The Fanatic Read online

  The Fanatic

  James Robertson

  Dedication

  for Ange

  Epigraph

  In that same year 1670 was that monster of men and reproach of mankind (for otherwayes I cannot stile him), Major Weir, for most horrible witchcraft, Incest, Bestiality, and other enorme crymes, at first contest by himselfe (his conscience being awakned by the terrors of the Almightie), but afterwards faintly denied by him, brunt. So sad a spectacle he was of humane frailty that I think no history can parallell the like. We saw him the fornoon before he died, but he could be drawen to no sense of a mercifull God, so horribly was he lost to himselfe. The thing that aggravated his guilt most was the pretext and show of godlinesse wt which he had even to that tyme deceived the world. His sister also was but a very lamentable object … She was hanged.

  —Journals of Sir John Lauder, Lord Fountainhall, with his observations on public affairs and other memoranda 1665–1676

  This is the world’s old age; it is declining; albeit it seems a fine and beautiful thing in the eyes of them that know no better, and unto those who are of yesterday and know nothing it looks as if it had been created yesterday, yet the truth is, and a believer knows, it is near the grave.

  —From a sermon by Hugh Binning (1627–53), minister of Govan

  The wild heads of the tyme do dream,

  There’s a world in the moon,

  O, to deceive if I were trier,

  For heir will trust me none.

  —Lines from a satirical poem on Archbishop James Sharp, c.1667, Analecta Scotica

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue (Bass Rock, March 1677)

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Linlithgow, September 1645

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Edinburgh, September 1656

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Edinburgh, April 1677

  Edinburgh, April 1997/October 1987

  Bass Rock, April 1677/Edinburgh, December 1666

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Rotterdam, January 1667

  Edinburgh, April 1997/July 1668

  Edinburgh, February 1670

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Bass Rock, April 1677/Kippen, November 1673

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Bass Rock, June 1677/Edinburgh, April 1670

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Edinburgh, January 1676

  Bass Rock, July 1677

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Edinburgh, September 1677

  Edinburgh, 12 April 1670

  Edinburgh, 1 May 1997

  Edinburgh, 1 May 1997/January 1678

  Edinburgh, 10, 11 January 1678

  Edinburgh, 1 May 1997

  Edinburgh, May 1997

  Edinburgh, 2 May 1997

  Portobello, 2 May 1997

  A Historical Note and Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  (Bass Rock, March 1677)

  James Mitchel was dreaming. The kind of dream that mocks, constantly slipping in doubts: this is real, this is not real.

  In the dream he was awake and lying in bed. The room was heavy and warm with the smell of woman. A great sadness was welling up in him. He lay there in the growing light and felt the sadness rise from the pit of his belly, a physical thing, spreading through his chest and to his throat till he thought he would have to cry out. But he didn’t; he didn’t want to wake her. Elizabeth. Aye, it was her right enough, he could hear her regular breathing. He heard his own breath, the air passing against the hair of his nostrils, a sound that was of him and yet not of him. Like the sound of your voice when you put your fingers in your lugs. Like the sound of the sea in a shell.

  The dawn squeezed into the room. He reached out for Lizzie, and felt cold stone. Suddenly he felt fully, really awake. He turned his head and she wasn’t there. He knew then that they would never touch again. My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. He wanted to scream or just to greet quietly but the constriction in his throat prevented it, would only allow a whimper.

  He was lying in a tiny, damp cell that smelt of salt and urine. Daylight inched its dwaiblie way in and gave up. His bed was a wooden shelf hard up against the stone. He was alone. His right leg oozed pain.

  He fell away again. Now he dreamt a face staring at him, evil, a bishop’s face sneering and cold beneath its black skull-cap. Mitchel stared back, refusing to flinch. But then there was another figure, darker and larger, wearing a hood with holes cut for the eyes. The figure reached for him, almost tenderly; lifted his right leg at the ankle, and laid it out straight as if streeking a corpse. Mitchel clamped his teeth together. He was seated in a chair, his arms bound behind him, his leg boxed like a planted sapling. The hooded man turned away, then back again. He was holding an iron-headed mallet in one hand, and a wooden wedge in the other.

  The leg convulsed and Mitchel woke again. He sat upright. Through the wall he could hear a man reading from the Psalms: O my God, my soul is cast down within me; therefore will I remember thee from the land of Jordan. Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. Yet the Lord will command his loving kindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life …

  Mitchel minded where he was.

  He was Maister James Mitchel, MA, preacher, tutor, soldier and sword of Christ, prisoner of the King. His enemies called him by a different set of names: fanatic, enthusiastical villain, disaffected rebel, assassin. He had been tortured to extract a confession for a crime he did not consider a crime, an act committed in the service of Christ. His wife Elizabeth was fifteen miles away in Edinburgh. He was incarcerated in the stinking prison of the Bass Rock off the east coast of Scotland, and he did not expect ever to be free again.

