PICTISH KINGDOM. firms the traditionary history that the wedge-shaped peninsula shut off by the sea and the two firths from the rest of Scotland, and from modern Perthshire by the Ochils, the highest moun- tain-range of southern Scotland, had been one of the many separate kingdoms of the Picts, who never formed a united monarchy. Several of its place-names still bear witness to the existence of an independent, or it may have been a dependent, king. Inchrye is the King's Inch, Strathendry the Strath of the King, Kilrymont the Church of the King's Mount, and Kings- barns is perhaps a translation of an older Celtic name. These sites indicate that there were, as was natural, royal forts or strongholds both in the west and east of the Pictish kingdom. An ancient division of the kingdom of Fife into Fife proper and Fothrif, a name whose origin is lost and which is now obsolete, dates from Celtic, and it may well be Pagan, times, and though originally political, was much longer maintained for ecclesiastical purposes in the names of two of the deaneries of the diocese of St Andrews. A list of the parishes within each, in the thirteenth century, which has been preserved, shows that it nearly answered to the eastern and western divisions of the county in modern times. The line of division was drawn from the mouth of the Leven to the east boundary of the parish of Cults, and from Cults by the west boundary of Collessie to the east boundary of Auchter- muchty. All to the west of this line was Fothrif, and all to the east Fife proper. In feudal times another division into quarters was introduced. An inquest in 1517, and the Exchequer Rolls of an earlier date, give the names of the quarters as Inverkeithing, Dunfermline, Leven, and Eden. The number of small shires within the district was remark- able, and included Coupre (Cupar), Dunfermline, Forgund (Forgan), Fothrif; Gaitmilk and Gelland (Gellat) — places now obscure in western Fife — Karel (Crail), Kellin or MARKINCH OR DALGINCH THE CHIEF PLACE. 3 Chellin (Kellie), Kennachin (Kennoway ?), Kennocher (Kil- conquhar), Kercaledinit (Kirkcaldy), Kinglassie, Portmoak or the Bishopshire, Lochore, Newburn, Rathully (Rathillet), Strathmigloch (Strathmiglo), and Wemyss. Most of these shires became parishes, and some of them baronies, and the word shire may have been used for any division. Still it is singular that the Saxon word was so generally adopted by a Celtic race, and it deserves inquiry whether it did not repre- sent a partition of the land which descends from Celtic times. In several shires we find traces of the Thane or Baron and the Serjeant, the feudal equivalents of the Celtic Toshach and Mair or Maor. The shire may have been the Celtic " Tuath," as Mr Skene conjectures ; but if so, it was the territory of a sept rather than a tribe in the ordinary sense of that word. Markinch, or its neighbour Dalginch, in the middle of the county, was probably the central residence and court of the king, where he administered justice. It continued in the time of William the Lion to be the place where the warrantors of goods challenged as stolen had to appear. A cell of the Cul- dees was established there by one of the last Celtic bishops, and the ancient cross near Balgonie may mark its site. The terraces faintly visible on the north side of the hill may be traces, like those on Arthur's Seat, of a primitive form of spade husbandry long practised before the plough was known. The scoffing proverbs which the rest of the Kingdom still cast at Markinch, though their form is modern, may be reflec- tions on its former greatness which departed when the old Celtic chiefs ceased to be kings, the Culdees were supplanted by monks of Roman orders, and the seat of justice was trans- ferred to Cupar. To no period after the Celtic can the name of The Kingdom, still familiar by tradition to its natives, and preserved by Fife alone of the counties of Scotland, be reason- ably ascribed. 4 OLD AND NEW SHIRES OF KINROSS. The modern shire of Kinross was formed in 1685 by the addition to the older shire of the parishes of Portmoak, Cleish, and Tullibole, in a charter confirmed by Parliament in favour of Sir William Bruce of Kinross, its heritable sheriff. The older shire, which seems to have been limited to the parishes of Kinross and Orwell, existed at least as early as the middle of the thirteenth century, and had become a heredi- tary sheriffdom at the date of Edward I.'s ordinance in 1305 for the government of Scotland, in which John of Kinross is named as sheriff of fee or hereditary sheriff. Like Clack- mannan, it returned a member to the Scottish Parliament after James I. introduced representation and dispensed with the attendance of the small barons in 1427. But it con- tinued to muster, as of old, with the men of Fife at wapin- schaws and royal levies. The parish of Portmoak, or at all events those lands in it which had belonged to the Church and of which the Bishop of St Andrews was superior, were identical with the Bishopshire, a name still in popular use and preserved in the Bishop's Hill and Bishop's Muir, which formed a lordship or regality under the bishop and his own officers. But one of the later bishops, George Martin con- jectures Bishop Schevez, ceded the rights of the see in the Bishopshire to Douglas of Lochleven, as he did those in Muckartshire to Campbell of Argyle. The union of Portmoak, Cleish, and Tullibole with Kinross, and the formation of Kinross into a modern county, was due to the favour and influence of Sir William Bruce, the royal architect of Charles II. He is said to have built the House of Kinross as a residence for the Duke of York in case the Exclusion Bill had debarred him from the English throne. "Dis aliter visum est." The courtier's offering was never in- habited by royalty, and has long been without a tenant. When George Buchanan declares that Kinross and other MODERN CHANGES IN KINROSS. 5 small shires owed their origin to ambition, he must of course refer to the older shire. But it is not improbable that this was one of the cases in which an old shire represented an ancient Celtic division. In 1323 an inquest held at Kinross separated the lands of the Forest from the lands of the Thanage of that name. So the shire of Kelly (Chellin) ap- pears from a charter of David I. to have been the district of a thane, and Mr Skene's research has detected traces of thanages of Kinneir, Dairsie, Falkland, and perhaps Fordell. Robert the Bruce granted the church of Kinross and the chapel of Orwell to the monks of Dunfermline, in honour of his royal predecessors buried at Dunfermline Abbey, which he had specially chosen for his own sepulture ; and this grant was confirmed by Bishop Lamberton. The separation of the ecclesiastical patronage from St Andrews may have been caused by, and would certainly confirm, the separation of the civil jurisdiction. In the present century Kinross has been the subject of more than one change of jurisdiction by a vacillating Legislature, although its boundaries, subject to slight alter- ations by the Boundary Commission, have remained the same. In 1807 the shire of Kinross was disjoined from Fife and united to Clackmannan under one sheriff. By an Act passed in 1853 Clackmannan and Kinross were united with Linlithgow, but another in 1870 reunited it with Fife as regards the jurisdiction of the sheriff. The British Par- liament had slowly learned the natural connection of the two counties which formed the ancient kingdom. In parlia- mentary representation Kinross is united not with Fife but Clackmannan. The area of Fife is nearly 315,000 imperial acres. Its population in 1891 was 190,365, and the valuation of its lands and heritages in 1894 was ^1,148,147. The area of 6 AREA — POPULATION — VALUATIONS. Kinross is 46,487 acres. Its population in 1891 was 6373, and its valuation in 1894 was ^62,065, or, if effect is given to the alterations of the last Boundary Commission, ^67,343. The total population of the two counties is now probably about 200,000, and the total valuation, which has fallen somewhat in consequence of agricultural depression, about ^1,215,490. In spite of this depression Fife may still be deemed a pros- perous and populous district, and the description of Pennant, the English traveller, in 1770, though exaggerated, is in the main true: "The peninsula of Fife is a county so populous that except the environs of London [and we must now add Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and a few other towns], scarce one in South Britain can vie with it, fertile in soil, abundant in cattle, happy in collieries, in ironstone, lime, and freestone, rich in manufactures ; the property remarkably well divided, none insultingly powerful to distress and often de- populate a county, the most of the fortunes of a useful mediocrity." It is the aim of the following pages to trace the origin and causes of this prosperity, to give an outline of the vicissitudes of the history of Fife, as well as of the part it has taken in the history of Scotland, and to discover the character of its natives. "Fife," remarks a recent writer, Mr Geddie, who has graphically illustrated the fringes or coast of the county, "contains the concentrated essence of Scottish history and character." Probably other parts of Scotland might dispute the claim. But I shall be well pleased if this sketch of the little ancient Kingdom from the dawn of history to the pres- ent time should be found to explain some points in the history of Scotland and some traits in the character of the Scottish people. If we wish to know anything of Fife before the seventh century, we must have recourse to archeology, which pursues FIFE NOT CONQUERED BY ROMANS. 7 different methods and arrives at a different kind of result from history. The Roman historians, and their inferior suc- cessors, the Byzantine and Latin writers of the early middle ages, enable us to catch glimpses of other parts of Scotland. Fife is a dark and unknown land. The fleet of Agricola must have sailed round its coast on the way to Orkney, the Ultima Thule or North Pole of the Roman world. The Roman legions probably more than once crossed the Forth and passed the Ochils. But there is no record that they conquered the district between Kinross and Muckross, as its Celtic natives called, in their apt way of naming places, the head and snout of the well-defined promontory of Scotland which lies south of the Caledonian Forest, between the Tay and the Forth. Supposed remains of Roman roads and camps in the neighbourhood of Dunfermline and at Loch Or are doubtful, and similar discoveries farther east are imaginary antiquities. The zeal of a local minister, the Rev. Andrew Small, and a military antiquary, Colonel Millar, found one of the many sites of the battle of the Grampians in the parish of Strathmiglo, at a ford of the Eden called Merlsford, near Wellfield House. No one now defends this position. The very few Roman coins which have been found in Fife prove there can have been no permanent occupation of any part of the county. They may well have been collections made after the Romans left, or, like similar finds in Ireland, are independent of any conquest. The halting lines of the old Fife poet are nearer true though somewhat boastful history than the guesses of the old antiquaries : — " But thou didst scorn Rome's captive for to be, And kept thyself from Roman legions free." Sir Robert Sibbald's conjecture, that " after-times may dis- cover in this shire many Roman antiquities when curious persons shall search for them," has not been confirmed. 8 LEGENDS OF SAINTS EARLIEST HISTORY. Before the Romans came in the first, and after they left in the fifth, century, this district was a part of the country then perhaps called Alban, and now Scotland. Its first known inhabitants belonged to the branch of Celts named Picts, perhaps the painted race, though some think it a tribal name. They were called in their own tongue Cruithne. Fibh (pro- nounced Fife) was, according to an early mythical genealogy, one of the seven sons of Cruithne, the father of the race from whom it took its name. No satisfactory etymology has been found either for Cruithne or Fibh. Neither name represented real persons. They are only the figures in a myth which con- tains some crushed and buried fragments of history. It was after the earliest Celtic annals had faded into poetic myths, and the Roman historians had passed away with the Roman Empire, that the narratives of the lives of the first Christian missionaries shed a dim historic light on the shores and a few places in the interior of Fife. The Legends of the Saints tell the stories of those who converted pagan races to Christianity, or who reformed the corruptions of the Christianity of their age. Written in general long after the events, the legends were read in the churches, especially in those dedicated to the saint where his relics rested, or were supposed to rest. They contain fictitious as well as historical matter. Miracles and prophecies, sometimes childish in nai'vetd, sometimes childlike in simplicity, mingle with the natural acts of the guides who led barbarians along the first steps of civilisation, and taught heathens the elements of Christian doctrine and morals. The earlier Saints are born, and live, and die, contrary to the ordinary course of nature. They subsist without food, walk the waves, lay the storms, kill the living, and cure the dying, by a sign or a word. They have not so much visions of, as actual conflicts with, Satan and his devils, and actual converse with good angels, with INTERPRETATION OF LEGENDS. 9 Christ and God. But they also kill wild beasts, reclaim waste lands, plant fruit-trees, find and hallow wells, erect crosses, enclose cemeteries, and found churches. Whatever may be real and whatever invented, they were the preachers of the virtue of purity, the gospel of peace, the hope of eternal life. Our ancestors in the middle ages believed the whole Legend. They testified to their belief by dedicating churches and putting up crosses and images in honour of the Saints. They venerated and enshrined what had been blessed by holy hands, the bells and books, the banners and crosiers. They celebrated the Saints' days by festivals, fairs, and pilgrimages. They called their children and their homes after the names of the Saints. Our nearer kin of the Reformation denounced almost the whole Legend as superstitious. They demolished the churches, broke the images, destroyed the books which re- corded the lives of the Saints, cast their relics to the winds, altered or forgot their days, and corrupted the names their forefathers deemed the holiest of the holy. It is the hard but needful task of history to sift the true from the false, and to try so far as possible to realise by what men, and by what means, the country we live in became Christian. As an artist would lovingly preserve the half-faded, half-repainted canvas of an old master, or a reverent architect the ruins of an abbey or cathedral, so should the historian interpret the Legends. They contain, mingled with the dust of antiquity and the incense of superstition, the true relics of noble lives. Piecing together what we find in the lives of the Saints, and rejecting what is incredible, the probable story of the conversion of Fife may be briefly told. The absence, with three exceptions, probably of a later date, of any dedication to St Ninian in Fife, is strong evi- IO LEGEND OF ST SERF. dence that its natives did not belong to the southern Picts, whom the British apostle of Galloway converted in the be- ginning of the fifth century. The isolated dedication to St Columba at Inchcolm, where a solitary hermit monk may have come from Iona at an earlier period, but whose monastery dates from Alexander I., is a similar proof that neither that saint, nor his immediate successors as Abbots of Iona, planted churches on the shores or islands of the Forth. But Adamnan, his biographer, the ninth Abbot of Iona, who lived in the end of the seventh century, and died in 704, may, as he certainly visited Northumbria, have landed at Inchkeith, where there was once a church or a cell dedicated to him. It was to another saint of the early Celtic Church, St Serf, that the conversion of Fife was due. There is difficulty in fixing his exact date, but no reasonable doubt as to his exist- ence. The Legends vary by several centuries. According to one, Serf was the companion and suffragan of Palladius, long believed to have been sent on a mission to the Scots by Pope Celestine early in the fifth century. But there were few, if any, Scots in Scotland at this date, and none in Fife, which was still peopled by Picts, and ruled by Pictish kings for three centuries later. So this legend, in which Palladius is perhaps confused with St Patrick, who converted the Scots of Ireland, must be dismissed. In another story, Serf was the adoptive father of Kentigern, the contemporary of Col- umba, the apostle of Cumbria and first Bishop of Glasgow, who, according to this legend, was born at Culross, where Serf then lived, and where Kentigem's mother, Thenew, had been driven by a storm. Yet a third, and it is probably the truest, form of the legend makes Serf contemporary with Adamnan, by whose advice he undertook the conversion of Fife. This would correspond with the date of Brude, the son of Derili, one of ST SERF CONVERTS PICTS OF FIFE. II many Pictish kings of that name ; and a Brude, the son of Dergart, is said to have given the isle of Lochleven to St Serf and the Culdees, as an earlier Brude had given Iona to St Columba. It was the tendency of medieval legend to ante- date itself, through the natural fondness most men have for antiquity, and the desire to prove that the country to which the legend relates had a more ancient Christianity than other districts. The parentage of Serf is not known. One legend makes him son of a Canaanite king and Arab princess, and relates that before he came to Scotland he was Pope for seven years, at a date in the sixth century when we know there was no such Pope. Another legend calls him an Israelite ; and a third, in a tract on " The Mothers of the Saints," gives him an Irish mother, which is probably due to its author having been himself an Irish Celt. His name of Serf, in Latin Servanus, may indicate no more than that he was a servant of God like the Culdees, whose name has a similar meaning. But while there is so much doubtful and uncertain about Serf, the places to which he brought the Gospel do not mate- rially vary, and are confirmed by subsequent history. Most of them are connected with Fife, which was the centre of his ministry. He meets Adamnan at Inchkeith, and having asked Adamnan " How he should dispose of his followers," is told, " Let them inhabit the land of Fife from the hill of the Bri- tons [Largo Law?] to the hill called Okhel [the Ochils]." The cave at Dysart still bears his name, and marks probably his first landing-place and home in Fife. Thence he pro- ceeded north and west. He founds a church and cemetery at Culross, where for many centuries his day was kept on ist July by a procession of the inhabitants carrying green boughs, — an example of the wise policy by which Pope Gregory, as Bede relates, directed that on the day of the dedication " the people 12 GIFTS TO ST SERF — HIS MONASTERY. might be allowed to build themselves huts of the boughs of trees where heathen temples had been turned into churches, and no longer offer beasts to the devil, but to the praise of God, in their eating returning thanks to the giver of all things for their food." He visits Portmoak, on the banks of Loch- leven, where an early church bore his name. The erection of the small monastery on the island called his Inch, in the same loch, may have been during his own life, or a later foundation in his honour. He preaches at Tillibothy, now Tullibody, at Tillicoultry, at Alva where a well still bears his name, and at Airthrie. He cannot have built the present narrow bridge over the Devon which leads to the old road through the Ochils to Strathearn ; but its name of St Serf's bridge is probably a reminiscence that he passed that way in one of his missions. He died and was buried at Culross. The Gille-Serfs of Clackmannan mentioned in a charter of David I., who may be compared with the Brandanes or men of St Brendan, in Bute, show that grants had been made from the royal domain, which afterwards became the shire of that name, to St Serf himself, or more probably to his successors in the monastery of Lochleven. The island called St Serf's Inch was the gift of Brude, the last Pictish king. Macbeth and his queen added the lands of Kirkness, Portmoak, and Bolgyn (Bogie, near Kirkcaldy) ; Malcolm Canmore and Margaret added Balchristie in the parish of Newbum, and their son Ethelred, Auchmore ; and Malduin, Tuathal, and Fothad II., the last Celtic Bishops of St Andrews, the patronage and lands of the churches of Markinch, Scoonie, and Auchterderran. The parochial system had already to some extent begun in the time of the Celtic Church. When Bishop De Bernham made the visitations of his diocese between 1239 and 1249, and dedicated or rededicated about 140 parish churches, the DEDICATIONS TO CELTIC SAINTS. 1 3 names of the Celtic saints, their original founders, were still preserved, — as St Adrian at Flisk and Lindores, St Serf at Parva Kingorn, afterwards Burntisland, Kinross and Clack- mannan, St Memma at Scoonie, St Maelrubha at Crail, St Ethernan at Kilrenny and Lathrisk, St Monan at St Monans and Kilconquhar, St Cainnech at Kennoway ; but in some cases, perhaps in all, for the record is imperfect, a Roman saint was conjoined with the Celtic, as St John with St Modrust at Markinch, St Stephen with St Moak or Mollock at Portmoak, St Andrew with St Fillan at Forgan. The most northern point St Serf reached was Dunning, in Strathearn, where tradition said he slew a dragon in the den still called the " Dragon's Den." The mention of his name in other places in Perthshire and Aberdeenshire seems due to foundations after his death, but he is personally connected with several places in Fife, especially with Dysart and with Creich. At Dysart he had his famous argument with the "Devil," so quaintly told by Wyntoun, in which the Saint always has the better — '• Then saw the Dewyl that he cowthe noucht With all the wylis that he sowcht Ourecum Saynct Serf; he said than He kend hym for a wys man, For he wan at hym na profyte. Saynct Serf sayd, "Thou wrech, ga Fra this stede, and noy na ma In-to this stede, I byd the. Suddanly theyne passyd he : Fra that stede he held hym away, And never was sene thare till this day." The Church during the time of St Serf was monastic. He was a monk, not a bishop. The rule he followed was framed chiefly for hermits who passed their days in solitary cells, not in communities like the monks of St Augustine's or St Bene- dict's rule. Whether it was identical with the earliest form 14 CULDEE MONASTERIES. of the Culdee rule or not, the Culdees of Lochleven accepted St Serf as their patron. It was a Pictish race that St Serf converted, and it was a Pictish king who gave the island to the Culdees. Nothing is more certain than the fact that the Picts in Fife, as else- where, became Christian. Nothing is more singular than the fact that, having become Christian, they have left so little record of their history, and such meagre vestiges even of their language. There were at least two other foundations of Culdees in Fife which became more famous than Lochleven. These were Abernethy and St Andrews. Their origin is very obscure. If we could accept tradition they belonged even to an earlier date, but it is probable that in their case also true history has been perverted by the attempt to claim a greater antiquity than the facts warrant. Abernethy is said to have been founded by a Pictish King Nectan in honour of St Bridget, Abbess of Kildare in Ireland, at the request of the next abbess of the same convent, Darlugdach, who was present and chanted the Halleluia Hymn when the king's offering was made. St Bridget was a contemporary of St Patrick and died early in the sixth century, and Dar- lugdach was her immediate successor. But Nectan Morbet, called the son of Erip, is a very shadowy Pictish king. The Nectan best known to history did not reign till the seventh century; so here again we are perplexed by dates. Fortun- ately, chronology, though often the best, is only one, of the guides of history. It is probable that Abernethy was founded by a mission from the Irish Church, and dedicated to Bridget, the saint who has been called the Mary of Ireland. The Culdees must have been a later foundation if Abernethy was originally intended for religious women under the rule of St Bridget, for the introduction of women into the Culdees' LEGEND OF ST ANDREW. 1 5 monasteries was a corruption of their primitive Rule. They did not belong to the first age of the saints, which, accord- ing to Irish hagiology, included women as well as men, and allowed the services of women even in monasteries. Accord- ing to Fordoun, Abernethy became the see of the Bishop of the Celtic Church of Scotland after Dunkeld, and in its church three elections of bishops were made, while as yet there was only one bishop in Scotland. The other Culdee monastery was at Kilrigmonaigh or Kil- rymont, near St Andrews. The first preaching of Christianity in East Fife was attributed to Cainnech (Kenneth), patron saint of Kennoway, in the end of the sixth century ; but his fame was eclipsed by that of St Regulus or St Rule, who is credited by the legend with having brought the relics of St Andrew from Patras in Achaia to St Andrews, where he received a gift of a district called the Boar's Chase from Hungus or Angus, a Pictish king. This name is still preserved in Boar's Hill, though some think the original name was Byre's Hill, which suggests a different derivation. A confusion not yet dispelled is found in the body of this legend, which makes Constantius, an emperor of the fourth century, in whose reign the relics are said to have been removed from Patras in Achaia, the con- temporary of Angus, a Pictish king of the eighth century, who is said to have defeated Athelstan, the Saxon king of the end of the ninth century, through the aid of St Andrew. It is impossible not to suspect the hand of a patriotic but ignorant Scottish monk of the later time, when Scotland was fighting for its existence against the monarchs of England, in this manipulation of the legend. Yet there was a legend to manipulate, and a legend is not an invention, but a distor- tion of facts. That Scotland at a very early date accepted St Andrew as its patron is beyond doubt. He is the only Scottish Saint whose day has survived all ecclesiastical change 1 6 LEGENDS OF ST ADRIAN AND ST MONAN. and is observed by Protestants as well as Romanists. There were twelve Celtic bishops, probably Culdees of St Andrews, from Cellach in the reign of Constantine, son of Aedh, down to the election of the Anglian Turgot in the reign of Malcolm Canmore. Of the other saints connected with Fife, the most memor- able was Adrian, called in his legend, perhaps by a later addition to flatter or honour the country from which Queen Margaret came, a Hungarian, who settled in the Isle of May, where he was martyred by the Danes about the middle of the ninth century, at a time when Hungary was not yet Christian. The ruins of a little church called after him, which was a favourite place of pilgrimage, may still be seen. The haven where the pilgrims, one of the most constant of whom was James IV., landed, is still called Pilgrim's Haven, and the Lady's, the Pilgrim's, St John's, and St Andrew's wells are still pointed out, though their brackish waters have lost the magic virtue they were credited with in early Christian, pos- sibly in pagan times. To Adrian the churches of Lindores and Flisk were dedicated under the name of St Magridin, which perhaps appeared on the inscription of Macduff's Cross. In the caves of Caiplie, in the East Neuk of Fife, may still be seen rude crosses which may have been cut on the rock — "When Adrian with his company Together came to Caplauchy." St Monan, in whose honour the church of Abercromby was named St Monans, was one of the companions of Adrian, and his relics were supposed to rest at Invery, until transferred by David II. to the church which afterwards bore his name; though Mr Skene prefers to identify him with Moinen, an Irish bishop of Clonfert, whose relics may have been brought over from the great monastery founded by St Brendan, the FIFE STILL PICTISH WHEN CONVERTED. 17 navigator, on the banks of the Shannon, to save them from the Danish raiders. St Fillan, an Irish saint of the eighth cen- tury, whose name is chiefly associated with the parish on Loch- earnside, where he left his crosier enclosed in the quigrach now in the Antiquarian Museum, and his bell, also left traces of his footsteps in the cave at Pittenweem called after him ; and the parish of Forgan was originally dedicated to St Fillan. Such figures flit past us like shades in the dark background of history. But some of the buildings associated with their names, though not founded in their time, keep alive their memory and attest the belief in their existence. We still gaze with wonder and admiration on the round tower of Aber- nethy, whose form demonstrates its Irish origin ; the square tower of St Regulus, which recalls the Byzantine architecture of Ravenna • and the pointed spire of St Monans of compara- tively recent date, replacing the earlier edifice which contained his shrine. Impossible as it is to fix dates with any approach to preci- sion, it may be safely concluded that these saints flourished while most of the population of Fife was still Pictish. A common Christianity facilitated the union of the two branches of the Celtic race in the north and east of Scotland. Had the one been heathen and the other Christian, there would have been records of a much longer and more desperate con- flict. It is not improbable that the ecclesiastics may have been the main agents in effecting the union, although the Churches of the Picts and Scots for a time stood out for their peculiar privileges and special customs. Throughout the legends, which in this point at least reflect the true history, it was the heathen Danes, not the pagan Celts, who made martyrs of the Scottish saints. In the middle of the ninth century, the Scots of the West 1 8 FIFE BECOMES PART OF KINGDOM OF SCONE. Highlands and Isles, and the Picts of the north and centre of Scotland, were united in one monarchy by Kenneth Macal- pine. His chief seat was Scone. All traces of the early fort and abbey, and even of the Moot hill, are obliterated by Lord Mansfield's modern palace and policies. It requires a strong effort of imagination to recall the fact that this low-lying ground, guarded only by the swift-flowing Tay, was the central seat of the Scottish monarchy for many centuries. But a ford in the days before bridges was often one of the best natural defences. The site of Dublin was also due to a ford, from which it took its older name of Athcliath, the ford of the hurdles. A town often outlives the cause which determined its site. Scone is not a far cry from Abernethy, nor even from Dunfermline or St Andrews. There seems no doubt that Fife was included at an early date in this kingdom, though on what terms its Pictish kings, of whom Brude, son of Dergard, is said to have been the last, submitted to the growing Scottish monarchy, we do not know. The submission of the Picts was probably connected with the new organisation of the Celtic Church in the plan of Diocesan Episcopacy which took the place of the purely monastic system. In the reign of Kenneth Macalpine, some relics of Columba were transferred from Iona to Dunkeld ; and Tuathal, son of Artgusa, Abbot of Dunkeld, is called in the middle of the ninth century chief Bishop of Fortren, a district whose bounds included the Picts of Forfar and Perth. After Tuathal's death in the reign of Constantine MacKenneth, there were three bishops who belonged, not to Dunkeld, but to Abernethy. Abernethy was then the eccle- siastical seat of the whole realm of the Picts. The names of the bishops of Abernethy are lost ; their successor was Cellach, who lived half a century later in the reign of BISHOPS OF THE SCOTS AT ABERNETHY. 1 9 Constantine MacAedh. This king, along with his bishop, swore at a conference on the little hill at Scone to preserve the laws and discipline of the faith, and the rights of the churches and the gospels, on an equality with the Scots. Such is the brief fragment of the Pictish chronicle which excites and baffles our curiosity. The Celtic bishop, who is called Bishop of the Scots, was the overseer or ecclesiastical superintendent of a district, and his district or diocese was the whole Scottish Pictish monarchy. The earlier Celtic Church, both in Ireland and Scotland, had also bishops. The theory that there was a primitive Church with only presbyters has no place in history. But these early bishops differed greatly from the lordly prelates of the medieval Church. In Ireland, if we could accept implicitly the annalists' numbers, bishops were so numerous, sometimes hundreds connected with a single monastery, that they could not have held distinct territorial offices. In Scot- land there is no trace of such a multiplicity of bishops, and there is reason to suppose that its earliest Church was neither Episcopal nor Presbyterian, but Monastic. The exact position of the earliest Scottish bishops is obscure, but they seem to have exercised the power of ordination, and to have been held in special honour, although not in such high honour as the abbots of the monasteries, the suc- cessors of St Columba or St Serf. The creation of a chief bishop for the whole kingdom was a step from the Monastic to the Episcopal Diocesan Church. Scotland was no longer pagan, with merely points of Gospel light shining from mon- astic cloisters, chiefly in islands, and hermit cells chiefly in unfrequented places called deserts, of which Dysart may have been one (though some prefer the Gaelic etymology of the Point of God, in remembrance of St Serf's landing), or in caves. All round the coast from Dysart to St Andrews, 20 CHURCH OF THE SCOTS BECOMES DIOCESAN, wherever the sea has hollowed the sandstone strata, there may still be seen the chambers or cells in which the earliest missionaries lived and worshipped. In some the crosses by which they were hallowed may be dimly traced, as in the caves of Wemyss, though they have disappeared from the caves which bear the names of St Serf at Dysart and of St Rule at St Andrews. Such places retained long their old sanctity, but the Church had now gone out to leaven the heathen world. The diocese of the bishop with the chapter of his cathedral, originally taken from the Culdee monks, was divided into parishes with separate churches and priests, who permeated the whole country, and educated the whole people in a way the solitary hermit or the cloistered monk could not have done. The ministers of religion were no longer saints or hermits, virgins or martyrs ; they became mitred bishops, abbots, and priors, the councillors, sometimes the rulers, of the king and of the nation. Why was it that the chief pastor of this reorganised Church migrated from Iona to Dunkeld, from Dunkeld to Abernethy, from Abernethy to St Andrews ? It was probably due to the political causes which directed the course of Scottish history from the close of the ninth to the middle of the eleventh century. The Celtic monarchy, after its union, pressed for- ward from the west and north to the east and south. The dreaded attacks of Danish and Norse Vikings, whose long dragon boats preyed on the coasts and sailed up the firths or fiords, forced the consolidation of the kingdom. Scone, an inland place, was now a safer political, and Dunkeld or Aber- nethy a safer ecclesiastical centre. The Danes' Dyke, between Balcomie and Fife Ness, in the East Neuk, was probably built to defend the coast of Fife from their depredations. Near it, in the black cave, or at Inverdovat in the parish of Forgan, Constantine I., the son of Kenneth Macalpine, was WITH ST ANDREWS AS METROPOLIS. 21 slain in 88 1 by the Dubhgall, or Black Strangers, as the Irish called the Danes. It is not so clear why St Andrews obtained and retained the primacy of the Church in preference to Dunkeld. It never was the royal seat of the united monarchy, though the names of Kilrymont (the Church of the King's Mount) and Kingsbarns confirm the tradition which made it one of the residences of the district Pictish king. It was situated at the corner of the Kingdom ; it had no rich lands such as those which attracted later monks to Cupar, Pittenweem, Balmerino, Lindores, and Culross. Its rocky headland, where we still trace the outline of the little Culdee church on the Kirk- heugh, is washed by the sea on which the northern pirates had their home, and from which they ravaged the coasts. Along the whole coast of Fife the spade or the plough now and again reveals the skeletons of those merciless invaders, and of those who died to defend their homes. Why should a spot so barren and exposed have been selected for the Scottish Canterbury ? Probably it was because it alone claimed, of all the churches of Scotland, the possession of the relics of an apostle, the brother of St Peter, and because, like Kent, it was the first landing-place and settlement of Roman mis- sionaries. The name of St Andrew, as the Church multi- plied and became more closely connected with Rome, was deemed more venerable than that of St Columba or St Serf, or any local Celtic saint. The decline and fall of the Celtic Church and the Culdee monasteries began when Malcolm and Margaret introduced the Roman ritual, and brought English canons from Durham to instruct the Scottish Church. It was concluded when David I. transferred their possessions to the Canons Regular, who elected English bishops to the See of St Andrews. Some traces, however, lingered till the end of the thirteenth century, 22 MARGARET THE ATHELING COMES TO FIFE. when the Culdees were finally excluded from voting in the election of the bishops. An outward sign of their extinction was lately brought to light, when it was found that the Celtic crosses on their tombs had been used for the foundations of the east wall and window of the Cathedral. The subjection of the Irish and Scottish Churches was one of the first triumphs of Ultramontane Romanism, which, after so many centuries of conquest, interrupted by the Reformation, were followed by its victory over the Gallican and other national Churches, and were consummated by the decrees of the Vatican Council in spite of the protests of some of the most learned Catholics. The first period of the history of Fife, the age of the Saints, closes with St Margaret, the wife of Malcolm Canmore. Her life is indissolubly linked with another locality of Fife, Dun- fermline. The Scottish monarchy had gone on increasing under a series of vigorous kings, who moved its boundaries farther and farther south during the decline of the Anglian monarchy of Northumbria. Lothian had been conquered. The Rock of Dunedin, originally perhaps a Pictish Dun, afterwards a Northumbrian Burgh of Edwin the Fair, was now one of the strongholds of the Scottish monarchs. Their raids had extended far beyond the present limits of the Tweed and Solway, and were the terror of Northern England, which they called Saxony, the land of the Sassenach. In the middle of the eleventh century Malcolm Canmore, the son of Duncan, a Celt by speech and paternity, but whose mother was an Anglo-Dane, daughter of Earl Siward of Northumbria, re- covered his father's throne, which Macbeth, perhaps the repre- sentative of the Northern Celtic Kings, or Maormor, had usurped. Though educated at the Court of Edward the Con- fessor, and aided by Tostig, the Saxon Earl of Northumbria, Malcolm, true to his father's blood, was the enemy of the MARRIES MALCOLM CANMORE. 23 Norman kings of England. A few years later the Norman Conquest brought as exiles to his Court three members of the dethroned Saxon royal house. Edgar the Atheling, and his sisters Margaret and Christina, were children of Edward, the son of Edmund Ironside, who had been driven from England by Canute, and had taken refuge in Hungary, where Edward married Agatha, a kinswoman of Gisela, wife of St Stephen, King of Hungary, and sister of the Emperor Henry II. Margaret had been educated in the school of adversity as well as in the school of Christianity. Her rare beauty and bright intelligence won and held the heart of the fierce king. Marriage and its duties did not make him cease fighting. His life was still spent in almost constant war with England, now ruled by its Norman conquerors. But his domestic, and especially his ecclesiastical policy, was directed by his wife. Her character more than his has left its mark on the civilisa- tion of Scotland. They were married in 1070 at Dunferm- line, where Malcolm had a tower on an isolated mound, surrounded on every side but one by the deep dell cut by the Linn burn from which Dunfermline takes its name. Its foundation may still be seen in the grounds of Pitten- crieff, a little west of the later palace. At Dunfermline their children were born ; and there, a few years later, in honour of the marriage, were laid the foundations of the Abbey Church, the little Scottish Durham. Its nave and west door are amongst the best specimens of Early Norman architecture in Scotland. With Durham Malcolm and his house were closely connected. He was present at the foundation of its new cathedral in 1093, and his son Alex- ander witnessed the translation of the relics of St Cuthbert from Lindisfarne in 11 04. Beneath its altar lay the relics of the Celtic saint, Aidan, and the Lothian saint, Cuthbert. Its archives contain the earliest Scottish charters. It was 24 DUNFERMLINE THE SCOTTISH DURHAM. natural that the model of Durham should be followed in the choice of the site and in the architecture of Dunferm- line, which may have been the work of the same masons. Only the commencement of the building was made during Margaret's life, but it was completed by her son, David I. It was enriched by gifts of lands from her husband. She herself gave it gold and silver ornaments for the sacred offices, and the crucifix or reliquary studded with gems which held the precious rood of black wood, carved out of a frag- ment, she believed, of the cross of Christ, with the figure of our Saviour sculptured in solid ivory. There, too, was held the memorable Council, when, at her instance, the Celtic • Church was reformed. It was instructed by her, assisted by the monks of Durham, in the observance of the Lord's Day, the Roman ritual for the Mass, and the prohibition of incest- uous marriage. Her Court was a model of purity. In it no wicked or scandalous word was spoken. More civilised cus- toms were introduced in dress and for the table, and the use of linen more probably than tartan, though both have claimed her as their earliest patron. The Grace Cup became known in Scotland as Queen Margaret's Blessing. Charity was taught by example. The Queen fed the poor with food she herself prepared ; at her cost were erected the first Scottish inns, rest- ing-places on the roads and guest-houses on either side of the Forth for the pilgrims who came to Dunfermline by the ferry, called after her the Queensferry, as that near Elie was called the Earlsferry, after the Earl of Fife. The stone where she rested is still pointed out on the highroad from North Queens- ferry to Dunfermline. Her prayers were constant ; and the little cave on the Linn, just below the present Drill Hall of the Volunteers, enabled her to practise them in secret. Such are some of the traits in the life by her confessor Turgot. It is the portrait of a friendly MARGARET'S DEATH — HER RELICS. 