Extract from 'The Martyr Graves of Scotland'
Watching the bees, and talking of the times when the wild country around us was the refuge of the noble men who, at the price of many privations, and not seldom of their own lives, secured for us our present liberties, we came in view of the site of the loch that bears the name of the house we were soon to visit. Lochgoin Loch was an irregularly shaped sheet of water, covering about one hundred and forty acres. It was entirely artificial, and was first formed in 1828, for the purpose of supplying the mills at Kilmarnock with water. Some four or five years ago it was tapped dry, as the embankment was supposed to be insufficient, and its peaty bottom traversed by surface drains. The loch which formerly bore the name of Lochgoin lay some two hundred yards to the west of the one lately drained. It was drained about forty years ago, and is now a fertile meadow, but of no great size, as indeed its name Lochgoin-i.e., loch for the stirks- indicates. As we left the site of the loch behind us on the left, our path became less trackless, and gave signs that we were nearing the object of our visit. From being little better than a sheep-walk it took the form of a road, with a ditch on either side that seemed to tell of all but unfathomable depths of peat moss. Soon we came to a gate, and a small burn that forms the frontier between the two shires, and we had the pleasure, in turn, of having one foot in Renfrew and the other in Ayrshire. We had now entered the parish of Fenwick, the scene of the labours of the well-known William Guthrie, the author of the "Christian's Great Interest." About forty yards to the south, close upon the wire fence, the march that divides the shires, a small mound rises two or three feet from above the surrounding moss. It marks the place where lie the remains of a poor famished wanderer of the name of Miller, who came begging to Lochgoin, two hundred years or more ago, during one of the famines that were not uncommon in the early ages of Scottish history. He received food, and left for Eaglesham; but his hunger had been so great, that from the full meal that he had taken, he became ill on the road, and died on the spot where his body lies buried. Leaving the march behind us, a few hundred yards further into Ayrshire brought us to the house which some of our party had come far to see, and we were now at Lochgoin.
The present house is a roomy, commodious abode, well suited for the purposes of a moorland farm. It was built in 1858, on the site of the old house, which, through age, had become quite unfit for the abode of man. On the lintel, as we enter, several dates are inscribed, telling of the changes that have taken place, either upon the family or their abode. The first, 1178, is the year when three brothers of the name of Hoi, or Hoy, now Howie, came from one of the Waldensian valleys to escape the fury of the persecutor, and found refuge in Lochgoin. It would have been interesting to have known what were the reasons, in a century in which not a little was done for the evangelisation of the north of Europe, which led them to make Scotland the country of their adoption. But they have left no record behind them. The first of the family of whom we have any printed notice is James Howie, the great-grandfather of the writer of "Scots Worthies." He lived during the twenty-eight years' persecution. From his known sympathies and its inaccessible position, Lochgoin became a favourite place of resort to the persecuted remnant. Twelve times was his house harried by the soldiers, and once all his cattle were driven away. A narrative of his sufferings is appended to John Howie's (of the "Scots Worthies") autobiography. It is short, for it does not occupy more than seven pages, but it is so full of stirring incidents, that are a sample only of what he could have told us, that one regrets the writer had not told us more. Indeed, what he does tell is given merely because the autobiography fell short of the pages specified in the proposals.
Noted as Lochgoin was for a place of refuge during the years of persecution, it yet would not have been better known to us than many a farmhouse in the south-west of Scotland that afforded shelter to the persecuted, but for its connection with the writer of the "Scots Worthies." John Howie was born at Lochgoin. "I had a religious education," he says, "and my grandfather and grandmother, with whom I was brought up from the time I was a year old, were reputed in the place where they lived for honest, religious persons." But at first his religious training little profited him. Indeed, his early life was such as reflected no credit upon a religious profession. It was not until he was married for the second time, that the seed sown in youth produced fruit. His second wife, Janet Howie, a cousin of his own, was a pious woman, and her piety was the making of her husband. He died January 5, 1793, after a lengthened illness, which there is reason to believe was brought on by his too great devotion to literary pursuits. From childhood the lives of the martyrs and the stories of their sufferings were his delight, so that he was only following early predilections when he began to write about them. "I took up," he says, " a resolution to collect what materials I could obtain, and write a kind of lives of a number of them, which I did at leisure hours, with small views that ever anything I could do should merit the publishing of them." The result was the "Scots Worthies," which were published in 1775, and in a second and improved as well as enlarged edition in 1781or 1782. It soon asserted for itself a place among the books of a Scotch household. Indeed, few books are better known in the country districts of Scotland. This it owes both to the national interest of its subject, and the unpretending matter-of-fact style in which it is written. Its lives are well told. It possesses, to a large extent, the happy art of telling of a man the leading points in his life and character, without wearying the reader by minute details.
