Page:Celebrated Trials - Volume 1.djvu/486

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SAWNEY CUNNINGHAM.

EXECUTED AT LEITH, 12TH OF APRIL, 1635.

This person had no reason to say that a good education or tuition was denied him, whereby he might have avoided the several villanous actions he afterwards committed. His family lived in tolerable good repute at Glasgow in Scotland, where he was born; but, in spite of all the learning his parents had given him, or good examples they had set before him, to regulate his passions and direct his conduct right, he abandoned himself, from his earliest acquaintance with the world, to evil practices, till at last he became a monster of prophaneness and wicked living. However, these great disadvantages did not hinder him from making a very honourable marriage; for, as his parents still kept up an honest and genteel character in the neighbourhood where they lived, and as it would have been infamous to have reproached them for those miscarriages in the son which they had strove all they could to root out of his mind, and could not help, so an old gentleman, who had preserved for a long tine an inviolable friendship for the family, entered into an alliance with Mr. Cunningham the elder, which at last terminated in giving his daughter to Sawney, and an estate in portion with her of above one hundred and forty pounds per annum, thinking that marriage might be a means to reclaim our adventurer from his ill course of life, and at last settle his mind, to the mutual satisfaction of both families, for which he thought his daughter's portion would be a good purchase, and well laid out. Sawney no sooner found himself in possession of an estate able to support his extravagances, but he immediately gave a greater scope to his passions than he had hitherto done. He made taverns and alehouses the frequent places of his resort, and, not content to waste the day in debauchery and drunkenness, the night too was passed. in the same manner. These steps could not but be attended. with hurtful consequences, and he was too soon an eye-witness of some of them: for not having always wherewithal to,

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