Untitled - Electric Scotland

4 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. i.
congregation," we are "
told, were obliged to sit, sometimes
under a heavy rain, sometimes with their benches or stools
planted in the snow, while he officiated and addressed them
from the window." 1
Among these undaunted worshippers
was the large family of Thomas Tait, whose son John, on
leaving Aberdeenshire to settle in Edinburgh, must have
carried with him stirring memories of the Sundays of his
early years. Small was the encouragement or support
which these sorely pressed and gallant Churchmen received
from the great sister Church of England, and it would have
startled them indeed to learn that the grandson of John
Tait would be Archbishop of Canterbury.
Once settled in Edinburgh, John Tait was articled in
the office of Ronald Craufurd, a well-known Writer to the
Signet, in whose hands lay the legal business of many of
the foremost Scottish families, and there John received the
legal training of which he made good use in after life when
he succeeded, on Mr. Craufurd s death, to the increasing
business of the house. There is a portrait of John Tait,
by Raeburn, which well represents the calm good sense and
the spirit of manly enterprise which he inherited from the
blue bonnets of Aberdeen. He married, in 1763, a
lady of the singular name of Charles Murdoch, so called
after Prince Charlie, the hero of Scottish imagination, in
She was,"
whose cause her family had suffered much.
"
we are told,
"
well born, well educated, very pretty, and
very poor, and so independent was her spirit that, like
many of the Stuart ladies of the day, she supported her
widowed mother by the work of her own hands." Charles
Murdoch, Jacobite though she was, was .a Presbyterian,
and drew her husband to the Established Church of Scot
land, into which their only son, Craufurd, was baptized.
Craufurd Tait s mother died when he was only sixteen.
1 See Walker s Life of John Skinner, p. 59.