The Fanatic (34 page)

John Lauder attended court to hear the verdict against Mitchel on the Thursday, then went home, locked himself in his study, and turned up a new page of his journal. He was limping slightly, from a bruise on his leg where he had been kicked in the struggle to get out of court the day before. The case was fascinating from a jurisprudential point of view. He would fill several pages with the arguments, the technicalities, the points scored and lost on both sides. He should write it down before he forgot the details. But as he was thinking this his enthusiasm waned. He closed the book again – he would do it later. For the time being, he had an urge to write of the other thing he had seen in the court-room: the state, a huge, bejewelled, white-bellied monster, devouring a broken and deluded man.

He pitied Mitchel. He pitied him even though he well understood that a fanatic did not ask for pity. And yet when Lauder thought of Mitchel it was not his cause, not his strength, not his faith, but the pity he inspired that dignified him. You could have all the politics and religion and philosophy and learning the world could take – and you needed these things to imagine the world and see how it was – but it was not these things that were locked up and left to rot in the Bass, or brought back from there to be hanged. It was a man. If he lost his pity for the man, Lauder thought, he would lose some essential part of himself. He would himself become less human.

He did not wish to think about the following Friday. Mitchel would glorify God in the Grassmarket. That, apparently, had been Lauderdale’s bad joke when, after the court adjourned, he and his fellow Privy Councillors had retreated upstairs to the Council chamber. There they had discovered, in the register, the fact that they had promised Mitchel his life recorded in black and white. The clerks of Council were
aware of it; Sir John Nisbet, who had been removed as King’s Advocate to make way for Mackenzie, also knew it and was busy broadcasting it to those who wished to hear. They could tear the page out but they could not erase their perjury.

Lauderdale had set about some damage limitation already. George Hickes, his chaplain, was even now writing an account of the whole affair, to be published as a pamphlet as soon as possible. Hickes’s task was to depict Mitchel in the worst possible light. Lauder had heard that he was seeking information on how close the fanatic had been to that monstrous hypocrite, Major Weir. How he would love to hear Lauder’s story: well, he could whistle for it! Other rhymers and scribes were being encouraged to make up verses linking the two men, and to recite and sell them on the streets. There was a week to go before the execution, but the machinery of malice was clanking into motion already.

Would Sharp sleep any easier in his bed tonight? He had what he had wanted for so long – Mitchel’s neck ready for the tow. But now that Mitchel was about to be removed from the world, might he not make room for another to take his place? If I were the Archbishop, Lauder thought, I would double-lock my doors from now on.

Jean Weir came into his mind too. There had been a daft kind of logic to her. He would need to talk to Eleis about that, once he’d sorted his thoughts out on paper, and once Eleis had come to terms with losing the Mitchel case. But he probably had already – he wasn’t a man for dwelling on the past, and it had been more Lockhart’s show than his. Lauder should probably seek him out, take him to Painton’s for a few hours.

Eleis and Jean weren’t so far apart, maybe. He was cool and calculating and rational, and she was the very opposite. But Jean had talked of a place where there were no witches, or where everyone could be a witch in safety, and Eleis saw somewhere like that ahead of him too.

Lauder knew that his cousin, though he would have to be gotten very drunk in a private place to come out and say it, didn’t believe in God. Himself, he couldn’t let go of the idea. He needed some greater thing outside of himself in order to
be able to understand the world, and himself in it. God was a fearful presence, but Lauder worried for the world without him. Eleis, on the other hand, longed for a world rid of all gods.

There were so many wanderers in the world: deceivers and deceived, folk that planned and organised and folk that scuttered through life, the ones that seized the moment and the ones that were seized by it. He thought of Jean Weir and of Jonet Douglas, who was dumb and then did speak. The old and the young, the accused and the accusing. The Privy Council had not been able to decide how to deal with Jonet: in the end they had banished her, but then the problem of how to get her out of the country arose, for few skippers would take such an unchancy cargo on board. But there was always somebody with a price. At great expense, a ship had been found at the back-end of the year, and the lass was away now supposedly, gone to oblivion or to new tricks across the sea.