2$ and courtly hand, but bears marks of truth. Only one miracle is recorded. Margaret's Book of the Gospels read during Mass, illuminated with miniatures of the Evangelists, having been allowed by a careless bearer to fall into the water, was recovered without stain save a mark of damp. Her biographer, declaring his own belief in this simplest of all miracles, which occurs in the life of more than one Celtic saint, expresses doubt whether others will credit it. How different from the spirit in which Adamnan describes the miracles that crowd his life of Columba, or Bede those he relates in the life of St Cuthbert ! The tide of belief in present miracle had begun to ebb, and has never since flowed. Margaret died in 1093 in the Castle of Edin- burgh, shortly after her son Edgar brought the news of her husband's death. Her last breath was spent in the prayer that this trial might purge her from sin. Under cover of a fog her body was taken out of the castle by the door in the western bastion recently restored, carried across the firth, and buried at Dunfermline. The limestone slabs which covered her tomb still stand a few feet beyond the east window of the modern church ; but her relics were dispersed by an untoward fate. The head was carried during the Reforma- tion to the Castle of Edinburgh, afterwards brought back to the manor-house of George Dury, Abbot of Dunfermline, delivered in 1597 to the Jesuits, who took it to Antwerp, and was ultimately placed in the chapel of the Scottish College at Douai, from which it disappeared during the troubles of the French Revolution. Some minor relics are said to have been acquired at Venice by Philip II. of Spain and deposited in the reliquary of the chapel of St Jerome in the church of St Lawrence at the Escurial, on the gates of which are, or were, full-length paintings of Margaret and Malcolm. On a search being recently made for the relics 26 MARGARET'S GOSPEL BOOK. at the instance of Dr Gillies, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Edinburgh, they could not be found. This is not sur- prising. Philip II. has been aptly called by Mr Ford a relicomaniac. He amassed the relics of more than five hundred separate saints, placed them in costly shrines, and housed them in the reliquary chamber or under the altars of the church of the Escurial. But the French general La Houssaye plundered the gold and silver of the shrines and scattered their contents. The doctrine that the same relics might be in different places at the same time, accepted by so little credulous a writer as John Major, gave ample room for their multiplication and little opportunity for their identi- fication. A singular good fortune has preserved the Gospel Book of Queen Margaret. After nearly eight centuries it seems almost certain that it has been rediscovered, and is now safely deposited in the Bodleian Library. A book, at least, whose date is vouched by the best authorities to be not later than the eleventh century, was acquired at a recent sale of books belonging to the parish of Brent Ely in Suffolk, and some of which had belonged to Lord Howard of Naworth : in it, besides miniatures of the four evangelists and other features answering to the description of Queen Margaret's book, the Latin verses on a blank leaf, after describing its loss and recovery, conclude with the lines — " Salvati semper sint Rex Reginaqitc sancta Quorum codex erat nuper salvatus ab undis Gloria magna Deo libium qui salvat eundem." Within Dunfermline Abbey or its precincts more royal dust has mingled with the soil than in any other spot of Scotland save Iona : Margaret, and by her side her husband, Canmore, brought from Tynemouth by the pious care of her son Alex- ander I. ; her sons, Edgar, and Alexander I., with his queen ; David I., with his two queens ; Malcolm IV.; Alexander III., MARGARET LAST SCOTTISH SAINT. 2J with his first wife Margaret, and their sons David and Alex- ander ; Robert the Bruce, with his queen Elizabeth, and their daughter Matilda ; and Annabella Drummond, wife of Robert III. and mother of James, the first of his name and the best of his race. Margaret Logy, the wife of David II., brought from London tombs of alabaster for herself and her husband, which were erected at Dunfermline ; but as she was divorced, it is not likely she was buried there. David himself was buried at Holyrood. No successor to Margaret has yet found a place in the Roman Calendar of Scottish Saints. Her son David re- ceived the title from his people, and was called by one of his successors a " sair saint for the Crown," so large were his gifts to the Church, but the Church never canonised its benefactor. At the urgent suit of Scottish Catholics Rome has for many years been considering the claim of Mary Stuart, but as yet hesitates. The decree in her favour, if it is given, will be based on different grounds from those which justify historians as well as divines in conferring it on Mar- garet. Mary may be deemed a martyr for the Catholic faith. Margaret was a confessor of the Christian life. In her the virtues of a woman were combined with those of a queen. Though she wrought no miracles like those of earlier saints, she exhibited the greater and rarer miracle of a life almost without fault. The age of pilgrimage is past. To organise one by railway trains is alien to the spirit which led, for several centuries, the barefoot pilgrims with staff and scrip to fast and pray at the shrine of Margaret. Man cannot turn back the hand of the dial. Yet the dweller in Dunfermline, or the stranger who passes its abbey, whatever creed he professes, may still recall with silent veneration how much the life of one good woman did for Scotland. 28 CHAPTER II. THE SAXON INTERLUDE IN SCOTTISH HISTORY, 1057-I093— THE DISUSE OF GAELIC IN FIFE — NORMAN FEUDALISM INTRODUCED BY DAVID I. AND HIS SUCCESSORS, I093-1286— MACDUFF, DESCENDANT OF THE CELTIC CHIEF OR KING, BECOMES FEUDAL EARL OF FIFE — PRIVILEGES OF THE CLAN MACDUFF — MACDUFF'S CROSS NEAR NEWBURGH — THE EARLY BURGHS OF FIFE — DEATH OF ALEXANDER III. AT KINGHORN, 1286 — WAR OF INDEPENDENCE — EDWARD I. AT DUNFERMLINE, 1305 — ROBERT BRUCE AT DEDICATION OF CATHEDRAL OF ST ANDREWS, 1318 — HIS TOMB AT DUNFERMLINE — EXPLOITS OF WALLACE IN FIFE- PARLIAMENT OF DAIRSIE, 1335 — MURDER OF DUKE OF ROTHESAY AT FALKLAND, I399— FOUNDATION OF UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS BY BISHOP VVARDLAW, I411. From the death of Margaret in 1093 to that of Alexander III. in 1286, a period of nearly two centuries, Scotland, and Fife as a part of it, grew in civilisation and prosperity. The Celtic period of the Scottish monarchy was at an end. It is not possible to date with precision the time when Gaelic ceased to be spoken in Fife. Canmore is the last of our kings who used Gaelic as his native language, but according to his wife's biography he knew English as well, and his mother was a Northumbrian. It is a proof of the long disuse of Gaelic in Fife, that while the place names are largely, the family names are now rarely, Celtic. There is no trace of a clan except the Macduffs and the Macbeths, and it is probable that both had their origin north of the Tay. None of those who are recorded as claiming the privilege of the Cross of Clan Macduff bore the name, which shows that the clan system ANGLO-SAXON INTERLUDE IN SCOTTISH HISTORY. 29 had broken down in Fife. But in the earliest charters there are many Celtic names which have now disappeared, chiefly amongst the clergy and the serfs. The Saxon had a brief existence, like the interlude between the acts of a drama, almost confined to the life of Malcolm and Margaret. Amongst the parties and witnesses to the charters, which are the best vouchers in such a matter, Anglo-Saxon or Danish names of landowners are rare in Fife. Merle Swain, who acquired lands at or near Kelly, and Orm, who acquired lands at Abernethy, are perhaps the only dis- tinctly Saxon names of owners of land which can be traced by charter evidence to the date of Malcolm Canmore. Norman names come into immediate contact with Celtic. There are only two Anglo-Saxon Bishops of St Andrews. Yet it is probable that a considerable number of Anglo- Saxons, and perhaps some Danes, settled in Fife, although they did not become the possessors of the largest fiefs or richest benefices. We cannot otherwise account for the early adoption of an Anglo-Saxon dialect, which has in the ' Chronicle of Wyntoun ' one of its earliest representatives in literature. But there may have been a still earlier Teutonic migration to the eastern coast of Scotland, as to which history is silent. The children of Malcolm and Margaret, especi- ally David I., who was educated at the Court of Henry I. of England, the husband of his sister Maud, were Norman in character, though not in blood. The cadets of Norman families began in the reigns of David I. and his successors the northern migration, and acquisition of lands and honours, which greatly facilitated the adoption of feudal customs and principles, and formed the only true Norman Conquest of Scot- land. This was carried out in Fife as far as, or further than, in any other part of Scotland. Nearly the whole land in the county passed into the hands of Norman proprietors, who in 3., hatred] of thy person, the luif of thy riches, nor the fear of any truble thow could have done to me in particulare, moved, nor moves me to stryk thee ; but only becaus thow hast bein, and remanes OPINIONS OF KNOX AND LYNDSAY. 63 ane obstinat ennemye against Christ Jesus and His holy evan- gell.' And so he stroke him twyse or thrise throwgh with a slog sweard ; and so he fell, never word heard out of his mouth but ' I am a preast ! I am a preast ! fy, fy ! all is gone.'" To some, such words as Melvin's and Knox's marginal note describing the cold-blooded murder as " The Godly Act and Words of James Melvin," appear the height of blasphemy and cruelty, while to others they may seem the expression of a man who was, and believed himself, the hand of a righteous God. They were, in fact, the act and words of a time when the feelings of men had become like those of soldiers in a battle at the moment when not merely life and victory, but a cause they hold dearer than life and victory, is at stake. Fortunately soldiers act at such moments without words. It is difficult to combine the parts of judge and executioner. The lines ascribed to Lyndsay, though not to be found in his works, express the opinion of the most impartial spectator then possible — • ' ' Although the loon was weill away, The deed was foully done." The echoes of that tempest continued to be heard in Scot- land for more than a century. Are its waves even now still ? Are we yet, after two more centuries have passed, sufficiently distant and calm to give Lyndsay's words a wider reference ? May we say, although it was right that a Church corrupt in doctrine, discipline, and morals should be reformed, yet there was much in the mode of the revolution we call the Reforma- tion which was not well done ? It was not only the super- stitious images but also the houses pious men had dedicated to God's service which were wrecked. That service was not merely changed to the vulgar tongue, but deprived of the aids which architecture, painting, and music lend to lift the human 64 CALVINISM OF REFORMATION. spirit to the contemplation of the Almighty. A great gulf was made as if by one of the convulsions of nature between the Church of St Serf and St Margaret, and the Church of Knox and Melville. Or must we acknowledge that the sterner verdict of our forefathers was nearer the truth, that in this way, and in no other, was reformation possible. There are mysteries in the course of history, as in the order of nature, which baffle the wit of men to interpret. The historian is bound to be a witness to the truth so far as he sees it. He is not bound, though he is ever ready, to pronounce judgment. Perhaps we may most safely adopt the words of one who lived within sight of a time when deeds of violence, and murders by fire and sword, were not occasional but constant : — " It is better for us to admonish the negligent that crimes may not abound, than to blame the things that have been done." The world-famed tale of the Sibylline books received a new and altered application. For the Church which had rejected the reforms of the Lollards, the Hussites, and the Lutherans, there remained the narrower doctrine and stricter discipline of the Reformation of Calvin. The political Calvinism of Scotland was partly a conse- quence and partly a cause of the growth of the democratic spirit, and of the devotion of the Royal House to the Roman Church. The nobles were divided. Some followed the King, others became Lords of the Congregation. This division weakened their power, though it still continued great. The people, with rare local exceptions, none of which were in Fife, went over to the Reformed Church, whose ministers became their leaders. 6 S CHAPTER V. JOHN KNOX AND MARY STUART IN FIFE — KNOX PREACHES AT ST ANDREWS, JUNE 8, 1547— DISPUTATION BETWEEN KNOX AND WYN- RAM IN ST LEONARD'S YARD — THE PULPIT BECOMES A POWER IN SCOTLAND — KNOX IN THE FRENCH GALLEYS OFF THE COAST OF FIFE, JUNE 1548 — KNOX AGAIN PREACHES AT ST ANDREWS, JUNE 1559 — ENCOUNTER OF THE TROOPS OF MARY OF GUISE AND OF THE RE- FORMERS AT CUPAR MUIR — MARY OF GUISE AND KNOX — MARY STUART AND CHASTELLARD AT BURNTISLAND, 1563 — DARNLEY AND MARY AT WEMYSS CASTLE, 1565 — MARY PRISONER IN LOCHLEVEN CASTLE, JUNE 17, I567 — INTERVIEW WITH KNOX — HER ESCAPE, MAY 2, 1568 — KNOX'S LAST VISIT TO ST ANDREWS, JULY 1571 TO AUGUST 17, 1572. The history of Fife before the Reformation closes with the martyrdom of Wishart and the murder of Beaton. The last trial for heresy was that of Walter Myln, the old priest of Lunan, who was taken at Dysart in 1558 when "warming himself in a poor wife's house and teaching her the com- mandments of God." He was burnt at St Andrews in the end of April 1558. The burgesses, who had shut their shops to prevent the sale of materials for his execution, erected a pile of stones to his memory. In 1560 the Council of Blackfriars ordered Sir David Lyndsay's books to be burnt ; and John Knox was burnt in effigy. Fire consumed no more heretics, but another century had to pass before witches ceased to be burnt. Its next and most interesting chapter includes the preaching of John Knox, the chief author of the Scottish Reformation, and the first acts E 66 QUEEN MARY AND JOHN KNOX. in the tragedy of Mary Stuart, the heroine, though not yet the saint, of the Roman Church. Some of the most memor- able passages in the lives of Mary and of Knox occurred in Fife. No contrast could be greater than that of the two actors, who so often confront each other in portrait-galleries as in life. The stern, bearded, middle-aged man of the commons met the beautiful young woman, in whose veins the blood of the Stuarts mingled with the blood of the Tudors and the Guises. The one had been bred in the school of ad- versity, the galleys and exile, and came within danger of the stake. The other had been delicately nurtured in the most brilliant Court of Europe, whose crown for a brief space she added to her own. Yet it was the man who, after a success- ful life, died honoured by most of his countrymen. The woman passed through blood and battle, baffled at every turn, into a captivity which ended on the scaffold. But by one of the revenges of time, Mary has now a wider, though not a higher, fame than Knox. Differing in all other respects, in two points they were alike — the tenacity with which Mary with feminine supple- ness, Knox with masculine boldness, pursued the objects each held sacred, and the courage which knew neither scruple nor fear. From the Scottish historical drama, in which they played leading parts, it is necessary to select the chief inci- dents illustrating the " History of Fife." Knox first preached in public in the parish church of St Andrews. This church had been dedicated to the Trinity by Bishop De Bernham, and though more than once repaired almost rebuilt in 1798, it still occupies the same site in the centre of the town. It was a Sunday in the end of May or beginning of June 1547. He had come at Easter to the castle with his pupils, the sons of Douglas of Longniddrie and Cockburn of Ormiston. East Lothian was no longer KNOX PREACHES IN ST ANDREWS. 67 safe, and St Andrews, after its castle had passed from the dead hand of Beaton into the custody of the swords of the Reformers, was the refuge and rallying-point of the professors of the Reformed doctrine. Protected by these, Knox con- tinued, in the chief citadel of the Roman Catholic Church, and the chapel of the castle of the Cardinal, quietly to instruct his pupils in the Gospel of St John, from the place where he had left off at Longniddrie, and also catechised them publicly in the parish church. His talent for instructing an elder class and wider audience could not be hid. John Rough, a friar turned preacher, Henry Balnavis, a theolo- gical lawyer, and Sir David Lyndsay, the Lyon King and poet, gave him a call to preach in public. To fill his spirit with that of the prophet from whom he determined to take his text, Knox for many days after his call showed no mirth, and avoided company. Once in the pulpit, hesitation vanished. He spoke as no preacher in Scotland had spoken since the first missionaries of the Celtic Church denounced paganism and preached the Gospel. He took for his text part of the 24th and 25th verses of the 7th chapter of Daniel, " And ane other king shall rise after thame, and he shall be unlyik unto the first, and he shall subdew three kinges, and shall speak wordes against the Most Heigh, and shall consome the sanctes of the Most Heigh, and think that he may change tymes and lawes, and thei shal be gevin unto his handis, until a tyme, and tymes, and deviding of tymes." It was, and is, a favourite text for the preacher anxious to find in the figures of the Hebrew prophets poetical expression and divine sanction for his own convictions. But it has never been used by one more persuaded of its inter- pretation than Knox. His abridgment of the sermon in the ' History of the Reformation ' may be condensed, though to the prejudice of its argument and its eloquence. His exhorta- 68 THE AUDIENCE. tion praised the love of God in foretelling the dangers the Church was to pass through. He then treated the Babylonish captivity of the Israelites, and passed by natural transition to the four empires, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome, from whose ruins sprang the Roman Church. All the marks of the fourth beast of Daniel's vision were manifest in that Church. He contrasted it with the true Kirk, which fol- lowed the voice of Christ, its pastor. The New Testament confirmed the prophecy of the Old. The Papacy was the Antichrist or Man of Sin spoken of by Paul in the Thes- salonians, and the Babylonish Woman foretold by John in the Revelation. Then turning from prophet and apostle to recent history, he deciphered, or as we should say dissected, the lives of popes and friars. He compared their doctrine and laws with those of God and Christ, and asserted the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith in the blood of Christ, in opposition to the Roman doctrine of works, which included not only those prescribed by God's law, but others of man's invention, as " pilgrimages, pardons, and other sic baggage." The Pope showed the marks of the beast by his blasphemous claims to be vicar of Christ, " one that cannot err," the doctrine of infallibility; "that may make right of wrong," the doctrine of casuistry; and "of nothing some- what," perhaps the doctrine of transubstantiation ; who " trafficked in the bodies and souls of men " by the sale of indulgences and masses. He ended by challenging any doctor present to dispute his interpretation of the sacred writers. He was ready to prove they meant what he had said. His audience had been a strange mixture. His friends from the . Castle were there, and amongst them the daring men who had taken part in the murder of Beaton, the two Leslies, Kirkaldy of Grange, and Carmichael, as well as DISPUTATION IN ST LEONARDS YARDS. 69 others who, like Rough and Lyndsay, sympathised, as Knox himself did, with the deed when done. But there was also present John Major, provost of St Salvator's, the most learned scholastic theologian in Scotland, but now old and timid, along with the other reverend heads of the university ; Wynram the sub-prior, vicar-general in the vacancy of the see, canons and friars of both colours, Franciscan and Dom- inican, the leading citizens, lairds from the county, women and children. The comments on this, as on other sermons, varied. Some said " he struck at the root, while other preachers only sned the branches ; " others " that he would be burned like Wishart," which Forsyth, the Laird of Nydie, hearing, remarked, " Better try other defences than fire and sword, for men now have other eyes." Besides those favour- able to the Reformed doctrine, and the priests and friars, most of whom were its determined opponents, the majority of his hearers were waverers, ready to be converted by the best argument or most persuasive speaker. The challenge of Knox could scarcely be neglected, and a disputation followed in the yards of St Leonards, at the instance of Hamilton, the archbishop - designate, between Knox and Wynram. Wynram, a half-hearted champion, afterwards a convert to the Reformed doctrine, left the defence after a little to Friar Arbuckle, whom Knox over- came with logic and ridicule, as a master of fence might a bungler with the foil. Another mode of argument was tried. The friars every Sunday occupied the pulpit, to keep Knox out. He evaded this stratagem by preaching on week- days, till he was silenced by the arrival of the French galleys, under Strozzi, the prior of Capua, who, in breach of the terms of capitulation, carried off the bold Reformer and his companions as captives. It mattered little. The pulpit, so long silent, had found a voice which had a longer range 70 KNOX IN GALLEY OFF FIFE COAST. than any artillery then or since invented. For three cen- turies, from Knox to Chalmers, it became the chief popular power in Scotland. Knox served in the galleys for nineteen months. During this time Knox's galley returned in June 1548 to the coast of Scotland. When it lay between Dundee and St Andrews, James Balfour, son of the laird of Montquhanie, then his fellow-prisoner, afterwards parson of Flisk and Lord Clerk Register, the draftsman of the bond for Darnley's murder, asked Knox if they should ever be delivered. Knox answered " that God would deliver them from that bondage to His glory even in this life." And when Balfour further inquired if he knew the land, Knox replied, " I know it well, for I see the steeple of that place where God in public first opened my mouth to His glory ; and I am fully persuaded, how weak that ever I now appear, that I shall not depart this life till that my tongue shall glorify His godly name in the same place." Balfour afterwards denied that he had ever been in the galleys ; but Knox, who denounced him as a liar and a renegade, avers that Balfour had repeated this prophecy many years before the return of Knox to Scotland. In the same year the men of Fife, led by Lord James, the Commendator of St Andrews, Lords Lindsay and Rothes, and the lairds of Wemyss and Largo, watched the coast of Fife and prevented the landing of the English. Ten years passed, and Knox, more favoured than most prophets, took the fulfilment of his prophecy into his own hands. On Friday, the 2d June 1559, he preached at An- struther, on Saturday at Crail, when he announced his pur- pose to preach on Sunday at St Andrews. Archbishop Hamilton had collected there a force of two hundred spears. Mary of Guise, the Queen Regent, was at Falkland with her French troops. Lord James Stewart, the future Regent KNOX AGAIN PREACHES AT ST ANDREWS. 7 1 Murray, and the Earl of Argyll, the two young lords who led the Reformers, — for they had the liking of their country- men, even when most democratic, to be led by a lord, — had only a few retainers, and frightened by the threat of the Archbishop that if Knox preached he would be saluted with a dozen of culverins, "whereof the most part should light upon his nose," they counselled delay. But Knox, resolute always, declined to be stopped. He would preach, as he had foretold, in the town and church where God had called him to the dignity of a preacher. His life was in God's hands. He wished no defenders. He only craved an audience. As usual, the stronger will got its way. Knox mounted the pulpit, and the Archbishop fled to Falkland to obtain help from Mary. The text of the sermon which Knox preached was from the description of the buyers and sellers Christ drove from the temple : " And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer ; but ye have made it a den of thieves " (Matt. xxi. 12, 13). The account he gives of the sermon is pregnant. The sermon was probably brief when fighting was deemed near. The corruption of the Papacy, he said, was the same as that of the Jews. Its priests dishonoured the house of God, making it a house of merchandise. The act of Christ in overthrow- ing the tables and the seats pointed the duty of those to whom God had given power and zeal. Although the town had not before openly professed sympathy with the Reform- ers, the magistrates and the greater part of the commonalty now acted on his suggestion, and "removed all monuments of idolatry with expedition." 72 ENCOUNTER OF CUPAR MUIR. There was little time for delay. Lodgings had been as- signed to the Queen and her troops at Cupar, but on Monday night Lord James and Argyll, with one hundred horse and some foot from the coast, occupied the town. Before noon on Tuesday, their number had swelled to three thousand. From Lothian came Ormiston, Calder, Hatton, and other lairds whom Knox had confirmed by his teaching in the Reformed doctrine. Lord Ruthven came from Perth; the Earl of Rothes, as sheriff, brought the men of Fife, "an honest company." Dundee and St Andrews sent their quota ; Cupar its whole force. "It appeared," says Knox, "as if men had rained from the clouds." The Queen's forces, led by the Duke of Chastelereau and D'Osell the French com- mander, had advanced during the night, keeping the south side of the Eden. Halliburton, the Provost of Dundee, chose the ground for the Reformers upon the muir about a mile and a half to the west of Cupar, on the same side of the river, with sufficient room for retreat in case of attack. Ruthven with the horse rode on in front to prevent the enemy from discovering their numbers, and protected the roads to Cupar and St Andrews. After several fruitless attempts to force an attack, and to discover the strength opposed to them, the mist which hung that day, as it often still hangs, over the Eden, cleared, and in the afternoon the scouts saw for the first time the men of Dundee and St Andrews drawn up in a separate array from the gentlemen of Fife, Angus, and Mearns. This discovery led to a medi- ation, for the Queen's forces had expected no resistance. Terms of truce were signed by Chastelereau and D'Osell at Garliebank, the western slope of the Owl or Tarvit Hill, on whose summit the Cupar cross now stands. It was agreed that the Queen's troops should retire to Falkland, and that no French or other soldiers, except the former MARY OF GUISE AND KNOX. 73 garrisons of Dysart, Kirkcaldy, and Kinghorn, should remain in Fife. There was to be a truce for eight days until further terms might be negotiated. Chastelereau and D'Osell returned to Falkland, where the Queen expressed her indignation that they had missed so good an occasion for fighting. The troops of the Reformed party dispersed, but the two lords and the great part of the gentry went to St Andrews, where it was agreed that they should meet at Perth on the 24th of June to relieve that town from its French garrison. The Queen having shown no sign of negotiating further, a letter was written to her complaining that the assurance was not kept that French soldiers, or what was the same thing, soldiers in French pay, were kept in Perth contrary to a promise given by the Duke at Stirling some time before, and that a provost had been enforced upon the citizens. Perth was relieved on Sunday, the 25th June; but we must not pass beyond the bounds of Fife. A desultory war of sieges, skirmishes, and sallies went on as elsewhere, or perhaps more than elsewhere, in Fife, which abounded in fortified houses- of all sizes. In this partisan war Kirkaldy of Grange, another of Knox's companions in the galleys, who had since served an apprenticeship in the wars in Picardy, greatly distinguished himself by making reprisals on the French, who destroyed his castle of Halyards, and spoiled his lands of Grange on the coast. For a time the French troops had the best of it, and Mary of Guise exultingly said, " Where is now John Knox his God ? My God is stronger than his, even in Fife." It had come to this, that those who acknow- ledged the same Son and Saviour believed in different Gods. But the prophecy proved false. The French were soon after driven from Fife, and the contest centred in the siege of Leith, still held by a French garrison, as was also the Castle of Edinburgh, in which Mary of Guise had been forced to 74 QUEEN MARY IN FIFE. take refuge. She saw the corpses of enemies stretched out on the ground, and delighted in it as "a bonny sight." By the Reformers the mother of Mary Stuart was naturally deemed another Jezebel. Her death in the Castle of Edin- burgh, and the reduction of Leith with the aid of the English, led to the peace of Edinburgh and the Establishment of the Protestant religion by the Parliament of 1560. The death of Francis II. before the close of the same year brought a new actor on the field, whose connection with Fife has given it a world-wide interest. It is only a small portion of mankind who give heed to the preacher. Every heart is touched by the charm and fate of Mary Stuart, and few minds resist the attempt to read the riddle of her life. In August 1 56 1 she returned to Scotland, sad at quitting France with its bright sky, not sorry to leave Catherine de Medici, a mother- in-law with the feelings popularly attributed to a step-mother, and glad to exchange the position of a young dowager for that of a regnant queen. She knew the outward contrast between the polished courtiers and as yet submissive third estate of France, and the rough barons and rude commons of her own country. But she was not fully conscious of the inward and deep difference, political as well as religious, between the people she then left and those whom she was now to try to govern. During the six years of her actual reign she was much in Fife, visiting Falkland, Lochleven, Cupar, Wemyss, and St Andrews, hunting and hawking, dancing and singing, escaping the restraint of Court at Holyrood and the mob of the Edinburgh streets, to play the bourgeois wife in the merchant's house still standing at the corner of South Street in St Andrews, or the country girl in the park and woods of Falkland. Our attention must be fixed on three places, each the scene of incidents notable even amongst the many CHASTELLARD AND MARY. 75 romantic scenes of her life. At Burntisland, then called Wester Kinghorn, Chastellard committed the fault or crime for which he paid the forfeit of his life. At Wemyss she met Darnley. In the Castle of Lochleven she found her first prison, and commenced, if guilty, her lifelong expiation ; if innocent, her slow torture for his death. When the Queen, only in her nineteenth year, returned to Scotland, amongst her brilliant suite was a young cavalier and poet, Chastellard, a gentleman in the service of M. dAmville, the son of Anne de Montmorency, afterwards Constable of France. He came of good family in Dauphin^, and was grandnephew by his mother of Bayard, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, whom be resembled in the former quality. It was said he was also like Bayard in his good figure, his skill in arms, games, and dancing. He spoke and wrote both prose and verse in a pleasing style ; but if the few specimens of his poetry preserved are fair samples, he was an indif- ferent poet. This accomplished gentleman, says his friend Brantome, made the Queen's acquaintance by his good quali- ties, and especially by his rhymes. In a sonnet translated from the Italian he put the dangerous question, " Of what use is it to possess kingdoms, cities, towns, provinces, and to com- mand nations, to be respected, feared, and admired by every one, yet to live a lonely widow, cold as ice ? " In another he paid a trite, perhaps still more hazardous, compliment to her beauty, " That her eyes lit the sea, and made torches needless for a lover." The Queen returned compliment for compli- ment and verse for verse. Like many royal ladies of the time, and some of her own ancestors, she practised poetry, an unsafe guide for life. Chastellard returned to France with M. dAmville ; but, unwilling to take part in the religious wars of France, and longing again to see the lady of his heart, like a moth unable to shun the flame, he came to Scotland in 1562 "j6 CHASTELLARD AT BURNTISLAND, 1563. with a letter from M. d'Amville recommending him to the Queen. He was received in the beginning of November at Montrose, where Randolph, the English envoy, saw him de- liver his letter, watching the Queen with spy's eyes as she read. He detected only smiles, in which Lethington, the astute secretary, assured him there were no politics. It was probably no more than a letter of recommendation and a smile of recog- nition. But Mary imprudently treated the young cavalier with more than her common graciousness, accepted a copy of his poems, and mounted him on a horse, the gift of Lord Robert Stuart. Knox insinuates further familiarities, that she chose him, and it is likely enough she did, for her partner in a dance called " The Purpose," leaned on his shoulder, and preferred his company to that of the nobles, which is a charge he repeats almost in the same words with regard to Rizzio. Her condescension turned a giddy brain. Brantome, in the light manner of his time and country which we can scarcely understand, boasts of the amour which cost his friend his life. Yet it must be remembered he knew Mary Stuart as well as Chastellard. " In old times," he says, " mortals loved god- desses and knights princesses. Men will continue to love those above them." Chastellard's conduct was an extravagance, not a crime. He was a Phaethon or a Pygmalion. Mary was the Sun that burnt, not a Galatea who rewarded her lover. This was the era in France of Ronsard and the Pleiad. The classic and heathen had mingled with and corrupted the medieval and religious idea of chivalric love. Royal ladies specially favoured poets, from the day when a daughter of James I. of Scotland, the wife of the Dauphin, afterwards Louis XI., kissed the lips of Alan Chartier, from which so many virtuous thoughts and wise sayings had come, to that on which Margaret of Savoy won the favour of Henry of Navarre for Ronsard by reading his verses with her royal lips. Mary Stuart's smiles were fatal HIS EXECUTION AT ST ANDREWS. JJ gifts. On the night of 12th February 1563, Chastellard hid himself in the Queen's room at Holyrood. Pardoned, whether by or against the wish of the Queen is not certain, he followed her in a few days to Burntisland, and was again found in a room still called the state bed-chamber, in the Castle of Ross- end, on the rock forming the west side of the harbour of Burntisland, where Mary rested on her way to St Andrews. It was impossible to overlook a second offence. He was tried by an assize, of which the record along with that of others of this period is unfortunately lost, and executed at St Andrews on the 2 2d of February. According to Knox, he confessed his guilt. Randolph makes a similar statement in a letter to Cecil ; but Brantome, with more probability, says that he re- fused the aid of minister or confessor, and died after reading on the scaffold a hymn to death by his master Ronsard. His last words were the passionate cry, an echo of " La belle Dame sans merci," " Adieu ! most beautiful and most cruel princess of the world." " Such," remarks Knox, " was the reward of his dancing," which was in the eyes of the Reformer, as of some of his countrymen, almost a sin. Brantome, on the other hand, though he does not himself accept, reports the view of the Frenchmen of his class, that all the misfortunes of Mary were due to the one crime of Chastellard's death. Mary herself was at St Andrews on the day of the execution ; and though she must have felt the scandal, within a week, accord- ing to Randolph's report, she was merry again, till the news of the murder of her uncle, the Duke of Guise, again saddened her young volatile spirits. But the fate of Chastellard, he adds, is a scar that will never be effaced. The story of Chastellard is not a mere episode in the life of Mary. It was one of the causes which led to the marriage with Darnley. It convinced her, probably not unwilling to be convinced, that a young widowed queen could not live in 78 DARNLEY AND QUEEN ELIZABETH. Scotland without risk of scandal or even of outrage, and that marriage was a personal as well as a political necessity. Every Court in Europe had wooers for the hand which held the dowry of France and the crown of Scotland in fee, with the crown of England in reversion. Queen Elizabeth had an- nounced her intention not to marry. With an inscrutable insincerity or inconsistency, which baffles all historians to interpret, except Mr Froude, who applies his theory of self sacrifice to her as to Henry VIII., Elizabeth pressed Dudley, whom she loved herself, as the most suitable husband for her dear sister and cousin. Yet at the last moment the young Darnley, whom she thought the least desirable match, and who was known to aspire to his cousin's hand, was allowed to follow his father Lennox to Scotland. Did she wish to try or tempt both the man she loved and the woman she hated ? Dudley, preferring the chance of the greater kingdom, professed himself unworthy of Mary, and did not take a single step to urge his suit. Darnley, with all his faults, possessed to perfec- tion the qualities of an ardent lover. He was only nineteen, a little younger than Mary. The grandson of Margaret Tudor, he had the privilege of cousinhood, and he was on his fathers side a Stuart, with some drops of the mysterious royal blood, which counted for so much in the theory of equality in mar- riage. He could write a good letter, and verses at least as good as Chastellard's. He was tall, well made, with a fair, smooth face, so much talked of, that when Sir James Melville came to Elizabeth's Court, and she started the subject of the marriage with Dudley without getting any favourable reply from the old diplomatist and match-maker, she said to him, " You like better of that long lad," pointing to Darnley, who carried the sword of honour as nearest prince of the blood. His mother, proud of her boy, had perhaps sent him to visit Mary in her widowhood in France, and certainly now prepared DARNLEY AND MARY AT WEMYSS CASTLE. 