Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
This letter shows that Burns had already been taken up, as the phrase goes, by the élite of Edinburgh; and it shows also and quite as clearly in the tone of quiet banter, that he was little likely to lose his head by the notice taken of him. To the Earl of Glencairn, mentioned in it, he had been introduced probably by Mr.
Accordingly, with the flower of their vassals and retainers, besides Argyle and Glencairn, came many of the nobles; and having protested their detestation of the conduct of the Queen, they entered into a Solemn League and Covenant, wherein they rehearsed, as causes for their confederating against the misrule with which the kingdom was so humbled, that the Scottish people were abhorred and vilipendit amongst all Christian nations; declaring that they would never desist till they had revenged the foul murder of the King, rescued the Queen from her thraldom to the Earl of Bothwell, and dissolved her ignominious marriage.
The Earl of Mar, the young prince's tutor, Argyll, Athol, Glencairn, Lindley, Boyd, and even Morton and Maitland themselves, those eternal accomplices of Bothwell, rose, they said, to avenge the death of the king, and to draw the son from hands which had killed the father and which were keeping the mother captive.
For the same night letters were sent to the Earl of Murray from divers of the nobility, entreating him to return forthwith; and my grandfather, at the incitement of the Earl of Argyle, was secretly sent by his patron Glencairn to beg the friends of the state and the lawful prince, the son whom the Queen had born to her murdered husband, to meet without delay at Stirling.
I have the advice of some very judicious friends among the literati here, but with them I sometimes find it necessary to claim the privilege of thinking for myself. The noble Earl of Glencairn, to whom I owe more than to any man, does me the honour of giving me his strictures; his hints, with respect to impropriety or indelicacy, I follow implicitly.
Their retreat was known to the shepherds of the district, and indeed to the whole family of Auchincairn; but no one ever was suspected of imitating the conduct of the infamous Baxter, who had proved false, and discovered a cave in Glencairn, where four Covenanters were immediately shot, and two left hanging upon a tree.
He chose only his late supporters: Glencairn who raised his standard in 1653; Rothes, a humorous and not a cruel voluptuary; and, as Secretary for Scotland in London, Lauderdale, who had urged him to take the Covenant, and who for twenty years was to be his buffoon, his favourite, and his wavering and unscrupulous adviser.
But as my grandfather was not with them in those raids, being sent on the night of the great demolition at St Andrews to apprise the Earl of Glencairn, his patron, of the extremities to which matters had come there, it belongs not to the scope of my story to tell what ensued, farther than that from Perth the Congregation proceeded to Stirling, where they demolished the monasteries; then they went to Lithgow, and herret the nests of the locusts there; and proceeding bravely on, purging the realm as they went forward, they arrived at Edinburgh, and constrained the Queen Regent, who was before them with her forces there, to pack up her ends and her awls, and make what speed she could with them to Dunbar.
As several of her children had died in infancy, she earnestly sought that the Lord would give her a child, who would not only be an heir of glory, but who might live to serve God in his generation. Her prayer was heard and graciously answered. The son of her vows was born at Moniaive, in the parish of Glencairn, Gallowayshire, on the 15th of February, 1662.
Well, in full, it is John Robin Ross-Ellison Ilderim Dost Mahommed Mir Hafiz Ullah Khan, and its explanation is my descent from General Ross-Ellison, Laird of Glencairn, and from Mir Faquir Mahommed Afzul Khan, Jam of Mekran Kot". In Piccadilly, wearing the garb of Piccadilly, he looked an Englishman of the English.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking