Buchanites

Buchanites, an extraordinary sect of fanatics which sprang up in the west of Scotland in the last quarter of the 18th century. Its founder was Elspeth Buchan, born in 1738, the daughter of John Simpson, a wayside innkeeper near Banff. She married Robert Buchan, a potter, but ultimately separated from him, having begun meanwhile to preach strange religious doctrines which she professed to find in the Scriptures. At Irvine she became acquainted with the Rev. Hugh White, minister of the Relief Church there, a weak and vain man, who adopted her opinions, for which he was deposed by his presbytery. A few followers joined them, but the magistrates expelled her from the town in May 1784. Accompanied by White and a handful of crazy fanatics, she travelled towards Nithsdale, and found a resting-place in a barn at New Cample, near Thornhill. Their whole number was forty-six, and here they built for themselves a house of one apartment with a loft, in which they all dwelt, supported chiefly by the money of the more wealthy of their number. Mrs Buchan, who gave herself out as the woman of Rev. xii., seems to have been rogue as well as fool, for with all her other-worldliness she had a very mundane interest in money, and could hardly have herself believed in the bogus miracles she wrought. The poet Burns in a letter (August 1784) speaks of the idleness and immorality of her followers. They seem to have had a community of women. Mrs Buchan died in May 1791, and was buried clandestinely by White. The last survivor of her sect died in 1848. See The Buchanites from First to Last, by Joseph Train (Edin. 1846).