79 the way for a youth no longer a boy with a woman's tact, by gifts of jewels to the Queen and her principal advisers. " She was," says Melville, with whom she had a secret understanding, and who was the bearer of her gifts, " a very discreet matron." "Cousinage," says the French proverb, "dangereuse voisin- age." While other suitors wrote letters, talked about terms, and sent envoys, Darnley came, was seen, and conquered. He reached Berwick on the 12th of February 1565, and after staying a night with Maitland at Lethington, and two days in Edinburgh, crossed the Firth and found her at the Castle of Wemyss on the 16th. This castle stands on one of the picturesque sites in Fife, a cliff some forty feet above the sea, about the centre of the finely curved bay between Kinghorn and the point of Elie. Its tower has a clear view across the Forth to the well-marked outline of the ridge on which Edinburgh then stretched its single line of buildings from Holyrood at the foot of Arthur Seat to the Castlehill, with the Braids and Pentlands in the background. Inchkeith, the May, the Bass, and the Law of North Berwick, give variety to the outlines of the landscape. On the east at a little distance are the fragments of the wall of one of Macduffs castles, and on the shore below, the sea has made the caves which gave Wemyss its name, inscribed with rude figures of mysterious Pagan symbols and the Chris- tian cross of the early missionaries carved by unknown hands before history was written. The castle, encrusted with mod- ern building, still contains the room magniloquently called a presence-chamber, now the housekeeper's parlour, in which Mary received Darnley. It was situated in the quadrangular court, then the centre of the building. It belonged, as it still does, to a family which claims descent from Macduff, the Celtic chief, perhaps King of Fife, one of whose ancestors had been sent with Sir Michael Scot of Balwearie to bring 80 MARY MARRIES DARNLEY. home the Maid of Norway. But at this date it was in the possession of Lord James, the Queen's brother, with what object is not explained. It is said that Darnley, on being shown Murray's estates on a map of Scotland, imprudently growled, " He has too much land." No Scotch lord or laird before or since knew better the art of " birsing yont" than Murray. The season was inclement, and neither landscape, history, nor politics probably were thought of by a pair of lovers during the sweet swift hours of the dawn of love. In January the French Ambassador De Foix wrote to Catherine de Medici that the Queen had begun to marry her Marys, and said she would be of the band and marry within six months. She was leading a merry life, hunting in the morning and dancing in the evening, with Lennox as her most frequent partner. The news had come that Darnley had at last got leave from Queen Elizabeth, and was about to start for Scotland. Mary knew as well as Elizabeth what Darnley's errand was. She received him graciously, though she coyly declined a ring too soon offered. But she had, for the first and last time in her life, fallen in love. Unless Both- well is an exception, all her later matrimonial projects were directed by the head, not by the heart. It was her lot to be loved rather than to love. " Her Majestie," writes the courtier Melville, " tuk weill with Darnley, and said that he was the best-proportioned lang lad that she had seen, for he was of a heich stature, lang and small, even and brent up, weill instructed from his youth in all honest and comely exer- cises." The longer he was with her the better she liked him. Before he left Wemyss on the 19th of February, she had determined, though not consented, to marry. The public marriage at Holyrood did not take place till the end of Tuly, but a private marriage or betrothal was celebrated, in a room fitted up by Rizzio as a chapel at Stirling, in April. "She MARY PRISONER IN LOCHLEVEN CASTLE. 8 1 does everything to please him," wrote Randolph to Cecil shortly before the marriage (3d July 1566), "though he can- not be persuaded to yield the smallest thing to please her." But after a few months (13th Feb. 1567), "I know now for certain that the Queen repenteth her marriage, that she hateth him and all his kin." The hasty marriage had led to a quick repentance. It takes little time to dissolve the marriage of the eye. Before her son was born, Rizzio, the Italian adventurer, whose voice first gained her ear, and whose skill in languages had given him possession of her secrets, — cause enough for jealousy without the invention of a guilty attachment, — was murdered in her presence with Darnley's connivance, for which she never forgave him. His own murder by Bothwell followed within less than a year that of Rizzio. Her marriage to Bothwell was a little more than three months after Darnley's death, and her surrender and Bothwell's flight at Carberry were within two months from their fatal marriage. A prisoner in the hands of the nobles of the Protestant party, Mary was sent to Lochleven on 17th June 1567, and remained there till her escape on the 2d of May in the follow- ing year. The castle on the island was the scene of her last and longest residence in Fife. It was not unknown to her, for she had more than once stopped there in riding to or from Perth. She had built on the west of its courtyard a new pre- sence-chamber, and hung on its walls tapestry with scenes of hunting and hawking, her favourite sport. The choice of this castle for her imprisonment was perhaps due to the fact that Lady Douglas, the mother of its young owner, Sir James Douglas, was the mother also by James V. of Lord James, the Queen's illegitimate brother and future Regent. But it was used before as well as after as a State prison. It even became a saying that "those never got luck who came to Lochleven." Her fate and that of the Earl of Northumber- F 82 LOCHLEVEN LANDSCAPE AND HISTORY. land probably assisted in the making of this proverb. The curse is past. One who goes to Lochleven now, even if he has not luck in angling, finds a picturesque scene, and returns with his imagination full both of its past and present. It has not the wild beauty of Highland lochs, nor the rich foliage of English and Irish lakes, but when the sun shines on its broad sheet of water, or the moon rises over the Bishop's Hill, its quiet landscape has a peculiar charm. In historical memories Lochleven has no rival among Scottish lochs. One of its islands was the cradle of Chris- tianity in Fife, and the Priory of Portmoak had a cell there dedicated to St Serf. In this cell, or the home of the prior, Andrew of Wintoun probably wrote his ' Oryginal Chronicle of Scotland,' and Kinross-shire may be deemed the birth- place of Scottish History. The castle in which Mary was confined, which gives its name to the Castle Island, may have been built in the thirteenth century. It had been associated with a daring exploit of Wallace, who delivered it from the English. It stood a siege by Baliol, and later received as prisoners of state King Robert II., his lawless son the Wolf of Badenoch, and a Primate of Scotland, Patrick Graham, whose Royal blood and high office did not save him, in the reign of James III., from a captive's grave on St Serf's Island, where a skeleton, probably his, was not long ago disinterred. Queen Mary herself had met Knox there on 13th April 1565, and a second time at Turfhills, in the immediate neighbourhood, in the least stormy of their interviews, when she was all smiles, and, according to tradition, gave a watch to the Reformer, whose good offices she sought to make up a quarrel between the Earl of Argyll and his wife. But Knox's stern verdict, then formed and never altered, was that her heart was closed, if any heart had ever been, against MARYS LIFE AT LOCHLEVEN. 83 God and His truth. Within three miles of the loch, at Barn- hill, she and Darnley narrowly escaped capture when on the road to Edinburgh for their public marriage, outrunning the ambush concerted by Murray, Argyll, and other nobles, by one of the early and rapid rides in which she delighted. Every feature of the loch and its surroundings, the braes of the Ochils on the north, the Bishop's Hill on the east, Benarty on the south, the flat carse with Kinross, the head of the peninsula of Fife, on the west, and the neighbouring towers of Burleigh, Dowhill, Cleish, Aldie, and Tullibole, the monastery of Portmoak, and the hospital at Scotlandwell, must have been familiar to the Queen. Nature wears a different garb when seen from a prison ; and though her hands were busy with the needle and the spindle, or if she got sufficient ink from coal with the pen, the one thought of the captive was how to escape. The life of Mary at Lochleven has been minutely described in the memorial of Nau, her secretary, in ' The Abbot ' of Scott, a romance which is not fiction, and in a careful memoir by Mr Burns Begg. Antiquaries, more fortunate than usual in all which concerns Queen Mary, have preserved the screen she and her maids worked with the scenes appar- ently of her own history, the sceptre she cast into the loch in her flight, the keys young Willie Douglas stole to enable her to escape, and possibly the cannon-ball Sir William Douglas shot at his brother George when hovering round the loch to communicate with her and aid her flight. Tradition marks the spot near the east of the grounds of the new house of Kinross where she stepped on shore, and gives a quaint turn to the praise of her fair skin that the red wine shone through her transparent neck. No passages of Scottish history are better known than those which record her extorted signature to the Deed of Abdication ; Lindsay's savage answer to her 84 MARY'S ESCAPE FROM LOCHLEVEN, 1568. tears, " Better women weep than bearded men " ; her inter- views with Murray, when a Stuart met a Stuart ; and the visit of Sir Robert Melville, from the scabbard of whose sword dropt the letter by which Lethington gave her the clue of a mouse gnawing the net which confined a lion. The mouse took the hint, and did a good deal of gnawing with her fine teeth. She had recently recovered from a miscarriage, but at no period of her stirring life was her brain more busy, her body more alert. Her escape, first projected by a forcible seizure of the transport boat and an assault on the castle, was de- feated by the vigilance of James Drysdale, captain of the guard. It was a second time attempted in the disguise of a laundress, and was finally effected by the ingenious series of ruses and mystifications by which Mary herself got Drysdale out of the way and young Willie Douglas hoodwinked the keeper of the castle, possibly his own father, with a boy's pleasure in a game, which grown people seldom have when the game is earnest. She spoke so openly of her deter- mination to escape, that Douglas and his mother thought either she would not try or would certainly fail. She wrote letters to Catherine de Medici and to Queen Elizabeth, skil- fully conceived in terms which, if they were intercepted, would make her keepers believe she thought escape impossible unless by foreign aid. She played pranks with Willie Douglas and her attendants, even rehearsing her escape, making experi- ments how the garden-wall should be leapt, and in the mock play of the "Abbot of Unreason," in which Willie acted the boy abbot, followed him in a romping race about the ground till every one laughed as if he were drunk or simple. But his simplicity enabled him to jam with pegs the chains of the boats, except of one in which Mary was to escape, and to lift the key with a napkin from the table where it lay by the side KNOX'S LAST VISIT TO ST ANDREWS. 85 of Sir William when at supper. Mary, after she had supped, went to the room above her own tower, usually occupied by her surgeon, she said to pray. Who will doubt that she prayed for deliverance ? But she found time also to put on a hood and cape as a disguise, and to provide herself with a kerchief as a signal. As soon as Willie Douglas gave the sign that the key was stolen, she ran down the stairs, along the lobby, past the door of the room where Sir William still lingered over his wine, through the unlocked gate, relocked outside as soon as she passed into the unchained boat, over the short mile to the nearest shore. Lord Seton, with a troop of horse who lay concealed in a hollow of the Hill of Ben- arty, the rim of which gave an outlook on the Castle Island, galloped round to meet her. As arranged, she waved the kerchief. It was of a colour well chosen, red bordered with black, and on landing she was at once met by Seton and his men. Greeted with looks and words of sympathy from the villagers as she passed through Kinross, she rode without halt to Queensferry, where she passed the Forth to Niddrie, Seton's house, in the parish of Kirkliston, where she slept after her swift ride. Mary never again set foot in Fife or Kinross; but she never forgot, any more than history can forget, the weary months spent in her first prison. Years after, she dictated an account of her captivity and escape to Nau, to beguile the still wearier months of Fotheringay, when hope had become despair. John Knox visited St Andrews for the third and last time the year before his death, residing there from the beginning of July 1 57 1 to 17th August 1572. Although the cause of which he had been the champion had in the main triumphed, the religious war was not yet over. The events of the last few years had clouded the triumph of the Reformers. These might have made one less convinced that God governed the 86 THE SPIRIT OF KNOX. world, and would guide Scotland in the way Knox believed alone right, dread the future. The Regent Murray, his chief political supporter, had been . murdered ; Lennox had met the same fate ; Mar, who succeeded to the regency, and Morton, who looked forward to it, and already possessed the chief influence in political affairs, were Reformers of too moderate a type for Knox. The Castle of Edinburgh was held for the Queen by Kirkaldy of Grange, and Maitland of Lethington had transferred his versatile talents once more to her side. The loss of the most gallant sword and the coolest head in Scotland was deeply felt by Knox. Maitland he had always distrusted, and he now declared, in terrible words to be used by one of another mortal, that he could not answer for his fate in this world or the next. The loss of Grange was the loss of a friend, the greatest blow which can fall on an old man. Knox himself had just recovered from a stroke of apoplexy, which for a time tied his tongue, to the joy of his adversaries, and when he recovered speech left him physically weak, and keenly conscious of his own weakness. But the indomitable spirit knew no decay. His lodging, in the new buildings near the abbey at St Andrews, was the centre of the life of the Protestant cause. With the eye of a general he surveyed the field, and directed his chief attack at the strongest point of the enemy's position without neglecting minor skirmishes where an advantage could be gained. The Castle of Edinburgh, personified by his vivid imagination, was the subject of the most vehement denunciations, both from the pulpit and in letters to his friends. "That Babylon, the Castle of Edinburgh," he wrote to the Laird of Drumlanrig, " sail ones bring Scotland in that miserie that we and our posteritie sail murne for a tyme. Bot yit, schir, be nocht ye nor the faythful afraid, for to destruc- tione sail it come, and they that presently sufferis sail rejoice THE PARTIES IN ST ANDREWS. 87 in this life and eternallie." He signs, " Yours lying in Sanct Androis half deid, the 26 of May 1572 "; and he calls out as if his pen spoke, " Dead Scotland waiken, who before wald nocht be admonished of trubles to cum. Bot now in middis of trubles it seikis a wronge remede ; for it is neather Eng- land, France, nor Spain in whom God has placed any comfort to pure Scotland, but onlie it rests in Himself, and onlie of Him must we receave it." In spite of weakness he preached every Sunday, again choosing Daniel for his texts, from the 1st to the middle of the 9th chapter. " He always applied his text," says his secretary Bannatyne, " to the time and state of the people : whereby the wicked and troublers of God's Kirk might be pointed out in their colours." How different were the cold sermons of Mr Robert Hamilton, the minister of the town, who spoke only generalities which might be applied to those that sustained the good cause, as well as to the troublers of the Kirk, and suppressed the doings of such troublers, content if he had an approved author for anything he said ! In St Andrews Knox was far from having all his own way. He was opposed not only by Hamilton, but also by John Rutherford, the provost of St Salvator ; by two other Hamiltons, Archi- bald and Robert ; even by Mr Homer Blair, a young student of St Salvator's, who inveighed against him and the students of St Leonard's in a public oration. The hottest words were used. Mr Archibald Hamilton would not attend Knox's sermons, which was not wonderful, as one of Knox's particular applications had been that all Hamiltons were murderers. Hamilton retaliated, " Mr Knox was as great a murderer as any Hamilton in Scotland if all things were well tried, and therefore should not cry out so fast against murderers, for he had subscribed the slaughter of the Queen's husband along with Murray." Knox, to whom this charge was reported, 88 KNOX PROTESTS AGAINST UNIVERSITIES. challenged Hamilton, in a letter sent by Richard Bannatyne, his secretary, to say whether he had affirmed that he had seen Knox's subscription. Hamilton returned a shifting answer, with the sneer at the too zealous and over-credulous Banna- tyne, that if the smallest boy had been sent instead of Banna- tyne, Hamilton would have come to Knox and satisfied him. A further attempt to prove that the libellous charge had been made by confronting Robert with James Hamilton, to whom he was said to have made the charge, ended, as libellous charges often do, in the smoke of controversy. James Ham- ilton, taunted by his kinsmen and fellow-students as " Knox's bird," was forced to leave St Salvator's. Minor, even trivial causes of dispute, clouded the chief issue. There was jealousy between the two colleges, and the old feud in a new form between the university authorities and the ministers. Scandal did what it could to blacken. Knox, it was said, preached against making Mr John Douglas a bishop, the first of Morton's tulchan bishops, because he did not get the bish- opric himself ; to which Knox replied in his next sermon, " that he had refused a greater bishopric which he might have had with the favour of greater men." The real contest was not for titles, but for power. The man who swayed the Scottish Presbyterian Church as absolutely as any Pope that of Rome, had little need of the name of bishop. One of his protests was characteristic of his determination that there should be no rival of his pulpit throne. " I protest," he said, " that neather the pulpit of Saint Androis, neather yit of ony congregatione within the realm, be subject to the censure of the schooles, universities, or faculties within the same, but only that it be reserved to God, the judge of all, and to the General Assemblie gatherit within the same realm lauchfullie. The reason of this my protestation is, that I luike for no better regiment in times to come than has been in ages passing THE RELIGIOUS DEMOCRACY. 89 before us, in the quhilk it is evident that universities, orderis weal established, and men raised up to defend the Kirk of God have oppressed it, and the malice of Satan is always to be fearit." This is the utterance of the Scottish religious democracy, and of a leader satisfied that when he spoke it was the voice of God, when his opponents acted it was the malice of Satan. But if one who used such language, and never concealed his opinion, had, as was natural, bitter enemies, both open and concealed, and betrayed the weaknesses which beset popular leaders of the Church as well as the State, Knox had also during his stay in St Andrews warm friends, and showed a nobler side of his character. Bannatyne, whose tedious and dry memorials are sincere even to the point of exhibiting his own and his master's failings, served him with a devotion like that of a Highland foster-brother to his foster- chief. The faithful in Edinburgh and throughout the country waited on his least words. The heads of St Leonard's came in to his grace after dinner to enjoy his conversation. The leading ministers crossed the ferries of the Forth and Tay to visit him. Lekprevick removed his press from Edinburgh to St Andrews when Mr Knox came there. David Ferguson, the minister of Dunfermline, sent to John Knox and his brethren his answer to Renard Benedict, a Roman contro- versialist, which Knox acknowledged, "with my dead hand but glad heart, praising God that of His mercy He leaves such light to the Kirk in its desolation." The students of St Leonard's were as strongly attached as those of St Salvator's were opposed to him. A singular good fortune brought to this college in the very year of Knox's residence a lad of fifteen from Montrose, who had the qualities common in the best students — an eager desire for knowledge, a modest estimate of himself, a respect 90 JAMES MELVILLE'S DESCRIPTION OF KNOX. for his parents and teachers, an inquiring mind, observant eyes, and a diligent pen. The Diary of James Melville contains the most lifelike picture of Knox ever drawn, for the painter has failed to catch in any portrait the mingled stern- ness and tenderness which could charm as well as terrify. It would be wrong to alter a word. " Bot because in all my course," he says, " the graittest benefit was the sight and heir- ing of that extraordinar man of God, Mr Jhone Knox, sa far as I then knew and herd of him, I man heir record. In the tyme of his being in St Androis ther was a General Assemblie hauldin in the scholles of St Leonard's, our Collage. Thair amangs uther things was motioned the making of Bischopes ; to the quhilk Mr Knox opponit him selff directlie and zealuslie. . . . The Erie of Mortoun gat the Bischoprik of St Androis, efter the hanging of Jhone Hamiltone, and pre- sented therunto that honorable father of the Universitie, as Rector thairof for the present, Mr Jhone Dowglass, a guid, upright-harted man, bot ambitius and simple, nocht knawing wha delt with him. I hard Mr Knox speak against it, bot sparinglie, because he lovit the man, and with regrat saying, ' Alas ! for pitie to lay upone an auld weak man's back that quhilk twentie of the best gifts could nocht bear. It will wrak him and disgrace him ! ' " After mentioning Knox's bodily weakness, he describes his preaching. " I saw him everie day of his doctrine [preaching] go hulie [slowly] and fear [fairly] with a furring of martiks [martin-skins, which, by an Act of James I., only knights and lords of 200 merks at the least of yearly rent had been allowed to wear] about his neck, a staff in the an hand, and guid godlie Richart Ballanden [Bannatyne], his servand, halding upe the uther oxtar [arm- pit] from the Abbay to the Paroche Kirk, and be the said Richart and another servant, lifted upe to the pulpit, whar he behovit to lean at his first entrie ; bot or he haid done Melville's notes of knox's sermons. 91 with his sermont, he was sa active and vigorus that he was lyk to ding that pulpit in blads and fly out of it. . . . There was twa in Saint Androis wha wer his aydant [diligent] heirars and wrot his sermonts, an my condisciple, Mr Andro Yowng, now minister of Dumblean, wha transleated some of tham in Latin, and read tham in the hall of the Collage in stead of his orations. That uther was servant to Mr Robert Hamilton, minister of the town, whom Mr Robert causit to wrait, for what end God knawes. The threatnings of his sermonts war verie soar ; and sa particular, that sic as lyket nocht the cause tuk occasion to reprotche him as a rashe railer, without warrand. And Mr Robert Hamilton himselff being offendit, conferrit with Mr Knox, asking his warrand of that particular thretning against the Castel of Edinbruche, that it sould rin lyk a sand-glass ; it sould spew out the Captain with schame ; he sould nocht com out at the yet, bot doun ower the walles ; and sick lyk. Mr Knox answerit, ' God is my warrant and yie sail sie it.' Whill as the uther was skarslie satisfeit, and tuk hardlie with it, the nixt sermont from pulpit he repeates the threatnings, and addes therto, ' Thow that will nocht beleive my warrand, sail sie it with thy eis that day, and sail say, what haif I to do heir ? ' " These prophecies and prognostics which we should now deem not so wonderfully particular, were fulfilled to the letter when the castle was taken by storm, and Kirkaldy of Grange, its captain, made prisoner. Like many other of Knox's utterances, they proved his power of foresight, if not of prophecy, as his followers long believed. Melville also took notes of Knox's sermons on Daniel. " I had my pen and my little buik," he says, "and tuk away sic things as I could comprehend. In the opening up of his text he was moderate for the space of an half hour ; but when entered into applica- 92 KNOX BLESSES STUDENTS OF ST LEONARDS. tion, he made me so to grew and tremble that I could not hold a pen to wrait." But Knox had gentler moments, and would sometimes " come in and repose him in our college yeard, and call us schollars unto him, and blis us and exhort us to know God and His wark in our countrie, and stand by the guid cause, to use our time weel, and learn the guid instructions and follow the guid example of our maisters." He even took part in the amusements of the place, and was present at a play acted at the marriage of Mr Colvin. He may have been tempted to what some of his successors would have regarded as a sin, by the subject of the play, which was the siege and taking of the Castle of Edinburgh and the Captain " according to Mr Knox's doctrine." At last, as so many years before, there came a call, in which he recognised the voice of God, that he dare not resist, and he removed from St Andrews to Edinburgh to take charge of the congregation there at the earnest request of the Kirk and brethren. They referred his returning to his own judgment. He made it a condition that he should not be pressed in any sort to temper his tongue or cease to speak against the treasonable dealings of the Castle of Edinburgh, and received a humble assurance that " they never mean it nor thocht to put a bridle to his tongue." It was a tongue no man or woman then living could bridle, though political necessity had once forced him to soften its voice in explaining to Queen Elizabeth his discourse against the Regiment of Women. There was more than one text of Scripture which Knox and his brethren overlooked, but the times required the Scriptures to be searched, as they thought, in the prophecies of Daniel or the Book of the Revelation, not in the Psalms of David or the Epistle of James. "He left St Andrews to the grief," says Bannatyne, " of a few godlie that wer in that town, but to the gret joy and pleasure of the LEKPREVICK'S PRESS AT ST ANDREWS. 93 rest, especially to the Balfours, Kirkcaldies, and Hamiltons, enemies of God and the King." This was a rigid estimate of the numbers of the godly even for the strictest Calvinist. The influence of Knox was great while and wherever he lived and taught, and did not pass with his death. He left behind him many disciples in St Andrews and the other burghs of the East Neuk. Fife became one of the parts of Scotland which adhered most numerously and firmly to the doctrines of the Reformation, as afterwards narrowed and adapted by the Covenanters and their successors, to suit their special testimonies against their own times. The first print of Lekprevick at St Andrews, in 1572, had been a copy in Scots of Buchanan's 'Detection of the Douingis of Marie Quene of Scottis touching the Murther of her Hus- band'; the last, in 1573, was a poem on " Uprichtness," in single metre, by John Davidson, regent in St Leonard's, to which was added " Ane Schort Discurs of the Estaites, quha has cum to deplore the death of this excellent servant of God, John Knox." Each of these broadsheets, now mere biblio- graphical curiosities, was then a blow in the civil and religious war then waging, with a singular exception. ' The Taill of Rauf Coilzear, quha harbourit King Charles,' issued at this time by the same press, is a comic romance which can have been printed only to amuse. As during the siege of Paris the theatres remained open, so in the storm of the Scottish Reformation human nature craved the relaxation of tales and plays. 94 CHAPTER VI. JAMES VI. — RESIDENCE AT FALKLAND — VISIT OF DU BARTAS — THE KING TAKES HIM TO ST ANDREWS, JUNE 1587 — ANDREW MELVILLE'S LESSON — SHIPS OF THE SPANISH ARMADA AT ANSTRUTHER, 1588 — JAMES MELVILLE AND THE SPANISH CAPTAINS — MURDER OF THE BONNIE EARL OF MORAY AT DONIBRISTLE — ANDREW MELVILLE AT FALK- LAND CALLS THE KING "GOD'S SILLY VASSAL," SEPTEMBER 1596 — FIFE ADVENTURERS AND THE LEWES, 1597 — FAILURE OF THEIR ATTEMPT — CHILDREN OF JAMES VI. BORN AT DUNFERMLINE — THE NURSE'S TALE OF THE DEVIL'S CLOAK CAST ON CHARLES I. —JAMES VI. REVISITS FIFE IN 1617 — DUNFERMLINE, CULROSS, FALKLAND, ST ANDREWS — CHARLES II. IN FIFE, 1650 — NO ROYAL VISIT FOR 200 YEARS — EFFECT OF ABSENCE OF ROYALTY — CONTRAST OF MEDIEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY. The commencement of the reign of James VI. in Scotland was marked by outrages and murders even more than other parts of its bloodstained annals. A violent death, with or without form of law, was the ordinary fate of a regent or an archbishop. Mary's life was for a time safer in an English prison than it would have been in a Scottish palace. If James exaggerated the attempts on his own life, it was a very natural exaggeration. There were feuds everywhere, harrying of lands, burning of castles, and slaying of men. With a curious mixture of legal forms and criminal intentions, leading nobles still bound themselves and their retainers amongst the landed gentry in bonds or covenants, duly written by notaries with witnesses and seals, to make common cause in offensive as well as defensive war. Before what court, save that of JAMES VI. AT FALKLAND. 95 Mars, these deadly bonds of Man-rent, as they were called, could be enforced, none of the signatories considered. The form of warranty in Scottish deeds, contra omnes mortaks, or in the sterner vernacular against all deadly, is a curious survival of the old practice of private war adapted to a time when its battles were fought in the court instead of the field. Fife, with its many castles and royal residences, was no exception from this chronic war. The King himself, like his mother and several of his ancestors, had more than once to run the risk of kidnapping. It was one of the modes by which the feudal nobles limited the Scottish monarchy. Another Bothwell attempted to seize his person at Holyrood and Falkland, as his predecessor had seized that of Mary. The most famous of these attempts was the Raid of Ruthven. The Gowrie Plot took place outside, though just outside, the borders of Fife. When he fled from Perth, James took refuge at Falkland. Fife was still one of the homes of the Scottish monarchs. The relation of James with the Presbyterian clergy was as strained as with many of the nobles. If the latter tried to control his person, the former claimed to direct his conscience. The one represented an aristocracy unaccustomed to submit to royal authority, and the other a democracy to which the religious revolution had given a new power. Educated as a Presbyterian under George Buchanan, James, like a clever boy repelled rather than attracted by a domineering teacher, early showed personal inclination to Episcopacy, and a dis- position to treat the Catholic nobles with toleration. The Presbyterian Church had passed beyond the stage of the First Book of Discipline into that of the Second, of which Andrew Melville was the chief compiler. Melville was another, not a wiser, Knox. With more scholastic learning, a professor rather than a minister, with less knowledge of men, and less 96 ANDREW MELVILLE'S " LESSON " AT ST ANDREWS. political though perhaps as much ecclesiastical power, he had, though not all, some of the eloquence of his great prede- cessor, and the same unbending spirit. Like Knox, he led the Church, and was the chief antagonist of James, as Knox had been of Mary. To see Church and State confront each other in the persons of their chief rulers had become a com- mon, almost a natural, sight in Scotland. The conferences with a view to healing, but with the effect of widening, the breach between the King and the Presbyterians, which took place in Fife, have been described by the lively- pen of his nephew, James Melville. Their first interview was for a different purpose. In June 1587 James came to St Andrews, where Andrew Melville was head of the college, then called New, afterwards St Mary's. Reformed by his masterly administration, it had gained a name far beyond Scotland. The King brought with him Du Bartas, a French poet, then famous, now little known. He declared his wish to hear Melville lecture for the entertainment of his guest. But Melville, instead of complying with the royal command, thought it necessary to assert his independence, and sent a rude message that he " had teached his ordinar that day in the forenoon " ; to which the King, with the want of dignity and arbitrariness which marked his character, replied, "That is all ane, I mon hae a lesson, and be here within ane hour." Instead of further reluctance Melville came and gave a lesson of a kind James was to hear more often than he desired. "He treated," says his nephew, " maist clearly and mightily of the right government of Christ, and in effect refuted the haill Actes of Parliament made against the discipline thereof, to the great instruction and comfort of its auditory, except the King alane, wha was very angry all that night " — " crabbit," as his father had been after listening to a sermon of Knox. Next day, Adamson, the bishop, gave a lecture. Andrew MELVILLE ANSWERS ADAMSON. 97 Melville, contrary to his custom, attended, and took notes. He then caused his bell to be rung at two o'clock, long after his ordinary hour, to let the students know that he would answer the Bishop. The King remonstrated, and even offered to take his four-hours or afternoon meal in the college with Melville to prevent the lecture. When Melville insisted on giving it, he came with the Bishop, who asked leave to answer on the spot. But Melville ingeniously denounced only the Papists and their works, ascribing to them, without naming Adamson, all the Bishop had said in the morning, and proving their contradiction of Scripture with such a "flood of eloquence," says his nephew, "that the Bishop was struck as dumb as the stock he sat on." The King tried to calm matters by a speech in Scotch, in which he enjoined the University to reverence his Bishop ; while James Melville played the part of peacemaker in a fashion his strong lan- guage in the Diary would scarcely lead us to expect, by pre- paring a banquet of wet and dry sweetmeats, of which the King merrily partook before riding back to Falkland. Du Bartas remained behind to talk with Melville ; and, according to James, expressed his opinion that Andrew Melville's spirit and courage was far above the Bishop's. Perhaps this was French politeness. We owe to the same writer a sketch of an incident which brings the history of the East Neuk of Fife into contact with the history of Europe. In 1586, James Melville was presented to the parish, which then included Anstruther Wester and Easter, Pittenweem, Kilrenny, and Abercrombie. Two years later, about Lammas 1588, the coasts of Britain, Fife included, were trembling at the news, then abroad, and more alarming by its vagueness, that the Spanish Armada was on the seas. It was like the alarm in the beginning of this century which gave rise to the first volunteers through fear of Napoleon. " Terrible," G 98 THE SPANISH CAPTAINS AT ANSTRUTHER. writes Melville, " war the feir, persing war the pretchings, ernest, zealus, and fervent war the prayers ; sounding war the siches and sobbes, and abounding war the teares at that last Generall Assemblie keepit at Edinbruche, when the newes war credibile tauld, — sum tymes of their landing at Dunbar, sum tymes at St Andrews, and in Tay, and now and then at Aberdein and Cromertie Firth." But " the Lord of Armies, wha ryddes upon the wings of the winds, the Keipar of his awin Israeli, was in the mean tyme convoying that monstrous navie about our costes, and directing their hulkes and galiates to the ylands, rokkes, and sands, wharupon he had destinat thair wrak and destruction." From this general prelude Melville proceeds to the particular anecdote which interests the student of the history of Fife : " Within twa or thrie moneths thairefter," he says, " earlie in the murning, be brak of day, ane of our bailyies cam to my bedsyde," in the old, not the new manse of Anstruther we now see, which was built by Melville three years later, " saying (but nocht with fray), I haiff to tell you newes, sir. Ther is arryvit within our herbrie this murning a schipe full of Spainyarts, bot nocht to giff mercie bot to ask. And sa schawes me that the com- manders haid landit, and he haid commandit them to thair schipe again till the Magistrates of the toun haid advysit, and the Spainyarts haid humblie obeyit : therfor desyrit me to ryse and heir thair petition with them. Up I got with dili- gence, and assembling the honest men of toun, cam to the Tolbuthe; and efter consultation taken to heir tham, and what answer to mak, ther presentes us a verie reverend man of big stature, and grave and stour countenance, grey-bearded, and verie humble lyk, wha, efter mikle and verie law cour- tessie, bowing down with his face neir the ground, and twitch- ing my scho with his hand, began his harang in the Spanise toung, wharof I understud the substance " (for Melville was PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC COURTESIES. 99 a travelled Scot), " he haiffing onlie a young man with him to be his interpreter, began and tauld ower againe to us in guid Inglis. The sum was, that King Philipe, his maister, haid rigget out a navie and armie to land in England for just causes to be avengit of manie intolerable wrangs quhilk he had receavit of that nation ; but God for ther sinnes haid bein against thame, and be storme of wather haid dryven the navie by the cost of England, and him with a certean of Capteanes, being the generall of twentie hulks, upon an yll of Scotland called the Fear Yll, wher they maid schipewrak, and whar sa monie as haid eschapit the merciless sies and rokes, haid mair nor sax or seven ouks [weeks] suffered grait hunger and cauld, till conducing that bark out of Orkney, they war com hither as to thair speciall frinds and confederates to kiss the King's Majestie's hands of Scotland (and thairwith bekkit even to the yeard), and to find relieff and comfort thairby to him selff, these gentilmen Capteanes, and the poor souldarts." Melville replied that their friendship could not be great, seeing " they war frinds to the graitest enemie of Chryst, the Pape of Rome," but that the bailies granted him licence to get refreshment, but not to land any of his men till the over- lord of the town was advertised. Next day, the laird having come and received them in audience, leave was given to land to the number of twelve score, for the most part "young berdless men, sillie, trauchled, and houngered." The names of the commanders were "Jan Gomez de Medina, generall of twenty houlkes ; Captain Patritio, Captain de Legoretto, Cap- tain de Luffera, Captain Mauritio, and Senyour Serrano." They thought their comrades had escaped harm till Melville brought from St Andrews a print of the wreck of the Galleats in Ireland, the Highlands, Wales, and other parts of England, which he communicated to Jan Gomez, and when he heard the same, " O then he cryed out for grieff, bursted and grat. IOO SPANISH BLOOD. But we thanked God with our hartes, that we haid seen them amang us in that forme." Gomez, on his way home, with Spanish high-bred courtesy treated kindly an Anstruther crew detained at Calais, and sent his compliments to the Laird of Anstruther, James Melville the minister, and the host in whose house he had lived. It is refreshing, at a time when men's passions and religious rancour ran higher than the sea which wrecked the Armada, to find an exchange of good offices between the Catholic Spaniard and the Protestant Scot. Nor need we, as the event happened otherwise, too curiously speculate what might have been if the Armada had conquered, if Philip of Spain had become monarch of Scotland in virtue of the will of Mary Stuart, and the Inquisitors of the holy office had tried the Reformers in Scotland as in Spain. A tradition lingers in the East Neuk, as in the Fair Isle, the Hebrides, and the Solway Firth, that Spanish blood may be traced in the dark complexion of some of the modern inhabitants, derived from the shipwrecked sea- men of the Armada too disabled or too poor to return home. It is difficult to test this persistent rumour, which has perhaps nothing but a pair of black eyes or the bright red dyes of a bonnet or a shawl to support it ; but when we are told that the Gosmans of Anstruther are descendants of Gomez, the Spanish admiral, or Guzman, a Spanish grandee, incredulity becomes at least pardonable. It was not necessary, at the close of the sixteenth century, for Scotchmen to look abroad for examples of cruelty. One of the most treacherous murders in Scottish history was per- petrated in the county of Fife in 1592 by a Scottish noble — many thought, probably unjustly, at the instigation of the King. The hamesucken and slaughter of the Bonnie Earl of Moray has made the place of Donibristle celebrated, though the house has been twice burned since that fatal night. MURDER OF MORAY AT DONIBRISTLE. IOI The young Earl of Moray was son-in-law of the Regent, and on that account not pleasing to King James. Scandal soon after, if not before, reported that the Queen had, in the King's hearing, praised him "with too many epithets as a proper and gallant man." He was suspected of connivance in Bothwell's daring attempt on the King's person. But a feud between him and the Earl of Huntly, which had grown out of the grant of the lands, as well as the earldom of Moray, to his father-in-law by Queen Mary, an earldom the ancestor of Huntly once held, was the direct cause of his murder. It was interwoven with another feud in the West against the Earl of Argyll and the Campbells. Lord Thirlestane, the chan- cellor and favourite of the King, was certainly involved in the dispute. James himself probably did no more than give his signature to a legal warrant, but, like that of William of Orange in the affair of Glencoe, his subsequent conduct did not show much zeal to punish those who exceeded his orders. A man- date was issued to Huntly to apprehend Moray on a charge of complicity in Bothwell's plot, and on the 7th of February 1592 Huntly left Holyrood on the pretence of going to a horse-race at Leith. Instead, he crossed Queensferry, stopping the passage of all other boats. He had with him some seven score friends, and surprised Moray at Donibristle, his castle in the parish of Dalgety, between Aberdour and Inverkeithing. Moray had come from Darnaway with Dunbar, the Sheriff of Moray, and a few followers, in the false belief that the King had forgiven him. Huntly's men set fire to the house. Moray, who knew his sworn enemy was at his gate, hesitated, says the contem- porary narrator, " whether to come out and be slain, or remain and be burnt." His faithful friend, Dunbar the Sheriff, went out first, that in the dark night he might be taken for the Earl, who himself was to escape in the confusion. It happened in part as Dunbar, who died for his friend, anticipated ; but the 102 BALLAD OF THE BONNIE EARL. Earl, after escaping to the rocks on the seaside, was discovered by the silk string of his hood (knapskull tippet) taking fire without his knowledge, which betrayed him. Gordon of Buckie struck the first blow, and forced his chief, Huntly, to repeat it with his own dagger, as Ruthven had forced Darnley when Rizzio was murdered. In such deeds no man could trust another. Even thieves' honour is unknown amongst assassins. Their dastardly cruelty brings into relief the heroic sacrifice of Dunbar. Moray's last words had been to taunt his enemy with spoil- ing a fairer face than his own. His youthful beauty, of which he was vain, was celebrated in the diaries of the time before it was embodied in the ballad which now is the best known version of the story. " He was," says Moysie in his Memoirs, " the lustiest youth, the first nobleman of the king's blood, and one of the peers of the country, who was thus slain to the great regret of the hale people." " A comlie personage, strong of body as a kemp or champion," says another chronicler. The best form of the ballad probably does not swerve much from the facts : — " Now wae to thee, Huntly ! And whairfor did you sae? I bad you bring him wi' ye, But forbade you him to slae. He was a braw gallant, And he rid at the ring, And the bonnie Earl of Murray, Oh, he might hae been a king. He was a braw gallant, And he played at the glove, And the bonnie Earl of Murray, Oh, he was the queen's love." Gordon of Buckie, sent to tell James the news, was detained at the gate of Holyrood, and denied audience. The corpses ANDREW MELVILLE AT FALKLAND. 