Читать книгу Traditions of Edinburgh онлайн

90 страница из 95

The grandest of all these old Edinburgh merchants was William Dick, ancestor of the Dicks, baronets of Prestonfield. In his youth, and during the lifetime of his father, he had been able to lend £6000 to King James, to defray the expense of his journey to Scotland. The affairs in which he was engaged would even now be considered important. For example, he farmed the customs on wine at £6222, and the crown rents of Orkney at £3000. Afterwards he farmed the excise. His fleets extended from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. The immense wealth he acquired enabled him to purchase large estates. He himself reckoned his property as at one time equal to two hundred thousand pounds sterling.

Strange to say, this great merchant came to poverty, and died in a prison. The reader of the Waverley novels may remember David Deans telling how his father ‘saw them toom the sacks of dollars out o’ Provost Dick’s window intill the carts that carried them to the army at Dunse Law’—‘if ye winna believe his testimony, there is the window itsell still standing in the Luckenbooths—I think it’s a claith-merchant’s buith the day.’ This refers to large advances which Dick made to the Covenanters to enable them to carry on the war against the king. The house alluded to is actually now a claith-merchant’s booth, having long been in the possession of Messrs John Clapperton & Company. Two years after Dunse Law, Dick gave the Covenanters 100,000 merks in one sum. Subsequently, being after all of royalist tendencies, he made still larger advances in favour of the Scottish government during the time when Charles II. was connected with it; and thus provoking the wrath of the English Commonwealth, his ruin was completed by the fines to which he was subjected by that party when triumphant, amounting in all to £65,000.