A number of other works followed the "Scots Worthies." The most important of them are his collections of lectures and sermons by Guthrie, Bruce, Cameron, Livingstone, and others. But for him, there is too much reason to fear that the manuscripts from which he copied them would have perished. In the Preface to the earlier collection, he says that the "discourses were collected from ten or twelve volumes, mostly in an old, small, cramp hand. Some of them. I suppose, were wrote by famous Sir Robert Hamilton and worthy Mr Robert Smith." Like the books of the Sibyl, these volumes have been destroyed, or have disappeared, save three. The handwriting of two of these volumes, to a practised eye, is not difficult to make out. One of them contains eleven sermons by Guthrie of Fenwick, four of which are printed in the earlier collection, while the other has a sermon by Bruce, also printed, and six by Cargill. The third volume is nearly illegible. On comparing the printed sermons with the manuscript note-book, it will be found that considerable liberties have been taken with the text. In his preface, John Howie says he has put some of the old-fashioned words, or expressions, into more proper English. It may be questioned if the changes are improvements. In the close of the eighteenth century, when the inflence of Samuel johnson was all powerful, it may have been thought better to replace plain Saxon by Latinised English, but the severer taste of the present day prefers the words actually spoken, however homely they may be. A single instance out of many that might be given of the changes Howie has made, may suffice. On page 14 of the earlier collection, in a sermon by William Guthrie on the words, "For what is a man profited if he should gain the whole world," etc., we have, "Ye that cast your souls at your heels, and undervalue them, and spend more time and pains on the poor perishing things of the world, would ye be called Christians? Nay, rather limbs of the devil, worldly worms, and moles of the earth." But in the manuscript it is, "Ye that cast your soul at your heel, and undervalue it, and spend your time on poor perishing things of the world, would ye be called Christians? Nay, rather devil's limbs, worldly worms, and moudiwarks."
Long as is the list of books which John Howie published, it does not comprise all that he prepared for the press. In May 1792 he issued proposals for an edition of Stevenson's "History of the Church and State of Scotland," in two octavo volumes of "upwards of 1100 pages," price of the volume sewed in blue paper, as., to be paid on delivery," to which he was to add "a postscript or supplement," "from 1649, where MR ANDREW STEVENSON leaves off, to the RESTORATION, 1660," "Subscribers to pay in proportion for it, as they pay for the above two volumes." Stevenson's "History" was published in 1753. Its title-page announces that it will be in four volumes, the fourth to embrace from 1649 to 1660, but three only appeared. It is said that the manuscript of the fourth was destroyed by fire. Howie died before the supplememt was sent to the press, Part of the manuscript exists, but it does not contain anything of value.
After his death a book was published by his son James, entitled, "Memories of the Life of John Howie." In the body of the work John Howie gives it a different name- "A Brief Narrative of some Religious Exercises," etc. This latter title aptly describes the character of the book, for it gives little of the history of his life. Its main interest lie in the insight it gives into the religious exercises of a pious Scotsman in the closing half of last century, as well as in the illustrations it gives us of the evangelical character of the preaching of the fathers of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, and of how much good men like John Howie profited under it. Like many diaries that good men have kept, it shows that his religion did not give him all the comfort it ought to have given him. But for this he had himself to blame. He was too much given to spiritual analysis - to looking inwards, when he should have looked outwards to the cross of Christ. Had he spent the time in meditating on the perfection of Christ's work that he did in looking into his own heart, he would have been a happier man.