103 of the Sheriff and the Earl were, two days later, brought over by Lady Doune, the Earl's mother, to present them to the King, but James escaped the ghastly spectacle by going out hunting. He failed to take steps to punish Huntly, and the body of Moray lay uninterred in the kirk of Leith for several months, " but by common rhymes and songs," says James Melville, " kept in fresh memory," until it was probably con- signed to the vault in St Giles's beside that of his murdered father-in-law ; but the place of its interment is not certain. At the time of his marriage James showed a little more disposition than at any other time to accept Presbyterianism. He had been accompanied to Denmark by David Lindsay, a Presbyterian minister, who performed the ceremony, and Andrew Melville was called on to make an oration in honour of it on his return. In 1592 he consented to the Act which has been called the charter of the Presbyterian Establishment. But the leniency shown by the King to the Papist lords, Huntly, Errol, and Angus, as well as his scarcely concealed favour for Episcopacy, again led to a rupture between him and the ministers. One of them, Mr David Black, a protege of Andrew Melville, and minister of St Andrews, made himself conspicuous by preaching a sharp and plain form of doctrine, sparing neither the King nor his ministers. The most dramatic of the interviews between the King and the Presbyterian clergy was at Falkland in September 1596, when a deputation from the Commission of the General Assembly at Cupar was sent to remonstrate with him for allowing the Papist lords to return to Scotland. It had been arranged that James Melville, as most conciliatory, should be the spokesman, and he began a speech, which was often inter- rupted by the King, who at last declared that the Assembly was seditious. The bolder Andrew then broke in and uttered " his commission as from the mighty God," calling the King, 104 "god's silly vassal." as he took him by the sleeve, " God's silly vassal " ; and in spite of continued interruptions, declaring the theory, often repeated, though not often in the presence of royalty, and never so confidently nor with such firm belief : " And therefor, Sir, as divers times before, so now again I maun tell you their is twa kings in Scotland. Thair is Christ Jesus the King, and His kingdom the Kirk, whas subject King James the Saxt is, and of whas kingdom nocht a king, nor a lord, nor a heid, but a member. And they whom Christ has callit to watch over His Kirk, and given His spiritual kingdom, has sufficient power and authority sae to do, baith together and severally, the quhilk nae Christian king nor prince should control or discharge." The King is represented by James Melville as overborne by this argument. When his passion cooled, he dismissed them pleasantly, asserting that the return of the Papist lords was without his knowledge. But James never forgot or forgave the language of the ministers, nor the doctrine it conveyed, which he regarded as treason. No two words could express better than " silly vassal " the change that had passed over Scotland, which was once the model of a feudal State, with a sovereign from whom all honour flowed and all land was held. The earthly monarch was rudely reminded that he had an Invisible Superior, which he might, perhaps, have brooked ; but, what was less easy to bear, that he was a man whom any minister of his subjects might call "silly." Rudeness is an example easily followed, and it is not surprising to find Jane Guthrie, the daughter of an Aber- deen saddler, described as a " poor simple servant of God," publicly admonishing the King at Falkland. Such language could not be agreeable to royal ears after they became ac- customed to the address of " Most sacred Majesty," and the reverence of the bended knee, which English courtiers and prelates used. Adulation completed the corruption of the THE FIFE ADVENTURERS TO THE LEWES. I05 Stuarts. But the use of such language corrupted also the Presbyterians, some of whose ministers were apt to confound the invisible Church, of which Christ was the Head, with the visible, of which they were the leaders. One of the most notable incidents in connection of James VI. with Fife, was a result of the long period during which the Scottish kings had made Dunfermline and Falkland their favourite home. This was the attempt to colonise the Lewes by a settlement of the gentlemen of Fife. While its immediate object ended in a failure as disastrous as the Darien expedi- tion, it afforded a precedent for the successful plantation of Ulster, and the colonisation of Nova Scotia. It showed that Scotland was becoming too small for the increase and energy of its inhabitants. It was a shadow cast before of the events which were to make Scotchmen amongst the leading colonists of the New World, and amongst the foremost adventurers in American and Australian settlement, in Arctic or African exploration. About the same time, several Fife families sent colonists to Orkney and Shetland, where they acquired estates, as the Trails of Holland, descendants of Trail of Blebo, the Bruces of Symbister, and others. The origin of the expedition to the Lewes is obscure. But Lindsay of Menmuir, afterwards Lord Balcarres, seems to have been one of the chief advisers of the project, and it may be fairly conjectured that he found in the county which was after- wards to produce Alexander Selkirk of Largo, the original of " Robinson Crusoe," a large share of the adventurous spirit. His object, one of several in which James showed a premature and half-wise statesmanship, was to civilise the wild Scots of the west by a graft from the more cultivated and better blended stock of the east. His grandfather, in the celebrated voyage, conducted by " that excellent pilot," whose name indicates a Fife mariner, Alexander Lindsay, which first showed a Scottish 106 THE CHIEFS ORDERED TO PRODUCE TITLES. king the full extent of his dominions, had taken with him to the Lewes and Skye some gentlemen of Fife, and so intro- duced them to that distant part of Scotland. But it required more than an occasional royal visit to curb the lawlessness of the Celtic chiefs, the absolute monarchs of their clans. The Macleods of Lewes, a race fertile in bastards, not content with internal feuds, preyed upon all ships that came to their island waters, and according to a Highland chronicle, " They hanged so many of the inhabitants of the coast side of Fife that they used diligence of law against Roy Macleod and his clan." The adventurous fishers of Fife already knew the wealth and the danger of the western seas. Ordinary law was quite inadequate for the case, and James determined to try a more stringent policy. In 1597 an Act was passed requiring the chiefs to produce their titles before the Lords of the Exchequer on Whitsunday 1598, and to find security for payment of the rents due to the Crown which they had long ceased to pay, as well as for the peaceful conduct of their followers. Another Act provided for the erection of three burghs in Kintyre, Lochaber, and the Lewes. A council was organised to advise the king upon the affairs of the West Highlands. Its leading members were Lindsay of Balcarres, Lord Menmuir, the secretary, and Sir William Stewart, com- mendator of Pittenweem. It was natural to choose men of Fife, the land of many burghs, seaports, and fishing villages, for such a business. When the Lords of Exchequer met at Whitsunday, the chiefs, as had been expected, failed to pro- duce titles, and the Isles of Harris and Lewes, and the lands of Dunvegan in Skye, as well as of Glenelg on the opposite coast, were declared forfeited. Lewes was granted to a company of Adventurers, of which the chairman, to use nineteenth-century language, was the Duke of Lennox. But the directors and shareholders were almost all gentlemen FIFE LAIRDS IN THE LEWES. 1 07 of Fife : Sir Patrick Leslie, commendator of Lindores ; Sir William Stewart, commendator of Pittenweem ; Sir James Anstruther, younger of that Ilk ; James Learmont, younger of Balcomie ; and James Spens of Wormiston. They were to pay no rent for seven years, in consideration of the cost to which they were put, the hazard of their own lives, as well as the lives of their kinsmen and friends ; but after that date a grain rent of 140 chalders bear was to be paid for Lewes. Similar terms were also agreed to with reference to the lands of Harris, Skye, Dunvegan, and Glenelg. A member of the family of Bethune or Beton of Balfour settled in Skye and left descendants. Four parish churches were to be erected in the Lewes, and two in Skye, as the King (here some of the councillors spoke in his name) was " most careful that these gentlemen and their successors should not be destitute of the comfort of spiritual pastors for preaching and adminis- trating the sacrament." A commission was issued to Lennox, as Lieutenant of the Isles, which was again renewed in 1599, when the Earl of Huntly was joined with him, and both were charged to assist the gentlemen venturers and enterprisers of the conquest of Lewes. The expedition did not start till October. It in- cluded five or six hundred men under wages, besides volun- teers. The ill-chosen season, and the lack of lodgings such as the gentlemen of Fife were accustomed to, induced disease which weakened the force. They commenced building "a pretty town," or, as the Highland chroniclers call it, "a bonny village." The future Stornoway was then begun, and consisted of a few fortified houses or stances, for the burgh was never completed. The Macleods rose under Neil and Murdoch, two bastards of their last chief. The Fife men, under Learmont, were surprised at sea by Murdoch, who slew most of the crew, and kept Learmont captive in Lewes 108 THE ADVENTURERS CAPITULATE. for six months, when he was released on ransom, but died in Orkney on his way home. Bannatyne deemed his death a fulfilment of a prediction of Knox, but the Highlanders re- gretted it, because Macleod lost the ransom of his prisoner. A dispute between the two brothers led Neil to side for a time with the Adventurers, on condition of his own pardon to betray his brother, who was executed at St Andrews, and to return as an ally of the Adventurers to Lewes. In the following year a new commission was issued to Lennox and Huntly, with larger powers and still larger promises, but neither took an active part in the enterprise. The leaders who returned with Neil Macleod were the three Fife lairds. Pittenweem, Wormiston, and the heir of Balcomie, the lairds of Fingask in Perth and of Airdrie in Lanark. A quarrel between Wormiston and Macleod, abetted by Mac- kenzie of Kintail, and Tormood, an illegitimate son of the old chief of Lewes, led to an attack upon the camp of the Ad- venturers, who capitulated. The terms were ignominious. They were to procure a full pardon for the Macleods, never to return to the Lewes, to surrender their title to Tormood, and to leave Spens of Wormiston, and his son-in-law, Money- penny of Pitmilly, as hostages. In 1602 the hostages were released, and a remission granted to the Macleods ; but a proclamation for a new expedition was issued in July for September 1602. Warned perhaps by the mishap of attempt- ing it at such a season, it was delayed till the following spring. The further attempts for the settlement of the Lewes belong more to the history of the West Highlands than to the history of Fife, and must be briefly told. In 1605 the Adventurers, armed with letters of fire and sword — such at times have been the stern, but not always successful, methods of coercion — temporarily reduced the Lewes by securing the submission of Tormood Macleod ; LAST ATTEMPT TO COLONISE FAILS. 109 but his brother Neil held out, and, aided by Macneill of Barra, Macdonald of Clanranald, and Macleod of Harris, prevented anything like a permanent conquest. Other com- petitors, Huntly, Argyll, and Mackenzie, chief of Kintail, began to contend for a share in barren islands, coveted for the extent and not the riches of their soil. In 1607 the remnant of the original partners of the Fife Company, many of whom had died or spent all their means, returned to Fife. Kintail, through the favour of the Chancellor, Lord Dunfermline, got a surreptitious gift of the Lewes ; but this was revoked, and, with the consent of the original Adventurers, a new grant was made to three gentlemen, two of whom were Fife lairds — James Elphinstone, Lord Balmerino ; Sir James Spens of Wormiston ; and Sir George Hay of Nether- cliff, afterwards Lord Kinnoul : but Hay and Spens, who, after the conviction of Balmerino for treason in 1609, once more tried to conquer the Lewes, were thwarted by the in- trigues of Kintail. They disbanded their forces, and a small garrison left in the fort at Stornoway was surprised by Neil Macleod, who burnt the fort and sent the garrison back to Fife, receiving, besides a money payment, the lands of Let- tercurry, which were given him as compensation. This was the last attempt of the Lowlanders to colonise the Lewes. Hay and Spens sold what they could not con- quer to Mackenzie of Kintail, afterwards created a baron. This wily chief also got a gift of Balcomie's forfeited share of the Lewes adventure. With better knowledge of the character of the country and its natives, Kintail, who had used the Macleods against the Adventurers, now used the Adventurers' title to oust the Macleods. He substituted the rule of a Highland chief, who at least acknowledged the authority of the king, for one who recognised no law, and despised a sheepskin title. The civilisation, in the modern 110 DUNFERMLINE BIRTHPLACE OF PRINCES. sense, of this part of the West Highlands, was delayed for more than a century. Before his accession to the English crown, Falkland and Dunfermline were the favourite residences of James. The one was resorted to chiefly in summer, for the sake of its sport ; the other in winter, as a palace preferable to Linlith- gow or Holyrood, with their gloomy memories. In Dun- fermline were born his daughter Elizabeth, afterwards the Electress Palatine, through whom the house of Hanover came to the British throne ; his second son, Charles, after- wards king ; and his third son, Robert, who died young. " The greatest honour," writes Sir Robert Sibbald, " this shire ever had, was that it gave birth to King Charles, the royal martyr, who was born in the Abbey of Dunfermline, and baptised by Mr David Lindsay, Bishop of Ross, on December 23, 1600, — ■ " Whose heavenly virtues angels should rehearse ; It is a theme too high for human verse." A traditional story, true to the character at least of King James, presents a different view of the infancy of King Charles. One night his nurse broke James's slumber with the tale — " There was like an auld man coming into the room, who threw his cloak owre the prince's cradle, and syne drew it till him again as if he had ta'en cradle, bairn, and a' away wi' him. I feared it was the thing that's no' canny ; " to which the King exclaimed, " Fiend ! would he had ta'en the girnin' brat clean awa ! Gin he air be king there'll be na gude a' his ring [reign] ; the deil has cussin [cast] his cloak ower him already." The last words became, perhaps still are, a byword in the town for an unlucky child. James, after his accession to the English throne, returned only once to Scotland, in 16 17, although he had promised to return every third year. It was a paternal example in the JAMES VI. REVISITS FIFE. Ill Royal Stuart art of breaking promises. The situation was something like that which now exists between Sweden and Norway, and had similar effects. Courtiers preferred the pleasures and the profits of the Court and capital. The people, left to themselves, began to take an independent course, which led in a democratic direction. During his visit to Scotland, James naturally went to Dunfermline and Falkland. He also visited St Andrews, where, no longer awed by the presence of Andrew Melville, he made jokes on the names of the professors, and presided at disputations of the students on the harmless question whether sheriffships and other inferior offices should be hereditary. He little foresaw how soon the same question was to be put as to the royal office. He was greeted with panegyrical verses in a very different strain from Melville's lectures. Yet the mur- murs of the Presbyterians at the forcible restoration of Epis- copacy and of ritual services might have reached the royal ears, although the sturdiest maintainers of the principles of the Second Book of Discipline had been silenced or banished. His visit to Dunfermline, either on this or an earlier occa- sion, was marked by an incident illustrative of the progress of one of the great industries of Fife. Sir George Bruce of Culross took the King to see his coal - mines, which were worked at some distance under the sea ; and when the party were being drawn up a shaft whose mouth was on an island, James, alarmed at finding himself surrounded by water, called out " Treason ! " as he had done some years before at Gowrie House. His timid and suspicious nature was alarmed at any unexpected situation, and happy only when surrounded by admiring courtiers or jovial boon companions. Scotland was not a home for such a faint-hearted prince. Charles I. had not accompanied his father, but he came to Scotland for his coronation in 1633 ; and once again in 1641, 112 CHARLES I. AND II. IN FIFE. vainly hoping to raise the Scots against the English Parliament in support of the royal prerogative. The coronation was at Edinburgh, but he paid a short visit to his birthplace. Charles II., when he accepted the Covenant to gain the crown in 1650, made a brief tour round Fife, but, alarmed at the arrival of Cromwell, fled to England, and never returned to Scotland. No king visited Scotland for nearly 200 years, and Fife, which had owed to the residence of the kings the charters of its royal burghs, the titles and honours of its land- owners, and the careers opened to enterprising merchants and younger sons of lairds, suffered at first probably more than the rest of Scotland from the absence of royalty. The troubles of the civil religious war, which lasted, with scarcely an interval, for half a century, from 1638 to 1688, also told severely upon the population and prosperity of Fife. How it emerged along with the rest of Scotland from this crisis, and grew after it stronger, more prosperous, more in- telligent than in the days when it numbered kings amongst its inhabitants, belongs to a later chapter of its history. No portion of its annals is so full of romantic incidents as the half-century the outline of which has been traced from the Reformation to the Union of the Crowns. But history, like life, is not all or chiefly romance. Truth is stronger as well as stranger than fiction. Even when history affords fewer motives for poetry, it supplies matter for moral and examples for political philosophy. The modern history of Fife includes only one battle and only one historic murder. Individual character, perhaps still as strongly marked there as anywhere in Scotland, has no longer so many opportunities to display its good and evil on a conspicuous stage. Now other and wider interests succeed. We must try to follow the improvement of agriculture, the growth of manufactures, the adventures by sea and land which led to MEDIEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY. 113 the discovery of more than one new world, the planting of Scottish colonies, the triumphs of engineering, the reform of government and law which has given to all citizens a par- ticipation in public affairs, the advance of learning in schools and universities, the religious movements, too often sectarian in character but deeply influencing many lives. All these have left their reflection on the history of Fife during the last two centuries. That history, more complex, perhaps more difficult to narrate, affords matter more varied than, and as instructive as, the history of the times when kings lived and princes were born at Dunfermline, when archbishops held their courts and heretics were burned at St Andrews. Ancient and medieval history have the enchantment of the distant view and the halo of time. Modern history comes nearer home. Its atmosphere is clearer, its colours less dim. We are no longer spectators merely, for the plot, though part of it is past or passing, is not yet over, and concerns our own and our country's future destiny. So much the more neces- sary is it that truth, the genius of history, should teach us neither to exaggerate nor to diminish the value of what is most worthy of record. Fife now became part of Great Britain. But it had to pass through a period of revolution before it received the franchise of the English constitution, and the opportunity of aiding in making the larger but not yet, as it has been wrongly called, the greater Britain beyond the seas. H4 CHAPTER VII. REVOLUTIONS OF SEVENTEENTH CENTURY — ALEXANDER HENDERSON OF LEUCHARS — HIS SERMON AT THE GLASGOW ASSEMBLY, 1638 — ALEX- ANDER LESLIE THE GENERAL AND ALEXANDER HENDERSON THE MINISTER, BOTH MEN OF FIFE, LEADERS AT DUNSE LAW, 1639 — GIBSON OF DURIE AND HOPE OF CRAIGHALL COMMAND THE LAWYERS' COM- PANY — HENDERSON AT EDINBURGH ASSEMBLY, 1639 — AT ST ANTHO- LINS'S IN LONDON, 1640 — MODERATOR OF EDINBURGH ASSEMBLY, 164I — CHAPLAIN TO CHARLES I. AT HOLYROOD— DRAFTS THE SOLEMN- LEAGUE AND COVENANT, 1643— AT ST MARGARET'S, WESTMINSTER, WHEN ENGLISH SIGN THE COVENANT — MEETS CHARLES AT UXBRIDGE, 1645 — SAMUEL RUTHERFORD AT ST ANDREWS, 1639 — HIS ' LEX REX ' BURNT BY THE HANGMAN AT ST ANDREWS AFTER THE RESTORATION — GEORGE GILLESPIE, "THE THUNDERING PREACHER" OF KIRKCALDY — PATRICK GILLESPIE SUPPORTS CROMWELL, AND MADE PRINCIPAL OF GLASGOW UNIVERSITY — BATTLE OF PITREAVIE, SUNDAY, 20TH JULY 1651, LAST BATTLE IN FIFE— CROMWELL AT BURNTISLAND — THE PROTEST OF ST ANDREWS — RISE OF MIDDLE CLASSES— FIFE LOSSES AT KILSYTH — CASTLES NO LONGER FORTIFIED — LEARNED SCOTTISH GENTRY IN FIFE — SIR JOHN SCOT OF SCOTSTARVIT— SCOT- LAND IN BLAEU'S ATLAS — ' DELITI/E POETARUM SCOTORUM ' — SIR JAMES BALFOUR OF DENMYLN AND HIS BROTHER SIR ROBERT BAL- FOUR, M.D. — SIR ROBERT SIBBALD OF GIBLISTON. Two ministers closely connected with Fife represent the best aspects of the character of the Covenanters, their strong intellect and their fervent piety. The cause which converted the head of Alexander Henderson, minister of Leuchars, and inspired the heart of Samuel Rutherford, Principal of the University of St Andrews, must command the respect of impartial judges. It will be necessary to record some of its fanatical excesses which were closely connected with the history of Fife ; but it is only fair to HENDERSON THE COVENANTER. 115 notice also the basis on which it rested, and which gave it so firm a hold on men of all classes. The Covenant was the work of a Fife author, and its importance justifies'a fuller account of the life of Henderson than might be otherwise proper in these outlines. His par- entage is unknown, but it is probable that he belonged to the family of the Henrysons of Fordel, between Queens- ferry and Aberdour, which just misses also the certainty of having a right to claim the Dunfermline poet, and has for its only proved worthy the King's Advocate of James IV. One account says he was a native of Creich, a parish in the north of Fife, and this is supported by his gift to its school. Still it may be hoped that the portrait of the great Covenanter which hangs on the castle walls of Fordel does not represent an imaginary kinsman. His burial in the Fordel lair of the kirkyard of Greyfriars confirms the claim of relationship, which is not inconsistent with his birth in another part of Fife, or the variation in the spelling of his surname. Born about 1583, he was educated at, and became a regent in, the University of St Andrews. In 1 6 1 8 he was presented to the church of Leuchars by Arch- bishop Gledstanes, possibly in return for the dedication of his graduation thesis to the Archbishop. His settlement was so unpopular that when he came to take possession he found the doors of the church barred by the parishioners, and had to effect an entrance by a window. One of the earliest recorded instances of a disputed settlement was that of the future leader of the Covenanters. That it should have been so, marks the rapid change, within a generation after the Reformation, from the submissive attitude of the people under the Roman to their independent attitude under the Presbyterian Church. Before the Reformation there had been many disputed elections to Episcopal sees. But no Il6 DISPUTED SETTLEMENT AT LEUCHARS. one thought it worth while to dispute a presentation to a parochial cure. The Reformation in Scotland diminished the height of the Episcopal and raised that of the Pastoral office. The Congregation of the Church, and on a minor scale of the parish, became an independent power. The conversion of Henderson the Episcopal presentee into Henderson the Covenanting minister was due to a sermon preached at Leuchars by Robert Bruce, the minister of Edin- burgh, who had been banished beyond the Tay by James VI. for refusing to accept the royal account of the Gowrie plot. His text had the appropriateness which catches the popular ear : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheep-fold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber." It was natural that this text should please the sheep, but not so natural that it should touch, as in this case it did, the heart of the robber. When Henderson preached in 1638 to the Glasgow Assembly, he made, though in general terms, a personal confession. " Alas ! how many of us have rather sought the Kirk, than the Kirk sought us ! How many have rather got the Kirk given them, than they have been given to the Kirk for the good thereof! " but he pleaded in excuse : " If there were any faults or wrong steps in our entry (as who of us are free ?), let us acknowledge the Lord's calling of us, if we have since got a seal from heaven of our ministry, and let us labour with diligence and faithfulness in our office." He could then look back on a ministry of twenty years, during which he had never faltered, through evil or good report, in the hour of danger and the hour of hope, to preach the principles which culminated in the Covenant. Like Knox, he paid special attention to educa- tion, endowed a school in Leuchars with a schoolmaster's glebe and small stipend, the school of Creich with 2000 merks, and gave ,£100 Scots to the St Andrews University Library. HENDERSON AND THE SERVICE-BOOK. WJ In 1618 he denounced the Five Articles of Perth, and was cited before the Court of High Commissioners at St Andrews for a book published by him and two other ministers, in which they declared the Perth Assembly a nullity. The proceedings against him were, however, dropped. The last years of James VI. and the first of Charles were a period of more pacific policy. It was the lull before the storm. Though sanctioned by a statute in 16 21, the Five Articles were not rigidly en- forced. Henderson, and most of the ministers who opposed them, were allowed to conduct services in their own way, and to take part in the exercises by which they strengthened and prepared themselves for the coming struggle. It came when the attempt was made to impose the Service-Book in 1637. The Archbishop of St Andrews gave a charge by letters of horning, which was the Scottish process of executing decrees, adapted from an old feudal form, ordaining Henderson, Hamil- ton the minister of Newbarns, and Bruce the minister of Kings- barns in Fife, to purchase and use the obnoxious book. They suspended the charge, and succeeded in obtaining a judgment from the Privy Council, declaring that the letters extended only "to the buying of the said books, and no further." The supplication to the Council, drawn by Henderson, stated more clearly than any other of many similar protests from all parts of Scotland, why the ministers refused to conform. The book was not warranted, it contended, by the authority of the General Assembly, "the representative of the Church of this kingdom." The liberties of the true Kirk and form of worship received at the Reformation were warranted both by Acts of Assembly and of Parliament, and " the Kirk of Scot- land is ane free and independent Kirk, and their pastors should be most able to discuss and direct what doth best beseem our measure of Reformation, and what may seem most for the good of the people." From the day it was pre- 1 1 8 HENDERSON AT GLASGOW ASSEMBLY. sented, Henderson was marked out as the leader of the move- ment. When the supplicants met at the tables in the Parlia- ment House, he drew the obligatory part of the renewed Covenant on the model of the earlier Covenant of the Lords of the Congregation ; he received a call to the church in Edinburgh, though he did not then accept it; he was sent along with the Marquis of Montrose and David Dickson to Aberdeen to procure the signature of the Covenant and over- come the opposition of the Doctors of the University ; and when the Glasgow Assembly met in November 1638, he was unanimously elected Moderator. Archbishop Laud called him " a Moderator without moderation ! " nor can this be wondered at when the chief acts of the Assembly were the deposition of the bishops and the restoration of Presbyterian Church government. The short Glasgow Assembly was the Scottish counterpart of the English Long Parliament. Scotland remodelled the government of the Church, while England remodelled the government of the State. Both can be judged only by a revolutionary standard. The conduct of Henderson was that of an able party leader, not of an impartial chairman. The alleged grounds of the deposition of the bishops were, — con- tumacy in not appearing, participation in the Acts relative to Church government and ritual, and charges of immorality declared proved on none or the slenderest evidence. That such charges should have been sustained is discreditable to the Assembly and to Henderson. The real ground of deposition was the determination of the nation, so far as represented in the Assembly, to revert to Presbyterian government. At every point in its proceedings — the resolution to continue sitting when Hamilton, the Commissioner, dissolved it ; the examina- tion of the registers ; the denunciation of Arminianism ; the mock trial of the bishops ; the solemn sermon he preached WITH LESLIE AT DUNSE LAW. 119 announcing their excommunication ; the abrogation of all Acts contrary to Presbyterianism ; the votes of thanks to the nobles and the magistrates who supported the Assembly — we hear the voice of Henderson. The rest do little more than echo his opinions or applaud his speeches, which they no doubt felt were the best expression of their own opinions. In his closing speech, while asserting there was no inconsistency between monarchy and Presbytery, he declared, "We are like a man that has lain long in irons, who after they are off and he redeemed, feel not his liberty for some time, but the smart of them makes him apprehend that they are on him still. So it is with us : we do not yet feel our liberty. Take heed of a second defection, and rather endure the greatest extremity than be entangled again with the yoke of bondage." The Assembly was the proclamation of civil war, and within a few months the troops of the Covenanters confronted those of Charles at Dunse Law. Their leader was another man of Fife, Alexander Leslie, " the old little crooked soldier," born at Balgonie, and bred in the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus. He disciplined and led the troops with the same power of command which Henderson exercised in the Assembly. The laymen who had kept their arms by their sides when at Glas- gow, now had them in their hands. The ministers, Baillie, Henderson, Rutherford, Gillespie, and others, were present to watch and counsel, to exhort and pray. The blue banner of the army was inscribed " For Christ's Crown and Covenant," in golden letters. Amongst the forces specially noted in Baillie's lively description were "Rothes, Lindesay, Sinclair, with two full regiments at least, from Fife," Balcarres, a noble- man of Fife, with a horse troop, and " the constant guard of the General," some hundreds of " our lawyers, musqueteers," under two Fife lairds, Sir Alexander Gibson of Durie and Sir Thomas Hope of Craighall, "standing in good arms, with 120 HENDERSON AT EDINBURGH ASSEMBLY. cocked matches and well apparelled." This demonstration of strength forced Charles to conclude the Pacification of Ber- wick, and reluctantly to allow an Assembly to meet in Edin- burgh. Bold as was the language and still bolder as were the acts of the Glasgow Assembly, in the Edinburgh Assembly of 1639 Traquair, the King's Commissioner, proposed that Henderson should again occupy the Moderator's chair. It was felt that he alone could control the fiercer spirits. He pleaded age ; and the suspicion of an insidious design to introduce con- stant moderators, which would have been a violation of the Presbyterian parity, led to the election of David Dickson, Minister of Irvine. Henderson, as outgoing Moderator, preached the opening sermon, in which he exhorted Tra- quair " to see that Cassar should have his own, but let not Ca?sar have what belongs to God." Addressing the members of the Assembly, in a tone somewhat moderated from that of Glasgow, he said : " After all these troubles, with a holy moderation go on ; for zeal is a good servant, but an ill master ; like a ship that has a full sail and wants a rudder. We have need of Christian prudence ; for ye know what ill speeches our adversaries have made upon us. Let it be shown to his majesty that this presbyterial government can very well stand with a monarchical government, and we shall gain his majesty's favour, and God shall get the glory, to whom be praise, for ever and ever, amen." Henderson was as far removed from the fanatics as from the bishops, and he has been claimed as the precursor of the Presbyterian Establishment, as well as of the constitutional Dissenters. In 1640 he was chosen by the Town Council Rector of the University of Edinburgh, and proved himself a wise adminis- trator of the higher education, as at Leuchars of the parish schools. PREACHES AT ST ANTHOLINS'S, LONDON. 121 When the army of the Covenant, finding Charles unwilling to keep his engagements except at the sword's point, invaded England, Henderson, along with Blair, Gillespie, and Baillie, went as the representatives of the ministers to London to negotiate with the King. They remained seven months, the opening months of the Long Parliament, and of Strafford's trial and death. Henderson was active in the negotiations which the Scottish Commissioners carried on at once with the King and the Parliament. He lived in lodgings near the London Stone, which had been assigned to the Scottish Com- missioners by the Corporation, and took his turn in preaching at St Antholins's Church. "From the first appearance of day," writes Clarendon in his ' History of the Rebellion,' " in the morning on every Sunday, to the shutting in of the light, the church was never empty." It was the first, but not the last, occasion when the robust and plain Scottish preacher reached the hearts of the London middle class better than the refined and learned orators of Oxford and Cambridge. It was by such sermons that Presbyterianism was propagated in England, and the vision of a united Presbyterian Church for both kingdoms was made to appear possible. The last form of " The Charge of the Scottish Commissioners against Laud and Strafford " was the work of Henderson, though the first draft was by Baillie, who modestly assigns " the polishing of all writs " to his colleague, and he prepared a paper in support of "a proposalfor unity in religion and uniformity in church, as a special means for conserving of peace between the two kingdoms ; " to which the King and Parliament replied that, as " the Parliament had taken into consideration the refor- mation of Church government, so they will proceed therein in due time. Henderson did not neglect the interest of the universities, and Baillie reports : " Mr Henderson had a very sweet con- 122 HENDERSON CHAPLAIN TO CHARLES II. ference with the King, then alone, for the helping of our universities from the bishop's rents. I hope it shall be obtained. A pitie bot that sweet Prince had good companie about him." All the demands of the Scottish Commissioners having been agreed to except one for the immediate abolition of Episcopacy in England, they returned home in July 1641. At this time the Presbyterian leaders, and especially Baillie, hoped that as they had gained so many of the Scottish nobles and the English Commons, they might even gain the King himself. This would have suited their monarchical principles and diminished their ecclesiastical dread of the Independents, now beginning to show their heads. In the Assembly which the Commissioners found sitting in Edinburgh, Henderson was chosen Moderator against his own inclination and the opposition of David Calderwood the his- torian, one of the more stubborn Presbyterians, who thought the re-election even of the ablest man contrary to the principle of equality. His chief work during it, besides presiding, was the ' Overture against Impiety and Schism.' It was directed against the meetings of the Independents, whose principles threatened to spread in Scotland, and were deemed fatal to Church unity by High Church Presbyterians. He also carried a motion for drawing up a confession, catechism, directory for worship, and platform for government, in the hope that these might afterwards be accepted in England. The task of preparing these was reluctantly accepted by him. At the close of the Assembly he petitioned, and with difficulty obtained permission, to demit his charge in Edinburgh, but did not avail himself of it. The King having come to Edin- burgh, Henderson acted as his chaplain, reproved him for not attending the afternoon service, and conducted family prayers at Holyrood morning and evening. That Charles relished this discipline any more than his father or his son is not DRAFTS SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT. 123 likely, but he dissembled his dislike better, and Henderson probably made his preaching as palatable as possible con- sistently with his principles. An immediate and urgent common object unites on friendly terms men with different ulterior views. He was appointed by the Commission of Assembly in 1642 to go again to England, but for a time was prevented by the outbreak of the Civil War. When the King had established himself at Oxford, he went there along with other Commissioners to attempt to mediate between Charles and the Parliament. This attempt miscarried, for the King was now over - confident in his strength, and unwilling to make concessions. Nor did Henderson succeed better in an interview after his return at the Bridge of Stirling with his former comrade, Montrose, who now sided with the King against the Covenanters. In the Assembly of 1643, Hender- son, as Moderator, drafted the Solemn League and Covenant, which was revised by Committees of the Parliament of England, the Scottish Convention of Estates, and General Assembly, and transmitted to the Parliament of England for approval. To procure this he was sent to London as one of the Commissioners to the Westminster Assembly, and imme- diately after his arrival on 25th September, the Covenant was sworn and subscribed by the English at St Margaret's, West- minster. England was now, so far as the Westminster As- sembly by words and oaths could make it, Presbyterian. In this Assembly Henderson proved his conciliatory yet firm management, even more than in the Assembly of Glasgow, where his word had been law. At Westminster he had to deal with politicians inclined to subordinate the Church to the State, with theologians who deemed Presby- tery as devoid as Episcopacy either of divine right or human reason, and with Englishmen jealous of Scottish interfer- 124 HENDERSON AT WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY. ence. He had the majority on his side, but he was an assessor rather than a member of a body which contained many elements of division. He spoke seldom, always with weight, sometimes, though rarely, with fire. He yielded minor points, but upheld without a moment's wavering the Presbyterian standard. The compromise with the Inde- pendents, which allowed a doctor as well as a pastor in congregations, was his suggestion ; and he cut by a similar compromise the knotty point of whether the ordination re- ferred to in the draft of the Articles of the Assembly was exclusive or inclusive of popular election. But when Nye, an English Independent, attacked Presbytery, and argued that a Presbyterian union of the kingdoms would be danger- ous to the State, he denounced Nye as an incendiary, com- paring him to Sanballat who stirred up heathen rulers against the Jews, or Lucian who incited the Roman Emperor against the Christians. In 1645 he was one of the Commissioners sent to Charles, at Uxbridge, but failed, as might have been expected, to induce him to surrender Episcopacy. When next year the King was forced by defeat to throw himself upon the support of the Scottish troops at Newcastle, Henderson was sent for by the King, and an argument was conducted in written papers on both sides, with a moderation rare in such times, between the King and his chaplain. It was again ineffectual, for Charles, whatever his faults, was as attached to the Church of England as his grandmother had been to that of Rome. They parted, however, with mutual respect, Henderson warn- ing the King of the consequence of allowing controversy to turn upon the Royal Prerogative. He was already in failing health, and died a few days after his arrival in Edinburgh, on 19th August 1646.. Baillie, who remained in London, thought Henderson was CHARACTER OF HENDERSON. 