Islay hurried to Edinburgh, where no evidence could be extracted.  “The High Flyers of our Scottish Church,” he wrote, “have made this infamous murder a point of conscience. . . .  All the lower rank of the people who have distinguished themselves by the pretensions of superior sanctity speak of this murder as the hand of God doing justice.”  They went by the precedent of the murder of Archbishop Sharp, it appears.  In the Lords (February 1737) a Bill was passed for disabling the Provost—­one Wilson—­for public employment, destroying the Town Charter, abolishing the Town Guard, and throwing down the gate of the Nether Bow.  Argyll opposed the Bill; in the Commons all Scottish members were against it; Walpole gave way.  Wilson was dismissed, and a fine of 2000 pounds was levied and presented to the widow of Porteous.  An Act commanding preachers to read monthly for a year, in church, a proclamation bidding their hearers aid the cause of justice against the murderers, was an insult to the Kirk, from an Assembly containing bishops.  It is said that at least half of the ministers disobeyed with impunity.  It was impossible, of course, to evict half of the preachers in the country.

Argyll now went into opposition against Walpole, and, at least, listened to Keith—­later the great Field-Marshal of Frederick the Great, and brother of the exiled Earl Marischal.

In 1737 the Jacobites began to stir again:  a committee of five Chiefs and Lords was formed to manage their affairs.  John Murray of Broughton went to Rome, and lost his heart to Prince Charles—­now a tall handsome lad of seventeen, with large brown eyes, and, when he pleased, a very attractive manner.  To Murray, more than to any other man, was due the Rising of 1745.

Meanwhile, in secular affairs, Scotland showed nothing more remarkable than the increasing dislike, strengthened by Argyll, of Walpole’s Government.

CHAPTER XXXII.  THE FIRST SECESSION.

For long we have heard little of the Kirk, which between 1720 and 1740 passed through a cycle of internal storms.  She had been little vexed, either during her years of triumph or defeat, by heresy or schism.  But now the doctrines of Antoinette Bourignon, a French lady mystic, reached Scotland, and won the sympathies of some students of divinity—­including the Rev. John Simson, of an old clerical family which had been notorious since the Reformation for the turbulence of its members.  In 1714, and again in 1717, Mr Simson was acquitted by the Assembly on the charges of being a Jesuit, a Socinian, and an Arminian, but was warned against “a tendency to attribute too much to natural reason.”  In 1726-29 he was accused of minimising the doctrines of the creed of St Athanasius, and tending to the Arian heresy,—­“lately raked out of hell,” said the Kirk-session of Portmoak (1725), addressing the sympathetic Presbytery of Kirkcaldy.  At the Assembly of 1726 that Presbytery,