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in his possession; but pled that at the time libelled he had been commanded by the Earl of Angus, then Lieutenant of the Borders, to accompany him thither to a Justice Court to be held at Peebles on October 9 and 10, and that consequently he, Sir James, did na wrang to provide himself of armour' upon the preceding day. He further pled-and this plea, Pitcairn notes, affords a striking illustration of the original use of the word 'servitour' that he was, at that time, domestic servitour and proper depender upon my Lord of Angus, like as he was divers years of before,' which statement, he adds, is offered to be verified presently by my Lord of Angus's own declaration, wha is personally 'present.' The prosecutor, however, would not listen to these pleas. The accused, he said, did not live within the bounds of Angus's lieutenaney, and the place where the crime is libelled to be committed' was in the highway between Niddrie and Kirkliston, in the county of Linlithgowconsequently a long way from the Borders. He, moreover, could not accept the Earl of Angus as an admissible witness for the accused, seeing that Sir James was so nearly related to his lordship baith in affinity and consanguinity.' Sir James, at this stage, withdrew his pleas, and referred himself to the king's mercy; and we hear no more of the matter.

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The trial is, of itself, of little moment; but, as already remarked, it is noticeable for two things. In the first place, it affords an instance of the eagerness with which the younger sons of the lesser barons and gentry attached themselves to the households of the higher barons, doubtless in the hope of thereby finding a ready way to promotion and office. The situation bears no analogy to that implied in our modern use of the word 'servitor.' In this case we have a knight, a man of good birth and rank, designating himself as Lord Angus's 'domestic servitour,' and a 'proper depender' upon his lordship. Sir James's relationship to his lordship both by 'affinity and consanguinity' is also obvious, for both of them were, apart from whatever other ties of pedigree, closely related to the family of the Oliphants; the Countess of Angus being the fourth Lord Oliphant's daughter, and Katherine Oliphant, the mother of Sir James, being the same Lord. Oliphant's sister. We have already seen that Katherine Oliphant was a 'prudent dame,' said to have provided an estate for her son out of her pin-money; and probably one other way she took to advance her boy's fortune was to have him placed in the service of her kinsman Lord Angus. But the chief point of interest brought out in the trial is the

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relation in which Sir James, the son of a leading Protestant, stood to Lord Angus, who with Errol and Huntley formed, shortly before, the head and front of the popish party militant in Scotland. Only a few years previous to this time, Angus and his followers were openly in arms against King James, and they even defeated the king's forces under Argyll at Glenlivet so recently as October 1594. But in the end the 'popish lords' had to yield, though not till their estates had been forfeited and their lives placed in deadly peril. Only eighteen months before the date of the above trial, Angus was still an 'excommunicat papist,' and it was only when compelled by the force of circumstances that he, along with Errol and Huntley, underwent the ordeal of a public conversion and recantation in St. Nicholas's Church, Aberdeen, and so was received into the fold of Presbytery, that he was restored to the favour of the king. When, therefore, Sir James Dundas pleads before the Court that he was then Angus's 'domestic servitour' and proper depender,' as he had been for divers years' before, are we to infer that Sir James was united with the earl in his political schemes for the restoration of the ancient faith, and that he had taken part with Angus in his rebellion? The evidence before us is not sufficient to warrant an affirmative conclusion; but we should have been glad if the family papers had thrown any light upon a situation which offers to the curious reader a good many points of interest and enquiry. It would not have been at all strange had this divergence in the family politics been found to exist. For it was then indeed a time of marvellous trimming and setting of sails among the Scottish nobles and gentry. There was the English influence on the one side, and the French influence on the other. There was, besides, an unintermittent flow of natural jealousies through all the precincts of the Scottish Court itself, by which sometimes a whole party of nobles, sometimes even the king himself, had been wellnigh overwhelmed. The raid of Ruthven was not long past, and already the Gowrie conspiracy was in the air. Even the Reformation itself was only a thing of a generation; and amidst all these clashings of self-interest and personal ambi

* At the General Assembly held at Edinburgh in August 1588, Sir James's father, the Laird of Dundas, was one of an important deputation appointed to wait upon the king in person, and convey the thanks of the Assembly to his majesty. (Calderwood's History,' vol. iv. p. 684.)

tion and unscrupulous partisanship, it was scarcely to be wondered at that, constituted as human nature is, there should always have been men, and families, and sections of families, holding themselves in diverse attitudes of watchfulness and unrest, not knowing which way, when the storm came, the tree should fall.

At the date of the trial in question, Angus had made his peace with the king and been restored to office; and James's accession to the English throne a few years thereafter probably put an end to what necessity existed on the part of many of keeping a loose hold on the reformed religion. If Sir James Dundas ever did hang for a time between two opinions a point which is only matter of speculation, not of knowledge-the occasion for it soon ceased to exist, and up to the time of his death in 1628 he seems to have lived quietly on his own estate, following after the religion of his father. His son James, by whom he was succeeded, was at the time of his death but a child of eight years. When this second James arrived at manhood, there was no doubt as to the principles, political and religious, to which he adhered; and in the course of his career throughout the troubled period of the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and after, he exhibited a self-denying integrity of character, a noble and conscientious devotion to principle, such as reflects honour upon any family and upon any individual. His mother was a daughter of George Home of Wedderburn, and appears, during her son's minority, to have exercised over him a kind and loving control, not unmindful of his interests both material and moral. Like his father, he was educated at St. Andrews University; and when he arrived at maturity, he warmly espoused the cause of the Presbyterians.