125 wasting time in arguing with Charles, and two years after his death the report was spread by an anonymous pamphlet that he had yielded too much to the Royal arguments ; but the Assembly recorded its opinion that this was a calumny. The erasure of the inscription on his monument in Greyfriars' churchyard after the Restoration, was an acknowledgment by his opponents that he died as he had lived, a firm Pres- byterian. His friend Baillie pronounced in the Assembly of 1647 a eulogium often repeated: "If the thoughts of others be conform to my inmost sense, he ought to be accounted by us and posterity the fairest ornament, after John Knox, of incomparable memory, that ever the Church of Scotland did enjoy." His textual sermons and argu- mentative speeches are not fitted to raise the enthusiasm of posterity to this pitch. Neither the Covenant nor the Confession, nor the Catechisms, Larger or Shorter, now hold a place second to the Scriptures. There are many zealous Presbyterians who consider the Covenant no longer suited to the times, and are ready even to revise the Confession. But the high aim of Henderson will not be overlooked by the historian, to whatever Church he may belong. That aim was the unity of the Church and nation in Protestant doctrine and under Presbyterian government. He pursued it with statesmanlike perseverance and prudence. He failed to secure it, because the human spirit had burst its ecclesi- astical fetters more effectually than he was aware of, and could no longer be bound by Calvinistic Presbyterian any more than by Roman Catholic uniformity ; nor did he allow for the sense of independence, which was as strong in England as in Scotland. That such an attempt should have been made, even with partial and transient success, by the minister of the small parish of Leuchars, was almost as striking a phenomenon as the transient Commonwealth estab- 126 SAMUEL RUTHERFORD PRINCIPAL OF ST MARY'S. lished by his successful rival Oliver Cromwell, the representa- tive of the Independents. The connection of Samuel Rutherford with Fife began shortly before that of Henderson closed. His early life was spent in the south of Scotland, but his mature years in Fife. His settlement at St Andrews is one of many examples of the care with which the rulers of the Presbyterian Church selected the posts they deemed fittest for the best talents. Henderson was the politician, Baillie the historian, and Rutherford the divine of the Covenant. Born in Crailing, near Jedburgh, in 1600, educated at Edinburgh, and minister of Anwoth in Kirkcudbright from 1627 to 1636, he was deposed for preaching against the Articles of Perth, and banished to Aberdeen during the King's pleasure. He called himself Christ's prisoner, and his prison Christ's palace ; but his confinement, though it prevented him from preaching, does not appear to have been strict. On the Ecclesiastical Revolution in 1638 he returned to Anwoth, and was present at the Glasgow Assembly. The Commission next year appointed him Professor of Divinity at St Andrews, and soon after colleague of Robert Blair in the City Church, which enabled him to make up for his "dumb Sabbaths" at Aberdeen. In spite of the wishes of the congregation, who desired to associate with him another minister, he was maintained in the sole pastoral charge by the Assembly. He was sent as a colleague of Henderson to the Westminster Assembly, and remained in London nearly four years. On his return to Scotland, he was appointed Principal of St Mary's College at St Andrews, and, declining two calls to chairs of Divinity in Holland, continued in St Andrews till his death on 19th March 1661. Shortly before it he was deprived of his offices both in the University and the Church, and one of the first Acts of the Restoration was the burnine of his RUTHERFORD S WORKS. I 27 treatise ' Lex Rex ' by the common hangman at the market- place of St Andrews. In spite of Milton's saying, it was better to burn a book than a man ; but though death released him from an impending prosecution, and it is possible, but scarcely probable, he might have met the fate of Guthrie, who was hanged in Edinburgh, there is no reason to suppose he would have run the risk of that of Wishart. After a time even bigots get tired or ashamed of killing their adversaries, and have recourse to other methods of silencing thought. Rutherford was an indefatigable writer in the two depart- ments of controversial and of devotional theology, not often or easily united. He took little part in the debates of the "Westminster Assembly, and laboured for the common cause chiefly in the pulpit or with the pen. He defended Calvin- ism against the Arminians, and Presbytery against both the Independents and the Erastians. His controversial works are now little known, except ' Lex Rex,' in which he con- tinued and applied the argument of Buchanan's ' De Jure Regni ' against the Royal Prerogative. Though burnt by the hangman, the doctrine of this work has lived and become part of the constitutional doctrine of Great Britain. Yet in Eng- land this merit is forgotten, and Rutherford is probably only remembered by Milton's lines : — " Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword To force our consciences that Christ set free, And ride us with a classic hierarchy, Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford?" The most celebrated of his writings are his Letters, pub- lished at Rotterdam in 1664, under the title of 'Joshua Redivivus,' and since in at least fifteen editions, several of London, down to 1857, and one quite recently by the Rev. Dr Whyte of Edinburgh. It is difficult to form an impartial opinion of a work some have regarded as the most perfect 128 GEORGE GILLESPIE OF KIRKCALDY. fruit of piety, others as the ravings of religious ecstasy. In- tended for the private eye, these letters are sometimes expressed in language drawn from the Song of Solomon rather than from the other books of the Bible, and pass the bounds of pro- priety in describing divine in terms of human love. They will be judged according to the different degrees of the emo- tional religious temperament in different persons, or the same person at different times. They are in tone nearer the devo- tional works of some Roman Catholic writers than the usual strain of Protestant authors of similar works. They recall St Francis de Sales rather than John Bunyan. They have consoled many good men and women in hours of suffering and trial, and faults of taste and style weigh little against such a claim to respect. Perhaps their exuberance may be most fairly considered a relief from the sterner dogmas of the Cal- vinistic creed. They are evidently the genuine utterance of the heart of " the little fair man," of whom one of his hearers said " he showed him in his preaching not the love but the loveliness of Christ." Yet a third minister connected with Fife was the associate of Henderson and Rutherford in the Westminster Assembly, the pious and acute George Gillespie, son of John Gillespie, the " thundering preacher " of Kirkcaldy. Educated at St Andrews, he was presented to the church of Wemyss early in 1638, and ordained by the Presbytery "maugre St An- drew's beard," without the concurrence of the Archbishop, but transferred towards' the end of the same year to Methil, near Wemyss, where he remained till his translation to Edin- burgh in 1642. Having made his name known by a pam- phlet, "A Dispute against the English Popish Ceremonies obtruded on the Church of Scotland," he was chosen to preach before the Glasgow Assembly, and, like other ministers, followed the troops of the Covenant to Dunse Law. PATRICK GILLESPIE. 1 29 In the Westminster Assembly he was the youngest member, yet he broke a lance against, and according to the Covenant- ing tradition overcame, the veteran scholar John Selden. He took part in the composition of the draft of the Confes- sion, and obtained its ratification by the Scottish Assembly of 1647, and next year was Moderator of the Assembly. The definition of God in the Shorter Catechism is said to have been taken from one of his prayers. He died before the close of the year at Kirkcaldy. A touching letter to him as he lay on his deathbed is one of the best of Rutherford's letters. Of his controversial works, that once most widely known is ' Aaron's Rod Blossoming, or the Divine Ordinance of Church Government,' which he dedicated to the West- minster Assembly in 1646. There is a somewhat milder tone in Gillespie's writings than in those of other Covenanters, which seems to correspond with the fine classic features of his portrait, not unlike the later portraits of Milton. The inscription on his tomb at Kirkcaldy, like that of Hen- derson in the Greyfriars', was erased at the Restoration, but, like it, has been since restored, and Gillespie, partly because of his premature death, has been held in specially affectionate remembrance. Many of the stories about him and Ruther- ford belong to the legendary history of the Covenanters. His younger brother, Patrick, abandoned the cause of the Covenant, became the chief supporter of Cromwell amongst the Scottish clergy, and received in return from the Protector the Principalship of the University of Glasgow. Though de- prived of office and for a short time imprisoned after the Restoration, he threw himself on the Royal mercy, and was pardoned though never reinstated. It is in lives such as his, and that of Baillie, who accepted Charles II. as a covenanted King, that we see the weakness of the Covenant in the house of its friends. 130 OLIVER CROMWELL IN SCOTLAND. The modern Ecclesiastical History of Scotland dates from Knox. The modern Political History dates from Cromwell. It is to his influence and action that the separation of the in- terests of the State from those of the Church may be traced. He carried Disestablishment, though in a different sense from the modern use of that term. His appearance in Scotland was only a flash, but it was the flash of lightning which illumines even when it destroys. A single year, from the end of July 1 6 5 o to the beginning of August 1651, was the whole time of his presence in Scotland, and of this scarcely a week, from 28th July to 3d August 1 65 1, was spent in Fife. It was enough to reveal the weak points both of Church and State in Scotland, and for a time to subdue almost all open opposition by either. His quarrel with the Presbyterians was on account of their acknowledgment as King of Charles II., who accepted their Covenant with his lips, hating it in his heart. Nor would Cromwell tolerate the assumption by the ministers of temporal power. No adversary in that age could have been so fatal as one who quoted Scripture as well as any of them, was as deeply convinced of his own interpretation of it as they were of theirs, and commanded troops better able to carry out the practical application of his speeches. He addressed the Scottish ministers in memorable words : "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." Like other users of strong language, he never dreamt that he might be mistaken also himself. It was his sword and not his texts which triumphed at Dunbar, gave him possession of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and laid the south of Scotland at his feet. It required a minor victory to reduce Fife, and force Charles II., whose strength lay in the Highlands, with Perth and Stirling as outposts, to fly to England. It was always difficult to get the Royalist troops to engage, for there was BATTLE OF PITREAVIE. 131 division in a camp partly commanded by Charles and his generals, and partly by the Ministers. There were even deserters to Cromwell. The chief force of the King lay at Stirling, but Cromwell's generalship succeeded in provoking an engagement by threatening Dunfermline. On 17th July he sent Colonel Overton with 1600 foot and some horse across the Forth at Queensferry, and Major-General Lambert followed on the 18th and 19th with two regiments of horse and two of foot, to secure the northern landing, and to attempt upon the enemy as occasion should serve. The occasion came on Sunday the 20th, when the King's forces under General Holborn and Sir John Brown, with five regi- ments of foot and four or five of horse, were sent to inter- cept Lambert. Neither Presbyterians nor Independents kept that Sabbath as a day of rest. Lambert met the Royal forces between Inverkeithing and Dunfermline, and notwithstanding inferior numbers, put them to total rout, killed nearly 2000, took 500 prisoners, amongst them Brown the Major-General, and forty colours which were carried after Worcester to Lon- don to grace Cromwell's triumph. Holborn, suspected of treachery, fled, and the whole force being dispersed, Fife was at the mercy of Cromwell. Two anecdotes of the battle of Inverkeithing or Pitreavie rest on tradition, but answer to the character of the time. The Highlanders were led by Hector MacLean of Duart, and as seven of his sons came to his rescue and met the same fate, he saluted them with the cry, "Another for Hector." Nearly the whole clan present perished. A few who escaped to the castle of Pitreavie were killed by stones thrown from its roof while begging shelter. The Wardlaws, the family who owned that castle, were said to have gone off like snow from a dike as a punishment for their inhospitality, which showed the Fife lairds were not all Royalists. But this may 132 CROMWELL AT BURNTISLAND. have referred to the laird who died suddenly on 2d March 1653, it was said with an oath on his lips. The family after- wards redeemed its fame, and one of its heads was husband of the authoress of the ballad of " Hardyknute." The Pinkerton burn ran blood for three days after the battle, and the fields through which it flows were " as thick with corpses as with sheaves at harvest." Cromwell describes it as an " unspeakable mercy," and trusts " the Lord will follow it until He hath perfected peace and truth." It was soon followed by the bloody victory he called his "crowning mercy" at Worcester, which made him master of England and Charles again an exile. Cromwell had not been at the battle of Pitreavie, which he is said to have watched from the woods of Barnbougle, on the other side of the Forth, but he can only have seen the smoke of the firearms, for the battlefield is hidden by the Ferryhills from the Lothian coast. Overton's troops crossed to North Queensferry and forced a landing in spite of showers of great and small shot. The defenders of the Fife coast found Cromwell's Ironsides more disciplined and determined foes than the marauding troops of the Tudor kings. A few days after he crossed to Burntisland. Inchgarvie, then a fort used as a prison, now a rock on which one of the piers of the Forth Bridge stands, had meantime surrendered, and the possession of Burntisland and Queensferry gave him control of the Firth. Perth also was taken, so that the passage on that side to the Highlands was secured. The King still lay at Stirling. The main body of Cromwell's forces, some 14,000 horse and foot, were now in Fife, waiting, as he expressed it, "what way God will lead us." He was greatly gratified by the capture of Burntisland, and gave in a few lines a clear description of its military importance : " The town is well seated, pretty strong, but capable of further improvement in FIFE TRADITIONS ABOUT CROMWELL. 1 33 that respect without great charge. The harbour at a high spring-tide is near a fathom deeper than Leith, and doth not lie commanded by any ground without the town." One of his generals, Whalley, marched along the coast of Fife attended by a fleet, and took a great store of the guns, as well as ships, of the Royalists. The enemy's affairs, he writes on 29th July, "are in great discomposure, as we hear. Surely the Lord will blow upon them." The tradition that he visited the castle of Rosyth, which had belonged to the Stuarts, cadets of the Royal race, from whom his mother is said to have been descended, does not appear to be histori- cally vouched any more than this step in his genealogy. Fife reduced, Cromwell was recalled in the first days of August across the Firth by the sudden news that the King had abandoned Scotland, and was on his march to England. The small force left in Fife, stationed chiefly at Queensferry, Falkland, and Struthers, was sufficient to levy the cess, to support the English judges, and to sow the seeds of one form of dissent through the influence of Cromwell's officers and chaplains, who made a few converts, and rebaptised them by immersion in the Eden. The tradition that Cromwell cause- wayed the streets of Burntisland and improved its harbour is not accurate, for this was done two years after he left Scot- land ; but the suggestion and impulse was, without doubt, due to him. So, too, the story that the burning of Falkland Palace, and the cutting down of the woods James IV. spared when sorely pressed for timber for his ships, was the work of Cromwell's soldiers is not literally exact ; but a wing of the palace was in fact burnt when some of his troops were quartered in it. Both Royalists and Cromwellians have to answer for the fall of the fine trees, of which only one or two stragglers survive near Strathmiglo. The destructive as well as the constructive statesmanship 134 THE PROTESTERS AT ST ANDREWS ASSEMBLY. of this period originated with Cromwell. His influence pre- cipitated the disruptions of the Presbyterian Church. The Assembly was sitting at St Andrews on the Sunday of the battle of Pitreavie, and as soon as it heard of the defeat, adjourned to Dundee. Before it left St Andrews, a protest was given in by Samuel Rutherford, then minister of St An- drews and Principal of St Mary's, subscribed by twenty-two ministers, against the lawfulness of the Assembly as corrupt, ill-constituted, and not free. The names of some of the Protesters, besides Rutherford himself, were Andrew Cant, minister of Aberdeen ; James Guthrie, minister of Stirling : Patrick Gillespie, afterwards Cromwell's Principal of the College of Glasgow ; and James Simpson, minister of Airth, near Alloa. They were the leaders in the east of Scotland of the party of Protesters, which opposed the Resolutioners who were led by Robert Douglas, Moderator of the As- sembly, and formed the party that recognised Charles II. as King. The adjourned Assembly at Dundee promptly deposed Guthrie, Gillespie, and Simpson, because they had preached against the proceedings both of Church and State, and remitted to the Commission to deal with the other Protesters, " and if they could not be convinced, to process them." This was the germ from which grew all subsequent secessions, and the standing precedent of the mode in which the Conservative party in the Church dealt with them. The divisive forces of Scottish sectarianism had their source in this revolutionary epoch, but they were supported by a natural in- clination of the Scottish intellect not only to independence, but also to doctrinal disputes and logical argument, which was greater perhaps than in any nation since the Eastern Church fought over the words and letters of the Nicene Creed. The strong hand of Cromwell, and of Monk as his lieutenant, maintained peace, silenced the ecclesiastics, and CROMWELL AND THE MEANER SORT. 1 35 enforced law in Fife as in the rest of the south of Scotland. Almost for the first time Scotland knew what it was to live under a firm Government, though a Government of coer- cion. Sir Walter Scott, an impartial judge, recognises the era of Cromwell as the commencement of the prosperity of Scotland. The bulk of the people, the smaller gentry, traders, and commons, while grumbling at the heavy taxation, which made the name of Cess odious to the landowners and farmers, as that of Excise was to the merchants and traders, profited by the stern discipline. Their former rulers, both the nobles and the leading ministers, were stripped of their exorbitant power. There is some exaggeration, but much truth, in the claim Cromwell made in his last public speech : " And hath Scotland been long settled ? I speak plainly. In good truth I do think the Scots nation have been under as great suffering in point of livelihood and subsistence as any people I have yet named to you. I do think truly they are a very ruined nation. And yet in a way (I have spoken with some gentlemen come from thence) hopeful enough — it hath pleased God to give that plentiful encouragement to the meaner sort in Scotland. The meaner sort in Scotland live as well, and are likely to come into as thriving a condition under your Government, as when they were under these great Lords, who made them work for their living no better than the peasants of France. I am loath to speak anything which may reflect upon that nation ; but the middle sort of people do grow up there into such a substance comfortable if not better than they were before." The Reformers had freed this middle and meaner sort from the tyranny of the Roman Church. Cromwell freed them from the tyranny of the Nobles, and for a time of the Pres- byters. The Restoration threw things back, but the revolu- tion thus effected could not be reversed. The middle classes 136 PEACE IN FIFE. in Scotland began to prosper, and gradually but surely ac- quired political power at the expense both of the nobility and the clergy, neither of whom reacquired all they lost. The participation of the meaner sort in politics was not due to Cromwell, but to reformers of a later date and different character. Cromwell, though he appealed to the lower, was the leader of the middle classes. War south of the Highland border now ceased. Pitreavie was the last battle on the soil of Fife. We hear little more of bonds for private war, of spuilzies, hamesucken, and murders. In Fife property was more subdivided than else- where, and there were fewer places of natural strength. Many country gentlemen began to follow the peaceful pursuits of learning, or exchanged the combats of the field for those of the courts. The merchants grew rich, and the dwellers in the towns and villages disciplined their memory and reasoning by the study of Calvinistic theology. Those of the natives inclined to fight, sought occupation chiefly in other countries or in other parts of Scotland, as the gallant regiments which had marched with Alexander Leslie to Dunse Law, or which perished almost to a man against Montrose at Kilsyth. In Kirkcaldy alone it was reported Kilsyth made two hundred widows, and in Pittenweem forty-nine. Ninety of its choicest men did not return to Crail. The younger Leslie, David, afterwards Lord Newark, who was born at Pitcairlie, near Newburgh, revenged the death of his countrymen at Philiphaugh. Many Fife natives now exchanged the love of war for that of adventure by sea or land. Castles continued to be built till late in the seven- teenth century. But their turrets and battlements presented only a mimicry of war, with loopholes from which no shot was fired, iron gates no longer barred, turrets from which no enemy was descried, drawbridges no longer drawn, and SCOT OF SCOTSTARVIT. 1 37 moats which were drained and became fertile fields. The armour and the arms of the sixteenth century, if not beaten into ploughshares, were nailed to the walls of the hall, whose owner regarded with wonder the two-handed sword his fore- fathers wielded, or the coat of mail which had clad their stalwart frames. In one of the later castles of Fife, whose single unpre- tending but striking tower stands on the depression between the hill where the generals of Mary of Guise met the generals of the Congregation and the ridge of higher ground to the west, one of the smaller barons of Fife led a life divided between the practice of politics and the pursuit of knowledge, from the latter part of the reign of James VI. till his death in that of Charles II. One side of the character of Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit exhibits a disappointed office-seeker, the author of the 'Staggering State of Scots Statesmen' — a "busy man in troubled times," as he is called by Sir James Balfour. But in spite of his unconcealed and natural chagrin at the loss of the hereditary office of Director of Chancery to Jaffray the Quaker, during the Commonwealth, and to one of the Kers of Ancrum, who " danced him out of it " after the Restoration, Scot deserved well of his country. No one of his class and time did more for learning. He founded the Humanity or Latin Chair at St Andrews and scholarships for poor boys at Glasgow. He encouraged Arthur Johnston in the compilation of the ' Delitiis Poetarum Scotorum,' the last fruit of the old tree of Scottish Latinity. The sixth volume of Blaeu's Atlas was published largely at his cost. It marked a step of progress when Scotland was given a distinct place in the Atlas of Europe. "At length," wrote Gordon of Straloch to Sir John Scot on 24th January 1648, " our Scotland presents itself to the world. It will now hold an honourable place among the other countries of the earth 138 SCOTLAND IN BLAEU'S ATLAS. in the grand and celebrated Atlas of Monsieur John Blaeu, to which the world has seen nothing comparable." To effect this object Scot had enlisted the services of Timothy Pont, the son of Robert Pont, minister of St Cuthbert's, but born at the hamlet of Shiresmill, in the parish of Culross, and Gordon of Straloch, in Aberdeenshire, the most competent draughts- man of the time, and spared no effort to get contributors and patrons. Pont had been educated at St Leonard's College, St Andrews, where he graduated in 1584. He was afterwards minister of Dunnet in Caithness, and he received a grant of 2000 acres in the plantation of Ulster, which may have been a reward for his map-making. The map of Fife in this Atlas, of which a facsimile is given, is more than usually well filled with names, no doubt from the personal knowledge of Sir John Scot and Pont. There are detailed plans both of Cupar and St Andrews. A sep- arate map of the little shire of Kinross, made by Gordon in 1642, though not published, is one of the drafts for- tunately preserved in the Advocates' Library. His proposal to obtain from the ministers of each parish statistics of its condition miscarried, though Baillie wrote to his friend Spang, " Sir John Scot's petition to have a description of our shyredom by some in everie Presbytery to be set before the map you have in hand is granted." This project gave the hint for the ' Statistical Account of Scotland ' which Sir John Sinclair carried out more than a century and a half later. Imperfect though it is, the work surpasses anything of the kind yet done for England or Ireland. Scot kept up an active correspondence with the learned men of the Continent, especi- ally of Holland, which he twice visited, and where he dictated the descriptions attached to some of the maps of Scotland, to the admiration of bis publisher Blaeu, whose epigram on Scot deserves to be recorded— drummond's "polemo-middinia." 139 " Quod Patriae Tabulas, sollers quas Pontius olim Descripsit, densis eruis e tenebris, Vel tibi grata suum tradebat Scotia nomen, Sumebat nomen vel sibi Scote tuum." The alliance between Scotland and Holland, which succeeded the old alliance with France, was nowhere closer than in Fife. It was cemented by ecclesiastical and political sympathies, by mercantile and literary commerce. Dysart got the name of Little Holland. A Scottish Church was founded at Rotter- dam and other towns, and a church in the Dutch style was built at Burntisland. There was a curious interchange of learning. The Dutch sent books to Scotland and the Scots professors and students to Holland, who learnt in the hos- pitable republic the virtue of toleration and the sciences of Theology, Medicine, and Law. The hospitable house of Scotstarvit was a centre for the literary circle of his countrymen. One of Scot's visitors — his brother-in-law, Drummond of Hawthornden — was induced to write the ' History of the Jameses ' by his suggestion, and has left a memorial more intimately associated with Fife in the " Polemo - Middinia." This poem celebrates in mock heroics and rollicking macaronic hexameters the contest between the people of Vitarva (Scotstarvit) and those of the neighbour laird, the father of Drummond's first love, Cun- ningham of Barns (Nebarna), about a road to a midden : — " Nymphte qufe colitis highissima monta Fifsea, Seu vos Pittenwema tenent, seu Crelia crofta, Sive Anstreea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis. Et vos, Skipperii, soliti qui per mare breddum Valde procul lanchare foras iterumque redire, Linquite skellatas botas, shippasque picatas Whistlantesque simul fechtam memorate blodceam Fechtam terribilem, quam marvellaverat omnis Banda Deiim, et Nympharum Cockelshelearum Maia ubi sheepifeda et solgoosifera Bassa Swellant in pelago ; " 140 THE LIGHT OF THE MAY. The combatants were well-known characters, whether the combat was real or imaginary : — " Hie aderant Geordie Akenhedius et little Johnus Et Jamie Richasus, et stout Michel Hendersonus Qui jolly tryppas ante alios dansare solebat Et bobbare bene, et lassas kissare bona;as ; " with too many more to name at length, though a word may be spared for the village fool, Jockie Robinson, " the Norland- bornus homo, valde valde Anti-Covenanter nomine Gordonus," and another local character, the " slavery-beardius homo qui pottas dightavit." The whole piece is of the soil and air of Fife. Its coarse rustic humour continued the vein of Lyndsay's 'Interludes,' and was carried on in the " Anster Fair" of Tennant. But the different genius of the authors, and the change of fashion, give each poem a distinct form and flavour. Arthur Johnston, another of Scotstarvit's friends, also merits a passing notice for the graceful Latin verses he turned on the chief towns of the county. Nor was Scotstarvit a solitary tower of light. Alexander Cunningham of Barns deserves grateful recognition for having maintained the beacon of coals on the May in 1636, the first of the Northern Lights which have guided the Scottish sailor on so many voyages, and welcome the ships of all nations, who now seek its shores not for plunder but for trade. Mr Geddie, a scholar of St Andrews, made two Latin lines to commemorate it and its date. Sibbald is responsible both for their Latinity and numerals : — " Flamina ne noceant neu fhmiina lumina Maia Prceb Vh et MeX>//s Ins V\a L I'X it Aq Vh." From 1 816 to 1888 the oil light shone nightly on the same spot from which now the electric flash gladdens the eyes of the mariner before he enters the Firth. This little island THE BALFOURS OF DENMYLN. 141 of Fife in the Forth contains the history of two centuries and a half of progress in the beneficent art which illumines the path of all who traverse the sea. At Denmyln, another small and frugal castle by the road- side, about a mile from Lindores, Sir James Balfour, one of ten Lyon Kings who were Fife lairds from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, united the study of heraldry with the study of history, and collected the manuscripts from which much of the authentic annals of Scotland have been written. One of his brothers, David, became a Judge of the Court of Session, like other Fife gentlemen, from Balfour of Mont- quhanie to Boswell of Balmuto. The youngest, Andrew, a traveller, naturalist, and physician in London, was deemed worthy of a place beside the illustrious Harvey, and returning to his own country reflected credit on a name distinguished by other men of note as the founder of the Botanic Garden of Edinburgh. He was the father of Scottish botany as well as of modern Scottish gardening, and left a successor in another gentleman of Fife, Sir Robert Sibbald of Gibliston, who was educated in Leyden and returning home spared time from the arduous profession of surgery to continue the work of both the Balfours. ' Sibbald was a diligent, somewhat whimsical and eccentric, observer of nature, as well as col- lector of antiquities. His surveys of his own as well as a few other shires are the basis from which subsequent Scottish county historians start. In these days learning was neither despised nor rare amongst the Scottish gentry. They not only bought but read and wrote books ; the library was at least as favourite a part of the castle as the stables or the kennels are now. The fashion of London was not yet a successful rival to the purer pleasure of a country home. One of the Lindsays, after trying a courtier's life a little, retired and spent the rest I42 SHARP OF CRAIL AND THAT ILK. of his life happily at Balcarres, to the disappointment and wonder of Charles II. and his courtiers. Another Fife laird of somewhat later date entailed his library, prohibited his heir from lending books, but bound him to allow free access to the neighbouring gentlemen, and a basin with water and a towel for the use of the readers — one of the humorous touches in which writers of their own wills sometimes indulge. It is painful to leave such honourable and honest employ- ments to notice what is fortunately the last historic murder that stained the soil of Fife. But history cannot choose events. The assassination of Archbishop Sharp is too memorable and significant to be overlooked. Though not born or educated in the county, -Sharp, from the time when he became minister of Crail till his death, was intimately connected with it. The Judas of the stern sons of the Covenant, the most Holy Martyr of his monument, which looks now somewhat strange on the wall of the Presbyterian Town Kirk of St Andrews, Cromwell probably hit the mark with his usual shrewdness when he called him Mr Sharp of that Ilk, after the conference in which his plausible tongue persuaded the Protector that it was for his interest to favour the Resolutioners or Moderate Royalist party amongst the Scottish clergy against the irrecon- cilable Protesters, who would be as ready if necessary to pro- test against Oliver as against Charles. When the tide began to turn at Cromwell's death, he went to Breda, and made himself still more agreeable to Charles II. He had the courtly manners found then in a section, though a small section, of the Presbyterian ministers, and seemed predestined to a bishopric. Charles and his political advisers soon gauged and knew their man. But one of his early friends, James Douglas, a chaplain in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, whose air of greatness gave rise to the story of his descent from George Douglas of Loch- leven and Mary Stuart, refused to call him brother, and after- CREATED ARCHBISHOP. 143 wards taunted him with the easy conscience which allowed him to accept the archbishopric. After the Restoration, he was sent to London by the Presbyterians to protect the interests of their Church, which trusted him and Lauderdale (as they afterwards trusted, with better results, Carstares and Melville) to secure the Presby- terian Establishment and prevent the King from breaking the covenant which he had sworn. No one knew better than Sharp how to use words to conceal thoughts. It is difficult to put the finger, in his voluminous, and, in spite of his clear handwriting, wearisome correspondence, on the precise moment when he deserted Presbytery for Episcopacy. His palliators till lately maintained he merely moved with the times, and that, always favourable to a moderate view of the claims of the Church in relation to the King, and alarmed by the violence of the fanatics, he gradually acquiesced in rather than assisted the restoration of Episcopacy and the Royal supremacy as the best settlement for the peace of a distracted country. The fuller publication of the Lauderdale papers has established the substantial truth of the adverse view of his character taken by his contemporary the Episcopal historian Burnet and the Presbyterian historian Wodrow, who had been distrusted as partial, and certainly had no liking for Sharp. In March and April 1661 he was corresponding with his Presbyterian friends, indignant at the " clandestine whispers " that he was trimming, and " commits himself to his faithful Creator, who will bring his integrity to light." But before he left Edinburgh he had been in correspondence with Middle- ton, and as soon as he came to London, with Clarendon and the English bishops. On 10th June he drew the proclama- tion for " the disposing of minds to acquiesce in the King's pleasure," and went back with it to Scotland. In November 144 sharp's progress through fife.- he was nominated, and on 15th December consecrated, Arch- bishop of St Andrews at Westminster Abbey, when he re- luctantly submitted to a private ordination as deacon and priest, thereby acknowledging the invalidity of his Presby- terian orders. Along with three other new bishops — Fair- foul, Hamilton, and Leighton — he drove in a coach to the North in the beginning of the next year. The saintly Leighton, one of the rare spirits who have lived in later times the lives of the first disciples of Christ, and truly aimed at healing the divisions of Christendom instead of promoting the exclusive claims of their own divided branch, refused the title of Lord, and disliking the ceremony of a public entry into Edinburgh, left his companions at Mor- peth. Burnet, who saw the entry of Sharp and Fairfoul, notes : " Though I was thoroughly episcopal, yet I thought there was somewhat in the pomp that did not look like the humility that becometh their function." So well had Sharp dissembled, that Robert Baillie, who had been for twenty years his friend, and was now near death, only began to suspect him in October 1661. When he took possession of his see the following April, he made a triumphal progress from Leslie, the house of the Earl of Rothes, to St Andrews, attended by seven hundred horsemen — the Earl of Rothes riding on his right and the Earl of Kellie on his left, but only two ministers. In his sermon, preached, as a malicious Presbyterian hearer noted, from a velvet cushion, he diverged from his text, " I deter- mined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified," to vindicate Episcopacy, the want of which, he said, had caused nothing but troubles and disturbances in Church and State ; and closed by observing that if the arguments he offered were not convincing, he had " more powerful ones in reserve." In the Synod a Presbyterian spy, CONDUCT AS ARCHBISHOP. 