If, back in 1670, Jean Weir had been Jonet’s age – if she had been capable of making a new life for herself – Lauder would have liked to have smuggled her off to that other land, wherever it was. Somewhere in everything that had happened was an answer to the riddle he had posed to his cousin. But it was too late, eight years too late, and he wondered if in fact that was how men always came to an understanding of the times in which they lived: too late. And now, even for himself, the years were beginning to pile up. He felt a growing need to sum up, to explain, to record his thoughts and his memories. He was – even in his thirties – entering his middle-age.

He reached for another, smaller book, one with its pages still blank and uninked. If he took his quill and began to write, how, where would he begin, to make sense of it all?

10th day of Januar 1678 – I am just now returned from the tryal of James Mitchel at the Criminall Court. He was pannelled for attempting the life of the Archbischop of St Androis. This tryal is the sum and end of many bad things, that I have sein and heard thir last ten years, whilk I maun putt doune tho I fear to doe it. Unsemely and stinking are the wayes emploied to
sicker this man’s doom, but soe is al thats gane befoir. I am sweert to write anent this afair in my other journal. This is ane new and secret book.

Elizabeth Sommervile, sister of Nicol, wife to James Mitchel, lay in her bed in a house in the Canongate, sick with the fever. The house was quiet. The silence pressed in on her, but at the edges of it she could hear the sounds of the city, strangely muted. Her brother had promised to come to her as soon as the verdict was announced. But she did not need him to come. She knew what the verdict would be.

Nicol had still not given up all hope. If James were found guilty, he had told her that morning, she must write a letter to the Privy Council at once. She must explain that she was sick, had been confined in childbirth, and could not attend the trial, had not even been able to see her husband since he was brought back from the Bass. She must beg for a stay of execution, on grounds of humanity, at least until such time as she was well enough to visit James and say her farewells. And to show him the bairn, Nicol added, it was important for James that he saw and blessed the bairn. Meanwhile, he would talk to Eleis and Lockhart, to see if there was anything else that could be done. An appeal to the King, perhaps. And some of the ladies of the town were talking of a subscription, to raise money for her and the bairn.

‘They’ll no see the seed of the righteous beggin their breid,’ said Nicol. ‘That’s whit they tellt me.’

‘It’s frae the Psalms,’ Lizzie said weakly. She would take the money if it came, she’d be mad not to, but she was scunnered of Scripture, endlessly quoted at every opportunity. And as for farewells, she had said her farewells. She had said them nine months ago, in the stinking hole on a rock in the sea where they had kept James for a year. If she were to see him again now, she would not be able to comfort him, relieve him from whatever pain he was in. She would want to ask him a question, one that would only anger him or make him sorrowful. She would ask him if it was worth anything: the love of Christ for which he had tried to kill, and for which he was to be killed. She would ask him if it was worth more than the love she had once given him.

He would not be able to answer. He would only be able to stare ahead of himself and see the coming kingdom. If he took his eyes off it for one second, as she had, he might lose sight of it altogether. And all his certainty would be lost, as hers was.

She believed she was a better person for her uncertainty. She did not want his blessing on the bairn. She did not want her growing up touched by the hand of a martyr or a fanatic. Whatever these words meant, she wanted them not to mean anything for her daughter.

She did not know what she would tell the bairn about her father, or how and where she was conceived. When she grew up, who would she look like? Like her mother? Or would there be something in her face, some shadow, that would link her to that day in the Bass? She thought again of James and how he had clasped Rutherford’s book to himself when she left. She thought of Tammas, holding her back, saying they must wait a minute before going down to the boat, that they must not be seen coming from Maister Mitchel’s cell. She wondered if even their seed had fought in her: the seed of the righteous and the seed of whatever Tammas was. She thought how little it mattered, which one of them was the father.

She would write the letter, as Nicol suggested. She would do it because it was expected of her. The last thing that was expected of her: after that, nothing. And nothing would come of it – the men that wanted James dead would discard her letter as a concoction of sentiment and deceit. So she would wait. Then one day very soon, they would drum James down to the Grassmarket and he would make a speech and they would kill him. And all the waiting would be over.

