The Book-Hunter
the close: they masterfully broke up the haill doors and windows of this
stately house; they brake down beds, boards, aumries, glassen windows,
took out the iron stauncheons, brake in the locks, and such as they
could carry had with them, and sold for little or nothing; but they got
none of the Bishop's plenishing to speak of, because it was all conveyed
away before their coming." On Sunday, Montrose and the other leaders
duly attended the devotional services of the eminent Covenanting divines
they had brought with them. "But," says Spalding, "the renegate
soldiers, in time of both preachings, is abusing and plundering New
Aberdeen pitifully, without regard to God or man;" and he goes on in his
specific way, describing the plundering until he reaches this climax:
"No foul--cock or hen--left unkilled. The haill house-dogs, messens, and
whelps within Aberdeen felled and slain upon the gate, so that neither
hound nor messen or other dog was left that they could see." But there
was a special reason for this. The ladies of Aberdeen, on the retiring
of Montrose's army, had decorated all the vagabond street-dogs with the
blue ribbon of the Covenant.
This was in 1639. Five years afterwards Montrose came back on them in
more terrible guise still, to punish the town for having yielded to the
Covenant. In Aberdeen, Cavalier principles generally predominated; but
after being overrun and plundered successively by either party, the
Covenanters, having the acting government of the country at their back,
succeeded in establishing a predominance in the councils of the
exhausted community. Spalding had no respect for the civic and rural
forces they attempted to embody, and speaks of a petty bailie "who
brought in ane drill-master to learn our poor bodies to handle their
arms, who had more need to handle the plough and win their livings."
Montrose had now with him his celebrated army of Highlanders--or Irish,
as Spalding calls them--who broke at a rush through the feeble force
sent out of the town to meet them. Montrose "follows the chase to
Aberdeen, his men hewing and cutting down all manner of men they could
overtake within the town, upon the streets, or in their houses, and
round about the town, as our men were fleeing, with broadswords, but
mercy or remeid. These cruel Irish, seeing a man well clad, would first
tyr [_i.e._, strip] him and save the clothes unspoiled, then kill the
man; ... nothing heard but pitiful howling, crying, weeping, mourning,
through all the streets.... It is lamentable to hear how thir Irishes,
who had gotten the spoil of the town, did abuse the samin. The men that
they killed they would not suffer to be buried, but tirled them of
their clothes, syne left their naked bodies lying above the ground. The
wife durst not cry nor weep at her husband's slaughter before her eyes,
nor the mother for her son--which if they were heard, then they were
presently slain also; ... and none durst bury the dead. Yea, and I saw
two corpses carried to the burial through the old town with women only,
and not are man amongst them, so that the naked corpses lay unburied so
long as these limmers were ungone to the camp."
The Commissary-Clerk was on Montrose's side, but he had the hatred of a
Lowlander of that day for the Highlanders. He has a great many amusing
episodes describing the light-fingered lads from the hills coming down,
and in the general confusion of the times plundering Cavalier and
Covenanter alike; and on these occasions he drops his usual placidity
and becomes rabid and abusive, as the best-tempered Americans are said
to become when they speak of niggers, and deals out to them the terms
limmers, thieves, robbers, cut-throats, masterful vagrants, and so
forth, with great volubility. Of some of their chiefs, renowned in
history, he speaks as mere robber-leaders, and when they are known by
one name in their own country and another in the Lowlands, he puts an
_alias_ between the two. The very initial words of his chronicle are,
"Efter the death and burial of Angus Macintosh of Auldterlie, _alias_
Angus Williamson."
Montrose having departed, Argyle's troops commenced to plunder the
district for having submitted to his enemy, and these, being doubly
offensive as Covenanters and Highlanders, are treated accordingly. But
it is necessary to be impartial; and having bestowed so much on the
Cavalier annalist, let us take a glimpse at the other side.
Robert Wodrow.
From the collections of the Reverend Robert Wodrow, the historian of The
Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, a rich harvest has been reaped by
the northern clubs, one of which appropriately adopted his name. He was
a voluminous writer and an inexhaustible collector. It is generally
classed among the failings of the book-hunter that he looks only to the
far past, and disregards the contemporary and the recent. Wodrow was a
valuable exception to this propensity. Reversing the spirit of the
selfish bull which asks what posterity has done for us, he stored up
contemporary literature for subsequent generations; and he thus left, at
the commencement of the eighteenth century, such a library as a
collector of the nineteenth, could he have sent a caterer before him,
would have prepared to await his arrival in the world. The inestimable
value of the great collection of the civil-war pamphlets made by George
Thomason, and fortunately preserved in the British Museum, is very well
known. Just such another of its kind is Wodrow's, made up of the
pamphlets, broadsides, pasquinades, and other fugitive pieces of his own
day, and of the generation immediately preceding. These are things
easily obtained in their freshness, but the term fugitive is too
expressive of their nature, and after a generation or two they have all
flown away, save those which the book-hunter has exorcised into the
vaults of some public collection. There is perhaps too little done in
our own day in preserving for posterity these mute witnesses of our
sayings and doings. They are too light and volatile to be caught by the
Copyright Act, which so carefully deposits our quartos and octavos in
the privileged libraries. It is pleasant, by the way, at this moment, to
observe that the eminent scholar who has charge of the chief portion of
Wodrow's gatherings, as keeper of the Advocates' Library, is following
his example, by preserving a collection of the pamphlets of the present
century which will keep our posterity in employment, if they desire to
unwind the intricacies of all our civil and ecclesiastical sayings and
doings.