1 45 who had hidden under the seats, reported that when the minister of Leuchars complained of the growth of Popery, Sharp replied : " Let that alone. Let us take care to bear down the fanatics, our greatest enemies." It is impossible to credit implicitly evidence so obtained. To those who know the free manners and outspokenness of the labouring class in Scotland, there will be more verisimilitude in the story that when the Archbishop found his gardener in the garden of the Priory struggling with an obstinate weed, and asked its name, the gardener answered : " Ay ; it's a bitter, bad weed. They ca' it Bishopry ; and when it ance gets in, it's no' easily got out." Whether rightly called a weed or a flower, the popular leaders of Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found no great difficulty in rooting it out of the garden of their Kirk. The conduct of Sharp as Archbishop was of a piece with its commencement. He deserted Lauderdale for Middleton, and then Middleton for Lauderdale, and that adroit political manager got him restored to the favour of the King. " His majesty's hand with the diamond seal was to me," he writes to Lauderdale, " as a resurrection from the dead." He took part in some of the worst acts of the Privy Council, and especially in one which led to his own death, the retrial and execution in the beginning of 1678 of Mitchell, who had attempted his life, but made a confession on promise of pardon. He procured the restoration of the Court of High Commission. He removed the monumental tablet in the kirk of Kirkcaldy erected to the memory of George Gillespie. He showed as much of the zeal of a pervert as was compatible with a temper naturally diplomatic. On the afternoon of 2d May 1679, Sharp crossed the Forth, and lodged that night in Captain Seton's house, still standing in the village of Kennoway, though another old K 146 MURDERED AT MAGUS MUIR. house in the same close, nearer the churchyard, has also claimed to have been his last resting-place. Next morning he took the road to St Andrews, accompanied by his eldest daughter, in a coach and six — the one, perhaps, which he had brought from London for his ceremonial entry, for in Scot- land coaches and six were rare. He was attended by four servants, besides his coachman and postilion, but without a guard. He stopped at Ceres and smoked a pipe with the Episcopal incumbent, Alexander Leslie, then drove on over the still bleak, but then bleaker, Muir of Magus, to the point where the distant towers of St Andrews greet the eye. A party of nine Covenanters, headed by the Fife lairds Hackston of Rathillet and Balfour of Kinloch, were riding that day on the lookout for Carmichael, formerly a bailie of Edin- burgh, promoted by Sharp to be Sheriff of Fife, and odious as the executor of the severe laws against conventicles. A boy, loitering about the road, told them he had seen the Bishop's coach coming towards Blebo. They deliberately put to the vote whether they should seize the opportunity Providence, as they thought, had put into their hands, and decided in the affirmative, Hackston declining to act as a leader, because he had a private quarrel with Sharp. Balfour accepted the duty, for such he deemed it. The Bishop, when he saw them approach, called to his coachman to drive on ; but the fore- most horseman rode up to the window, shouting " Judas is taken ! " and fired into the coach. The other seven came up. Hackston, with a curious casuistry staying apart, looked on during the three-quarters of an hour which his comrades took to complete the slow murder of their victim. Wallace, one of Sharp's servants, attempted to discharge his carbine, but was disarmed before he could fire ; while the postilion, who had never sat in the Privy Council, and whose only crime was that he refused to stop, was struck with a sword, which cut CRUELTY OF THE MURDERERS. 147 off part of his chin. The commander then said, almost re- peating the words of James Melvin when he slew Cardinal Beaton : " I take God to witness, whose cause I desire to own in adhering to this persecuted Gospel, that it is not out of hatred to thy person, nor for any prejudice thou hast done or could do to me, for which we intend to take thy life, but it is because thou hast been, and continues to be, an avowed opposer of the flourishing of Christ's kingdom, and murderer of His saints, whose blood thou hast shed like water." Another of the band said to the Bishop, "Judas, repent;" to which he replied, "Save my life, and I will save yours." His assailant re- joined, " It is neither in your power to save us nor to kill us," and repeated a similar protest to that of the commander, refer- ring specially to Sharp's share in the blood of James Mitchell and James Learmonth. The commander then fired his pistol, and one of his comrades wounded the bishop with a shabble or pike. He at last came out of the coach, and while on his knees praying for life, was struck with two other wounds to the ground. More blows followed. His daughter cried from the coach, "This is murder!" to which she was an- swered, " Not murder, but God's vengeance on him for murdering many poor souls in the Kirk of Scotland." His footman called out he was dead ; but one of the band, determined to make sure, alighted from his horse, and, thrusting his sword through the body till the blood spurted, said, " I am sure he is dead now." His coach and portmanteau were then searched, and his papers carried off, but nothing particular was found except a brace of French pistols he had not used, and a Bible with portraits of Christ and the saints, the possession of which was deemed a greater sin than carrying pistols. When they opened his tobacco-box they found neither tobacco nor secret papers, but a bumming bee flew out. This either Rathillet or Balfour 148 VERDICT OF POSTERITY. called his familiar ; and some of the company, not understand- ing the term, they explained it to be a devil. Leaving the coach driven some paces off the road, the whole nine then rode to a place some three miles off, where they put up their horses and prayed jointly, thanking God for what He had permitted them to do. After resting till nightfall, and praying repeatedly, publicly and privately, they removed "with as much composure of spirits as their hearts could wish." This brutal murder modified the opinion, which would otherwise have been general, of the character of Sharp. He had been, not unnaturally, distrusted even by the Royal ministers. He had made himself indispensable by his power of management, but they disliked his slippery ambition and growing pride. The Covenanters would to a man have signed the character his murderers expressed. But such good points as he had were now remembered. All but bigoted partisans recalled his general chanty, good offices to his friends, and domestic virtues. Like Laud, he became the Episcopal as Charles I. became the Royal martyr. He had been slain almost in his daughter's arms ; and the crimes with which he was charged, with the exception of the death of Mitchell, were not so flagrant as those of the Cardinal. The slaughter of Beaton in his fortified castle more nearly resembled an act of war than a murder perpetrated on the open country road upon a defenceless old man. "His memory," says Burnet, who disliked him, "was treated with decency even by those who had little respect for him during his life. The dismal end of that unhappy man struck all people with horror, and softened his enemies with some tenderness." When Sir Walter Scott drove over the same road to St Andrews, and told his companions on the spot where it was done the story of the death of Sharp, it is no wonder his HACKSTON OF RATHILLET. 1 49 hearers shuddered. A print of a well-known picture of the scene is still to be found in many of the country houses of Fife, and preserves its memory. The portrait of Sharp by Sir Peter Lely, the painter of Charles II. 's mistresses, shows delicate features, white locks, bright eyes, fine thin lips, and a strongly marked clear-cut nose. Another por- trait, painted by his daughter, and now in the house of Blebo, presents the same well-marked handsome features. The verdict of history must be that, while no special plead- ing can justify the deed, neither can it justify the character of Sharp. He belongs to the sad list of Churchmen whose chief aim has been personal advancement, not the good of the Church or the people. Those of his assassins find a place in the no less painful catalogue of religious fanatics who have blasphemed their Maker by using His name to cover the crime of their own ungoverned passions. David Hackston of Rathillet, in the parish of Kilmany, one of the murderers of Sharp, carries us back to the beginning of the long series of protests, dissents, secessions, and disruptions, which mark the independent and divisive character of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. A modern Romanist might add another chapter to the History of the Variations of Pro- testantism, drawing examples wholly from the ecclesiastical history of Scotland, or indeed of Fife. But if he attempted to write it, a modern Protestant would reply that in these variations there was more of life and hope than in the passive acceptance of incredible medieval and the invention of modern dogmas, not really believed in by the best Romanists, or only believed in by the aid of the doctrines of development and accommodation of the subtle masters of modern casuistry. Our task now is to trace the origin and progress of the ecclesiastical secessions connected with Fife. When the poli- tical interests of Scotland had been swallowed up in those of 150 EXECUTION OF HACKSTON. Great Britain, the ecclesiastical movements form the main current of the local as of the national history of Scotland for more than a century. Hackston, after a wild youth, had been converted by the field-preachers to a wild faith. The murder of Sharp was deemed an act of faith, and Hackston, when obliged to quit Fife, joined the Covenanters in the western shires, contributed by his courage to the defeat of Claverhouse at Drumclog, and was one of the last to leave the field at Bothwell Brig. On 2 2d June 1680 he was taken at the encounter of Airdsmoss by another Fife laird of opposite principles, Bruce of Earlshall, the ancestor of the Earls of Elgin, whose tomb may be seen in the church of Leuchars. He was brought to Edinburgh, and led from the Watergate through the streets on a bare- backed horse, with his face to the tail and his feet tied under the belly. The head of Cameron, who had been slain at Airdsmoss, was carried before him on a pole to the Tolbooth. On 24th July, and again on the 28th and 29th, he was brought before the Council and asked, among other queries, "Whether the killing of the Archbishop was murder ? " to which he re- plied, " He thought it was no sin to dispatch a bloody mon- ster." He also disowned the King's authority, and was con- demned and executed at the Cross on the same day with a barbarity which had ceased to be common. His head was fixed on the Netherbow, one of his quarters with his hands at St Andrews, another at Glasgow, a third at Leith, and the fourth at Burntisland. The choice was not accidental. It was a recognition of the share of Fife in the Cameronian doc- trines and in Hackston's life. One of Hackston's hands was buried at Cupar, where an inscription, frequently renewed, still declares — "Here lies interred the heads of Lawr. Hay and Andrew Pitilloch, who suffered martyrdom in Edinburgh, July 13th 1 68 1, for adhering to the Word of God and Scot- CAMERON OF FALKLAND. 151 land's Covenanted Work of Reformation, and also one of the hands of David Halkston of Rathillet, who was cruelly mur- dered at Edinburgh, July 30th 1680, for the same cause." And on the obverse — " They Halkston's body cut asunder, And set it up, a world's wonder, In several places to proclaim These monsters gloried in their shame." Richard Cameron, whose name was given to the Camero- nians, or Society men, the most logical and most fanatical of all the Scottish sects, was also a native of Fife. His house of three storeys, with a yellow harled front and high thatched roof, still stands on the south of the square in the main street of Falkland. The Hackstons of Rathillet had a house in the same small town, then the precincts of the Court, now a smaller village. As cathedral towns have produced the most vehe- ment Dissenters, so the most determined anti-Royalists were bred in the vicinity of the palace. The son of a general merchant or dealer, he had been precentor and schoolmaster to the Episcopal curate, but, like Hackston, was converted to Presbytery by the field-preachers. Afterwards tutor in the family of Scot of Harden, he refused to attend the services of the indulged ministers, fled to Holland, where he received an indefinite ordination, and returning, instead of assuming a pastoral charge, placed himself at the head, along with Donald Cargill and Hackston, of the irreconcilable party amongst the Covenanters, who were most numerous in the western shires. Their principles, embodied in the Queensferry Declaration and the Sanquhar Proclamation, were that Charles having per- jured himself by breaking the Covenant, was no longer king ; that while they would submit to any civil government which owned the supremacy of Christ as King, they would acknow- ledge no other either by word or deed, would accept no Royal 152 CAMERON'S DEATH AT AIRDSMOSS. indulgences, and would prove, if need be by their deaths, their allegiance to their Lord and Master. Before the fight at Airdsmoss Cameron had washed his hands with more than usual care, and looking at them, said, " It was need to make them clean, for there are many to see them." He died praying " Lord, take the ripe and spare the green," for many young men followed him. The Head- ship of Christ as a political doctrine, which became to so many since a phrase admitting of modifications to suit the times, was to these men a reality. Their testimonies, sealed by their sufferings, in spite of a somewhat theatrical character, command a measure of respect even from those who in later peaceful times think the martyrs of the Covenant committed fatal errors. Amongst the tragic anecdotes of the " killing times " few are more pathetic than that of the exhibition of the head and hands, which were "very fair," of Cameron to his aged father, a prisoner for the same principles in the Tolbooth, who recognising, kissed them and said, " They are my dear son's. It is the Lord, who cannot wrong me nor mine, but has made goodness and mercy to follow us all our days." When fixed to the Netherbow Port of Edinburgh, one of his declared enemies exclaimed, "There are the head and hands of one who lived praying and preaching and died praying and fighting." We must remember, as at the time of the Reformation, that murders such as those of Sharp and Ayton of that Ilk, a Fifeshire Royalist laird, and deaths like those of Hackston and Cameron, were the retaliatory acts of religious war, not to be judged by the standard of happier times. Yet even war and executions may be con- ducted without the cruelty which by a fortunate dispensation recoils upon its perpetrators. Let us close almost the last chapter of barbarity in the annals of Scotland and the last BARBARITY DEFEATS ITSELF. 1 53 in the annals of Fife, with the hope that such times may never return. Modern history need not regret to leave the attraction of stories of blood and murder to the realistic novelist, who commits murder without committing crime, and spills blood as if it were water without injury to any one except himself. iS4 CHAPTER VIII. EFFECT OF THE UNION ON FIFE— OLD FIFE LAIRD ON NEW FASHIONS— THE JACOBITE REBELLIONS, 1715 AND 1745 — THE WEST OF FIFE THE NATIVE COUNTRY OF THE SECEDERS— THE SECEDERS CLAIMED DESCENT FROM THE PROTESTERS — EBENEZER ERSKINE OF PORTiMOAK, I7O3 — HIS DOCTRINE AND PREACHING —OPEN-AIR COMMUNIONS — SERMON AT THE PERTH SYNOD, 1732 — THE ACT OF SECESSION AT GAIRNEY BRIDGE, NOVEMBER II, 1733 — RALPH ERSKINE OF DUNFERMLINE — WILSON'S ROBBERY OF THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, PITTENWEEM — DEPOSITION OF EBENEZER ERSKINE, 1740— POPULARITY OF THE SECESSION — QUARREL OF SECEDERS WITH WHITFIELD — BURGHERS AND ANTI-BURGHERS — OLD AND NEW LIGHTS — GILLESPIE OF CARNOCK AND THE RELIEF KIRK — UNIONS OF SECEDERS BETWEEN 1820 AND 1852 — ABSENCE OF POLITICAL INTEREST AND PREDOMINANCE OF ECCLESIASTICAL — GLAS, SON OF MINISTER OF AUTCHTERMUCHTY, AND THE GLASSITES — EDWARD IRVING AT KIRKCALDY. The Revolution of 1688 brought peace with toleration, and the Union, after a short interval, brought prosperity with trade to Scotland. Fife, which had been described before the Union as the "heartiest and happiest part of Scotland," felt for a time the loss of a Court, and still more of the intimate connection with the Continent. It suffered perhaps most of all by the diversion of the main channel of commerce from the Forth to the Clyde, on whose banks lay the natural ports •for the New World across the Atlantic. A humorous poem of the beginning of the eighteenth century, " The Speech of a Fife laird newly come from the Grave," after describing the change and decay of Fife since his death, proceeds — OLD FIFE LAIRD ON NEW FASHIONS. 1 55 " O ! this is strange, that even in Fife I do know neither man nor wife, No Earl, no Lord, no Laird, no People, But Leslie and the Markinch steeple ; Old noble Wemyss, and that is all, I think, enjoy their father's hall." He then tries to discover the cause — " Some say the Fife laird ever rues Since they began to take the Lews. That bargain first did turn their bale, As tell the honest men of Craill ; Some do ascribe their supplantation Unto the Lawyer's congregation. " But he attributes it himself to foreign fashions and extravagant habits — " When I was born at Middle Yard Wight, There was no word of Laird or Knight ; The greatest style of honour then Was to be titled the goodman. When we did whiles meet at the hawking, We used no Cringes, but Handshaking, No Bowing, Shouldering, Gambo scraping, No French Whistling or Dutch Gaping ; We had no garments in our land But what was spun by the goodwife's hand." The old laird then gives a tedious though instructive list of the new-fangled dresses worn by lairds and ladies, and in the spirit of a praiser of the past describes the men of his own time as " Stout for our Friends on Horse or Foot, True to our Prince, to shed our Blood • For Kirk and for our Common Good." The Jacobite risings left few memories in Fife. The later Stuarts found few supporters amongst the lairds and none amongst the people of that county. The Earl of Mar landed in Fife in 17 15 to avoid the southern ports of the Forth, but went straight to the Highlands to raise his standard and 156 THE JACOBITES IN FIFE. gather his men. When Brigadier Mackintosh of Borlum made his daring but bootless descent on Edinburgh, the fishing-boats by which he passed his troops across the Forth were requisitioned at Pittenweem, Anstruther, and Craill, not given by the free will of their owners. Only ten landed gentlemen of Fife and Kinross appear in the list of rebels of 1745. The Earl of Kelly is the single name of note, though another strikes us by its unexpectedness, Helenas Hackston of Rathillet. Rebellion ran in the Hackston blood. Fife, however, would not have been true to its character if some of its natives had not adhered to opinions opposed to the majority of their neighbours. Episcopal congregations, which during the eighteenth century meant Jacobite sym- pathies, still met half secretly in several of the little towns from the East Neuk to the western corner of the shire. Mrs Bruce of Clackmannan, a lady of ninety when Burns visited her in 1787, gave as her first toast, " Awa Uncos." She was as much or more a Jacobite than the poet, and knighted him with the two-handed sword of Bruce, observing with sly humour that she had a better right to confer the title than some people. Their losses at Kilsyth are said to have given the men of Fife a distaste for fighting, and the few who fought at Sheriff- muir were on the side of the Constitution. The armies which took part in the Peninsular and Continental wars of last century raised recruits in Fife, and there was a regiment of Fife Fencibles, but Fife has not bred so many soldiers in recent times as the Highlands. The natives of the county devoted themselves more to industrial pursuits, bore the strain of the Union upon their trade, practised economy, cultivated the old and invented new industries. Before tracing this portion of its history, it will be convenient to conclude the narrative of the course ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF DISSENT. 1 57 of dissent which, almost unintelligible to foreigners, and even to Englishmen, is a vital element in the history of Fife and Scotland nearly down to the present time. The deepest and the most enduring tendencies of the Scottish character are towards toleration, union, peace in religious as well as civil affairs. But contrary currents have seldom been altogether absent, and at times appear predominant, which set towards dissent, division, and self-assertion. The strength which an English historian regards as the national characteristic of Scotland has shown itself also here, so it is not wonderful that some have mistaken the currents for the main stream. The Union, by transferring Parliament to London, centred the Scottish mind on questions of religious doctrine and Church government in preference to, and for a time almost to the exclusion of, questions of secular politics and the government of the State. It was naturally inclined in this direction. But in the earlier struggles of the Reformation and the Covenant civil and religious freedom had been a common cause. They were now severed. The Scots had never, with few exceptions, been Republican. Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike accepted Monarchy. But the former accepted it on the condition of the independence of the Church, and this independence was deemed in danger not merely by the express adoption of the Royal supremacy by the English Church, but by the modified form in which it was engrafted on the Presbyterian Establishment in Scotland, and the restoration of Patronage by an Act of Queen Anne. This deadly heresy, as it was deemed, was called Erastian- ism, and was the root of all the Secessions. The doctrine of the Headship of Christ, which meant to practical politicians that of the rulers of the Church under the scheme of Presby- teries, Synods, and Assemblies, and the mode of electing these rulers by the choice of the congregation and not by any 158 THE MOTHER COUNTRY OF SECEDERS. system of patronage, were the main points of controversy. Denunciation of Papacy, of Prelacy, of tests imposed by authority other than the Church, of interference, however slight, with religious worship, were results of the acceptance or interpretation of the fundamental principles. These prin- ciples were asserted to be the original principles of the Scottish Reformed Church, and each successive Secession claimed that it alone maintained them in their integrity, and that their body alone was the true Church. The Reformed Presbyterians, the successors of the Cameronians, could claim, in addition, that they had never departed from the Covenant. This explana- tion is needed to follow the history of the Secessions, which found adherents in all parts of Scotland, but nowhere more strenuous supporters than in Fife. The district between Perth and Stirling, and especially the western district of Fife and Kinross, including Abernethy, Dunfermline, Kinross, Portmoak, Orwell, Inverkeithing, Falk- land, and Burntisland, has been called the mother-country of the Seceders, though several of the ministers who were their leaders were born in other districts, and the Secession became at a later period more powerful in the west than the east. It is perhaps not far-fetched to trace its origin to the seed sown by the Protesters of the preceding generation, in the days of the Commonwealth and Charles II., and by the field-preachers who, in the conventicles of the Lomonds and the Ochils, con- verted Hackston of Rathillet and Cameron of Falkland. One of the early churches of the Secession was placed at Rathillet, a small hamlet in the parish of Kilmany, and another at Falk- land. "The same spirit that assembled the Covenanters at Loudon Hill draws together the Seceders of this day," wrote an eye-witness in 1776, "annually to the Muckle Ben, a hill near Abernethy, generally in June and July, when the labours of the spring are over, and those of the harvest have not EBENEZER ERSKINE AT PORTMOAK. 159 commenced." The Seceders claimed direct descent from the Protesters, and near kinship with the English Puritans. They disowned connection with the Cameronians, but amongst their original numbers were some who shared Cameronian views. This extreme party afterwards seceded from the ranks of the first Seceders when they had exchanged the principle of the Covenant, to which the King was a party, for the voluntary principle of a complete separation between Church and State, combined with a contention for disestablishment by political action instead of revolutionary methods. It was in the half-pastoral, half-agricultural parish of Port- moak, on the shore of Lochleven, under the shadow of the Bishop's Hill, one of the Lomonds, that Ebenezer Erskine passed his early manhood as its minister, and adopted the principles which led to the first or Original Secession. His father, minister of Cornhill in Berwickshire during the Killing Times, refused the Indulgence, lost his charge, and narrowly escaped imprisonment in the Bass. A tutorship in the Rothes family, followed by his presentation in 1703 to the parish of Portmoak, brought Erskine to Fife. The yoke of patron- age prevented his translation to Burntisland in 171 2, to Kirkcaldy in 1724, and to Tulliallan in the following year. He remained in Portmoak till he was at last successful in obtaining a settlement in the West Kirk of Stirling in 1 73 1. While at Portmoak he had refused to take the oath of Abjuration in 1712, and had embraced the Puritan views of the modified Calvinism of ' The Marrow of Modern Divinity,' which had passed into Scotland partly through the medium of Boston's 'Fourfold State.' He was one of the twelve apostles or Marrow men who protested against its condemnation by the Assembly of 1720. With Boston he was alarmed at the progress of rationalist and Arminian opposition to Calvinistic doctrine by Simpson the Glasgow l6o THE GOSPEL IN ITS MAJESTY. and Campbell the St Andrews professor. Such teaching was thought to lead to Socinianism. The slight censure the professors received from the Moderate party, who formed a majority of the Assembly, and the obstacles placed in the way of popular elections in the Church, confirmed him in the dissenting and protesting vein he had inherited with the blood of his Covenanting ancestry. But like all men who have influenced their fellows in matters of religion, there was an inward spiritual call as well as an external political side to the character of Ebenezer Erskine. A conversation on religion between his brother Ralph, minister of Dunfermline, the hymn - writer of the Secession, and his wife, which he overheard, was the occa- sion of his conversion to a deeper sense of sin and need of a Saviour. From that time his preaching was the fervid utterance of personal conviction. Through the cloudy and sometimes trivial controversies in which he engaged, and the tedious mannerism of the later Calvinistic pulpit, his piety shone like a guiding star. His preaching had little of the oratorical art, but his sermons affected his hearers at times to tears. They were aided by a dignity of person and grace of manner. " The Gospel in its Majesty " was the descrip- tion more than one hearer gave of his preaching. The Occasion, or week of tent-preaching ending with the Action sermon immediately before dispensing the Lord's Supper in the open air, was then common in Scotland. It still lingers in the Highlands as a survival of the times when there were either no churches, or only churches it was deemed wrong to enter. It was frequented on the hillside at Portmoak by as many as two thousand. Some walked sixty miles to attend. One self-taught country schoolmaster attracted by Erskine's preaching was John Brown, a herd-boy at Carpow, near Abernethy, afterwards the commentator of the Self- inter- ERSKINE APPEALS TO DEMOCRACY. l6l preting Bible, and minister of Haddington, the father of a line of eminent Dissenters, — for the principles of the Seceders, not lightly embraced, have descended through at least three generations. The year after he went to Stirling, Erskine preached as Moderator of the Synod at Perth from the text, " The stone which the builders rejected is become the head stone of the corner." An Act had been passed giving the heritors and elders power to elect and call, not merely to name and pro- pose, ministers ; and the pith of Erskine's discourse is in the following sentence : " I shall say less of the Act now that I had opportunity to express myself before the National Assembly when it was passed ; only allow me to say this, that whatever Church authority may be to that Act, yet it wants the authority of the Son of God. And seeing the Reverend Synod has put me in this place where I am in Christ's stead, I must be allowed to say of the Act what I apprehend Christ Himself would say of it were He personally where I am, and that is that by this Act the corner-stone is rejected. He is rejected by His poor members, and the rich of this world put in His room." It was a bold claim, made with simple sincerity, yet not without pride. We hear once more an echo of Knox, in language less vehement and rugged, yet with some of the same penetrating and per- suasive force. It is the voice of the religious leader appealing to the religious democracy of Scotland. On this sermon quickly followed the events which led to the Secession. Erskine, censured by the Synod, appealed to the Assembly, which sustained the Synod's action. On 14th ^ a Y 1 733 he was called to the bar and solemnly rebuked by the Moderator, who refused to allow him to read a protest he had prepared. It fell into the hands of a member, who called the attention of the Assembly to it at the evening L \6Z FATHERS OF SECESSION AT GAIRNEYBRIDGE. sederunt, and at 1 1 p.m. an officer cited him and three other ministers who had concurred in the protest to appear next morning. Remitted to a Committee, who dealt with them in the vain hope of a retractation, they were handed over to the Commission of the Assembly, which on nth November de- posed them by a casting vote. On the same day Ebenezer Erskine, William Wilson of Perth, Alexander Moncrieff of Abernethy, and James Fisher of Kinclaven signed an Act of Secession at a meeting in a small house at Gairney- bridge on the road from Dunfermline to Kinross. A monument now marks the spot where they drew up their extra-judicial testimony. On 6th December they formed themselves into an Associate Presbytery, with Erskine as Moderator. Alarmed at the support which the four ministers, the Fathers of the Secession Church, received, the Assembly of 1734 drew back and offered to reinstate them. It was too late. Wilson might have come back, but Erskine's stronger will prevailed, and on 3d December 1736 they again met and revised the Judicial Testimony, afterwards still further enlarged in 1742. This able but unequal document condemned the sins of the Established Church in the past and present, its accept- ance of Royal indulgences, its faithlessness to the Covenant, its Erastian backsliding, its submission to the civil magistrate in matters of doctrine and Church government, its tampering with Arminian heresies and tolerance of Episcopal chapels, its defect of Scriptural doctrine, and the repeal of the penal statutes against witches, contrary to the express letter of the law of God, " Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." The country in which they preached had witnessed some of the last burnings of witches. Robert Baillie, one of the most respected Presbyterian ministers, and Principal of the Uni- THE SECEDERS AND WITCHCRAFT. 163 versity of Glasgow, mentions that in 1643, "upon the regreat of the extraordinar multiplying of witches, above thirty being burnt in Fife in a few months, a Committee was appointed to think on that sin the way to search and cure it." The regret was for the sin of witchcraft, not of burning. Yet an uneasy feeling had begun that burning was not quite the right way to cure witchcraft. Fortunately for the Se- ceders, they never possessed the power their New England brethren had, to enforce in practice a part of their Testimony, of which their successors are justly ashamed. The time had passed when burning witches could be excused as a common error, but the belief in witches died hard and slowly. In this century Grizzel Robertson, an adherent of the Auld Lichts at Kennoway, would not comb out her hair at certain stages of the moon for fear of the witches. Keil's Den, near Largo, has not long ceased to be deemed haunted ground. Strangest of all, the old and widespread super- stitious belief that a fairy changeling, if passed through the fire, became again the person the fairies had stolen, which led to a recent cruel murder in Tipperary, is described in the Fife tale of Tammas Bodkin as still believed but not acted on by the old women of Fife in an earlier part of this century. The civilisation of Ireland still lags behind the civilisation of Britain, but the verdict of manslaughter at the Tipperary trial will, it may be hoped, mark a step of its advance in the sister country. In 1737, Ralph Erskine of Dunfermline and Thomas Mair of Orwell joined the Seceders, and later, Thomas Nairn of Abbotshall and James Thomson of Burntisland, who refused to read from the pulpit a proclamation for the discovery of the murderers of Porteous, which had been enjoined on pain of deprivation. Porteous, the captain of the City Guard, or chief constable of those days, had been 1 64 ERSKINE DEPOSED. lynched by an Edinburgh mob with a rope an Anstruther youth, Birrel, is said to have procured, because Porteous had guarded the scaffold and fired on the crowd which sought to rescue Wilson, who was being hung for the robbery of the custom-house at Pittenweem. "Smuggling," says a recent historian of the Secession, " was looked on as but a venial offence." Robbery was at least an offence which no Government could fail to prosecute, and the murder of an officer who acted in discharge of his duty, though with excess of zeal, could not be overlooked. The point on which the Seceding ministers took their stand was against reading any Government order by preachers from a pulpit during divine service. It was an unwise mode of promulga- tion, but a worse than unwise point for a protest in the name of God. The Assembly continued unwilling to let the Seceders go. It was not till 15th May 1740, after fruitless attempts at compromise, that Erskine and his friends were finally de- posed. Next Sunday he found the doors of his church locked, and, gathering a crowd, preached on the Abbey Craig in the open air, and continued the practice till a church was built towards the end of the same year. They submitted without much murmuring to the loss of churches and of stipends. Their successors claim for them that they were " martyrs without the solemnities of the stake,'' but there is little of this tone in their own language, which is rather that of triumph at deliverance from bondage. The out-of- door preaching of the early days of the Secession was another link which united the Seceders with the conventicles of the Covenanters. As those who have listened to sermons in the open air know, it gives a robust, direct, and strenuous note to preaching, which is absent from more formal sermons preached from the comfortable pulpit to the sitters in the SECESSION POPULAR IN SMALL BURGHS. 16$ somnolent and almost luxurious seats of a heated modern city church. The Secession was popular, especially in the small burghs. In 1765 it numbered 100,000 adherents, with 120 churches. But it carried in its bosom the seed of division. It asserted the right of a minority, however small, to form a separate Church on what they deemed principles the more vital because a majority would not accept them. The next years of the history of the Secession are not regarded with satis- faction even by its most devoted followers. In 1741 the leaders quarrelled with the evangelical English revivalist Whit- field, because he preached in the parish church at Dunferm- line, as well as in their churches, where alone, they said, " God's people " were. Whitfield's reply, that he wished to preach to the "devil's people," like that of Cromwell to the Covenanters, was made to deaf ears. The question whether the burgess oath, which required only a pledge to support the true religion as presently professed in this king- dom and authorised by the laws thereof, without further defining it, and to oppose Papacy, might lawfully be taken, split in 1746 the Associate Presbytery into Burghers, more numerous north of the Tay, and Antiburghers, chiefly found south of that river. In 1748 the Antiburgher Synod, of which Adam Gib of Edinburgh, called by his opponents Pope Gib, was founder, deposed Ebenezer Erskine and ten other ministers. Mr Nairn, the minister of Abbotshall near Kirkcaldy, separated from his brethren on grounds similar to those held by the Cameronians. Towards the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century both the Burgher and Antiburgher Synods split into Old Lights and New, the latter supporting a revision of the terms of testimony, and a more emphatic assertion of the Voluntary principle, which the former repudiated. 166 GILLESPIE AND THE RELIEF CHURCH. A separate Secession, called the Relief, also of Fife origin, had taken place in 1752, when Thomas Gillespie, minister of Carnock, near Dunfermline, and others, were deposed for refusing to obey the orders of the Assembly as to the admission of an obnoxious presentee to the parish of Inverkeithing. The political principles of the Seceders were somewhat modified, and the opposition which they might have met with from the Government was averted, by the stand they took against any external rebellion or revolution. In the '45, Ebenezer Erskine mounted guard at Stirling against the Pretender, and received the special thanks of the Duke of Cumberland. John Brown served in the Castle of Edin- burgh. Adam Gib took a prominent part on the same side. When towards the close of the century the doctrines of the French Revolution spread to Scotland, Robert Shirra, the eloquent and eccentric Secession minister of Kirkcaldy, who had been bred in Erskine's church, preached a quaint sermon against equality, which, he said, with many pithy illustrations, he had found nowhere " in the course of his travels on earth, in heaven, or in hell " ; and he challenged any of his hearers who had met with it in their travels to tell where they had found it. It was the same minister who, kneeling with his fisher-flock on the sands, prayed for wind to drive back Paul Jones, the last pirate in the Forth. The Seceders somewhat relaxed in strictness after the deaths of the original Fathers of the Secession. Matthew, a son of Alexander Moncrieff, who was Laird of Culfargie as well as Secession minister at Abernethy, scandalised his flock by chasing a hare on the Sabbath, and some of the brethren when he was men- tioned would say, shaking their heads, "Ay, he's a man that would gar anybody like him ; but, oh that beast I" while others, less strait-laced, would rejoin, "Hoot, he's no' a wranr man REUNION OF SECEDERS. \6j for a' the beast." " It became a proverb," says the Rev. James Hall, writing in 1803, "in all the middle parts of Scotland, and is so at this day, speaking of any one who, though subject to some failing, is a good sort of person on the whole, they say, ' He's no' a wrung man for a' the beast? " It was a proverb too far-fetched to live, and probably died out before the last of the strict Seceders. Soon after the commencement of this century the dis- senting spirit spent its force, and the spirit of union began to operate. In 1820 the New Light Burghers and New Light Antiburghers united; in 1842 the Old Light Burghers and Antiburghers united under the name of the Original Seceders; and in 1847 the Relief and the Secession joined hands, forming the United Presbyterian Church, — " a name," says the historian of the Relief, " to be remembered in all generations." In 1839 a party of the Old Light Burghers had returned to the Established Church, and in 1852 a section of the Original Seceders joined the Free Church. Even this brief outline has carried us beyond Fife ; but in the little burghs of the county during last century and the beginning of this, no questions were more keenly debated than the grounds for separation, and afterwards of union, of these various religious bodies. Between 1731 and 1891 they produced a voluminous controversial literature. One thousand and fifty separate books, and eleven hundred and fifty pamphlets, on the principles and conflicts of the Se- ceders were recently offered for sale, but with difficulty found a purchaser. The tradition of Calvinism, handed down through a succession of generations taught the Shorter Catechism in youth, listening Sabbath after Sabbath to the same theology from the pulpit, and engaging in ecclesiastical debates through the week, formed much of the intellectual and spiritual nutriment of a large portion of the population 168 POLITICAL LIFE STAGNANT. in the towns. " The region between the Tay and the Forth,' writes Hall, " is the hottest quarter of religious zeal and con- troversy in Scotland." Sir David Lyndsay's works and the old ballads once so popular were driven out of the cottages by Boston's 'Fourfold State,' Gib's 'Display of the Secession Testimony,' and the martyrology of the Covenanters in Howie's ' Scots Worthies.' In the rural districts the Estab- lished Presbyterian Church more successfully maintained itself amongst the farmers and some of the labourers, while many of the larger landowners remained or became adherents of Episcopacy. Romanism was almost extinct. In politics there was little room for independent action till the Parliamentary and Municipal Reform Acts. The representation of the county gave rise to occasional and bitter contests ; but they were conducted almost wholly by party managers. A gentleman not very long dead exercised, as delegate, a sixth part of the parliamentary representation of the burghs of Fife. The municipal government was carried on in a manner described in the line, " The Provost was perpetual, and drove the whole machine." Sir Peter Halkett, head of the family of Pitfirran, was Provost of Dun- fermline for twenty-seven years in succession. The indepen- dence of the Scottish character, of which Fife, like Aberdeen, was a conspicuous sample, manifested itself almost entirely in ecclesiastical affairs. In the middle of the present century, to conclude this rapid sketch of ecclesiastical history, the wider, though not originally deeper, Secession of the Free Church set up a separate and rival minister in almost every parish in Fife, for which the new name of the Disruption was invented and came into popular use. The question of patronage was again the occasion of the Secession ; but the doctrine of the Headship of Christ, and opposition to the Moderate views held by many who remained in the Established Church, in- FREE KIRK DISRUPTION IN FIFE. 169 fluenced the movement, and gave it a continued life after patronage had been abolished in 1878. The original leaders of the Disruption strongly asserted the duty of the State to support the Church, and repudiated the Voluntary principle of the earlier Secessions which implied the separation of Church and State ; and although the succeeding generations have more and more moved in that direction, the attempt to unite the United Presbyterian with the Free Church in a still larger union of Presbyterian Dissenters has been as yet unsuccessful, though some in all the Churches have begun to nourish the hope of a wider Presbyterian union, a few even of a union of Christians. The Disruption found in Fife its greatest leader, Thomas Chalmers, who never lost the accent of Fife in his speech, and represented some of the best elements of the Fife character. What it is necessary to say of a movement so recent, and yet which now seems so distant, as the Disruption, will be better deferred till his life comes into view. It was reserved for two other ministers, one of Fife descent and the other connected with the county by residence and marriage, to complete the full circle of dissent from the Pres- byterian Established Church. The one lived in the first part of last and the other in the first part of the present century. With little else in common, both John Glas and Edward Irving shared the tendency of religious enthusiasm to found new Churches. Both were counted extravagant by the mem- bers of the more numerous Churches ; but a certain measure of sobriety may be noted even in their extravagances. Glas, a son of the minister of Auchtermuchty, in which parish he was born in 1695, was educated at the University of St Andrews, but did not live much in Fife. It was when minister of Tealing, in Forfarshire, in 1729, that he announced the peculiar views which led to his deposition. He repudiated I70 GLAS OF AUCHTERMUCHTY AND THE GLASSITES. the Covenant, the corner-stone of other Scottish sects, and drew a sharp line of demarcation between the Old and the New Testament Dispensation. While, like the Seceders, he disowned the authority of the State in all matters ecclesias- tical, he did not assert the authority of the Church in matters temporal, or in the debatable ground between the spiritual and temporal provinces. He regarded the true believers as a purely spiritual community, living apart from the world, and practising literally some of the precepts of the New Testament Scriptures. It was a movement founded, like that of the Quakers and other sects, on a literal interpretation of parti- cular passages of Scripture ; but such sects have either not chosen the same texts or given the same texts a different interpretation. Glas revived the common meals of the early Church as the true form of the Communion, practised in the primitive Church, and the kiss of peace as a direct injunction of the Apostles. The Bible, he said, " was never intended to teach philosophy." The Church of "The King of Martyrs" was not of this world. His toleration of others went so far as to say, when informed of the execution of his son's murderers, " It would be a glorious instance of divine mercy if George Glas and his murderers should meet in heaven." How dif- ferent from the spirit which excommunicated from their Church those who differed from it even on minute points, called themselves God's people, deemed members of other Churches the devil's people, and had neither charity nor hope for the Romanist, any more than some Romanists have for the Protestant. It is an unfortunate feature of ecclesiastical history, not in Scotland alone, that intolerant opinions have in general more power of propagation than tolerant. The Glassites, or Sandemanians, one of the smallest of denominations, have at least proved their own tenet that they do not belong to this EDWARD IRVING AT KIRKCALDY. 