The carriage had not yet departed the street. The Archbishop of St Andrews, James Sharp, and the Bishop of Orkney were seated within when a man discharged a pistol. The ball struck the bishop in the arm and shoulder, shattering bone. The archbishop escaped unharmed. Amid the crowd drawn together by the report, the marksman vanished, bearing a second pistol still charged.
The cause, as recorded by George Borrow in his compilation of 1825, opens upon the trial of James Mitchel, ten years after the outrage in Edinburgh. The libel dated the discharge to the 9th of July, 1668, or to some other day of that same month. It alleged an attempt upon the life of the archbishop and the wounding of the Bishop of Orkney. The pleadings, confessions, and testimonies unfold an event whose political and judicial consequences far outstripped the firing of a single shot.
Mitchel was a field-preacher and had served as chaplain in divers households. According to the indictment, he harbored malice toward Sharp for his elevation to the primacy and his place upon the Privy Council. The investigators maintained that he had procured two pistols, then lay in wait for the prelate as he issued forth toward his coach. The piece was fired through the carriage door. According to the surgeon who dressed him, Orkney had his hand upon the archbishop’s coach when the ball took effect. Surgeons deposed that bones had been fractured, small splinters subsequently issuing from the wound; yet they affirmed that the bishop had been healed and had recovered the use of his arm.
The marksman eluded arrest. By the terms of the charges later framed, he fled the realm, abiding in Holland, England, and Ireland before venturing back to Edinburgh. There, for a season, he was said to have kept an open shop not far from Sharp’s lodgings. When he was finally apprehended, he was found bearing a pistol loaded with powder and ball. The prosecution contended that this was the very weapon employed in the street, and that Mitchel purposed to turn it upon any man who should seek to lay hands upon him. The archbishop, who had observed the assailant approaching his coach, declared that he recognized him following his arrest.
The complexion of the cause altered when Mitchel spoke before the authorities. In 1674, he subscribed a confession before the Chancellor, the Lord Register, the King’s Advocate, and the Treasurer-Depute. Therein he acknowledged having fired upon Sharp in 1668, swearing upon oath that no other person had instigated him or shared in his design. The declaration was read before the members of the Council; several of their number affirmed they had seen him ratify it. Mitchel disputed not merely its contents, but the manner in which the evidence had been obtained and preserved. He maintained that an assurance of life had drawn the confession from him. According to the witnesses from the Council, he stated he had acted because the archbishop was an enemy to the “godly” of the west, following the rising at Pentland. The royal libel thus tied the assault not to a private feud, but to Sharp’s station upon the Council and his measures against the insurgent bands. At trial, Mitchel pleaded not guilty and denied having emitted the confession.
The dilemma dividing the court turned upon what had been pledged in exchange for his acknowledgment. Mitchel produced a copy of an act of the Council which he construed as an assurance of life. The Crown’s representatives, among them the Chancellor and Lauderdale, denied having promised him his life. Sharp declared that upon the prisoner's first apprehension, he had merely told him that if he would freely confess and express repentance, he would do what lay in his power for him. He affirmed he had guaranteed no outcome. The assize had thus to weigh two distinct matters: the assault itself, and the existence of a promise that might shield Mitchel from capital punishment.
The legal dispute was prolonged. Counsel for Mitchel argued that an attempt which had taken no man's life ought not to be visited with the pains of murder. He challenged as well the application of the term “assassination” in Scots law, the weight of a confession received by the Council, and the doctrine that a wound subsequently healed was equivalent to a fatal maiming. The prosecution countered that a statutory act made any assault upon a Privy Councillor a capital crime, and that the shot aimed at Sharp fell squarely beneath its provisions. It was not merely the wounding of Orkney that stood upon trial: Mitchel’s hand had been raised against a councillor of the King.
The witnesses assigned both a place and a sequence to the shot. William Paterson had perceived a man with a pistol in Blackfriars Wynd immediately after the report, though he could not depose that it was Mitchel. The keeper of the tolbooth stated that the panel had confessed the deed to him, recounting how he had returned into the street to feign joining the hue and cry after the malefactor. The Bishop of Galloway testified to having conversed with Mitchel in prison; the latter had allegedly told him that Sharp was an enemy to the godly, and that they could know no safety while he lived. The articles of the libel drew strength from this convergence of the weapon, the confession, and the religious motive.
The paper exhibited by Mitchel confronted the lords of the Council with their own words. The Chancellor, Rothes, insisted he had given no assurance of life. If the record contained expressions that seemed to imply one, he added, according to the report, they must have been entered by clerical error. The King’s Advocate objected to the production of the register: the Privy Councillors had already sworn they made no such engagement. Mitchel was thus driven to establish, against the very men who had interrogated him, the covenant that should have preserved him. The judges conceded that a proven promise would have sufficed to spare his life; all now rested upon what the jurors chose to believe.
On the 10th of January, 1678, the assize unanimously found the assault upon the archbishop and the wounding of the bishop proven. They likewise sustained the confession, but repelled the defense founded upon a promise of life. Sentence was pronounced for Friday, the 18th of January, at the Mercat Cross of Edinburgh: Mitchel was to be hanged, and his moveable goods escheated to the King. With this condemnation Borrow’s chronicle concludes.
The archbishop had walked from the street unhurt; the Bishop of Orkney had borne the bullet's mark in his arm. Mitchel, for his part, had spent nearly ten years between the shot, the flight, the return, and the confession that the jury ultimately accepted. The utterances of the Council regarding a possible pardon were not sustained as a binding pledge; nor could his advocate persuade the court to set aside the bare design. In Edinburgh, a bullet had missed its mark, yet the intervening years of uncertainty had not deflected the course of the law from the hand that fired it.