  He shared the Rock with half a dozen others, also of the godly party, but they would hardly speak to him. Some thought him foolish, wrong-headed, ignorant; and some among them blamed him for having enraged the government and brought its wrath upon their heads. He had been in the Bass nearly two months and if he did not remain till he died it would only be because he had been fetched back to Edinburgh for execution.

  His leg was a thrawn limb, in more ways than one. Under the torture of the ‘boots’ it had been so mangled and crushed that it was now not much more than an encumbrance. Even more than a year later he could put little weight upon it. The external injuries had healed, after a fashion, but it remained mere pulp within. It might as well have been missing altogether for all the use it was, and yet it refused to let him be. The pulsing and throbbing might start at any time in the day or night, and cease just as suddenly. It was like having a dog gripped onto him, a sleeping dog that woke hungry from time to time and gnawed at him as if meat and marrow were all he was.

  Nine strokes of the mallet he had suffered. The number was hammered into his brain like iron studs in an oak door. He would wake sweating in the night from a dream of himself crushed into a coffin, unable to move, while some demonic servitor, having transported him thus like a living dead man, chapped nine dirling blows at the gates of Hell. Even though Mitchel knew that he was destined not for that place but for Heaven, the memory drove spikes of fire through his ruined leg.

  It was ironic that the man who had caused his suffering, the man in the black skull-cap, had not even been present at the torture. James Sharp, Archbishop of St Andrews, had been in London at the time, but Mitchel did not absolve him on that score. Nobody was loathed by an entire people as Sharp was. The
minister of Crail who had been so strong, apparently, in defence of Scotland’s Covenant with God; who had been sent by the Kirk to negotiate with King Charles in the year of his Restoration to the throne, and ensure the maintenance of Presbyterianism; who had gone to London to put down bishops and come back an archbishop … Judas Sharp, traitor of traitors. At Mitchel’s torture, some of those on the committee of counsellors and judges appointed to interrogate him had hidden their faces from him when he was brought before them in the vaulted room below the Parliament house in Edinburgh. They feared reprisals if his sympathisers got word of who they were, or they were conscious of their own guilt, or both. To Mitchel, Sharp was no more absent from the laich chamber than those other men were made invisible by covering their eyes. It might just as well have been St Andrews himself, and not the public executioner, hammering the wedges home.

  Sharp should have been dead and Mitchel free. Mitchel had had his chance to kill him nine years before, but something had taken it from him, either his own hesitation or God’s finger spoiling his aim. And part of the rage that Mitchel felt was that he still did not know which.

  Through the wall of the cell the voice read on from the next Psalm: Judge me, o God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation: O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man. Mitchel would have said Amen loudly to that but it was the minister James Fraser of Brea reading in his distinctive northern accent, and Fraser, though they had been brought together under the same guard from Edinburgh, had remained cool and disdainful of Mitchel because he thought his grasp of Holy Scripture suspect. Fraser was gentry, the son of a bankrupt Highland laird. A pox on him, Mitchel thought.

  He concentrated on his leg instead, seizing the knee with both hands and pressing as hard as he could with his long, bony fingers. Sometimes he could drive the hurt downwards in this manner. He did not understand why this worked, since the damage was concentrated at the knee and below, nor could he recall how he had learnt it as a method of controlling the leg’s contumacy. He had tried everything, though, and by trial and error his hands had refined their haphazard skills. Sometimes he spoke aloud, mockingly, like a preacher excommunicating a malignant royalist: Thou art a girning apostate dog of a leg. He had a fantasy in which he imagined his leg being cast into eternal hellfire come the day of Christ’s judgment, while he ascended, hopping, to Heaven. A less than perfect saint among the saints.

  He thought it was not blasphemous to contemplate this scenario in an effort to stem the floods of pain that the leg brought upon him. In fact, the idea of being unique in Heaven appealed to him. They would honour him there for his suffering. Christ Jesus knew him to be true: Jesus knew that he believed his Word, that legless or not he would be remade whole and glorious in the everlasting kingdom.

  All Christ’s good bairns go to heaven with a broken brow, and with a crooked leg. He minded that. It was a line from a book he had once possessed, the letters of Samuel Rutherford, a book that had been loathed by the government and burnt by the hangman for its righteousness and truth. Mitchel’s copy was long since lost, but he had loved and treasured it, and still had whole passages by heart. Rutherford was like a second Bible to him. He took dry comfort from that sentence. The crooked leg he had already, and the brow would be broken soon enough.

  He clutched his arms around himself and tried to squeeze out the cold. It felt like the sea itself had got into his bones. Outside he could hear the solan geese screaming. The Bass was home to thousands of the birds. They had arrived from wherever they spent the winter – Africa, some said – about the same time as Mitchel. The air was filled with their wheeling and pitching and screaming as they built their nests and pierced the sea for fish. He minded the approach to the Rock by boat, seeing the great streaks of shit down its hulk, its cliffs smoored white and green with the droppings of centuries. The swell of the sea sucked and belched against the foot of it, where steps had been cut leading up to the prison buildings. He had come there from Edinburgh a year after the torture, having lain in chains for most of that time in the city Tolbooth. Twelve horse and thirty foot soldiers had brought him, together with James Fraser, on a bitter day at the end of January. Soldiers had helped him from the boat and oxtered him up the steps and dumped him in this icy chamber, wrapped in a blanket, feverish and shuddering.