171 world. Perth, to which Glas's son-in-law Sandeman belonged, was the centre of an almost family sect ; but one or two con- gregations at one time existed and perhaps still maintain an obscure existence in Fife. A sect of similar tenets, though even more limited in numbers, the Bereans, founded by John Barclay of Muthil, in Perthshire, had a congregation at New- burgh, in Fife, of which Mr Alexander Pirie, after passing through the sects of Burghers, Antiburghers, and the Relief, became the minister. The Glassites were not too small a sect to have a secession of their own, which was led by James Morrison, a son of a bookseller and postmaster in Perth. He must not be confounded with another James Morrison, son of a Secession minister, the founder of the Evangelical Union or Universalist Church. Edward Irving was, like Ebenezer Erskine, of Border origin, but came when a young man in 181 2 to Kirkcaldy as a schoolmaster, where he lived for seven years, fell in love with and married the daughter of Martin, the parish minister of Abbotshall, and afterwards became the assistant of Chal- mers in Glasgow. His eloquence, earnestness, and high ideal aims had become known at Kirkcaldy, where it was remem- bered that he took his pupils to the sands to watch the stars. But he did not discover the new interpretation of Scripture nor the gift of tongues till he went to London. The only incident of his later history connected with Fife was a sad accident by the fall of the gallery when he preached at Kirk- caldy. The Catholic and Apostolic Church was founded in London as a consequence of or offshoot from his later preaching, after his deposition from the office of minister of the Scottish National Presbyterian Church. It was a return from the idea of a national to that of a universal Church ; from the simplic- ity of Presbyterian worship to a new and less ornate ritualism 172 A SECT WITHOUT DISCIPLES IN FIFE. than the Roman, and from Calvinistic doctrine to a system chiefly based on a new interpretation of the prophetical books of the Old Testament and a few texts in the Acts and Epistles of the Apostles, and the Revelation of St John. In its con- stitution it aimed at establishing a hierarchy without the dangers of Papacy or Prelacy upon a scheme supposed to be copied from the constitution of the Apostolic Church. It ob- tained few members in Scotland, and probably scarcely any in Fife. The wife of Irving was almost his only permanent Fife disciple. The relation of the Church which was founded by the impulse of his genius, though it prudently refused to bear his name, to the history of Fife is negative, indicating that there was at least one form of dissent which the natives of that county were not prepared to adopt. But neither a land- scape nor a historical picture is complete which does not suggest what lies beyond its limits. 173 CHAPTER IX. TRAVELLERS IN FIFE IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY — DANIEL DEFOE SHORTLY BEFORE THE UNION VISITS INVERKEITHING, DUNFERMLINE, ABERDOUR, KINROSS, FALKLAND, BURNTISLAND, KINGHORN, KIRKCALDY, DYSART — ASCRIBES DECAY OF FIFE TO REMOVAL OF COURT— ADVISES INDUS- TRY AND MANUFACTURES — VISITS TOWNS OF EAST COAST, ST ANDREWS, CUPAR, AND BALMERINO— POCOCKE, BISHOP OF MEATH, IN 1760, AT ABEKNETHY, NEWBURGH, AND GAIRNEYBRIDGE — REMARKS ON THE SECEDERS — VISITS LINDORES, CUPAR, ST ANDREWS— THE EAST NEUK TO LARGO BAY, BALGONIE, KELTY, AND LUNDIE, LEVEN COAL-FIELD, LESLIE, MELVILLE, FALKLAND AND KINROSS, INVERKEITHING AND DUNFERMLINE — DR JOHNSON, IN I773, AT INCHKEITH, CUPAR, ST ANDREWS — OBSERVATIONS ON ITS DECAY — THOMAS CARLYLE SCHOOL- MASTER AT KIRKCALDY — HIS PICTURES OF KIRKCALDY BEACH, THE WEST LOMOND, FALKLAND AND INCHKEITH — HIS CHARACTER OF FIFE NATIVES. Good fortune brought to Fife during last century three travel- lers of different characters, but all possessing good powers of observation, whose descriptions trace its' external features with faithful accuracy. Its natives may through their descriptions see themselves as others saw them, and the student of their history should not neglect this valuable aid. Daniel Defoe passed through it shortly before, and wrote an account of his travels shortly after, the Union ; Richard Pococke, Bishop of Meath, visited it in 1760; and Dr Samuel Johnson in 1773, when the memory of the Jacobite risings was still fresh. The residence of Thomas Carlyle as a schoolmaster in Kirkcaldy enables us to complete the picture by a view 174 DANIEL DEFOE IN FIFE. drawn in the beginning of the century when the county was beginning to enter on a new career of prosperity. Defoe crossed at Queensferry into the county, which, he says, was called of old Caledonia — an error, for the Caledonian Wood was north of the Tay. He came first to Inverkeithing, an ancient "walled town still populous though greatly de- cayed " ; but in Dunfermline he noticed " the full perfection of decay — its decayed monastery, palace, and town, the natural consequence of the decay of the palace." Still, " the people would be poorer if they had not the manufacture of linen — the damask and better sort being carried on here and in the neighbouring towns with more hands than ordinary." He visited Lord Morton's house at Aberdour, the mansion of Kinross, and the ruins of Falkland. At Falkland he was struck, as an English traveller, with the fine palace of the Scottish kings, who had possessed, he remarks, more palaces than the Kings of England. At Kinross he saw the loch famed for its fish, and the castle where Mary was imprisoned, and from which she escaped, he " was not sure whether with or without a silver key." The older history of Scotland was not Defoe's strong point. He admired Sir 'William Bruce's plantations and the new house of Kinross, which is "all beauty," and applies to it Dryden's lines — " Strong Doric columns form the base, Corinthian fills the upper space ; So all below is strength and all above is grace." Leslie, the seat of the Earl of Rothes, to which he next went, was the work of the same architect. Its magnificent interior and fine gallery of pictures, and, above all, the park of six miles in area, he thought superior to its site. It was the glory of the place and of the whole province of Fife. From Leslie he passed to Burntisland, noting, as Cromwell DECAY OF BURGHS. 175 had done, its good harbour, though he thought more of its commercial than its military advantages, — " for what," he asks, " is the best harbour in the world without ships, and whence should ships be expected without a commerce to employ them ? " He adds that there was in Burntisland, as along all the coast of Fife, a manufacture of linen, and " especially for green cloth, which is in great demand in England for the printing trade, in the room of calicoes, which have been for some years prohibited." Kinghorn was supported by the manufacture of thread, which employed the wives while the men went to sea. Kirkcaldy was a larger town of one street a mile long, with some considerable corn merchants and traders with England, as well as shipyards and saltpans. It was one of four royal burghs within five miles, and there were eight more in the county. Dysart, though one of them, was dying but for its salt-work and a few nailers. It is curious that the collieries escaped his notice. This decline of all the towns he attributes to the removal of the Court and nobility to England. The Union had in- creased the commerce of western harbours like Glasgow and Irvine, and the southern burgh of Dumfries, but all the sea- ports on the east coast had lost theirs from the same cause ; yet he adds in his hopeful strain what proved a true prophecy : " Scotland has a plentiful product for exportation, and were the issue of that product returned and consumed at home it must necessarily grow rich." He proves this point by a detailed list of its exports and imports before the Union, remarking that the latter do not equal the lead, coal, and salt exported, so that the balance stands greatly to the credit of Scotland. " Is it not a pity," he wisely queries, " that her own nobility should not, like true patriots, lend a helping hand to the rising advantages of their own country? Why might not, for instance, the wool sent to England be spun 176 DEFOE SUGGESTS REMEDIES. into yarn in Scotland ? — a manufacture at which the Scots are very handy." He next runs over the other coast towns — Wemyss, with its castle; Buckhaven, with its fishermen, whose clownishness gave rise to the byword of the College of Buckhaven, but " with scarcely a poor man in it " ; Elie, a little town, but a good harbour ; and the Leven, which " bred the best salmon in Scotland," and was a good port for the export of coal, whose workers Drummond had described — " Coalhewers nigii girnantes more Divelli ; " Crail, Pittenweem, and Anstruther, all royal burghs ; and the May with its light, whose keeper was its sole inhabitant. Of St Andrews, which he calls the metropolis of Scotland, he gives a more minute account, tracing its ecclesiastical his- tory, and mentioning that of 945 houses 159 were ruinous, and that its harbour was so encroached on by the sea that it is not likely to be ever restored. The College of St Salvator was out of repair, though St Mary's and St Leonard's were still in good order, as they have a better revenue. From St Andrews he visited Melville and Balgonie, and then went to Cupar, the head town of the shire, of which Lord Rothes was hereditary sheriff. He afterwards turned north to see the ruins of Balmerino, and crossed the Tay into Perthshire, from which he made an excursion to Culross, a town on the confines of Fife, then famous for its girdle- makers and the vicinity of the coal-mines of the Bruces. "The plentiful country behind it, and the navigable Forth before it, will always," he remarks, " keep something of trade alive." One eye of the author of the ' Complete Tradesman ' looked to business, but his other eye was that of the patriot who saw in trade the source of national prosperity, and was BISHOP POCOCKE IN FIFE. 177 always wide awake. Scotland owed to Defoe not merely substantial help in the passing of the Union, by the use of his indefatigable and prudent pen, which smoothed away many obstacles, but also the disclosure of its future advan- tages. He had no spark of English jealousy, and sympathised with its natives. Almost all the improvements he suggested have been effected. Our next traveller was an Irish Bishop, whose observing power had been quickened by Eastern travel, and whose sym- pathy, unlike Defoe's, lay, not with the Presbyterians, but with the Episcopal remnant still left in Fife. Pococke, as became a bishop, observed chiefly the ecclesiastical antiquities, but he noticed also the modern ecclesiastical condition of the county, and cast side-glances at its agriculture, trade, and other mat- ters. He entered it by crossing the Tay to Newburgh on 29th August 1760, and was first struck by the rare round tower of Abernethy, which must have recalled the many similar towers of Ireland. He heard there of Moncrieff, one of the Seces- sion Fathers, who, after his deposition, had formed " a sort of university for educating young men for the congregation, about twenty of whom boarded with the farmers at two shillings a- week." These early frugal colleges of the Seceders, of which there was another at Gairneybridge, where John Brown taught, as well as in other parts of Scotland, were a marked feature in the early history of the Secession. The text-book for Philosophy at the College of Abernethy was Locke's ' Essay on the Human Understanding.' One of the professors, Mr Pirie, though he had no education beyond what he got from the Seceders, had a controversy on equal terms with Lord Kames on the Doctrine of Necessity. The educational in- stinct of the Scottish people, even the poorest classes, which did not limit education to the three R's, made itself felt in this movement. This tendency to culture produced in a M 178 EDUCATION AND TALENTS OF SECEDERS. comparatively small Church a historian like Dr M'Crie, a lexicographer like Jamieson, and, in a later generation, a humorist like Dr John Brown, and preachers like his father, Dr John Ker, and Principal Cairns. A minute study of both the Old and New Testaments supplied a sufficient vocabulary of good plain English ; and the imagination fed on the sublime poetry of the Psalms and the splendid visions of the Prophets. A peculiar vein of humour, sometimes broad, more rarely delicate, but drawn in either case from nature, marked the Scottish Seceder. Its greatest master in liter- ature hit it off by a word when he describes one of the dogs he loved so well as a " Scottish terrier of the U.P. persuasion," a rough, shaggy dog, with a twinkle in his eye and wag of his tail which we miss in more aristocratic breeds. Pococke next visited the Cross of Macduff, and saw, he thought, the sockets to whose iron rings the heifers had been tied, when the old privilege of the clan was claimed, and near which three witches had been burnt in 1669. The sockets were probably only places in the foundation-stone from which nodules of iron pyrites had been removed. In the neigh- bouring village of Newburgh, he says, the population was occupied either in farming or weaving, and he should have added in fishing. The Abbey of Lindores and the shady walk of the monks under the trees to the Holy, or perhaps Holly Mount from the hollies still standing in the grounds of Birkhill, and the den from which Wallace had come to the battle of Blackearnside, were also noticed. Visiting, as he passed, the ruins of Balmerino, he came to Cupar, a small town of about 2000 souls, on the highroad from Dundee to Edinburgh, with a good market and a pretty large Nonjuring Church. From Cupar he went to St Andrews, and admired on the VISITS ST ANDREWS AND EAST NEUK. 1 79 way the quiet but picturesque landscape of the castle, church, and bridge of Dairsie. He was pleased with the situation of St Andrews on the high ground facing the sea, with a small brook which " might be of great use in carrying on any manufacture," a prognostic since fulfilled by the prosperous paper-mill of Guardbridge. Of the ecclesiastical and col- legiate buildings he gives a full account, and records the repair of the Chapel of St Salvator's, which Defoe had seen in a dilapidated state. He was hospitably entertained by the professors, and gives a good account of the students, who are kept " strict to their studies, and do not attend any diversion that will take them off." From St Andrews he went round the East Neuk, and visited Crail and its collegiate church, Kilrenny, Anstruther, Pittenweem with a declining whale- fishing and an infant carpet manufacture, and St Monans, with its ancient church, partly honeycombed by the weather and unroofed, partly used for the parish kirk of Abercromby. The fine curve of the Bay, guarded by the Law of Largo, then came in view, and he noted some remains of earthen or Picts' houses, which, though still so called, are probably the dwelling-places of an earlier race than the Picts. He next visited the castles of Balgonie, Kelly, and Lundie, and the three Standing-Stones of Largo, perhaps the oldest memorial of Fife, which he thought had been part of an oblong Druid temple, but they are more likely the monu- ments of some fallen warriors. At Leven he saw the rich coal-field which stops south of the Eden. From Leven he went to Leslie to pay his respects to the Earl of Rothes, then Commander-in-Chief of Ireland, and noticed, as Defoe had done, its magnificent house, burnt three years after his visit, which the Duke had built in the time of Charles II., a rival of Holyrood in splendour, with its fine tapestry and picture-gallery of family portraits, and one of Rembrandt, I So VISITS WEST OF FIFE. painted by himself. Passing Melville, where a large house, still standing, had been built by Sir William Bruce, he came to Falkland, and minutely described the palace; and from that to Milnathort, where Mair of Orwell, one of the early Seceders, had " a meeting-house for his sect, which abounded in these parts." After visiting Lochleven, both the Castle Island and St Serf's, he passed the other lakes of the Loch Lands — Loch Ore with the castle of the Wardlaws, Loch Fitty, and Loch Gelly — remarking by the way the plantations of Adam, the architect, at Blairadam. His next stopping-place was Kirkcaldy, already spreading to its suburbs Sinclairtown, Pathhead, and Linktown, from which he came west along the coast by Kinghorn to Queensferry, calling by the way at the castle of the Hendersons at Fordel, the old house of Dalgety, and the good new house of Donibristle, where he saw, as at Leslie, tapestry and fine pictures, including one of Charles I. after Naseby, and an elegant chapel for the service of the Church of England. From this he passed to Inverkeithing, where he failed to see any remains of the Franciscan convent, and so to Dunfermline. Of the ruined buildings of royal Dunfermline, as of ecclesiastical St Andrews, his description is full, and he notes even smaller antiquities, the furniture of the palace, already scattered through the town, where pieces of it still occasionally are to be met, like the nuptial walnut- wood bed Anne of Denmark brought with her, then in the inn, now belonging to Lord Elgin. The Seceders again come in for a note, though he does not name Ralph Erskine, who had died not long before, nor the smallest of all Scotch sects, the Glassites or Sandemanians, who had a congregation in Dunfermline. The rising manufacturers of "table-linen of all kinds, ticking, carpets, and stripped woollen stuffs for women," made a thriving town of the abandoned seat of the Scots kings. « SAMUEL JOHNSON IN FIFE. l8l In Culross and Tulliallan, just beyond the bounds of Fife, though again lately reunited with it, he observed the growth of the linen industry ; and in Clackmannan Tower he saw the sword and helmet of Robert the Bruce. This completed his brief survey of Fife, where he spent little more than a week. Dr Johnson, Fife's next visitor of note, was the most re- markable of the three, and though he stayed only at St Andrews, and for a few days only, it was enough to raise many thoughts in a mind which had the combined power of observation and reflection at first sight and at first hand more strongly developed than any of his countrymen. The Tory Churchman, who had been scarcely out of London, had, except the power of observation, little in common with the Whig Dissenter, who had travelled before he came to Scotland. Yet both were Englishmen to the backbone. Much as we may admire Defoe, Johnson will be recognised as certainly the more critical and probably the stronger mind. Boswell, like a good Scot, boasted as they were crossing the ferry to Fife that the view of the Firth of Forth was " after Constantinople and Naples, the finest prospect in Europe " — a remark afterwards repeated by Sir David Wilkie ; but Johnson drily remarked, "Water is the same everywhere," capping it with the verse of Ovid — ■ " Una est injusti casrulea forma maris." " Nor groves nor towers the ruthless ocean shows, Unvaried still its azure surface flows." Byron may have remembered this when he wrote his famous line — " Time writes no wrinkles on thine azure brow." Johnson made puns on Leith and jokes on the barefooted Scots ; and when they landed on Inchkeith, which neither 1 82 REMARKS ON ST ANDREWS AND EDUCATION. of his companions had before visited, "Had it been near London," he remarked, "with what an emulation of price a few rocky acres would have been purchased ! " Fortunately it has as yet escaped any other inhabitants than the light- house-keeper and a few soldiers. The bare rock suits the landscape better than if any one had attempted to plant a garden with vines and trees as Johnson wished. They travelled in a one-horse gig to Cupar over a good road, and Johnson observed that in Scotland a man possessing a two- horse cart seemed to derive some degree of dignity. On a dusky night they reached St Andrews, and, revived by supper, Johnson began to rail at Scotch Latinity, which Buchanan alone had made famous, and in which he had gained only " as great a claim to immortality as modern Latin allows " ; but observed that the civil wars had destroyed scholarship in Scotland, which appears to be a partial observation, for if so, how had it survived in England ? A Greek professor, who declared that if it had not been for the Solemn League and Covenant the Scots would have made as good longs and shorts as English scholars, was nearer the mark. After supper they walked with a lantern to see St Leonard's College. Dr Watson, the historian of Philip II., had bought part of its site when the college had been dissolved, and on a visit to him next morning, the talk turned on the relations of learning and trade, of patronage and literature, and the de- cline of the College of Glasgow as a university since its com- merce increased, which Johnson deemed not to be necessary. " It is surely not without just reproach," he says, when he turned his reflections into a diary, " that a nation of which the commerce is hourly extending denies any participation of its prosperity to its literary societies, and, while its merchants and nobles are raising palaces, suffers its universities to moulder into dust," — a reproach since partially, but only A POOR WIDOW — SAVAGE MANNERS. 1 83 partially, removed. " St Andrews," he continues, " seems to be a place eminently adapted to study, ... yet the students do not exceed one hundred." Boswell happening to ask where John Knox was buried, which as a denizen of the Parliament House he should have known, Johnson said gruffly, " I hope in the highway ; I have been looking at his Deformations." It was a prejudiced remark, for the decay of learning and the universities was certainly not due to Knox. When sauntering round the ruins of the cathedral, they conversed on religious retirement and the monastic life, on which the strong memory of John- son recalled the lines of Hesiod : — " Let youth in deeds, in counsel men engage ; Prayer is the proper duty of old age ; " but he adds a Christian postscript to the adage of the wise heathen, " not that young men should not pray, or old men not give counsel, but that every season has its proper duties." Mrs Bruce, a poor widow who lived in one of the vaults in the Priory garden, now a tool-house, but once a part of the prior's house, with no company but a cat, was brought under the notice of the travellers, and no doubt received their alms. True to her country, where even the poorest are independent, she told them her husband's ancestors had lived there for four generations, and " though she is now neglected, she spins a thread and is troublesome to nobody." They dined with the professors, and inquired into the cost of a student's life, which they were told was only fifteen pounds for those of the higher, and ten for those of the lower rank during a seven months' session. An imprudent professor asked John- son how he liked his dinner. " I did not come to Fife," he grunted, " to get a good dinner, but to see savage men and savage manners, and I have not been disappointed." There had been at least one savage at that St Andrew's dinner. 1 84 DECAY OF ST ANDREWS. Amongst other sights, they saw a Nonjuring clergyman in his full canonicals, which was deemed a proof of toleration ; the school of a fencing-master, which Johnson said he would have attended had he been a student ; the tomb of Sharp in the Town Church ; and the neat chapel of St Salvator's, but the key of the Library of that College could not be found. Amongst other notables, they met Craig, a nephew of Thom- son the poet, and the architect of the New Town of Edin- burgh, not then built. It would be improper to linger longer over the many shrewd observations of Johnson. His con- cluding reflection was : " The kindness of the professors did not contribute to abate the necessary remembrance of an university declining, a college alienated, and a church pro- faned and hastening to the ground." The rude candour of Johnson at least enabled Scots willing to learn to realise the prayer of their poet, more often offered than granted or desired, " to see themselves as others see them." The decay of St Andrews struck even Scottish observers. " It is truly humiliating," wrote Francis Douglas of Abbots Inch, who visited it nearly ten years after Johnson, " to see a noble street almost without inhabitants terminated by the august ruins of a church so long the boast of this city. It is supposed that not above an eighth part of it is now in- habited. It appears from the account received that there were at some times 153 brewers in it; there are but 30 at present. There were 53 bakers ; now there are only 4." Scarcely more than half a century had passed from John- son's visit when a kindred though diverse spirit, Thomas Carlyle, came to Kirkcaldy in 1816, as a schoolmaster. His friend Edward Irving was already a teacher in another school in the same town. There had been a great change, but Fife still retained its old character. The little burghs, scarcely in- creased in size, were beginning to revive ; Dunfermline was CARLYLE AT KIRKCALDY. 1 85 busy with its looms, Kirkcaldy with its trade, St Andrews was once more a seat of active learning as well as of learned leisure. If some of the older professors were indolent, younger men were attracting the students. Chalmers was lecturing on chemistry, and Duncan on mathematics. The pictures which Carlyle draws of Kirkcaldy, and there are few better descrip- tive artists, are landscapes and portraits, not historical com- positions. But as the object of this sketch is to represent all aspects of the character of the county, one or two of them may be given. He paints vividly the beach of Kirkcaldy in sum- mer twilight : " A mile of the smoothest sand, with one long wave coming on gently, steadily, and breaking in gradual ex- plosion into harmless white, the break of it melodiously rush- ing along like a mass of foam, beautifully sounding, and ad- vancing from the West Burn to Kirkcaldy harbour." He and Irving strolled to Dysart, and to the caves and queer old salt- works of Wemyss. Once they made a pilgrimage to Dun- fermline to hear Chalmers, and found him " not disappointing," a Scottish form of approbation. Carlyle was not a favourable judge of any style of eloquence except his own. Another day they walked to the top of the Easter Lomond to see the trigonometrical survey, and found " five or six tents, one a black-stained cooking one, with a heap of coals close by, the rest all closed and the occupants gone," busy with the useful work which, continued down to our time, has produced maps of Fife which would have astonished Scotstarvit and Blaeu by their minute accuracy. Yet they are hardly more wonderful and are less artistic than those of which Gordon of Straloch and Robert Pont sent the drafts to be finished by the Dutch artist-engravers of the seventeenth century. Fife, to the discredit of the Imperial Government, has not yet completed its survey on the larger scale. On their way back to Kirkcaldy they saw Falkland, " like a black old bit of coffin 1 86 FIRST STEAMER ON THE FORTH. or protrusive piece of shin-bone striking through the soil of the dead past." Its present owner, Lord Bute, has recently, by judicious exploration, disinterred some of this dead past, and enabled us to see the outline of the older hunting-tower of Macduff and the ground-plan of the palace. They met in the kirk of Leslie next Sunday "a certain tragical Countess of Rothes, who had made a runaway match when an orphan at school in London, with a young gardener, to the horror of society, and ultimately of herself, I suppose," — a strange descendant of the cruel Duke who had lorded it over Scotland and Fife in the time of James II., and of the General-in-Chief of Ireland visited by Pococke. Like Johnson, but few other of the herd of travellers who cross the ferry on the bridge, they made an excursion to Inch- keith. They found the whole island "prettily savage," its grass mostly "wild and scraggy, but equal to the keep of seven cows, still without inhabitants save the lightkeeper and his family." No reader of the ' Tour to the Hebrides ' had taken Johnson's hint of a garden. Instead they saw the graves, with rude wooden crosses, of a Russian crew shipwrecked in 1799. Carlyle saw the first steamer which appeared on the Forth about 181 9, the year he left Kirkcaldy. Its rapid transit connected Fife with the Lothian mainland in a way which astonished the generation accustomed to sloops, but has been eclipsed by the great bridge recently opened. He compared Kirkcaldy favourably with his native Annan. Its population was " a pleasant, honest kind of fellow-mortals, something of quietly fruitful, of good old Scotch in their works and ways, more vernacular, peaceable, fixed, and almost genial in their mode of life, than I had been used to in the Border." He was, till lately, remembered in Kirkcaldy by some of the boys he flogged, one of whom became its Provost, and con- tinued till Carlyle's death to be his friend. carlyle's opinions of the natives. 187 "I always rather liked the people," he says, "though from the distance chiefly, chagrined and discouraged by the trade one had ; " and he extends his compliment to " the little burghs and sea villages, with their poor little havens, salt- pans, and weather-beaten bits of Cyclopean breakwaters, and rude innocent machineries, . . . looms, Baltic trade, and whale-fishing, and the flax-mills turned mainly by wind, and curious blue-painted wheels with obliqe vans." In two years he and Irving had got " tired of schoolmastering and its mean contradictions and poor results." He left it for the small metropolis of Scotland, and later for the great metropolis of England, to find contradictions perhaps not less mean and results no richer than those which the same brains might have gathered in Fife. Irving would, according to Carlyle, have been a happier and wiser man had he not dimmed his vision and wrecked his health in the glare and heat of the capital. Carlyle's vivid self-portraiture in his ' Reminiscences ' leaves the im- pression that his own character also suffered from contact with the political and the fashionable world which he half despised. Self-conscious power and unconscious ambition are instincts too strong even in divines and moralists not to seek their own gratification ; and this passage of the lives of the two young men, who found Fife too narrow a field, indicates that, although the period of its greatest depression was over, it had not yet recovered sufficiently to attract and retain ambitious youth. There was one native of Fife who, when he discovered the vanity of the world, exclaimed, " It's a weary and wicked world, and I must go back to Bougie," but it is not recorded that this moralist returned to his birthplace. CHAPTER X. FIFE REVIVES BY IMPROVED AGRICULTURE AND PROGRESS OF MANUFAC- TURES IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY — BEGINNINGS OF AGRICULTURE BY THE MONKS — SOCIETIES FOR IMPROVEMENT OF AGRIGULTURE AFTER THE UNION — THOMSON'S SURVEY OF THE AGRICULTURE OF FIFE — CASTLES AND MANSIONS IN FIFE — MORAL FROM THE RUINS OF OLD CASTLES— A SMALL FARM IN 1792— SMALL, VERSUS LARGE FARMS- RISE OF RENTS DURING FRENCH WAR — IMPROVEMENT OF FARM IM- PLEMENTS — ROTATION OF CROPS — INTRODUCTION OF POTATOES AND TURNIPS — CULTIVATION OF FLAX — INTRODUCTION OF ARTIFICIAL GRASSES — PLANTATIONS — DRAINAGE— FIFE BLACK CATTLE— IMPROVE- MENT IN BREEDING STOCK — RABBIT-WARRENS, DOOCOTS, AND BEE- HIVES — WAGES — BUDGET OF A SMALL FARM — OBSTACLES TO IM- PROVEMENT. Leaving the observations of travellers and visitors, let us note the progress of the county in itself, and trace some of its causes. The Scottish zeal for religion has often been com- bined with zeal for business. "Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord," has been a favourite text. There have been few hermits in Scotland since the Culdees. Even before the Reformation a large section of the Roman Catholic clergy had been active in secular affairs. Shrewd farmers, their granges, mills, and brewhouses studded Fife as other parts of the Lowlands. Busy gardeners, they intro- duced fruits like the pears which still ripen in the orchards of Nowburgh, planted trees like the hollies at Birkhill and the three yews of Forgan, and flowers in gardens which have vanished but left their seeds. The Friars' Shot is one of the PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE. 1 89 best on the Tay as on other rivers ; and the earliest traces of systematic sea-fishery in the Forth are connected with the vas- sals and tenants of the monasteries. The clergy or clerks were the notaries who wrote bonds and wills, and the judges who de- clared and dissolved marriages, administered executry estates, and appointed guardians to minors who did not fall under feudal ward. The bishops and monks were the first accumu- lators of wealth, the precursors of modern millionaires. Before the Reformation at least one-third of the land was theirs. The serfs found freedom, the middle classes employment, and the infirm or aged poor a shelter within or near the convent walls or on the wide estates of the prelates, until, abusing their wealth and opportunities, the successors of the benefactors became the oppressors of the people. With the Reformation much was altered for the better, some things for the worse ; but the spirit of industry and improvement continued. Fife appears to have been a specially industrious part of Scotland, removed from the scenes of civil war, and off the line of the predatory Highlander. Its howes and carses, watered by the Eden, the Leven, and the Ore, and the sunny sides of the Forth and the Tay, were fertile fields, " the fringe of gold" of the Royal proverb, so well described by Mr Geddie in the ' Fringes of Fife.' Even its hills, Largo, Kelly, and Norman Laws, Benarty and the Lomonds, and the Ochils which bound it on the north, were not wild, but smooth pasture for cattle and sheep. The forfeiture of the earldom of Fife to the Crown in the reign of James I. pro- bably gave its farmers easier rents ; for the Crown and the Church were the best landlords, and the earliest introducers of feu-farm tenure. It was indeed on the estates of the ancient Earls at Falkland, Auchtermuchty, and Lindores after their forfeiture to the crown that the experiment was first made by James IV. on a large scale of converting the poor labourers 190 THE MONKS, FIRST FARMERS. of the ground into feuars. The more thrifty members of this class added to their estates, and all clung with tenacity to their little freeholds. The sea, which surrounds two-thirds of the shire, yielded a rich harvest, and the burghs, both in the interior and on either side of the Firths, opened many markets. Fife had to contend with raw winds and a cold soil, which " girned all winter and grat all summer," but it contended bravely and with success. " Ilka blade o' grass keps its ain drap o' dew," was one of its hopeful proverbs. It produced more corn than any district of equal extent. It supported a larger pro- portionate population than any other county except those in which Edinburgh and Glasgow are situated. The primary industries of man had been followed from early times. Its working population was divided into the tillers of the soil, the toilers of the sea, and the weavers of the loom, to which were added, in the fourteenth century, the miners of the black gold which was to become a more stable and less speculative source of wealth than the red gold and precious stones of other climes. The history of the progress of these natural industries, and of the improvement of the condition of the labouring class, well deserves fuller study than is here possible. Lost sight of in the more stirring and glittering scenes of the surface, it is the subsoil of society, as of the land, in which the life of a nation has its roots. The Augustinian, Benedictine, and Cistercian monks were the first agriculturists on a large scale in Fife. The Priory of the Canons Regular at St Andrews, with its cells at Loch- leven, Portmoak, and Pittenweem ; the Benedictine monas- teries at Dunfermline and Lindores ; and the Cistercian at Cupar, Balmerino, and Culross, were agricultural centres from the western border to the East Neuk, and made and tilled the most productive soil, which is generally on the margin rather than in the interior of the county. ADVANCE OF AGRICULTURE AFTER THE UNION. 191 Wheat early figures in the rent-roll of these rich founda- tions. The runrig acres of their tenants may even now be traced in some places, as at Scotlandwell. The great plough, worked by twelve or eight oxen, the joint adventure of the village, which still often retained the old name of " the toun," continued to be used till after the Union. Before the Union agricultural progress had commenced, but there was still much waste and barren land, little drainage, old-fashioned implements and modes of tillage. The Union, with other benefits, brought a knowledge of the more advanced methods of England, and the Scotch pupils outstripped their masters. In 1723, "The Society of the Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland " was instituted ; and soon after local societies sprang up in different districts in Scotland, especially the Lothians and Galloway, Aberdeen and Fife, which greatly advanced this branch of industry. In 1793, Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster organised the scheme for the ' Statistical Account of Scotland,' and two years after obtained the appointment of a Scottish Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement. At the suggestion of this Board surveys were published of the agricultural condition of the counties of Scotland, and that of Fife was fortunately intrusted to Dr John Thomson, minister of Markinch, a nephew of the poet. Drawn up a few years earlier, the survey was published in 1800, and presents a clear picture of the agricultural state of Fife a century after the Union. He quotes on his title- page his uncle's lines : — " Oh, are there not some patriots to whose power That best, that godlike luxury is given, Of blessing thousands, thousands yet unborn, Through late posterity ? Some large of soul To cheer dejected industry, to give A double harvest to the pining swain, And teach the labouring hand the sweets of toil? Yes, there are such." 192 REPORT BY THOMSON OF MARKINCH. The work which follows is not imaginative but practical, and though the stage of progress which it marks has been dis- tanced by the improvements of the present century, it is worth while to recall its main features, and the wise remarks of the patriotic author. Although a practical farmer, Dr Thomson is not a grum- bler, but almost an optimist, and he takes the most favour- able view of all classes of the county in which he lived. But he never misses a chance to point out necessary im- provements or the obstacles to successful farming, in the modes of tenure, the conditions of leases, and the absence of enclosures. " Property in the county of Fife," he writes, " is more equally divided, and, in proportion to the value and extent, distributed among a greater number of proper- ties, than in any other county of Scotland. In Fife a large proportion of the estates run between ^400 and ^3000 per annum. From ^3000 to ^6000 there are only a few; and only one, I believe, amounts to ^8000. From ^400 down to ^30 or £40 per annum there are a great number of proprietors who pay cess and rank as heritors, and, although of inferior fortunes, are generally men of most respectable characters. The extensive distribution of property is attended with the happiest effects." The small estates in Fife have now been for the most part absorbed, and there are few Bonnet Lairds. But Kinross probably still has more small landowners than any equal space of Scotland. Comparing the valuation in 15 17, when an inquest was held by Patrick Lord Lindsay of the Byres as sheriff and twenty-four jurors, with the valued rent in 1S00, he shows it has increased from ^1347, 10s. to .