In 1809 a pamphlet, now very rare, entitled, "Humble Pleadings, etc ; or a Representation of Grievances for the consideration of the Reformed Prebytery, by John Howie," was issued by John Calderwood of Clanfin. Notwithstanding Mr Buckle's fancy that Scotsmen are given to fasting on set occasions, Calderwood is almost the only Scotsman that ever we heard of in this century that rigorously abstained on fast-days from all manner of food. Our informant, who served under him, assured us that not a bite of meat was used by him and his housekeeper, or given to others, from Wednesday night till Friday morning, when the sacramental fast came round. "As for me," he added, "I could not stand it ; but, on the way to the kirk, I went to a neighbour's and ate the breakfast I had taken the precaution to secure the night before ; but I am certain that John did not touch meat." He became a non-hearer. For forty years he did not enter a church door, and ultimately took such dark views of mankind, that when he was desirous of marrying a second time, he could find no minister of Christ upon earth correct enough in doctrine and practice to marry him, and so the good man had to remain unmarried. He published a number of pamphlets, and prefaced "A Collection of the Dying Testimonies of some holy and pious Christians who lived in Scotland before and since the revolution ;" one of which Lord Macaulay declares to be one of the most curious of the many curious papers written by the Covenanters of that generation. By a slip of the pen Macaulay calls him George, but his Christian name was John. In his postscript to the "Pleadings" Calderwood evidently claims John Howie as a non-hearer, but there is no evidence for this in the brief narrative. The passage in which Howie speaks of his attendance upon the Supper, is worth quoting. "For the Sacraments, particularly the Supper, I durst but scarcely partake of it, and that with much fear, and but seldom, not only on account of the terms of Church communion, which I and others looked upon to be somewhat difficult, but also on account of my own unworthiness, diffidence, and want of suitable exercises and frame ; so that I may say my case in this was similar to those mentioned by the apostle, 'Who were all their lifetime kept in bondage through fear.'" These are manifestly the words of doubting and fearing, but not those of a non-hearer. Much as John Howie speaks of the decay of vital religion among professing Christians in the prefaces of his different works - and there was much in the condition of the Church in the close of last century to lead him thus to speak - he was not so left to himself as to become a non-hearer, and die out of the communion of the visible Church.
One characteristic of Howie ought not to be overlooked. In all his publications he has one object in view. It is not to gratify an antiquarian taste, or to gain fame, but to advance the interests of what he believed to be the truth. Several of his books must have cost him great labour, but the desire to perpetuate and spread the principles of the reformation carried him through, and enabled him to surmount obstacles that, to one living so far from public libraries, would at first sight have seemed such as he could not overcome.
As might be expected from its history, and the interest John Howie took in all that related to the Scots Worthies, there is much in Lochgoin that recalls the times of persecution. There are:
Captain John Paton's Bible. - Captain John Paton is well known to the reader of the "Scots Worthies." His life is one of the best in the book. The Bible is a 24mo, dated "London, Printed by the Company of Stationers, 1653." The captain's autograph is on the blank side of the title page. The inscription on the inside of one of the boards tells its history. It is:
CAPT'N JOHN PATON'S BIBLE,
WHICH HE GAVE TO HIS WIFE FROM OFF THE
SCAFFOLD WHEN HE WAS EXECUTED FOR
THE CAUSE OF JESUS CHRIST,
AT EDINBURGH, ON THE 8TH MAY, 1684.
JAMES HOWIE RECEIVED IT FROM THE
CAPTAIN'S SONS DAUGHTERS HUSBAND
AND GAVE IT TO JOHN HOWIE HIS NEPHEW.
The book, through visitors pilfering its leaves, was rapidly disappearing, but a kind friend in 1873 got it handsomely bound, the missing leaves being supplied by blank pages, and put in its present oaken case. The last pages have been torn out so that the book somewhat strikingly ends with Rev. xxi, II, "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death."
Captain John Paton's Sword. - It is twenty-seven and a half inches in length, and is sadly worn away by rust. Although the tradition is that it has seen serious work, it is too light tohave been of much service. Another sword, an Andrea Ferrara, forty inches in length, and in excellent preservation, in the possession of Thomas Rowatt, Esq. of Bonnanhill, Strathaven, a descendant of Captain Paton, has been handed down in the family from generation to generation as belonging to their ancestor. It is a formidable weapon, and in the captain's hand was quite capable of the exploits Howie records were performed by it.
A Drum, said to have been at Drumclog.
