Soon after his marriage, Robert Barclay narrowly missed a first taste of prison life. The "monthly meeting" at Aberdeen (the gathering of the local congregations for denominational business, always preceded by worship) was entered by officers sent by the magistrates to disperse the assembly. They violently dragged to the Council House all the men who were present. There the magistrates endeavoured by fair words to induce them to give up their meeting, and then let them go. If they had had more experience of Friends they would have anticipated what followed. In spite of their recent arrest, the released Friends simply returned to the meeting, and resumed their worship. Soon the officers "appeared again, and with greater fury than before dragged them back to the Council House, where the provost and council reprimanded them for contumacious resistance of civil authority, using much threatening language. But Friends were preserved in a tranquil and innocent boldness, so that 'neither the big words nor yet the barbarous deeds' of their opponents could make them flinch from an honest confession of the true reasons for their conduct." They were all sent to prison, except Patrick Livingstone, and the young laird of Ury. To the eager martyr spirit of the latter, this exemption was quite disappointing. Young as he was, and so recently married, he would gladly have shared the hardships of his brethren. Christian Barclay became a minister of the Society of Friends, but how early we are not told. She was an admirable wife, and an exemplary mother to her seven children, all of whom not only survived their father, but by a remarkable longevity were alive fifty years after his death. She was a noted nurse, and the poor for many miles round sought her advice in sickness. No doubt she used these occasions like a true medical missionary to minister to both body and soul. She lived to be seventy-five years of age, and was greatly lamented, not only by her numerous descendants, but by the poor to whom she had been such a friend, and by the Society to which she belonged, and in whose spiritual welfare she took a deep and life-long interest.