Charles I. when he had visited Scotland in 1633, and been formally crowned at Holyrood, left behind him among his Scottish subjects a good many bitter seeds of discontent. He brought against himself the hostility of his nobles by desiring them to restore to the Church a portion of the property of which at the Reformation they had deprived it; and he likewise provoked the opposition of the clergy and the common people by seeking to force upon them certain hateful changes in the Church services and Church ritual. The king was right, and he was wrong. The claim upon the nobles was just and reasonable; the innovations upon the vestments of the clergy and the services of the Presbyterians were most unwise and undesirable. The end, as might have been expected, was a coalition between the nobles and the

clergy, which led to something like a constitutional struggle between the Scottish nation and the sovereign. It went on for years, culminating in 1638 in the first of the two famous Covenants, the National. This covenant was supported with marvellous unanimity; marvellous, in that it was a very rare thing in Scotland to find the nobles and the clergy acting in unison. Such unanimity had never been before, and has never been since. The nobles were moved with extraordinary zeal for the National Covenant; so much so, that, as Row tells us, many of the people called it the Noblemen's Covenant, for they stirred more about it nor the most of 'ministers did.' To this covenant James Dundas of Arniston adhibited his name; but few of his fellows among the gentry, whatever their zeal for the time, adhered to the principles embraced in that covenant with such unshaken constancy as we shall find Dundas doing. He signed it in 1639, when under twenty years of age.

6

In 1640 he was made an elder of the church, and so qualified to sit in the church courts; and in the following year he was married to a daughter of Robert, Lord Boyd. That same year, 1641, King Charles visited Scotland, and sought, by a few graceful concessions to the popular demands, to make his failure in the recent contest with his subjects look less like defeat. Among other things, he conferred honours upon Argyll, Warristoun, and other Presbyterian leaders; and it is some acknowledgement of the part which young Dundas was already taking in public affairs, that at this time the king conferred a knighthood upon him. For some years we do not find that he appears conspicuously in public affairs, though he was active in 1646 in taking order with a drunken minister' in the courts of Dalkeith Presbytery. In 1648 he was returned to the Scottish Parliament as one of the members for Midlothian; and in 1650 we learn that the Presbytery of Dalkeith were questioning him as to why he had not yet signed the second great historic charter of Scottish rights and religion, the Solemn League and Covenant. He stated that he had certain scruples whereof he desired to be resolved.' In the end he subscribed the Covenant, but for the next few years does not seem to have taken any leading part in the distracting events of the Commonwealth.

If Sir James Dundas had some hesitation in subscribing the Solemn League and Covenant, it was not from any want of fidelity to Presbyterian principles. This is rendered clear by what followed immediately upon the Restoration. That

event necessarily introduced many changes in the civic polity of Scotland, as Cromwell had swept away or metamorphosed the old law courts, appointing judges, chiefly Englishmen, in place of the old Scottish justices. Consequently when Charles II. resumed the crown, and the old order of things promised to be restored, there was, as might be expected, a somewhat keen competition among the leading Scotchmen for offices of place and power. Among these competitors was Sir James Dundas of Arniston. He wished to be appointed one of the lords of the Court of Session; and he had a friend at the English Court, Sir Alexander Hume, who undertook to bring his request under the king's notice. The king received it favourably, and after consulting with Middleton, who was then head of the Government in Scotland, conferred the appointment upon Dundas. The paragraph (pp. 23-4) in which the account of this transaction is given, is so very condensed as to be almost obscure. Mr. Omond has given no dates; does not say if Sir James Dundas ever took his seat as a judge; he does not even give the title which the judge assumed, but which we gather from the heading of the chapter was that of Lord Arniston.' The author has also neglected to tell us that Sir James was not a trained lawyer-a peculiarity in the appointment which, if it was not justifiable on any sound principles of government, renders it all the more a compliment to the individual on whom the honour was conferred. The fact of Sir James being a layman had also some bearing upon the final issue of a difficulty that shortly arose between him and the king.

The difficulty in question was due to the policy which Charles chose to pursue with regard to the religious establishment of Scotland. Sir James Dundas, as we have seen, had subscribed the Solemn League and Covenant; and so did also the king, in 1651, when he was crowned at Scone. But his Majesty, soon after the Restoration, resolved that this and the National Covenant should be abrogated, whether under pressure of his advisers, or from some religious impulse in his own mind, we need not discuss here. In this decision he was supported by his Scottish Council and by what was known as Middleton's Drunken Parliament.' No Christian king was ever beset by so mean a band of noblemen and advisers as Charles then had in Scotland. Lord Middleton had been a common trooper, and brought to the court the worst manners of the camp and the military canteen. Fletcher, the Lord Advocate, openly took bribes to thwart justice. Lauderdale, the Secretary, was an unprincipled

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