A Flag, made of linen, and six feet in length by five and a half in breadth. Little is known of it save that it has long been in possession of the family. Forty years ago it had become very dirty, from the peat reek common in houses where the fire is in the middle of the floor. It was washed, and has been so, till lately, once a year ever since. This has made it cleaner, but it has deprived it of the darker hues that suggest antiquity. The spelling of "Fenwick" as "Phinigk" is very old. In the "Act rescinding the forfeitures and fines past since the year 1665," an Act passed in 1690, it is always spelt "Phinnick," evidently a newer form than "Phinigk." We give its inscription:
An open Bible ----------------------------A Crown and Thistle
PHINIGK FOR GOD ------------------------------------CWNTRY
AND COVENANTED WORK
OF REFORMATIONS
The blank in the first line, between "FOR GOD" and "CWNTRY," would imply that it was made at a time when there was uncertainty about who was the ruler, so that it is not improbable it may be as old as Drumclog.
A Horn, made out of a bullock's horn, used as a trumpet, but from its appearance, more likely to have been a powder-horn.
In the youth of Thomas Howie, who died at the age of eighty-four, in the summer of 1863, the pistol holsters of Balfour of Kinloch, or Burley, were shown to visitors, but they have long ago disappeared.
Coins. - To many these will be the greatest source of attration. Originally they belonged to the James Howie who suffered so much during the persecution. One day, when the alarm had been given that the soldiers were coming, he took up his purse and fled. Lest he should be overtaken, he hid the purse in the ground, expecting to get it again after the soldiers were gone. But he never was able to come upon it again. A servant man about the house was blamed for having secretly gone out and stolen its contents. This he stoutly denied, but the theft was laid to his charge till the day of his death. About fifty years ago, on a Sabbath morning, James Howie, the son of the author of the "Scots Worthies," was driving the cattle out to the moor when one of the cows, in jumping over a sheuch, i.e., a ditch or furrow, sent one of its heels into a small hillock, and disclosed something bright, which glistened in the rays of the sun. It was a silver broad piece. "He picked it up," said a John Waterston to us, who was then a boy serving at Lochgoin, "and as many more as he could lay his hands upon;" but he did no more at the time, as it was the Lord's Day, than mark the spot - a spot not above fifty yards to the west of the house. Next morning he came with a spade and dug about until he came upon an old green purse and the rest of its contents. In all there were about forty dollars and several smaller coins. Of these, twenty-two only now remain. Nineteen are dollars. All are more or less clipped. The milling, the grand preventive of clipping - an improvement which, in this country, we owe to the genius and resolution of four of England's greatest names, Somers and Montagu, Locke and Newton - had not yet been generally introduced. Thirteen of the dollars are coins of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, whose early struggles for liberty have been so eloquently told in our own time in the pages of Prescott and Motley. The earliest is of Friesland, of date 1597, not long after the seven provinces had become united. Its inscription, "DEUS FORTITUDO ET SPES NOSTRA" i.e., "God our strength and hope," tells how it was that the youthful republic withstood the might of one of the greatest monarchies the world ever saw. The others are of the years 1620, 1623, 1629, 1631, 1657, 1659, 1660, and five of 1662, and have all the inscription, "RES PARVAE CRESCUNT CONCORDIA," i.e., "Small affairs increase by union," - an inscription as instructive to small churches, as doubtless it was to the small States of Holland.
Four are coins of the German empire. There is one of the irresolute and timid Rudolph II., of date 1601; another of the bigoted Ferdinand, the master of the proud Wallenstein, of date 1621; and two of Ferdinand III, - one, a very fine specimen, struck in the year 1648, the year of the Paece of Munster, which closed the thirty years' war - and a second, of date 1665.
Two are of the twelve free cities, Bremem, Hamburg, Frankfort, etc. - one of date 1601, and the other 1659. Its inscription, "DA PAC. DOMINE IN DIEB. NOSTRIS" - "Give peace, Lord, in our days" - affectingly tells of the barbarities the French, under Marshal Turenne, were then perpetrating in Germany.
The three smaller coins are shillings, one of them a shilling of the last year of Elizabeth's reign. and other two of the later Irish coinage of James I.
