The Fanatic (17 page)

He returns to the Cowgate, disgraced but not humbled. He knows that great sin often comes before a calling. Even Samuel Rutherford fell in fornication and lost his first teaching post at Edinburgh just before beginning his pure
ministry at Anworth. Mitchel waits in anticipation.

But times are changing for the godly party. Charles II, who can lie with a dozen gardeners’ wives and neither think shame nor be expelled for it, is restored to the throne. He has no intention of going on his travels again. A parliament and independence are restored to Scotland, Scotland is restored to the rule of bishops and royalist incendiaries. All the acts and laws of the previous twenty-three years are annulled by an Act Rescissory. Presbyterianism is in retreat, riven by splits and factions.

Meanwhile the wife of Mitchel’s old mentor Major Weir has died and he has moved a short distance from Mistress Whitford’s to a house just off the West Bow, where he bides with his sister Jean. The Bow is a refuge of the saints in Edinburgh: a hotbed of holiness. Mitchel visits the Major, seeking his help again. If Weir no longer cuts the figure he once did in Edinburgh, he still has some influence among the disaffected, the many who are now obliged to toil under the yoke of episcopacy, waiting their chance to restore God’s nation to God. Through Weir’s intercession, Mitchel is found another place as chaplain, this time in the devout family of a niece of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston.

Johnston – a symbol of all that has gone hideously wrong. Once a pillar of the Covenant, he sold himself to Cromwell in London, then fled abroad at the Restoration, but was tracked down and extradited from France. Brought to Edinburgh and tried on his knees before parliament, he was reduced to a babbling, begging wreck, unable even to remember the words of his Bible. Johnston, the scourge of kings and princes, wound up hanged and his head spiked on the Netherbow Port, next to the fading skull of his former friend James Guthrie. Thus are the saints made martyrs; and thus the martyrs made a mockery.

Mitchel performs his new duties dully, without enthusiasm. This is not what he was put on earth for. Then in 1666 unrest among the godly explodes into rebellion in the west. An army of a few hundred – a thousand at most – marches through the middle shires towards Edinburgh. Mitchel abandons his job and rushes to join them. But this is not yet his time. He is sent back on an errand to the city, and while
he’s away the miserable force is met in the Pentland Hills and destroyed by the Muscovite beast General Tarn Dalyell, whose beard, uncut since the execution of King Charles I, reaches to his waist, whose boots belch the smoke of hellfire and can walk at night on their own, and whose life can only be taken by a bullet made of silver. The rising of the saints is a complete failure. Mitchel is one of those specifically excluded from a pardon for his involvement in it and flees abroad to Rotterdam. A year later, though, he is back in Edinburgh, and now at last his time is at hand.

He lives like a spectre in the capital under the name of James Small, moving from one lodging to another, sometimes staying out of sight in one of the safe houses of the godly party’s sympathisers. He steeps himself in Scripture. The voice of Elijah in the cave of Horeb is dirling in his head:
I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: because the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.
And he reads of Jehu who was called by the prophet Elisha, and who came out of Ramoth-gilead to destroy Jezebel and all the house of Ahab, and how when the watchman on the tower of Jezreel saw the furious dust of Jehu’s chariot approaching, they sent a messenger to him from the king saying, Is it peace? And Jehu answered, What hast thou to do with peace?

Then James Mitchel thinks of the false prophets, that come in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. And chief among these is the apostate and reprobate James Sharp.

