xviii ORMISTOUN'S LETTERS 



were tried before him. John sat in Parliament from 1707 to 

 1741. Had he been half as much interested in Walpole's 

 long administration and the ways of his fellow Scots members 

 amid their novel surroundings as these letters show he was 

 in manure, and onions, and turnips, and trees, and the canna- 

 be-fashedness of his tenants, he might have filled now a 

 notable page in British history. 



The Old House of Ormistoun 



The approach crosses the Orme, a tributary of the Tyne, 

 which it joins below the village, and, rising to the top of the 

 south bank, leads westward alongside the river dean known 

 as the Glen, which the old house faces. This position, on a 

 bank overhanging a river hollow, is a characteristic site for an 

 old East Lothian mansion — witness Seton, Winton, Saltoun, 

 Yester, Biel, and Whittinghame. This ancient home of the 

 Cockburns is now a gaunt, featureless, two-story block, in rear 

 of the modern mansion, and is remarkable only for a low- 

 arched^ main doorway, at the left side of which is the 

 grated window of a small chamber that formed the tem- 

 porary prison of the martyr George Wishart. Earl Patrick, 

 father of the Bothwell of sinister aspect and unhappy memory, 

 had seized the preacher at Haddington, torn him from his 

 devoted pupil, Knox, and under promise of safety conveyed 

 him by Ormistoun to Elphinston Tower, standing a grim 

 peel on the ridge to the north across the Tyne valley. Here 

 waited Cardinal Beaton for his victim. The Cockburns had 

 been staunch for the English and reform party. According to 

 tradition, Wishart had often preached under an old yew-tree 

 which is now the most notable object at Ormistoun. This tree 

 is mentioned in a document of date 1474, and still bears 

 witness to its remarkable age. From its gnarled bole rise great 



^ The doorway is only four feet seven inches in height. The window is two 

 feet two inches by two feet. There is no sculpturing or any ornamentation on 

 the front It is now used as a tool-house and wood-store. 



