In the ensuing June, a poor woman of the same sort, named Janet Cook, residing in Leith, was denounced for offences in which a father and son were associated—a turpitude which excited a religious horror, and caused her to be regarded as a criminal of the highest class. The Lord Advocate reported of Janet to the Privy Council, that she had been put under the consideration of the Lords of Justiciary, as a person against whom ‘probation could not be found,’ but that the Lords were nevertheless ‘of opinion she might be banished the kingdom,’ and she herself had ‘consented to her banishment.’ The Lords of the Privy Council seem to have had no more difficulty about the case than those of [Sidenote: 1695.] the Court of Justiciary had had; they ordered that Janet should depart furth of the kingdom and not return, ‘under the highest pains and penalties.’ In January 1696, a woman named Elizabeth Waterstone, imprisoned on a charge identical in all respects with the above, was, in like manner, without trial, banished, with her own consent, to the plantations. On the 7th of February 1697, four boys who were notorious thieves, and eight women who were that and worse, were called before the magistrates of Edinburgh, and ‘interrogat whether or not they would consent freely to their own banishment furth of this kingdom, and go to his majesty’s plantations in America.’ ‘They one and all freely and unanimously consented so to do,’ and arrangements were made by the Privy Council for their deportation accordingly. It was only ordained regarding the boys that Lord Teviot might engage them as recruits for Flanders, in which case he was immediately to commence maintaining them. On the 15th February 1698, Robert Alexander, ‘a notorious horse-stealer,’ now in prison, was willing to appease justice by consenting to banishment without trial. He likewise made discoveries enabling several countrymen to recover their horses. The Privy Council therefore ordained him to be transported by the first ship to the plantations of America, not to return thence under pain of death. William Baillie, ‘ane Egyptian,’ prisoner in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, but regarding whom we hear of no specific offence and no trial, was summarily ordered (Sep. 12, 1699) to be transported in the first ship going to the plantations, the skipper to be allowed a proper gratuity from the treasury, and at the same time to give caution for five hundred merks that he would produce a certificate of the man being landed in America.[139] It was long before justice in Scotland took any qualm about this free-and-easy way of dealing with accused persons. So late as 1732, two men of humble rank—Henderson, a sedan-carrier, and Hamilton, a _street-cadie_—suspected of being accessory to the murder of an exciseman, having _petitioned_ for banishment before trial, were sent from the jail in Edinburgh to Glasgow, there to wait a vessel for the plantations.[140] [Sidenote: 1695. APR. 3.]