The Lords of the Privy Council had, of course, the usual dislike of deputies and commissions for seeing appeals taken against their decisions to the principal authority, and they embraced the first opportunity of laying hold of the customs tacksman and putting him up in the Tolbooth. There he did not perhaps change his mind as to his non-liability in justice for two thousand three hundred pounds for presents of wine to the officers of state in connection with the farming or tack of the customs, being a good ten per cent. upon the whole transaction; but he probably soon became sensible that the Privy Council of Scotland was not a body he could safely contend with. The Lord Advocate speedily commenced a process against him, on the ground of his memorial to the king falling under the statute of King James V. for severe punishment to those who _murmur_ any judge spiritual or temporal, and prove not the same; and on this charge he was brought before the Council (1st of February 1698). It was shewn that the charge for gratuities was ‘according to use and wont,’ and that the memorial was a high misdemeanour against their lordships; therefore inferring a severe punishment. As might have been expected, Sir Robert was glad to submit, and on his knee to crave pardon of their lordships, who thereupon discharged him.[218] [Sidenote: 1697.] The reader, who has just seen some other Edinburgh merchants punished for imputing to state-officers the possibility of their being bribed with money, will probably smile when he sees another in trouble so soon after, for remonstrating against the necessity he had been under of actually giving them bribes. [Sidenote: DEC. 28.] It had occurred to Mr Charles Ritchie, minister of the gospel, to be asked by Lieutenant Whitehead, of Colonel Sir John Hill’s regiment at Fort-William, to join him in marriage with the colonel’s daughter, and the ceremony was performed in the presence of several of the officers of the regiment, the minister professing to know of no impediment to the union of the young couple. For this fact, Mr Charles had been carried to Edinburgh, and put up in the Tolbooth, where he languished without trial for several months. He now petitioned for release or banishment, stating that he had been kept in jail all this time ‘without any subsistence,’ and ‘is reduced to the greatest extremity, not only for want of any mean of subsistence, but also by want of any measure of health.’ The Council, viewing his consent to banishment, granted him that boon, he enacting himself bound to depart ‘furth of the kingdom’ before the 1st of February, and never to return without his majesty’s or the Council’s warrant to that effect.[219]