The Privy Council was pretty fully occupied at this time in summoning and fining individuals who had been present at unauthorised religious meetings. For example, ‘Robert Burnes, merchant in Glasgow,’ expiated by a fine of 300 merks his having been at a conventicle lately held at Kirkintilloch. Four persons, described as merchants, were fined each in £100 Scots for being at such a meeting in Hilderston House, Linlithgowshire. A fifth, who had not only been there, but had a child baptised on the occasion, suffered to double the amount. A great number were brought into trouble by having been present at a famous conventicle held a short time before at the Hill of Beith, near Dunfermline. Adam Stobie and eight other men, who had been at both that conventicle and another at Livingseat, and who refused to take an oath regarding them, were ‘ordained to be carried to the plantations in America, and discharged to return under pain of death.’ In thus so harshly thwarting the extreme Presbyterians in their predilections as to clergymen and meetings for worship, the government must have calculated on a certain support from the reactionary feeling engendered by the recent twenty-two years of troubles--that feeling under which we may presume they themselves acted. But a constant repetition of such proceedings against members of the community who were only exercising a natural privilege, and meaning no harm to their fellow-creatures, could not fail to create very bitter feelings, and gradually muster elements for the destruction of the existing _régime_. There was at the same time an effort to deal what was doubtless intended to be equal justice towards the various dissenters whom the Presbyterians themselves were accustomed to persecute when in the possession of power. There were even now Quakers in the tolbooths of Aberdeen, Inverury, Montrose, Edinburgh, and other towns, charged with no other offence than that of holding meetings for their own kind of devotion. Professors of the Catholic faith were also from time to time assailed in ways which, one would think, must have been sufficiently annoying to them, although, there is reason to believe, not quite up to that point of severity which would have been satisfactory to the people on the opposite extreme.