HISTORICAL INCIDENTS AFTER THE RESTORA TION. I01
was permitted to retain arms in his possession without a warrant from the Privy Council ;
and religious persecution was carried to such a length, that the people were driven to
open rebellion. ‘(The King’s Majesty resolved
to settle the Church government in Scotland,” but the settlement thereof proved a
much more impracticable affair than he anticipated. One of the first steps towards the
accomplishment of this, was the consecration of Bishops, which took place on the 7th
of May 1662, in the Abbey Church of Holyrood. On the following day, the Parliament
assembled, and the Bishops were restored to their ancient privileges as members of
that body. They all assembled in the house of the Archbishop of St Andrews, at the
Nether Bow, from whence they walked in procession, in their Episcopal robes, attended
by the magistrates and nobles, and were received at the Parliament House with every
show of honour.’
The annals of Edinburgh, for some years after this, are chiefly occupied with the
barbarous executions of the Presbyterian Nonconformists ; in 1663, Lord Warriston,
an eminent lawyer and statesman, who had taken refuge in France, was delivered up by
Louis XIV. to Charles 11. He was sent to Edinburgh for trial, and, though tottering on
the brink of the grave, was condemned and executed for his adherence to the Covenant ;
the only mitigation of the usual sentence was, permission to inter his mutilated corpse in
the Grepfriars’ Churchyard. Others of humbler rank were speedily subjected to the
same mockefy of justice, torture being freely applied when other evidence failed, so that
the Grassmarket, which was then the scene of public executions, has acquired an interest
of a peculiar character, from the many heroic victims of intolerance who there laid down
their lives in defence of liberty of conscience.
The’Bishops, as the recognised heads of the ecclesiastical system, in whose name these
tyrannical acts were perpetrated, became thereby the objects of the most violent popular
hate. In 1668, Archbishop Sharp was shot at, as he sat in his coach at the head of Blackfriars’
Wynd. The Bishop of Orkney was stepping in at the moment, and received five
balls in different parts of his body, while the Archbishop, for whom they were intended,
escaped unhurt. The most rigid search was immediately instituted for the assassin. The
gates of the city were closed, and none allowed to pass without leave from a magistrate ;
yet he contrived, by a clever disguise, to elude their vigilance, and effect his escape, Six
years afterwards, the Primate recognised in one Mitchell, a fanatic preacher who eyed
him narrowly, the featura .of the person who fled from his coach after discharging the shot
which wounded the Bishop of Orkney. He was immediately seized, and a loaded pistol
found on him, but, notwithstanding these presumptive proofs of guilt, no other evidence
could be brought against him, and his trial exhibits little regard to any principle of
morality or justice. He was put to the torture, without eliciting any confession from
him ; and at length, in 1676, two years after his apprehension, he was brought from the
Bass, and executed at the Grassmarket, in order to strike terror into the minds of the
Covenanters.*
The year 1678 is memorable in the annals of the good town, as having closed the career
of one of its most noted characters, the celebrated wizard, Najor Weir. The spot on
The consequence of all this is well known.
.
Bicol’s Diary, p. 366. ’ Arnot, p, 148. Wodrew’a Hkt., TOL i. pp. 875, 613.