Wodrow carried on an active correspondence about matters of contemporary
policy, and the special inquiries connected with his History: selections
from this mass have furnished three sturdy volumes. Besides pamphlets,
he scraped together quantities of other people's manuscripts--some of
them rising high enough in importance to be counted State papers. How
the minister of the quiet rural parish of Eastwood could have got his
hands on them is a marvel, but it is fortunate that they were saved from
destruction; and it is nearly equally fortunate that they have been well
ransacked by zealous club-book makers, who have by this time probably
exhausted the better part of their material. In the next place, Wodrow
left behind several biographies of eminent members of his own Church,
its saints and martyrs; and goodly masses out of this storehouse have
also been printed.
But by far the most luxurious morsel in the worthy man's intellectual
larder was not intended to reach the profane vulgar, but destined for
his own special rumination. It consists in the veritable contents of his
private note-books, containing his communings with his own heart and his
imagination. They were written on small slips of paper, in a hand direly
cramped and minute; and lest this should not be a sufficient protection
to their privacy, a portion was committed to certain ciphers, which
their ingenious inventor deemed, no doubt, to be utterly impregnable. In
stenography, however, the art of lock-picking always keeps ahead of the
art of locking, as that of inventing destructive missiles seems to
outstrip that of forging impenetrable plates. Wodrow's trick was the
same as that of Samuel Pepys, and productive of the same
consequences--the excitement of a rabid curiosity, which at last found
its way into the recesses of his secret communings. They are now
printed, in the fine type of the Maitland Club, in four portly quartos,
under the title, Wodrow's Analecta. Few books would hold out so much
temptation to a commentator, but their editor is dumb, faithfully
reprinting the whole, page by page, and abstaining both from
introduction and explanatory foot-note.
Perhaps in the circumstances this was a prudent measure. Those who enjoy
the weaknesses of the enthusiastic historian have them at full length.
As to others partially like-minded with him, but more worldly, who would
rather that such a tissue of absurdities had not been revealed, they are
bound over to silence, seeing that a word said against the book is a
word of reproach against its idolised author--for as to the editor, he
may repeat after Macbeth, "Thou canst not say I did it."
Mr Buckle's ravenous researches into the most distant recesses of
literature revealed to him this pose. He has taken some curious
specimens out of it, but he might have made his anthology still richer
had he been in search of the picturesque and ludicrous, instead of
seeking solid support for his great theory of positivism. What he
chiefly amuses one with in this part of the world, however, is the
solemn manner in which he treats the responsibility of giving increased
publicity to such things, and invokes the Deity to witness that his
objects are sincere, and he is influenced by no irreverence. This
feeling may arise from a very creditable source, but a native of
Scotland has difficulty in understanding it. In this country, being, as
many of us have been, within the very skirts of the great contests that
have shaken the realm--Jacobitism on the one hand and Covenantism on the
other--we are roughened and hardened, and what shocks our sensitive
neighbours is very good fun to ourselves.
It appears that Wodrow had intended to publish a book on remarkable
special providences--something of a scientific character it was to be,
containing a classification of their phenomena, perhaps a theory of
their connection with revealed religion. The natural laws by which they
are ruled, he could not, of course, have sought to discover, since the
principle on which he set out predicated the non-existence of such laws.
The advantage of the peep enjoyed into his private note-book is, that we
have his incompleted inquiries containing the stories as to which even
he--a very poor adept at scepticism--required some confirmation. It is
quite evident that we thus have something more valuable to philosophy,
and infinitely more amusing, than his completed labours would have been.
Here, for instance, is one of his break-downs--an interesting
phenomenon, but not irrefragably proved.
"This day I have an accompt from Marion Stevenson, who says she had it
from one who was witness to it, that near Dunglass there was a child
found upon the highway by some shearers, to their uptaking lately born;
and they brought it to the next house, where the woman putting on the
pan to make some meat for it, the pan filled full of corn; and when she
turned it out and put it on the second time, it filled full of bear; and
when put on the third time, it filled full of blood; and upon this the
child began to alter its shapes some way, and to speak, and told them
this year should have great plenty, and the next year also, but the
third the land should be filled with blood and fire and sword! and the