The Fanatic. James Robertson

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       10th day of Januar 1678 – I am just now returned from the tryal of James Mitchel at the Criminall Court. He was pannelled for attempting the life of the Archbischop of St Androis. This tryal is the sum and end of many bad things, that I have sein and heard thir last ten years, whilk I maun putt doune tho I fear to doe it. Unsemely and stinking are the wayes emploied to sicker this man’s doom, but soe is al thats gane befoir. I am sweert to write anent this afair in my other journal. This is ane new and secret book.

       It is ane yeir since Mitchel was putt to the Bass, and but nine month since I socht leave to see him there from my father in law Lord Abbotshall …

       Edinburgh, April 1677

      Sir Andrew Ramsay, Lord Abbotshall, till lately Lord Provost of Edinburgh, considered leaving his long, luxurious wig on the stand where he had placed it earlier, while looking over his accounts. It was a very fine wig, thick and lavishly curled, but it made his head hot and got in the way when he was trying to read. Still, he did not really like to be seen without it; he was approaching sixty, and the wig gave his large face a dignity it otherwise lacked. Without his expensive clothes and headpiece he might have been taken for a publican or a shopkeeper. Not that Sir Andrew had anything against publicans and shopkeepers; on the contrary, he was their prince. Or, at least, he once had been.

      He was expecting his son-in-law and although John Lauder was family, Sir Andrew still liked to impress his formidable personality upon the younger man. He stood up, took the wig and, in front of a mirror, carefully lowered it onto his head. He laid the ends of it over his ample shoulders and briefly admired himself, large, sedate and solemn in the glass. That was his style in these times of wild ranters and gaunt rebels. Some might think him fat and graceless, but he saw himself as a dancing-master; nobody could jouk and birl like Sir Andrew Ramsay when it came to politics. He was the great survivor. ‘Andra, ye’re a richt continuum,’ a friend had recently told him. And there was no better evidence of his political brilliance than the fact that, over three decades of war, religious upheaval and governments of utterly different complexions, he had become progressively and irresistibly more and more rich.

      He cleared his throat with a grumble of self-approval, and sat back down to his books, his dreams of political intrigue, and his decanter of brandy. He was a merchant, the godfather of the city’s trade, and a laird with extensive properties in Fife and Haddingtonshire. He had served as provost under two regimes, first during the Commonwealth and then after the Restoration, when it suited the new government to install someone with a proven record, rather than trust to the vagaries of council elections. Once he had consolidated a power base on the council, elections were reintroduced and proceeded without alarm. Sir Andrew managed to remain Lord Provost year after year as if, like some portly extension of the royal prerogative, he had been restored to a throne of his own.

      Being a man with his own interests at heart he was as amenable to receiving bribes as he was adept at making them. He’d had a knighthood from King Charles, which discreetly obscured the one he’d received from the usurper Oliver Cromwell. Other honours accrued like interest. He was a Member of Parliament, Privy Counsellor and Commissioner of Exchequer. In 1671 he had achieved a further triumph: he was made a judge, an appointment for which he had no merit and only one qualification. His patron Lauderdale, the Secretary of State for Scotland, had raised him to the bench as Lord Abbotshall, although they both despised the law’s proclaimed adherence to that kittle principle, justice. That was the qualification.

      It was not a bad record of worldly achievement but there was no doubt about it: what Sir Andrew called management and his enemies called corruption was an exhausting business, and he was no longer young. For years he’d stayed one step ahead of the pack, cajoling here, wheedling there, showing a palm of gold one minute and a fist of iron the next. Sometimes he could be charm itself in the council chambers; other times he would blow in like a gale, driving all opposition before him. Once he’d even had to organise a riot in the street outside the council windows to emphasise his opinion. After twelve successful elections to the provostship, Sir Andrew had had just about enough of Edinburgh.

      And then, too, there had been the strained relationship with the Duke of Lauderdale, who’d been breathing down his neck on account of complaints about the competence, even the legality, of some of his decisions in the Court of Session. Finally, three years ago, Lauderdale had suggested that it was time to pull his finger from the fat pie of provostry, that his short stay on the bench must also come to an end, and that he should spend more time with his family at Kirkcaldy. The provost demurred. Lauderdale insisted, and Sir Andrew reluctantly resigned.

      But as his glory days were fading, he liked nothing better than to recount them, to anybody who would listen. His son-in-law, John Lauder, who owed him much in terms of placement and preferment, usually had no option but to lend an ear. It was a source of satisfaction to Sir Andrew to have a lawyer on the receiving end of his reminiscences: as a judge he had been deaved with lawyers’ arguments long enough in court, and their contempt for his ignorance was only matched by his hatred of their souple-tongued smugness.

      Not that John was by any means the worst. That prize would have to go to his cousins the John Eleises, father and son. The father was in his sixties now, and not so active, but the son was even more offensive, a subversive do-gooder who seemed to show no fear of his betters in arguing against them in favour of outed ministers, rebels and witches. It was Eleis who, with his mentor Sir George Lockhart, had been a ringleader of the advocates in 1674, when forty-nine of them had been debarred from practising because they dared to insist that they could appeal to parliament against decisions made by the Lords of Session, in spite of a royal edict forbidding it. Sir Andrew, though he had by then resigned from the bench, had been outraged by the presumption of these meddling pleaders.

      He could not abide the younger Eleis, who had even dragged John Lauder into the advocates’ dispute. John had foolishly stood on a principle as one of the forty-nine, and had been banished out of town to Haddington for more than a year until a compromise was reached: without sufficient advocates, the procedures of the courts ground almost to a halt, and the forty-nine were grudgingly readmitted.

      It was a great misfortune that John Lauder was infatuated with Eleis’s devotion to the principles and process of law: it had got him into trouble and would do so again. Nevertheless, Sir Andrew was fond of his daughter’s husband. He and Janet had been married nine years and provided him with five grandchildren to date. Lauder was only thirty, an open-minded, modest man who could yet be moulded.

      The Lauders stayed in the Lawnmarket, a stone’s throw from the courts. Sir Andrew’s residence in town was also at the upper end of the hill, but it was not the power-house it had once been. He still made huge amounts of money from various bits of business, and his accounts showed that the Toun itself owed him nearly two thousand pounds in rents and other debts, but he was no longer the driving-force of municipal commerce and enterprise, and folk no longer queued for an audience with him. More and more, he was taking Lauderdale’s advice and spending time at Abbotshall, across the Firth and away from the scenes of his past triumphs. A visit from his son-in-law, then, was not unwelcome, although it was fairly unusual. Their relationship was easy enough but there would always lie between them the shoogling-bog of their differences regarding the law. It was something they stepped around as a rule, to avoid an embarrassing slip on either side; especially on Sir Andrew’s, since he had been so very bad at law and John was very good.

      Today however it was John who was on the uncertain ground. He had come with a set of questions anent the Bass Rock and the black dogs that lay in it. He had been down in East Lothian often, sometimes visiting the Ramsay policies at Wauchton, and of course all the while he was in exile at Haddington the coast had been just a short ride away. He had seen the Bass stark in the great grey sea, but had not ventured across to it. The tide or the winds had always conspired against him. Now he was wondering about a trip to view the prison: ‘Would my lord Lauderdale object tae my gaein ower, dae ye think? I wouldna want tae gie offence by speirin if it was only tae be refusit.’

      ‘Whit