These are the days of God’s anger, the days of the nation’s darkness, the perilous times of which Paul wrote to Timothy, when men shall be traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but laden with diverse lusts. A pamphlet
Naphtali
has lately been circulating, so precise and threatening that the government has hunted and harried it, ordered it burnt and threatened any found in possession of it with a fine of ten thousand pounds. ‘A damned book come hither from beyond the sea,’ says the government; ‘it hath all the traitors’ speeches on the scaffold, and speaks with a tongue set on fire in Hell.’
‘Take notice,’ says
Naphtali
, ‘of the many Sufferings and Sufferers hereafter mentioned, whose Heads and Hands standing betwixt Heaven and Earth, doth not only cry for Vengeance, but night and day bear open Witness against this Adulterous Generation.’ Andrew Honyman, bishop of Orkney, like Sharp another Covenanter turned prelate, pens a reply,
A Survey of the Insolent and Infamous Libel, Entitled Naphtali.
‘Scotland, Ah Scotland!’ says
Naphtali
, ‘hath changed her glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, and be horribly afraid. If God doth not heal his People we shall become such a proverb amongst the Nations, that the generation to come of our Children, and the stranger that cometh from a far Land, when they see the plagues of this Land, shall wonder and ask, Wherefore hath the Lord done this unto this Land? What meaneth the heat of this great anger?’

This is the word storm that crashes and roars through Mitchel’s head in the spring months of 1668. He feels himself besieged by words, by threats, entreaties, instructions, warnings, challenges. He is looking for something he can do, something that will put these things in some semblance of order. He steels himself to act, to perform.

He goes down into the street one day, to the shop of Alexander Logan, dagmaker, in Leith Wynd, outwith the Netherbow Port. He knows that Logan turns a blind eye to some of his best customers, for by law he must not sell arms to anyone who has not subscribed to keep the peace, not firearms, sword, dirk, whinger or any such weapon. Mitchel has walked past the door many times, sometimes pausing, sometimes hardly daring to look, sometimes with his coat empty, sometimes carrying the money saved from his cousin John. On this day, like a shy man entering a whorehouse, he darts inside, and puts the money on the counter. ‘Whit can ye gie me for this?’ he asks.

Logan sells him a pair of long pistols, each with a bore like a musket, and shows him how to prime and load them. Mitchel carries them away in a box to his lonely room, and there he practises presenting them at the hearts of imagined men. Or one man, imagined over and over. A little paper has come into his hand, one of the squibs that fly from secret
presses into the street, and he marvels at its ingenious wit and tries to memorise it:

M
ercenarie, medling madcap,

A
bsurd, abjured, angry ape,

S
ancts’ SHARP scourge, Scotland’s Satanik spot,

T
rafecting, treacherous turncot,

E
nvy’s exemplar eminent,

R
ebell, relent, return, repent.

I
nfamous juglar, insolent

A
mbitious and arrogant

M
ischief’s midwyfe, monstrous madman,

E
rroneous, Erastian

S
aucie, selfish Simoniak.

S
ervile Soulseller stigmatick,

H
ell’s hound, hideous hierarchist,

A
bominable archatheist,

R
ailling ruffian, runagat,

P
erfidious, perjur’d Prelat.

He pins the paper to the wall; turns, pulls the pistols from his coat, aims, turns again, aims. And he scours his Bible for a certainty of God’s approval for what he intends to do.

When doubt enters his mind, he beats it back with the words of
Naphtali
: ‘What shall be given to thee, O Sharp! Or what shall be done to Thee, O false Tongue? Sharp arrows of the Mighty and Coals of Juniper.’ He thinks of Major Weir: ‘The Lord will find you work, James.’ And he thinks of John Knox, a century before, calling on the people and every member of the people to revenge the injury done against God’s glory by his enemies, ‘according to the vocation of every man and according to the possibility and occasion which God doth minister … Who dare be so impudent as to deny that this be most reasonable and just?’

On a Saturday early in July, about four in the afternoon, James Mitchel loads his pistols – three balls apiece – and arms himself with the best text of all, the verse from Deuteronomy that he carries in his heart:
And that prophet, or that dreamer of
dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the Lord thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee.
He leaves his room and enters onto the street, and makes his way to the top of Blackfriars Wynd. He hovers there, standing back from the folk that pass up and down the causey, watching the coach that sits outside the bishop’s lodgings a few yards away. His palms are sweating and he dichts them on his coat, feeling beneath it the bulges of his ready weapons. He is about to take the life of another man and send him to perdition.
God strengthen my arm and my resolve.
Into himself he mutters the words of Deuteronomy, the words of Moses, the Word of God:
Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him; but thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.