  In the first week of his being there his fellow-prisoners had tried to mend his leg and restore his physical strength, but the best they could offer was their prayers. They were ragged, slate-faced men, scrunted and thin, and bent, like the handful of wizened cherry trees that grew at the top of the Bass, by the constant buffeting of the wind. Then these men withdrew from him by degrees, because they could not reconcile themselves to the vehemence of his will. Mitchel knew that they thought him embittered, even deranged. But he saw through their weakness: he had only carried the principles that they all upheld – the right of God’s people to resist unholy rule, the duty of God’s Scotland to defend the Covenant against prelatic blasphemy – to their logical conclusion. What they shied away from was their own fear: they were afraid to strike the righteous blow, to be the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.

  Because of his leg, he had spent nearly all of the two months lying helpless in his cell. There was no possibility of escape from the Bass, which was sheer and devoid of landing-places on three sides and heavily fortified at the one spot on the fourth where a boat, in calm weather and with a favouring tide, could come in; and so the prisoners were allowed, one or two at a time, to walk everywhere upon it. But this was no advantage to him, crippled as he was. In any case, he was subject to special, more restrictive orders.

  Some of the others, in fine weather, or even in wet, cold-blasting storms, spent more time out stravaiging among the solans than in the company of each other. Alexander Peden, the prophet of Galloway, had been there nearly four years, and Alexander Forrester and William Bell, arrested for field-preaching in Fife and in the Pentland Hills, almost as long; James Fraser had arrived on the same boat with Mitchel, and shortly after had come another minister from the north, Thomas Hog of Kiltearn, and a man called George Scot, committed for harbouring fugitive ministers; and there was one Robert Dick, a merchant, who had organised and attended the Pentland conventicle at which William Bell had preached. Together or alone, standing among the pecking solans that moved like a crop of bleached barley in the stiff wind, these men could look across the narrow, impossible sea and dream of re-crossing it. The soldiers of the garrison used to joke that the ministers took lessons from the birds in whining and preaching, so that if they ever got back to Scotland they could deave the whole country with their piousness.

  The solans’ screaming never ceased. It sometimes sounded to Mitchel, who could only get to his door and back again, as though the cell must be the only place in the world not filled with birds. A madman would think the constant racket was inside his head. Several times a day Mitchel made a conscious effort to separate the white bird noise from his thoughts; to reclaim his mind from it.

  For in his dreams, behind the skull-capped bishop and the hooded torturer, there lurked a third figure, an old man, also a prisoner. Mitchel laboured at his prayers and his Bible because when his mind grew slack this old man approached. He had long white hair damp with seaspray and the skin of his face looked like it had been eaten away by years of salt. More years than Mitchel could bear to think of. He feared the old man; the doubt and self-loathing in his milky eyes. He knew who it was, and it was not himself; but he feared becoming him.

  Sometimes in rough weather supplies of food could not be got across from North Berwick for a week or more. In February the prisoners – and the soldiers who guarded them – had been reduced to mixing snow with oatmeal, and chewing on dried fish. The soldiers would sometimes catch fish from the sea, nail them to wooden boards and then float the boards on ropes under the cliffs. A diving solan, spotting the herring, would impale the wood with its beak and be hauled in to be roasted, but these adult birds, some of them twenty years old or
more, were tough and oily meat. It was better to eat the fish.

  In late summer, men would come to catch the solan chicks, when they were fat and tender but not yet able to fly. Hundreds were taken every year, and sent to London as a delicacy, and yet the colony showed no signs of decreasing in numbers. When the catchers were at work with their nets on the upper part of the Rock, or descending on ropes to knock the flightless chicks on the heads and fling them into the sea, where other men waited to pick them up from a boat, it was like watching Satan’s helpers harvesting souls.

  The captain of the garrison administered this business on behalf of the governor, in return for an annual salary and a percentage of the profits. The governor was the Secretary of State for Scotland, John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale. The solan crop was worth around eighty pounds annually. But, this aside, neither he nor anybody else cared much how the captain exercised his power. If he chose, the captain could shut the prisoners in their cells and deny them access to the meagre criss-cross of paths that usually they could share with the birds and the two dozen scabby sheep that grazed the upper slopes of the Rock. He could put a stop to mutual prayers, or prevent visits from friends or family, some of whom travelled for days to reach North Berwick. There was no set of rules, no higher arbitrator to whom the prisoners could apply: the Bass fortress lay off Scotland as impregnable and cold to human comfort as a castle in the moon.

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Hugh Hardie needed a ghost: one that would appear down a half-lit close at ten o’clock at night, and have people jumping out of their skins. He also needed a drink. He was seated at a table in Dawson’s, while Jackie Halkit was up at the bar getting it for him. The drink, he thought, might be business or it might be pleasure. He hoped both.