£362,514, 7s. 5d. Scots — above three times the average of other counties ; the real rent he estimates at something under ^212,000 sterling. In 1890 the valuation of the county, though adversely affected IMPROVEMENT IN FARMS AND HOUSES. 193 by the agricultural depression, was still more than three times the real rent in 1800; so that, so far as money is a test of prosperity, there is little reason for taking a pessimistic view as to the progress of the county. The increase in value was chiefly due to the improvements in agriculture which Mr Thomson recommended having been carried out, to the growth of manufactures, and to the opening of new markets by increased facilities of communication. With regard to the number of castles and mansions, he remarks : " Few counties in Scotland can boast of so great a number as the county of Fife, many of which are un- commonly elegant ; and the rich and extensive plantations and pleasure-grounds with which they are surrounded add greatly to the beauty of the county." Without pretending to exhaust the list, he gives the names of eighty-eight such houses, and specially notes that thirty-nine had either been wholly rebuilt or received large additions or repairs within the last twenty-four years. This building gave much em- ployment ; and the mason as well as the joiner or carpenter trades have always been popular. Fife, indeed, may boast of their honest, substantial work, as proudly as Carlyle does of the houses his father built in Dumfriesshire. If the castles have now in many places fallen into decay, and the old cottages disappeared, this has been due not to their builders' want of skill or care, but to their owners' or occupiers' negligence. Thomson calculates that not less, probably more, than ,£18,300 had been spent annually, or ^439,200 during the last twenty-four years prior to 1800, in improvements, and says that it was within his knowledge that £1 0,000 had been spent in one country parish in building new houses, without taking the houses of any of the great proprietors into account, within the last sixteen years. N 194 RUINS OF OLD CASTLES. When he contemplated the large number of ruined and ruinous buildings in Fife, Thomson, after the manner of his profession and his time, moralises in a melancholy strain which the present age does not care to express, and perhaps does not feel. "Ruins so extensive," he says, "in proportion to the narrow extent of territory to which they are confined, while they give a very high idea of the splendour and opulence of this county in former times, and of the dignity, rank, and consideration of its proprietors, spread a melancholy gloom over the mind, and lead irresistibly to serious reflections. The time was when these mouldering fabrics stood firm and complete, adorned with all the elegance known in ruder times, and many of them inhabited by the first families in the kingdom. But these once stately mansions, now un- roofed, stripped of their ornaments, and deserted, are moul- dering in solitary silence under the ravaging hand of time. The powerful, the flourishing, and wealthy masters whom they once boasted of are long since gone and forgotten in the dust. The names of but a few, and the deeds of still fewer, have reached the present times. What they and their habitations are now, we and our still less durable dwellings, in the revolution of a few ages, must certainly be." His moral is addressed to his agricultural readers. "Reputation may be more generally and not less honourably acquired by the more useful though less splendid labours of rural life. Let the spade and the plough engrave names upon your lands, and let your memory be perpetuated by substantial and per- manent improvements of the soil. With what warmth of affection will you be remembered by posterity, when they shall be able to say, To the skilful and patriotic industry of our ancestors we owe the richness and fertility of our lands ! " The increased fertility of Fife, due to the agricultural im- provements of the present century, may have been partly due DESCRIPTION OF SMALL FARM. 1 95 to these exhortations ; but whether posterity has remembered its patriotic ancestors is not certain. Even in his own day Thomson was able to note some pro- gress. The farmhouses and offices twenty years before he wrote had a mean and wretched appearance, the house low and smoky, badly lighted, and without separate rooms. The office-houses had low and rudely built walls and ponderous roofs, — the whole irregularly placed in a square, with the house and barn on one side, the stable and byre on the other, and the dunghill in the middle receiving and retaining all the rain that fell and the refuse which accumulated within the square. The establishment of a farm under 100 acres in 1792 is thus described by one of its inmates : " It consisted of the farmer, his wife, a lad about seventeen, a maid, and a boy — to wit, myself. All worked and ate together, and all slept in the farmhouse, which consisted of one room and a kitchen. ... In the morning about eight we breakfasted on oatmeal porridge, with churned or skimmed milk, and sometimes whey. Butter was scarcely ever used, and though a few hens were kept, they and their eggs were uniformly sold. The dinner-hour was one, and the fare was always barley- broth, with plenty of cabbage or green kail, sometimes a little pork or a salt herring being added ; occasionally, when there was no pork, a little butter in the broth, beef or mutton never being seen in the house. We had bread in abundance, — a healthy and substantial mixed bread of oat, pease, and barley meal, baked in the house. At night we had again porridge, or, in winter, potatoes and milk. On Sundays the master and the mistress indulged themselves with a cup of tea. I never saw or heard of spirits, wine, or even beer in the house. We made our own candles, but were more in- debted in the dark nights to the splint-coal. . . . The winter evenings were spent in the kitchen, mainly by the light of the 196 CUSTOMS AND PASTIMES OF FARM-LABOURERS. fire. While the women spun, the master knitted stockings, the man-servant mended his shoes or stockings, while I usually read aloud for the general benefit. Our stock of literature was scanty — the Bible, some old sermons, a copy of Boston's ' Fourfold State,' Hervey's ' Meditations among the Tombs,' and an ample stock of old stories and ballads, the latter being the joint property of the maid and myself. We had family worship every evening, the hour of which, as well as of bed- time, was a little uncertain, there being no watch or clock in the house. When the weather permitted, we regulated ourselves by the progress the seven stars made over the peat- stack." Harvest was a time of hard work, good pay, and mirth on an old Fife farm. The first day was celebrated by drinking, according to old custom, " the heuk ale " at the nearest public-house, and the last by the supper of " the maiden" or " the kirn," so well described in the poem of " The First and the Last Day of Hairst," by Alexander Douglas of Strathmiglo. The beer-barrel or whiskey-keg was broached at the close of the barley harvest, and song and dance followed to the music of the pipes or the fiddle, or, in lack of these, the time was given by "the diddler," of whose talent Hugh Haliburton has preserved the memory. Halloween, Hog- manay, Hansel Monday, and St Valentine's Eve were also cherished festivals of the rustic year. The Foy, or fare- well supper before Martinmas, was specially a ploughman's feast, as he often changed places at that time. When Thomson wrote there were already a good number of excellent farm-steadings with houses of two storeys, and every necessary convenience for the family : and the offices had been removed to the back, or a little distance from the house, and contained stables, cow-house, barn, sheds, store- yard for feeding cattle, and milk-house, all built of stone and lime, conveniently arranged, and of sufficient size for the farm. LARGE AND SMALL HOLDINGS. 1 97 The cottages had kept pace with the houses of the farmers, and were generally better than many of the best farm-houses thirty or forty years before ; but in the northern part of the county cottages were few, and feuing-ground in small lots not Common, so that mechanics, tradesmen, and labourers were discouraged from settling there. Even through the rest of the county cottages were not so numerous as their importance to agriculture and the population required. With reference to the size of farms, he points out that these, like the estates in Fife, varied much in extent, from 50 to 500 acres, on an average perhaps 120, but there were also many small holdings from 50 down to 8 acres. A writer who describes the state of Fife and Kinross towards the end of last century remarks : " Every one who possessed a piece of land rent free was called a laird and his wife in like manner a lady. You might have seen every day a lady from the Ochils with butter, cheese, and eggs swung over her horse in a pair of creels, and herself mounted with grave dignity above the whole, going to market with a stuff hood of large dimensions turned up only with silk on her head, and a cloak also of woollen, or sometimes, in place of this, a riding coat, which was reckoned a piece of finery. . . . As to the superior order of lairds, they lived in that easy and most enviable state of mediocrity between genteel and fashion- able life on the one hand, and poverty and labour or drudgery on the other." Yet it was doubted whether subdivision of land had not gone too far, and it was observed that with very few exceptions the feus were in a worse state of cultivation than the farms paying rent. One cause of this had been foreseen by Sir David Lyndsay : — ■ "And now begins any plagues among them That gentillmen their stedings take in fee Thus maun they pay great fermes or buy their stead." 198 DIFFUSION OF PROPERTY. Farms of 300 acres, says another observer of the same date, were not uncommon ; but the great bulk of the land was let in much smaller farms of 100 acres and under. The question of the best size of farm had been, Thomson states, "much agitated," as it still is. He supports the view that there should be a mixture of large and small farms, because " there is a great diversity among men in respect of abilities and cir- cumstances, and also to prevent a dangerous diminution of active and experienced hands for carrying on the operations of husbandry." He favours, in short, the golden mean. "To mince down," he says, " all the land into small holdings would neither increase population nor add to the strength of the State, and would most probably check the progress of im- provement. But to throw the whole estates of the kingdom into the hands of a few great farmers might be equally hurtful to the progress of agriculture, and would certainly be highly impolitic, as it would weaken the support which the constitu- tion of the country, as well as public order and tranquillity, derive from the general diffusion of property." This diffusion of property, he considers, saved Great Britain from the Revolu- tion then recent in France, where " the higher orders had monopolised all the honours, wealth, and power, while de- pendence, servility, and abject poverty had been the portion of the lower and by far the most numerous class." He praises the character of the Fife farmers. Several of them had come from more highly improved parts of the country, and contributed not a little by their ability and enterprise to the improvement of the county. Still the great body of the farmers were descendants of the old stock which had held the same farms for several generations, and he commends them for decency, sobriety, and integrity. Rents varied. In 1792 good land was to be had for 10 shillings an acre. In consequence of the war with France IMPROVEMENT IN FARM IMPLEMENTS. I99 it had risen in the best land to a very high rate : £2 an acre was common, but some large farms were let at ^3, or, near the town, even at £4, ^5, and _£6 an acre. The absence of tithes, so justly complained of in other countries, he thought highly favourable to the progress of agriculture. Poor-rates were also unknown, and, like the Scotch clergy of his genera- tion, he deprecates their introduction, and prefers the old Scottish mode of supporting the poor by collections at the church doors. He remarks, however, that these chiefly came from the pockets of the farmers, tradesmen, and labourers. Non-resident proprietors seldom gave anything, and few of the residents, many of whom were Episcopalians and attended their own chapels, came to the parish kirk, and consequently added little to the amount of collections. He approves of the Scottish system of leases, generally of nineteen years, but in some instances longer, and formerly with a liferent added, though this had become rare ; but he argues in favour of re- laxing the restrictions which bind the farmer in shackles to the end of his lease. The implements of husbandry had been much improved by the progress of agricultural science. The old Scots plough, made entirely of wood with the exception of the iron coulter, was almost gone entirely into disuse, and its place supplied by a small light plough with an iron head and cast-metal mould-board. Harrows of several kinds and rollers had come into use. Reaping was still almost invariably done by the hook, the scythe being only used where reapers were scarce, which was seldom the case in so populous a county. Threshing-machines had become common, driven both by water- and horse-power, but were still so much of a novelty that he deems it worth while to mention one erected at Kilrie, in the parish of Kinghorn ; another in the parish of Leuchars, put up by Mr Buchan, the tenant ; and a 200 NOTABLE AGRICULTURISTS. third, by Mr Cheape of Rossie, perhaps superior to any other in Fife. Amongst noted agriculturists in Fife were Sir John An- struther and the Earl of Balcarres, who were accounted the best farmers in the East Neuk, and would have been reckoned the best in all Fife if the palm had not been disputed with them by General Skene of Pitlour and Major Law near Falk- land. Even a Professor of St Andrews, Dr Wilkie, astonished the country people by talking to them in their own language and teaching them how to raise turnips and potatoes. The example he set was of great use in that part of the country, and his success was perhaps due to one of his maxims. " I never draw any conclusion," he said, " in matters of husbandry but from direct experiment, and I never reason from analogy." This was a practical application of the inductive philosophy of Bacon which Wilkie taught his students as well as the farmers of the neighbourhood. Enclosures were still much wanted, only a third of the county being substantially enclosed, the rest remaining partly open or fenced by dikes without hedges, hedges without dikes, or by ragged palings. Drainage, as the term is now understood, was almost unknown in last century, though surface moisture was in some parts carried away by rude stone drains. The majority of the ploughmen are praised for keeping the ridges straight and of equal breadth from end to end, but there were instances of slovenly work, which prevented the increase of the quantity and improvement of the quality of the produce of the soil. Rotation of crops had occupied attention for a number of years back, but there was still much to be desired, and he gives examples of four-, five-, and six-shift rotation adapted to the different qualities of the soil. The crop most gener- ally cultivated was oats, oatmeal being still a principal article GREEN CROPS AND ROTATION. 201 of food among the lower classes ; but the consumption by horses was on the increase, so that Dr Johnson's well-known sarcasm was probably by this time beginning to lose its point. Barley was cultivated to a considerable extent and considered a crop of great importance, barley-meal being much used, but a still greater quantity was consumed by the many breweries and distilleries in the county. Wheat during the last twenty or thirty years had become a favourite crop, and kept pace with the improvement of the soil, but probably its cultivation had been pushed further than proper on land not adapted for that crop. Beans and peas were cultivated best in the north and south, and pro- duced only a scanty crop in the middle and upland parts of the county. The potato, although brought over from America about two hundred and thirty years before, had become an agricultural crop in Fife for only sixty years. About 1740, and indeed till 1770 or 1780, it had been seen chiefly in gardens, as its value had been little under- stood. Even at the date of this survey, only 600 acres were under potatoes. Turnips were of recent introduction, very few having been grown till 1780; but since then they w r ere gradually coming into repute, though not yet so much as the nature of the soil would admit. North of the Eden and west from Burntisland comparatively few were raised ; and the cultivation of the Swedish turnip, though attempted, had not spread to any considerable extent, but its good qualities deserved attention. The cultivation of green crop materially altered the conditions of agriculture, and has to some extent mitigated the loss from the fall in the price of grain. Flax had been encouraged by the Board of Agriculture, and the writer, while admitting it to be a scourging crop, urges the importance of its cultivation in preference to im- portation in a county where the linen manufacture was so 202 ARTIFICIAL GRASSES — PLANTING. largely used. At that time about 1500 acres were under flax, which was found to thrive well and to be of fine quality in the high ground of the middle district. On some farms part of the wages of farm-servants was paid in flax. In the present century the growth of flax has almost dis- appeared, and although some attempts have been made to reintroduce it in Fife on account of the recent fall in the price of wheat, they do not seem as yet to have been suc- cessful. The artificial grasses, ryegrass, and red and white clover, which were rare some years before, were coming into use, and as about one-fifth of the county was inaccessible to the plough, the question of improving pasture was of much consequence. There was nothing in Fife that could properly be called an orchard, except the remains of that of the old Abbey of Lin- dores, but private gardens were numerous, owing to the great number of resident proprietors, and most families in the towns and villages had little gardens of their own. There was, however, only one market-garden of about twenty acres near Kirkcaldy. There was little common or waste ground. Several of the gentry had been active in planting, especially on the north of the county, on the properties of Blairadam, Rankeillor, and Craigrothie ; and on the south side General Wemyss of Wemyss, Sir James Erskine of Cambo, and Mr Ferguson of Raith, were noted as great planters. Almost all commons had been divided except that of the Lomonds near Falkland. A good deal had been done, but not enough for drainage, to carry out which it was necessary, as the tenants had not sufficient capital, that the landlords should advance the neces- sary expenditure and the tenant pay interest at a reasonable rate. Useful hints are given with reference to manuring, and weeding is strongly urged, for weeds "are robbers that CATTLE — HORSES— POULTRY — PIGEONS. 203 pilfer the food necessary for the more valuable and useful vegetable." With regard to live stock, he recommends the introduction of dairy farming, and the disuse of oxen for ploughing. Although there was a difference of opinion amongst farmers on the latter point, on the whole the use of oxen for draught was decidedly going out, not more than one being employed in the plough or cart for ten so used twenty years before. The cattle seem still to have been almost exclusively a special Fife black breed. But the county has, with a few honourable exceptions, — as the polled Angus herd of Miss Morison- Duncan at Naughton and the Clydesdale stud of Mr Gilmour at Montrave, — not yet acquired a reputation for breeding, as Angus has for its polled cattle, and Aberdeen for its shorthorns ; nor for dairy farms, as Ayrshire. It has confined itself chiefly to importing lean cattle from Ireland and other countries, and feeding them for the butcher. A great improvement in the quality of horses was marked, to which the pastime of hunting, and the popularity of the light-horse yeomanry corps amongst the farmers as well as the landed proprietors, has contributed. Rabbits were com- mon on the sandy links, but not yet bred for profit ; poultry, except turkeys and geese, chiefly to be seen about the houses of the gentry and large farmers, were largely bred for profit and sold in the towns or in Edinburgh. The " doocot," or pigeon-house, still so common an object in the Fife landscape, was then still more common ; there were not fewer than 360, with 36,000 pairs of breeders, making dreadful havoc among the grain, of which they were supposed to consume between 3000 and 4000 bolls a-year. As the profit of each pigeon-house could not be more than £5 a-year, gentlemen were beginning to count the cost, and pigeon-houses were suffered to go to ruin. Many of these, 204 WAGES — A FARM BUDGET. now deserted like the castles of their former owners, give point to the saying which describes the possessions of a Fife laird as consisting of " a puckle land, a lump of debt, a doocot, and a law plea." Good specimens of the old dovecot yet remaining may be seen at the castle of Newark near St Monans, one belonging to the castle of Rosyth near Inverkeithing, and a third near Kilrenny. A few beehives were found in Fife, when Thomson wrote, in every gentleman's garden ; but, whether from want of skill or the climate, this was deemed a precarious business and not much followed. The wages of the ordinary labourer were from is. to is. 6d. a-day in summer, and 2d. or 3d. less in winter. Married ploughmen had a free house and garden, £6 to _£8 of money, 6*4 bolls of meal, a cow's grass, and some other allowances, making their wage run from ^16 to ,£18: the unmarried lived in the farmer's family, with £8 to /12 of wages ; women-servants had ^3 to £4. But on the smaller farms much more modest wages were paid, and Mr Ritchie, one of the founders of the ' Scotsman ' newspaper, who as a boy, towards the end of last century, served on a farm of 90 acres near Largo, gives the following exact and curious budget of its expenses, which he says were nearly the total expenses of the farm : — The man-servant (including flax) £s The maid-servant (do. ) 2 10 The boy (/;/ 339 — Standing Stones at, 341. See also Durham, Wood. Largo Law weather rhyme, 286. " Lauder, Maggie," song, 316 — sequel to, 317. Lawyers of Fife, at Dunse Law, 119 — in College of Justice, 340. Learmont, James, younger of Bal- comie, one of the Lewes Adven- turers, 107. Learmont, Sir James, one of Crom- well's judges, 340. Leases, duration of, in Fife, 199. Lees, Charles, a Fife painter, 347. Legends, earliest history of Fife, 1 — character of, 8 — interpretation of, 9 — of St Serf, 10 et seq. — St Bridget, 14 — St Andrew, 15 — St Adrian, 16 —St Monan, ib. — St Fillan, 17 — of Dr Chalmers, 247. Leighton, Bishop, refuses title of Lord, 145. Lekprevick, the printer, brings his press to St Andrews when Knox there, 93 — his publications, ib. Leonard's, St, College of, foundation of, 44— Knox counsels the students of, 92. Leslie, Earl of Rothes' palace at, 174, 179. Leslie, Sir Alexander, Lord Leven, 33 2 - Leslie, Sir David, Lord Newark, 334. Leslie, Sir John, of Largo, 351. Leslies, the, family saying of, 296. Leuchars, Alexander Henderson, min- ister of, 115 — Robert Bruce's sermon at, 116 — parish church of, 342. Leuchars, Duke of Rothesay buried at, 39 — ninth Earl of Douglas, monk of, 46 — monks introduce pear-trees to, 188. Leven, the, quarter of Fife so called, 2 — proverbs as to, 287. Lindores, Abbey of, 263, 342— proverb on, 285. Lindsay, Lady Anne, or Barnard, authoress of "Auld Robin Gray," describes its composition, 319. Lindsay, Lord Balcarres, at Dunse Law, 119. Lindsay, Lord Menmuir, projects Lewes Adventure, 106. Lindsay, Robert, of Pitscottie, Chron- icles of Scotland by, 352. Lindsay or Lyndsay, Sir David, of the Mount, Masque for Mary of Guise at St Andrews by, 51 — plays on lute for James V. , 52— his description of Falk- land, ib. — account of his drama of "The Three Estates," 56 — his ver- dict on Cardinal Beaton's death, 63 — his books burnt in 1560, 65 — calls Knox to preach, 67 — in the castle with Knox, 69 — character of his poetry, 307, 349. Linen, early weaving of, in Fife, 49. Literature, stock of, in farm, 196 — read aloud in weaver's shop, 209 — Cockburn's shop at Anstruther, 230, 257 — local press, 230— Seceders' con- troversial, 167 — they alter popular, 168 — of Fife, 349 et seq. Loch Lands, 180. Lochleven, St Serfs Island in, 12 — proverb of, 81 — Queen Mary visits, ib. — her captivity in castle island, 83 — her escape from, 85. Lochore, old shire, 3. Low, David, Episcopal minister of Pittenweem, Bishop of Moray, Ross, and Argyle, sketch of his life, 256. Macalpine, Kenneth, 18. Macduff Cross, 32, 178. Macduff, Earl of Fife, called Thane by Wyntoun, 31 — privileges of his clan, ib. Mackenzie of Kintail, a wily Celtic chief, 109. MacLean of Duart, "Another for Hector," 131. Macleods, the, of Lewes, 108 et seq. Maelrubha, St, at Crail, 13. Maiden, the, festival of, 196. Mair or Maor, Celtic Serjeant, 3. Maitland, William, of Lethington, Darnley visits, 79. Major, John, believes in same relics of saints of different places, 26 — condemns extravagance of Bishop Kennedy, 41 — suggests foundation of University, ib. — history by, 352. Malcolm Canmore, grants to Culdees by, 12 — his tower at Dunfermline, 23 — builds the abbey there, ib. — con- nection of, with Durham, ib. — news 400 INDEX. of his death, 25 — portrait of, at Escu- rial, ib. — buried at Dunfermline, 26. Malcolm IV., or the Maiden, buried at Dunfermline, 26. Malone, Robert, song-writer, An- struther, 321. Manufactures of Fife, 209 et seq. — of flax, 209 — linen, 210 — oil-cloth, 218 —salt, 226 — glass, 227. Margaret the Atheling comes to Fife, 23 — marries Malcolm Canmore, id. — sketch of her life, 24— fate of her relics, 25 — recovery of her Gospel Book, 26— last Scottish saint, 27. Markinch, perhaps old capital, 3— Culdees at, id. — antiquities of, id. Martin, a Fife painter, 347. Mary of Guise, masque by Lindsay at marriage of, 51 — at Falkland with French troops, 71 — her troops at Cupar Muir, 72 — declares her God stronger than Knox's God, 73 — her death, 74. Mary, Queen, and Knox in Fife con- trasted, 66 — Mary returns to Scot- land, 74 — Mary and Chastellard first meet, 75 — Mary receives Chastellard at Montrose, 76 — Mary and Chas- tellard at Burntisland, 77 — Mary and Elizabeth, 78 — Darnley meets Mary at Wemyss, 79 — Mary a prisoner at Lochleven, 81 — her escape from Lochleven, 84 — devices on bed of State by, 291. Matthewson, Mr, of Dunfermline, linen manufacturer, 215. May, Isle of, holy wells at, 16 — sea- battle near, 47. Maynard, the Fleming, Provost of St Andrews, 32. M'Crie, Dr, historian, a Seceder min- ister, 178. Meldrum, David, Fife novelist, 352. Melville, Andrew, lesson to James VI. at St Andrews by, 96 — preaches on James's marriage, 103 — interview of, with James VI. at Falkland, 104. Melville, James, ministerof Anstruther, diary of, 53 — at St Andrews when James VI. visits it, 97 — meets Spanish captain at Anstruther, it>. Melville, Sir James, of Halhill, 53. Melville, Sir Robert, visits Queen Mary at Lochleven, 84. Melvin, James, of Carnbee, at Beaton's murder, 61. Memma, St, at Scoonie, 13. Mercantile system, Adam Smith con- demns, 211. Merlsford, near Strathmiglo, fictitious site of battle of Grampians, 7. Michael, Great St, built by James IV., 49. Middle classes, rise of the, 135. " Miller, The, of Fife," song of, 323. Miracles of the Saints, 8 — contrast between the, in Columba's Life by Adamnan and Turgot's Life of Queen Margaret, 25. Moak or MoUock, St, patron of Portmoak, 13. Modrust, St, patron of Markinch, 13. Monan, St, patron of Kilconquhar, 13 —legend of, 16 — patron of St Mon- an s, ib. Monans, St, church of, 17. Moncreiff, Sir James, of Tullibole, Justice-Clerk, 341. Moncrieff, Matthew, Seceder minister, proverb as to, 166. Monks, early Scottish Church mon- astic, 19— the first gardeners in Fife, 188— the first fishers, ib.— the first farmers, 190 — the first coal-miners, 220. Montrave, Clydesdale stud at, 203. Moray, Bonnie Earl of, murder at Donibristle of, 101 — ballad of, 102. Muckle Ben, the Seceders' Commission at, 158. Muckross, Celtic name for Fifeness, 7. Murders in Fife : Duke of Rothesay, 38 — Cardinal Beaton, 61 — Earl of Moray, 101 — Archbishop Sharp, 147 — Ayton of Ayton, 152. Murdoch, Duke of Albany, Earl of Fife, at coronation of James I., 45. Murray, Earl of, Regent, prevents English landing in Fife, 70 — at Cupar Muir, 72 — Darnley on, 80. Nairn, Mr Michael, introduces oil- cloth manufacture into Kirkcaldy, 219. Naughton herd of polled Angus cattle, 203. Navy, Scottish, early battles in the Forth, 47. See Barton and Wood. Nectan, Pictish king, 14. " Nettles, Jenny," song of, 321. Newark, Lord. See Leslie, Sir D. Newburgh, proverb of, 284. Newburn, an old shire, now a parish, 3, Newport, proverb as to, 285. Nicolson, a Fife painter, 347. Ninian, St, did not visit Fife, 9. Nonjuror minister at St Andrews, a, 184. Normans, descendants of Malcolm Canmore introduce customs of, 29 — Norman settlers in Fife become landowners, 30. INDEX. 40I Northern Lights, the first, a beacon- fire on Isle of May, 140. Novelists, Fife, 351. Ochils, the, northern boundary of Fife, 2 — Adamnan tells St Serf to occupy Fife, it — a lady from the Ochils de- scribed, 197 — rhyme of, afavouriteof Sir Walter Scott, 288— Hugh Hali- burton, their poet, 357. Oil-cloth manufacture at Kirkcaldy, 218. Oliphant, Mrs, Fife novelist, 351. Orchards of the monks of Lindores, 188. "Ordination of the Elders," picture of, represents Fife character, 347. Ore, the, weather rhymes, 287. Orwell, parish, 4 — chapel of, Kinross, 5- Overton, Colonel, a Cromwellian officer, in Fife, 131. Oxcar, rhymes on, 283, 284. Oxen used for ploughing, 191 — eight to the plough mentioned in "The Wyf of Auchtermuchty, " 302. Painting and painters of Fife, 347. See also Lees, Martin, Nicolson, Paton, Wilkie. Palaces of Fife. See Dunfermline, Falkland, Leslie. Park, Dr John, of St Andrews, ver- sion of song "Where Gadie rins," 321. Pathhead, proverbs as to, 276. Paton, David, verses by, on Dunferm- line linen trade, 214. Paton, Joseph, pattern designer and antiquary, 347. Paton, Sir Noel, 347. Patronage, cause of Secession, 168. Pauli, a German historian, recalls Kirkcaldy proverb, 272. Peace in Fife after the Union, 154. Picts, Fife originally Pictish kingdom, 8, 14 — Picts in Fife converted by St Serf and other saints, 10. Pigeon-houses in Fife, 203. Pilgrims to Isle of May, 16 — to Queen Margaret's tomb, Dunfermline, 27. Pirie, Mr, the Seceder, has contro- versy with Lord Karnes, 177. Pitmilly, proverb as to, 287, Pitreavie, battle of, 131. Pitscottie. See Lindsay, Robert. Pittenweem, David Low, Episcopal minister of, 256 — Cockburn's book- shop at, 257. Plantations of trees in Fife, 202— at Blair Adam, 344. 2 Playfair, the architect, 344. Plays by Scots authors, 55. Plough, old Scottish, 199 — oxen used for, 203, 304 — Thomson recom- mends disuse of, 203. Ploughmen, praised by Thomson, in report on Fife agriculture, 200 — rhymes by, 294. Pococke, Richard, travels in Scotland, 177 et seq. "Polemo-Middinia," by Drummond, 139. Politics, stagnant state of, in eigh- teenth century, 168. Pont, Robert, the geographer, born near Culross, 138. Population of Fife, 5 — of Kinross, 6. Portmoak, parish of, Kinross, 4 — foundation of St Serf at, 13. Potatoes, introduction of, in Fife, 207. Presbyterian Church, relation of, to James VI., 95 — Henderson tries to reconcile, with the monarch}'', 120 — ' Cromwell quarrels with, 130 — Crom- well cause of disruptions in, 134 — division between Protesters and Res- olutioners, ib. — Sharp deserts from, 143 — Cameronian dissent from, 150 etseq. — Original Seceders, history of, 157 — the Relief Secession, 166 — Free Church Disruption, 168. See also Secession and United Presby- terian Church. Press, of Lekprevick at St Andrews, 93 — of Tullis at Cupar, 230, 384 — of Westwood at Cupar, 230, 387. Property, valuation of, in Fife, 2 — subdivision of, in Fife, 192 — old valuation of, in Fife, ib. Prose, Scottish, rare, 53 — Fife writers of, ib. Protesters, the, make their Protest at St Andrews, 134 — names of signa- tories, ib. Proverbs of Fife and Kinross, 259 et seq. Queensferry, origin of name, 24 — bridge over Forth at, 205. Railways of Fife, a byword for incon- venient arrangements, 205. Ramornie, Sir John of, takes Duke of Rothesay to Falkland, 38. Ramsay, John, of Lochmalonie, manu- scripts of Blind Harry and "The Bruce " written by, 300. Rathillet, a shire, now a parish, 3. See also Hackston. Reformation, the, at St Andrews after Beaton's death, 69 — Knox preaches C 402 INDEX. in favour of, 67-69— Knox's lodgings at St Andrews its centre, 86. Reformers, early Scottish, 60. Regulus, St, or St Rule, at St Andrews, IS- Relics, of St Andrew at St Andrews, 15 — of St Monan at Invery, 16 — of St Columba brought to Dunkeld, 18 ■ — of St Margaret at Dunfermline, 25 — at the Escurial, ib. — of St Aidan and St Cuthbert at Durham, 26. Relief Church, Secession under Thomas Gillespie of Carnock, 160. Rent of lands in 1517, 1800, and 1890, 192. Rents of farms, 198. Ritchie, "William, description of small farm near Largo by, 195 — budget of small farm, 204. Roads in Fife, Acts relating to, 205 — good management of, ib. Rogers, Captain, account of Alexander Selkirk by, 336. Romance, contrasted with history, 112. Romans, did not conquer Fife, 7 — antiquities of, in east of Fife imagin- ary, in west doubtful, ib, Rossend Castle, jj. Rosyth Castle, 133. Rotation of crops, 200. Rothesay, David, Duke of, starved to death at Falkland, 38. Ruins of Fife, Defoe's description of, at St Andrews, 174 — Dr Johnson on, 184 — Francis Douglas on, ib. — Thomson moralises on, 194. Rutherford, Samuel, Principal of St Mary's, sketch of life of, 126 — his works, 127 — his letters, 128. Saints. See Adamnan, Adrian, An- drew, Bridget, Columba, Cuthbert, Ethernan, Fillan, Kenneth or Cain* nech, Maelrubha, Margaret, Mem- ma, Moak, Modrust, Monan, Nin- ian, Regulus, Salvator, Serf. St Andrew. See Andrew. St Andrews, legend of St Andrew at, 15 — Culdees of, ib, — becomes metro- polis of Scottish Church, 21 — first charter and provost of, 32 — dedica- tion of Cathedral at, 36 — foundation of University, 40 — of the College, 42 — Bishops and Archbishops of, 43 et seq. — martyrdom ofWishart at, 60 — murder of Cardinal Beaton at, 61 — Knox at, in 1547, 6j — again in 1559, 70 — Queen Mary at, 74 — Knox's last visit, 1571, 85 — James VI. with Du Bartas at, 96 — again visits, 111 — Alexander Henderson, Regent of, 115— Samuel Rutherford, Principal of St Mary's, 126 — General Assem- bly of 1652 at, 134 — plan of, in Blaeu's Atlas, 138 — Timothy Pont educated at, ib. — Archbishop Sharp's tri- umphal progress to, 144 — Defoe on decay of, 176 — Bishop Pococke at, 178— Dr Johnson at, 182 — revival of, 185 — Dr Wilkie, professor of, 200 — principals and professors of, 228 — Dr Chalmers student at, 244 — and Professor of Moral Philosophy at, 246 — the student poets of, 350 — philosophy taught at, 351. St Salvator, Bishop Kennedy's barge and college called after, 43, 46. Saxons. See Anglo-Saxons. Scheves, John, Official of St Andrews, 42. Schevez, William, Archbishop of St Andrews, 44. Scone, capital of Scottish monarchy of Kenneth Macalpine, 18. Scot, Sir John, of Scotstarvit, 139. Scot, Michael, of Balwearie, 33 — pre- dicts death of Alexander III., 34. Scott, Dr Hew, of Anstruther, 353. Scott, Sir Walter, Queen Mary's life at Lochleven described in ' The Abbot,' by, 83 — on Cromwell, 135 — on mur- der of Sharp, 145 — on "Auld Robin Gray," 319 — on " Folk of Fife," 355. " Scrappies," the, of the Lomonds, 358. Sculptors, few Scottish, 348. Secession and the Seceders, Fife and Kinross the mother-country of the, 158 — Ebenezer Erskineat Portmoak, 159 — Ralph Erskine of Dunfermline, 160— testimony of, at Gairneybridge, 162 — open-air preaching, 164 — quar- rel with Whitfield, 165— the Relief Secession, 166 — split on burghers' oath, 167 — split of Auld and New Lichts, ib. — reunions, 169 — deposi- tion of Glas, 170 — of Irving, 250 — literature of, 299. Selkirk, Alexander, original of Robin- son Crusoe, 336. Sempill, Robert, ballads of, circulate largely in Fife, 307. Serf, St, converts Picts of Fife, 10 — sketch of his legends, 11 — his Inch at Lochleven, 12 — protects Scots in Lochleven Castle against English, 37- Sermons: Knox's first sermon at St Andrews, 66 — Knox's, at Crail and St Andrews, 70 — Biuce's, at Leu- chars, 116 — Henderson's, at Glas- INDEX. 403 gow Assembly, 118 — Henderson's, at Edinburgh Assembly, 120 — Cove- nanters', at St Antholins's, London, 121 — Ebenezer Erskine's, at Perth Synod, 161 — Shirra's, at Fife Synod, 166 — Dr Chalmers's, in Fife, Glas- gow, and London, 248 et seq. Seton, Lord, aids Mary's escape from Lochleven, 85. Seton, Lord Dunfermline, Chancellor, 34°- Shairp, Principal, poems of, 353. Shan-trews danced at Strathmiglo in this century, 266. Sharp, James, Archbishop of St An- drews, Cromwell calls him " Sharp of that Ilk," 142— sketch of his life, ib. et seq. — his murder, ib. Shipbuilding in Fife, 225. Shirra, Mr R., Secession minister, Kirkcaldy, 166, 273. Sibbald, Sir Robert, of Gibliston, father of Scottish antiquaries, 353. Sinclair, Sir John, 'Statistical Account of Scotland,' 161. Smith, Adam, born at Kirkcaldy, 235 — sketch of his life, ib. et seq. — ' Wealth of Nations ' written at, 2 37- Somerville, Mrs, Fife mathematician, 35'- "Spens, Sir Patrick," ballad of, 314. Spens of Wormiston, one of Lewes Adventurers, 109. Spinning in early times in Fife, 208, 210 — machinery introduced, 213. Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St An- drews, 353 — his Church history, ib. Statistics of Fife, 5. Statistics of Scotland, Sir John Scot's project for, r38 — Sir John Sinclair's Statistical Account, ib., 191. Steam-power introduced for spinning and weaving, 215 — for fishing-boats, 225. Strathmiglo, an old shire, now a par- ish, 3. Stuart. See Mary, Queen. Stuart, Alexander, Archbishop of St Andrews, killed at Flodden, 44. Stuart, James, Duke of Ross, Arch- bishop of St Andrews, 44. Stuart, Sir William, commendator of Pittenweem, one of Fife Adventurers to the Lewes, 106. Syme, James, of Dunfermline, poems by, 325- Syme, James, the surgeon, 339. Tarvit Hill, truce of, 72 — proverb as to, 270. Taylor, Rev. W., of Flisk, Fife anti- quarian, 354. Theatre, why Scotland has no native, 54- Thomas the Rhymer prophesies death of Alexander III., 33. Thomson, James, the poet, 191. Thomson, Rev. John, minister of Markinch, 191 — Report on Agri- culture of Fife by, 192. Tillicoultry, St Serf at, 12. Torryburn, proverbs as to, 276. Toshach, Celtic baron, 3. Traill, Bishop, 44. Trails of Blebo went to Shetland, 105. "Tuath," Celtic district so called, 3- Tuathal, Celtic Bishop of St Andrews, 12. Tucker's Report on Fife customs in time of the Commonwealth, 226. Tullibody, St Serf at, 12. Tullis, press of, at Cupar, 230, 384. Tulloch, Principal of St Mary's, sketches of the Reformers by, 353. Turnips introduced in Fife, 201. Union, the, effect of personal Union of Crowns on Fife, centres Scottish interest on ecclesiastical affairs, r 57- United Presbyterian Church, 166, 178. University, a development of the monastery, 39 — John Knox protests against the Universities, 88 — Alex- ander Henderson favours, 121. Vagrant, saying by Fife, 358. Vipont, Allan D., storms English forts at Kinross, 37. Wages of farm-labourers, 204— of linen trade, 2r6 — of colliers, 221. Wallace, Sir William, in Fife, 35. War of Independence in Fife, 35 et seq. — change from chronic war to peace, 136. Wardlaw, Bishop, of St Andrews, founds the University, 41 — his liberality, 42. Wardlaw, Laird of Pitreavie, 131. Warranty of Scottish bonds, 95. Watson, Dr, Professor at St Andrews, 182. Weavers and weaving in Fife, 209. Wedderburn, James, plays by, 55. Wells, holy, on Isle of May, 16. Wemyss, an old shire, now a parish, 3 — Castle, 79 — proverbs as to, 281. 4°4 INDEX. Wemyss, Sir John, one of Cromwell's judges, 340. 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