A servant emerges from the doorway, opens the coach door and stands to one side. His master follows and steps into the coach. Now is Mitchel’s time, now he is
in
history. He draws the first pistol from within his coat, advances on the coach. There is a group of folk by it, poor bairns and beggars seeking alms, so his approach goes unnoticed. Nobody stands between him and the object of God’s wrath.

But then, history betrays him. As he reaches the open door and levels the gun, he realises that another man has followed Sharp out of the house – a man in clerical dress – and is about to mount the step of the coach. Mitchel glances to see if he is mistaken, if this second man is in fact the Archbishop. It is not. He looks back and sees Sharp frozen in shock, staring right into his eyes. He aims again just as the arm of the second man, putting his hand up to steady himself, moves into his vision. Mitchel fires the pistol. In that moment he knows that he has hit, but missed Sharp.

The second man’s hand and arm seem momentarily to separate; there is a spattering sound on the coach’s upholstery. Blood and smoke everywhere. Mitchel understands that he does not have time to draw the other gun. He can feel men
advancing on him. He ducks away and strides rapidly across the wynd.

His hand is grasping the butt of the second pistol. He pulls it out, trying to work out if he can return to kill Sharp with his remaining shot. But he knows it is too late. Everything that was clear in his vision a few moments before is now clouded. Noise and commotion are rippling out from the stationary coach. At the head of Niddrie’s Wynd a well-dressed, broad-faced man blocks his way. Mitchel presents the pistol at him. The man backs off and lets him by. Mitchel hides his weapons again, forces himself not to run, not to attract attention. He reaches the Cowgate, turns up Stevenlaw’s Close, checks behind him to see if he is followed, and chaps at a door. It is opened at once, he slips inside, is ushered up some stairs. The house of William Fergusson, a sympathiser.

Fergusson says, ‘Man, there’s powder marks on yer face and bluid on yer sleeve. Hae ye been huntin?’

‘Aye, but the beast’s no deid. Can ye fetch me new claes?’

Ten minutes later, re-wigged and new-washed, the pistols hidden by Fergusson, he is out on the streets again, in pursuit of himself, but keeping away from the soldiery. The citizens’ chase is half-hearted at best. When the cry went up, ‘A man is killt,’ it was followed by another, ‘It’s only a bishop,’ and loud laughter.

Mitchel walks as if in a dream. Could God have misguided his aim? If so, for what purpose? This
was
his purpose. A new verse from Jeremiah bombards him now:
Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully, and cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.
What is his purpose now? To avoid discovery, surely. God is testing him. Will there be another opportunity?

Sir Andrew Ramsay turns out the Guard. The bishops’ servants were so stunned by the brazenness of the assault that the man who fired got clean away from them. Someone says he made for the West Port, where an accomplice waited for him with a horse ready saddled – they rode for Corstorphine. Lord Provost Ramsay sends men in pursuit, but orders the whole town searched in case they are still lurking there. He writes a feverish letter to Lauderdale – this
kind of outrage is the last thing Edinburgh needs – bad for trade, bad for law and order, bad for Ramsay:
My lord, the fellow is none that belongs to this place, nor can this place be looked on with any worse eye because of this.

A reward is posted. The Archbishop is shaken by the foul, bloody and cowardly attempt on his life. In a rare outburst of spiritual passion he is heard praying, ‘My times are wholly in thy hands, O my God of my life!’ But he is unharmed. His companion in the coach was Honyman, the bishop of Orkney. He is grievously hurt, the bones in his wrist all shattered.

Mitchel goes to ground. By whispered word he hears of, and from a window-chink in a shuttered room he sees, the chase spreading through the town. Soldiers are everywhere, searching any house where Whigs stay or where a Whig terrorist might be harboured. More than once he has to move. People are arrested and interrogated, and all who favour Presbyterianism are cast under a cloud of suspicion. There is even a rumour that the bishops themselves planned the attack: for the sake of a wounded hand all Lauderdale’s plans to relax some of the prohibitions against non-indulged ministers are shelved.