At this date, the Privy Council, on Sutherland’s petition, took into consideration his losses, his inadequate salary, and the good service he was rendering, ‘whereby not only the young physicians, apothecaries, and chirurgeons, but also the nobility and gentry, are taught the knowledge of the herbs, and also a multitude of plants, shrubs, and trees are cultivated which were never known in this nation before, and more numerous than in any other garden in Britain, as weel for the honour of the place as for the advantage of the people.’ They therefore declared that they will in future allow Mr Sutherland fifty pounds a year out of fines falling to them, one half for expenses of the garden, and the other half by way of addition to his salary.[101] [Sidenote: 1693. APR. 13.] Mr Stephen Maxwell, ‘alleged to be a Romish priest,’ prisoner in Blackness Castle, Mr George Gordon, Mr Robert Davidson, and Mr Alexander Crichton, ‘also alleged to be popish priests,’ and prisoners in the Edinburgh Tolbooth, were ordered to be set at liberty, provided they would agree to deport themselves from the kingdom ‘in the fleet now lying under convoy of the man-of-war lying in the Road of Leith,’ and give caution to the extent of a hundred pounds that they would never return. On the 17th, Mr James Hepburn, ‘alleged to be a popish priest,’ was ordered to be liberated from the Canongate Tolbooth on the same terms. All of these gentlemen had been for many months deprived of their liberty. There still lay in Blackness Castle one John Seaton, who had been apprehended in December 1688, on suspicion of being a priest, and confined ever since, being four and a half years. He had been offered the same grace with the rest; but he was prevented by his personal condition from accepting it. According to his own account, he was seventy years of age. He ‘has not only spent any little thing he had, but his health is likewise entirely ruined, beyond any probability of recovery.’ He was most willing to have gone abroad, ‘where he might have expected better usage for ane in his condition than he can reasonably propose to himself anywhere in this kingdom;’ but ‘when the rest went away above a month ago, finding his health so totally broken by sickness, old age, and imprisonment, and his infirmity still growing worse,’ he was ‘necessitat to continue prisoner, rather than hazard a long sea-voyage, whereby he could expect no less than an unavoidable painful death, the petitioner, when formerly in health and strength at sea, being still in hazard of his life.’ John Seaton further represented that he had never, during his long imprisonment, received any support from the government, but been maintained by the charity of his friends. He now prayed the Council that they would take pity on him, and ‘not permit him, ane old sickly dying man, to languish in prison for the few days he can, by the course of nature and his disease, continue in this