‘It was Master Hutcheson himself who told me,’ said James. ‘A man in dapper coat, and handsome top boots, asking, “This fellow Lindsay on your student register? Is he a man of parts? With many friends coming from here and there to confer with him? Is he often seen in huddles?” And of course Master Hutcheson told me himself, his reply. “Are ye daft, my man? James Lindsay is not but a boy. Parts? Hoots, toots! The only parts he can afford must come out of his aunties’ allowances, and that’s no’ grand, sir, I assure ye! Why are ye asking?” And with that, Master Top Boots was gone, next to be heard of inquiring of me in another quarter. I don’t like it, Davy. I know my family and I don’t like it.’
‘You suspect Top Boots to be a government man?’ asked Davy Hume.
‘What other shadow could he have stepped from? Someone’s whispered something and he is gathering information. I said it before and I say it again, I know my family and I don’t like it. I smell blood in the air.’
Two young men, still in their teens. Students, not wealthy to look at, but adorned with the various devices of dress that announced their learned status. In the normal course they might never have met, but David Hume, an Edinburgh man, had paid a visit to Glasgow early in his student days, out of curiosity, to hear one Francis Hutcheson lecture there. Hutcheson, who had been gaining notoriety for his new dissenting philosophies, happened to be tutor to a young student from the north by the name of James Lindsay, of whom no-one had ever heard. Being the youngest students in the lecture hall to hear Hutcheson on that fateful day, the two young lads had gravitated together, and found there was much upon which they agreed – the principal being the examination of how to be virtuous in a world of political disorder and moral decay.
But that was not their topic for tonight, it was not why James Lindsay had parted with scarce pennies to spend thirteen hours on a bumping, malodorous coach to travel here to Edinburgh. The lad was worried. Master Top Boots hadn’t been the first to seek him out. There had been that damn priest.
Religion had been a settled matter in the Lindsay house for all of James’ life – but it had not always been so. The earl had been baptised a Catholic, but had renounced his faith during the religious warfare of the last century. Apparently, for a time, there’d been tumult, but his father’s decision to embrace the covenant had accorded with the people who called him laird; so, growing up, there had been no disgruntlement abroad for James to sense.
That was not to say he grew up unaware of the influence of the Catholic church, or its priesthood. Priests would from time to time turn up, as if by chance, at Kirkspindie, seeking audiences with the earl.
‘They don’t like it if ye jump the dyke, Jaimie lad,’ Gideon had explained after one such visitation. ‘He’s here to call yer faither back to the king’s true religion.’
‘But the true king doesn’t mind which a man calls his true religion,’ observed a nit-pickety thirteen-year-old James. ‘He’s said so.’
And what had Gideon to say about that? ‘Aye. And whit kings say and whit they do, Jaimie,’ delivered with one of his grins and one of his winks.
But what James had pointed out was true. Unlike his father, James II, who had thrown away his throne in religion’s name, James Francis Edward Stuart was showing himself to be more flexible. While not exactly renouncing his Catholicism, the son, whom they now called the pretender, had indeed sworn that after his restoration every man would have freedom of worship. Yet the schism between Rome and protestant still would not heal, neither in the pretender’s court abroad, nor in this realm he wished to reclaim.
Most of it went over the head of young James Lindsay; all such theological warfare seemed to him so much noise. But when that priest had accosted him in Glasgow, a mere few weeks ago, outside the university’s High Street gate, it had been more than matters of theology at stake.
At first, James thought the priest had been carrying some message from his father. But no. Once James had stopped to listen, he heard the man accuse him of being at Glenshiel.
‘He said everybody knew,’ said James. ‘That I was out for King James … trying to hide it, yes. But everybody knew. But how did they know, Davy? When there is nothing to know!’
‘What else did he say? What did he want?’
‘Oh, some rambling nonsense about the importance of my father returning to the true faith before the coming restoration, so he could help force the new King James to renounce all previous commitments and establish the Catholic church once again on his sovereign soil. And some other nonsense about how it was time for me to confess the sins I must have committed on that day at Glenshiel, but for which I would surely be forgiven by a grateful God. I told him, “The only sin I’ve committed, man, is listening to fools like you and worse … and for that it’s not God I need to seek forgiveness from, it is myself!” And I pushed him away and fled. If people know, then people have talked. It is the government come after me, Davy, for something I know not what. What must I do?’
James looked across his jug of claret at the gaunt countenance of his friend, the mischief-twinkly eyes, and the mangey appearance of his scholar’s wig.
‘The thing is,’ said James, at length, calm again, ‘if, as I know they must be, my family are again