She was going to get better. The bairn was beside the bed in a crib, sleeping. Lizzie could hear the anxious wee breaths that it made. It had come early by nearly three weeks, but like her it was fighting to stay in the world. Lizzie would get better and her daughter would survive. When they were both well enough, they would leave. With whatever siller they were given, and whatever she could scrape together, and with anything that she could sell on the way – tobacco, ribbon, cloth, anything – she and the bairn would go away
from here. England, Europe, America, maybe some other part of Scotland, she did not know where, but they would set out on a journey and sooner or later they would arrive.

In the Tolbooth, James Mitchel sat writing his death speech, his last address to the Christian people of Scotland. He was not often interrupted, as he was allowed visits only from his lawyers, ministers and his immediate family. The lawyers could do nothing more for him: he dismissed them. The date of his execution would not be changed. As for ministers, any that he might have wished to see could not come near him – they were in exile or in hiding. He received a letter from a Mr Annand, the dean of Edinburgh, offering to attend upon him notwithstanding their theological differences. Mitchel wrote him a stinging reply, thanking him for his civility and affection, rejecting his offer, and hoping that God would open his eyes to his wickedness and to his insulting of an unjustly condemned dying man. He was beyond ministers of all colours. He stood alone. He had precisely seven days to perfect his final act of glory.

As for family, Nicol had come, but Lizzie was too ill. They had a daughter, Nicol told him; she too was very weak. Lizzie would bring her into him whenever she was able. They were trying to get the hanging postponed.

Mitchel shook his head. He did not want any more delay, he told Nicol. He had been kept waiting for four years. If Lizzie could not come, she could not come. He was beyond her now. He hoped, though, that she and the lassie would live and prosper in a better Scotland than the one he was about to leave.

He wrote his speech over and over, until he had it right – not so long that he would not be able to read it all, but long enough to make all the points he wanted to. He knew in any case that the government had learned the political dangers of executions. It was likely that when he began speaking the drums would be beaten to drown him out. So when he had the speech to his satisfaction he copied it out half a dozen times so that he could throw it to the crowd. Somebody, surely, would recognise its worth and have it reprinted. He kept another copy with his private papers to be returned to
Lizzie. In this way, he hoped, his testimony would be preserved for posterity.

I have been before a court set up within me of terrors and challenges
, he read in Rutherford,
but my sweet Lord Jesus hath taken the mask off his face and said, ‘Kiss thy fill!’; and I will not smother nor conceal the kindness of my King Jesus. He hath broken in upon the poor prisoner’s soul like the swelling of Jordan. The Bridegroom’s love hath run away with my heart. O love, love, love! How sweet were it to me to swim the salt sea for my new Lover, my second Husband, my first Lord
…

After all else, he had nothing to do but read his Bible and pray. He understood now why God had made him miss Sharp with the pistol. What had happened to him since then had been a far greater test of his faith. And his trial and death, for
not
having killed the Archbishop, did this not show God’s people the true spirit of their enemies in an even harsher light? God was magnificent, incomprehensibly clever. He was about to do James Mitchel the greatest honour, and raise him up as upon a cross. It was the most a true Christian could hope for.

At night he dozed fitfully, but sleep was an irritant to him now, not a relief, an animal function that he did not want and scarcely needed. He kept awake as much as he could, concentrating on the day ahead, the blazing light that was coming for him. He did not dream, either in waking or in sleep. He was past dreaming. All he wanted was to go through death and into eternal life.

He had never been a great singer, but now he filled the cell with his voice, and it seemed to him melodious and powerful, drowning out the shouts and bangs of others in the building, who were already far distant from him. He sang the psalms of his childhood, not the newer versions that had come in in Cromwell’s time, but the ones he had learned as a boy from the minister who had held him on the bridge at Linlithgow all those years ago, whose language, that of the reforming fathers of Knox’s day, was sweet and unchanging and came from an age when Scotland had been smiled upon by God. In their simplicity they outstripped even the wisdom of Samuel Rutherford. He did not know what language he would speak in Heaven, but he hoped that when he finally limped in
through the yett, one of Christ’s good bairns, he would not have to change one word of them for all eternity.