or anywhere else that I know of, although there must have been a top copy. Nor is there any guarantee that John Lauder even wrote it, although the internal evidence is reasonably strong: the characteristically erratic spellings, the references to individuals Lauder knew and so on. On the other hand, it’s not altogether in his style. Not as lawyerish as you’d expect. I don’t think professional historians have ever taken it seriously – most of them probably don’t know it exists. Possibly it’s a great missing chunk of our history, but – and this is why I suggest you should be cautious and regard it with the utmost suspicion – it’s more likely to be an elaborate fake.
‘However, there’s no obvious reason why anyone would perpetrate such a hoax, unless the library paid money for the thing, but that would be unlikely and certainly then I’d expect much better documentation. The title-page text would suggest it was a donation. So why go to all the bother of inventing all this? If, by some chance, it is by Lauder – and I don’t see how we’ll ever know that now – it certainly fills a gap. Among the manuscripts of his that went missing were twenty years’ worth of his Historical Observes, which would have included all of the 1670s.’
MacDonald looked flustered, as if his statement had taken a lot out of him. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he finished. ‘Have a look at it, by all means, but … well, I’d be interested to know what you think.’
There were little beads of sweat on his brow, under the latticework of thin red hair. He took off his glasses and wiped his head with a large faded blue handkerchief. ‘I must go now,’ he said. ‘Must get on. That really belongs upstairs, but as you’re consulting books from this department too, it’ll be all right to look at it here.’
He turned away and seemed almost to dart back behind the counter, which was unoccupied. Still mopping his head, he pushed through a door beyond which Carlin could see stacks of leatherbound books. He watched MacDonald’s round-shouldered figure until it turned left and disappeared among the shelves. He found a vacant desk and sat down at it with the typescript. He opened it, read the note by D. Crosbie that MacDonald had mentioned, and turned to the next page.
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.
It is ane yeir since Mitchel was putt to the Bass, and but nine month since I socht leave to see him there from my father in law Lord Abbotshall …
Sir Andrew Ramsay, Lord Abbotshall, till lately Lord Provost of Edinburgh, considered leaving his long, luxurious wig on the stand where he had placed it earlier, while looking over his accounts. It was a very fine wig, thick and lavishly curled, but it made his head hot and got in the way when he was trying to read. Still, he did not really like to be seen without it; he was approaching sixty, and the wig gave his large face a dignity it otherwise lacked. Without his expensive clothes and headpiece he might have been taken for a publican or a shopkeeper. Not that Sir Andrew had anything against publicans and shopkeepers; on the contrary, he was their prince. Or, at least, he once had been.
He was expecting his son-in-law and although John Lauder was family, Sir Andrew still liked to impress his formidable personality upon the younger man. He stood up, took the wig and, in front of a mirror, carefully lowered it onto his head. He laid the ends of it over his ample shoulders and briefly admired himself, large, sedate and solemn in the glass. That was his style in these times of wild ranters and gaunt rebels. Some might think him fat and graceless, but he saw himself as a dancing-master; nobody could jouk and birl like Sir Andrew Ramsay when it came to politics. He was the great survivor. ‘Andra, ye’re a richt continuum,’ a friend had recently told him. And there was no better evidence of his political brilliance than the fact that, over three decades of war, religious upheaval and governments of utterly different complexions, he had become progressively and irresistibly more and more rich.
He cleared his throat with a grumble of self-approval, and sat back down to his books, his dreams of political intrigue, and his decanter of brandy. He was a merchant, the godfather of the city’s trade, and a laird with extensive properties in Fife and Haddingtonshire. He had served as provost under two regimes, first during the Commonwealth and then after the Restoration, when it suited the new government to install someone with a proven record, rather than trust to the vagaries of council elections. Once he had consolidated a power base on the council, elections were reintroduced and proceeded without alarm. Sir Andrew managed to remain Lord Provost year after year as if, like some portly extension of the royal prerogative, he had been restored to a throne of his own.
Being a man with his own interests at heart he was as amenable to receiving bribes as he was adept at making them. He’d had a knighthood from King Charles, which discreetly obscured the one he’d received from the usurper Oliver Cromwell. Other honours accrued like interest. He was a Member of Parliament, Privy Counsellor and Commissioner of Exchequer. In 1671 he had achieved a further triumph: he was made a judge, an appointment for which he had no merit and only one qualification. His patron Lauderdale, the Secretary of State for Scotland, had raised him to the bench as Lord Abbotshall, although they both despised the law’s proclaimed adherence to that kittle principle, justice. That was the qualification.
It was not a bad record of worldly achievement but there was no doubt about it: what Sir Andrew called management and his enemies called corruption was an exhausting business, and he was no longer young. For years he’d stayed one step ahead of the pack, cajoling here, wheedling there, showing a palm of gold one minute and a fist of iron the next. Sometimes he could be charm itself in the council chambers; other times he would blow in like a gale, driving all opposition before him. Once he’d even had to organise a riot in the street outside the council windows to emphasise his opinion. After twelve successful elections to the provostship, Sir Andrew had had just about enough of Edinburgh.
And then, too, there had been the strained relationship with the Duke of Lauderdale, who’d been breathing down his neck on account of complaints about the competence, even the legality, of some of his decisions in the Court of Session. Finally, three years ago, Lauderdale had suggested that it was time to pull his finger from the fat pie of provostry, that his short stay on the bench must also come to an end, and that he should spend more time with his family at Kirkcaldy. The provost demurred. Lauderdale insisted, and Sir Andrew reluctantly resigned.
But as his glory days were fading, he liked nothing better than to recount them, to anybody who would listen. His son-in-law, John Lauder, who owed him much in terms of placement and preferment, usually had no option but to lend an ear. It was a source of satisfaction to Sir Andrew to have a lawyer on the receiving end of his reminiscences: as a judge he had been deaved with lawyers’ arguments long enough in court, and their contempt for his ignorance was only matched by his hatred of their souple-tongued smugness.
Not that John was by any means the worst. That prize would have to go to his cousins the John Eleises, father and son. The father was in his sixties now, and not so active, but the son was even more offensive, a subversive do-gooder who seemed to show no fear of his betters in arguing against them in favour of outed ministers, rebels and witches. It was Eleis who, with his mentor Sir George Lockhart, had been a ringleader of the advocates in 1674, when forty-nine of them had been debarred from practising because they dared to insist that they could appeal to parliament against decisions made by the Lords of Session, in spite of a royal edict forbidding it. Sir
