Margaret Balfour, Lady Rollo, had brought her husband relief from a burden of forty thousand merks resting on his estate, being a debt owing to her father; and without this relief he could not have enjoyed the family property. She had, according to her own account, endeavoured to live with him as a dutiful and loving wife, and they had children grown up; yet he had been led into a base course of life with a female named Isobel Kininmont, and in October last he had deserted his family, and gone abroad. The lady now petitioned the Privy Council for aliment to herself and her six children. The estate, she said, being eight thousand merks per annum (£444, 8_s._ 10_d._⅔), she conceived that four thousand was the least that could be modified for her behalf, along with the mansion of Duncrub, which had been assigned to her as her jointure-house. The Lords of the Council ordained that Lord Rollo should be cited for a particular day, and that for the time past, and till that day, the tenants should pay her ladyship a thousand pounds Scots, she meanwhile enjoying the use of Duncrub House. Lord Rollo, failing to appear on the day cited, was declared rebel, and the lady’s petition was at the same time complied with in its whole extent.[173] [Sidenote: 1696. JAN.] William Murray, tavern-keeper in the Canongate, was again a prisoner on account of an offensive news-letter. He had suffered close imprisonment for twenty-one weeks, till ‘his health is so far decayed, that, if he were any longer where he is, the recovery thereof will be absolutely desperate.’ His house having been shut up by the magistrates, his liquors and furniture were spoiled, and ‘his poor wife and family exposed to the greatest extremity and hazard of being starved for cold and hunger in this season of the year.’ He represented to the Privy Council that he was willing to be tried for any crime that could be laid to his charge. ‘Ane Englishman’s directing,’ however, ‘of ane news-letter to him was neither a crime nor any fault of his.... In case there was anything unwarrantable in the letter, the postmaster was obliged in duty to have suppressed the same, after he had read and perused it.’ His having, on the contrary, delivered it, ‘after he had read and perused it,’ was ‘sufficient to put him _in bonâ fide_ to believe that the letter might thereafter be made patent.’ Murray went on to say that ‘this summar usage of himself and his poor family, being far above the greatest severity that ever was inflicted by their Lordships or any sovereign court of the nation, must be conceived to be illegal, arbitrary, and unwarrantable, and contrair both to the claim of right and established laws and inviolable practice of the nation.’ The Council did so far grant grace to Murray as to order him out of jail, but to be banished from Lothian, with certification that, if found in those bounds after ten days, he should be taken off to the plantations.[174] [Sidenote: JAN. 16.]