The large amount of foreign coin in the purse will not seem strange to those who remember how common it was for Scotsmen in that age, like the Swiss in the last century and in this, to serve as soldiers of fortune in the armies of Holland, of Germany, of France, and even of Spain. The redoubtable Dugald Dalgetty is something more than the creation of fancy. One of the most stirring pages in Schiller chronicles how Henderson, a Scotsman, commanded the reserve at the battle which proved fatal to Gustavus Adolphus, and yet turned out a victory for the Protestant interest, through the impassioned desire of the soldiery to avenge the death of the king, who they loved almost to idolatry. Captain Paton, whose Bible we have just looked at, and who was born and brought up within sight of Lochgoin, received his captaincy for deeds of valour in the service of the Swedish king. Nisbet of Hardhill, an estate in the neighbouring parish to Lochgoin, one of Howie's Scots Worthies, learned the art of war in foreign countries. And Paton and Nisbet, as we may be certain, were not the only Scotsmen in their district who had come home with the titles wherewith Gustavus honoured his brave soldiers, and the more substantial dollars earned in the armies of the wealthy burgers of Holland.
Manuscripts. - With the exception of the three note-books, these have all perished. About twenty years ago, a chest containing the papers of John Howie, that had long lain in the loft, was examined. It was found that the mice had reduced its contents, said our informant, "to mulins," i.e., to crumbs, and the whole were committed to the flames.
Books. - John Howie had amassed a large collection, as well as inherited some valuable volumes from his father, of which evidently scarcely the half remain. The most valuable - the broadsides, the last speeches of the martyrs, the pamphlets of the Covenanting period, and the controversial writings that arose out of Mr Macmillan's accession to the Societies - have nearly all disappeared. They have been stolen, or borrowed by people who have quietly forgotten that to keep what belongs to your neighbour is little better than to keep stolen goods. The books now to be seen are somewhat under three hundred in number. Although the best are away, there are still some of interest. There are the "Breeches" Bible, Lond. 1599; a black-letter copy of Foxe's "Book of Martyrs," Lond. 1641; and one or two curious old commentaries. On a copy of Irving's "Oracles of God," Lond. 1824, there is the following inscription, in the well-known handwriting of the author:
"To my cousins, the Howies of Loch Goyne, the representatives of a family which has done much, and suffered much for the testimony of Christ.
EDW'D IRVING"
The most valuable part of the library is the collection of pamphlets. They are chiefly of the middle and close of last century. Like most pamphlets issued at that time, the title-page generally contains as much matter as would now fill an ordinary preface. Some of these title-pages must have costs their authors no small pains. One of the most striking instances of such loaded pages is tobe found in Thorburn's "Vindiciae Magistratus," Edin. 1773. Its size is octavo, yet it contains not less than fifty lines. In others the great object seems to be to put the sting into the title-page - if possible, utterly to destroy the adversary before the page is turned. Three instances will suffice; and, if we are not mistaken, the first and second are both from the same pen:
THE
Presbyterian Covenanter
DISPLAYED,
In his POLITICAL PRINCIPLES;
AND THE
IMPOSTER DETECTED.
Being an Answer to an Extravagant
Testimony emitted by a Presbytery
usurping the title REFORMED
&c
****
DUBLIN
MDCC,LXV
The first of these is chiefly noteworthy as leading to the publication of the mass of compact and solid thinking that Mr Thorburn of Pentland published under the title of "Vindiciae Magistratus" - one of a series that the fathers of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in the last century issued, in vindication of the teachings of Scipture upon civil magistracy.
REMARKS
UPON A VERY
EXTRAORDINARY BOOK,
INTITLED
An Apology and Vindication, &c
EMITTED BY
Still more extraordinary Authors, who design
themselves "A poor illiterate, ignorant, and
despicable," (not despised) "handful of the
Associate Congregations of Kilmaurs, Beith &c
BUT NOTWITHSTANDING OF THIS
Their Profession of Ignorance, and want of
Learning, have commenced Expositors (rather
wresters) of Scripture and Divine Things ;
belying our Church Standards ; arraigning
and condemning Church Courts, for not pass-
ing Decisions agreeable to their Mind
ALL OF WHICH
Agree very well with the above Description, the
Authors give of themselves.
=========
GLASGOW
1783.
The second is certainly intended to be a stinging title-page.
The TESTIMONY Deserted
A PLAIN
DISCOVERY
OF THE
DEFECTIONS and SELF-INCON-
SISTENCES that Mr John M'Millan,
and the People in Communion with him,
are guilty of ; With the Reasons for
which the True Presbyterians of the Cove-
nanted Church of Scotland cannot own
Mr M'Millan for their Minister.
* * * *
By WILLIAM WILSON
* * * *