Excerpt from Men of the Covenant, Vol. 2

No doubt, they had perpetually to watch him, although they used his crafty diplomacy in their own interest. He was so apt to lift his head overweeningly. St. Andrews brags mightily, the Earl of Kincardine wrote, in the July of 1671, and even grows insolent. You know cajoling looseth him, and that he is never right but when he is keept under. But a little astute management would sober his arrogance, and would transmute him once more into a serviceable tool. Nobody detested the conventicles with such virulence, or meted out such punishment to the men and women who frequented them. Most of all that were at these rendezvouses, one of the members of the Privy Council said, catched violent colds, in so much as they may be tryed and found out by coughing. Some pity might have been extended to those for whom the road of the Cross was thus thorny and steep; but James Sharp had none. In the spring of 1679, a year after the Highlanders had left the west, he brought before his fellow-councillors the draft of a new edict, more deadly even than those which had been formerly devised. It gave liberty to kill any man who went armed to or from a meeting in the fields. No trial was necessary. The meanest officer who wore the King's uniform might shoot the suspected person on the spot. This was the culmination of the Archbishop's endeavours to stifle the Presbyterianism which he had once professed. But, before it received the Sovereign's consent, his race was run, and he had met with terrible death.

Before now, there had been warnings given him of the burning hatred engendered by his presence. Back in 1668, James Mitchell, a man whose brain was touched with madness, had tried to assassinate him in the streets of Edinburgh. For six years the would-be murderer escaped but, at the end of that time, Sharp recognised him one day, and had him apprehended and led before the Privy Council. The Council, know ing that he was scarcely responsible for his actions, persuaded him to confess the crime under a solemn promise that his life should be spared. He was sent to the Bass Rock. But if the poor man reckoned himself safe from the scaffold because of the explicit stipulation made to him, he had not fathomed the unrighteousness of his judges. In 1678, ten winters after he fired his shot into the Primate's coach, he was haled before the Justiciary Court. It seems incredible, but it is true, that the Earl of Rothes, who was Lord High Chancellor of Scotland, Charles Maitland of Hatton, who was Lord Treasurer Depute, the Duke of Lauderdale, and the Archbishop of St. Andrews himself, one after another entered the witness-box, and swore that no promise of pardon had ever been given by the Privy Council. It did not matter that a copy was instantly produced by Mitchell's advocate mere copies of documents are without legal value, and the Council's register was itself deliberately with held. Even Lauderdale had his dubieties and regrets about the iniquitous transaction, and would have been content to see the prisoner consigned again to the dungeon on the Bass. It was Sharp who showed no relenting. He meant that, at long length, the capital sentence should be inflicted and James Mitchell, in the mocking language of the day, was sent to glorify God at the Grassmarket.

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