Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

In the last century it was ‘the thing’ for promenaders in Hyde Park to gaze through the railings, and watch Queen Anne and her ladies airing their nobility within Kensington Gardens. The most important park incident of that Queen’s reign was the murderous duel between the Tory Duke of Hamilton and the Whig Lord Mohun. Their quarrel was personal and political, and it was embittered by a question as to right of property. On a gloomy November morning of 1712 they fought with swords, before it was quite daylight, and with such ferocity--hacking and rolling over each other on the ground--that, when Mohun dealt the Duke a mortal stab he himself fell dead on the grass. All the world went in crowds to the spot, to moralise, eat cakes, drink ale, and cut poor jokes on the scene of the butchery. No other park duel of the last century was so sanguinary. It was there that Martin, M.P. for Camelford, nearly killed Wilkes by shooting him through and through. ‘It would have been all over with me,’ said Wilkes, ‘only that Martin used government powder.’ It was in Hyde Park that George Garrick and Baddeley went out to pistol one another at instigation of a Jewish lover of Mrs. Baddeley, who hoped that George would kill the lady’s husband; but the affair ended by the parties dining together. A later fight was more serious; it occurred in December 1773. One Hugh Williamson managed to steal the despatches sent by the governors of the American colonies to Whately, one of the under-secretaries in England. Dr. Franklin received the stolen property, and sent the documents to America, where their publication caused the greatest indignation. Whately’s brother, a banker, expressed his suspicion of an American, one Temple, being the thief. Temple called Whately out, and the two pelted each other with shot, and then hacked and thrust at each other with swords, till Whately was removed in an almost dying state. At that time neither the thief nor the receiver was known. It was not till after the fight that Franklin acknowledged that he was the receiver, and it was not till much later that Hugh Williamson was discovered to be the thief. In 1780 the popular Lord Shelburne was hit in the groin in a duel with Colonel Fullarton, of whom, as an _attaché_ to the English Embassy in Paris, the minister had spoken with great contempt. The City of London sent every day a ‘How d’ye do?’ to the leader of the Opposition. Subsequently parsons were not ashamed to do their bit of murder here, or run the risk of being murdered by another. Parson Bate fought his co-proprietor of the ‘Morning Post’ without much harm to either; and Parson Allen stretched his man, Dulany, dead on the turf. For this feat he suffered half-a-year’s imprisonment in Newgate. But this penalty did not prevent the Hon. Cosmo Gordon from killing Colonel Thomas on the same spot, nor weaken the arm of General Stewart in running his sword into Lord Macartney. When people of quality thought butchering one another a salve for wounded honour, fools of lower degree soon followed the example. In June, 1792, one Frizell, weary of a night’s debauch with other Irish law students, was sarcastically rebuked for his comparative sobriety by his friend Clarke. The whole party resorted to Hyde Park, in the beautiful summer dawn, to settle the question with pistols. In five minutes poor Frizell was lying stark dead among the buttercups and daisies. His tipsy companions tumbled the body into a hackney-coach, which was afterwards found standing in Piccadilly, without coachman or any passenger except the dead law student, who was beyond giving any account of himself. In August, 1796, Mr. Pride, an American, killed his countryman, Mr. Carpenter, in the park. In 1797 Colonel King exchanged six shots ineffectually with Colonel Fitzgerald, a married man, from whom King had only recently recovered his sister whom Fitzgerald had seduced from her home. Some time after this duel in the park Fitzgerald went over to Kilworth, Ireland, in order to gain possession again of the unhappy young lady. Her brother, who had become Lord Kingsborough, broke into Fitzgerald’s room for the purpose of chastising him. He would probably have been slain by the stalwart ruffian but for the timely arrival of his father, the Earl of Kingston, who, seeing his son’s danger, fired at Fitzgerald, and killed the rascal on the spot.

But people found life in Hyde Park as well as death. Frost could not keep them from it in February, nor dust and heat in June. Fashion rode round and round the Ring, as equestrians do in a circus, to attract the admiration of spectators. Since hackney-coaches had been forbidden to enter the park, at the close of William’s reign, because their crowded inmates used to indulge in loud and rude comments on such public characters as passed them, the place had become more delightful to exclusive fashionables. Rogues and hussies, however, had the most dashing equipages. Camps and reviews--particularly in the Jacobite period--varied the grand spectacle; and there were crowds who went, as to a festival, to see a soldier nearly flogged to death or shot outright. The fine people, with less curiosity, walked meanwhile, with well-bred indifference, beneath the five rows of walnut trees which flourished there till 1814, when, by the exigencies of war, they were all cut down to be converted into gun-stocks. After the West Bourn was converted into the ‘Serpentine River,’ by order of Queen Caroline, there was boating on it, as now, but the yachts were ‘for the diversion of the royal family.’ That good queen, having taken 300 acres of the park, added them to Kensington Gardens. The good lady would fain have undone the gracious act of Charles I., and would have made the parks private; but she changed her mind on hearing the probable cost: Walpole estimated it at _three crowns_. The roads at this time were a disgrace to the authorities; and when ducal carriages broke down in the ruts, and commonplace chariots drove through the panels behind which royalty was seated, the public were comforted, for they thought that improvement must ensue. Gallantry, meanwhile, did not care for roads. The sight of Molly Nisbett’s ankle, as she walked by the Serpentine, so moved Lord Macclesfield’s heart that he ‘fell in love’ with her, as the phrase goes; but happening to meet her sister Dorothy when he expected to meet Molly, he fell still more in love with _her_, and at last married her. Walpole epigrammatically says that the Countess Dolly was my lord’s mistress--or at least other people’s.

Just a hundred and eleven years ago, George II. reviewed, in the park, Colonel Burgoyne’s troop of light horse; and the Colonel’s son, Sir John Burgoyne, died only recently, in his ninetieth year. The review was as nothing compared with a spectacle afforded at a later period by the Ranger of the park, Lord Orford, who drove a four-in-hand of reindeer instead of horses. Deer-hunting in the park by the royal family and privileged persons was not uncommon as late as the latter half of the last century. There, too, might be seen, on his little Welsh pony, great Chatham--he who first called the parks the ‘lungs of London.’ Ugly Wilkes there found willing listeners among the handsomest of women. The beaux about to make the _grand tour_ took leave of home by a display in the park, and probably dined with the Sçavoir Vivre Club, partaking of their favourite dish, from which beaux generally acquired the name of ‘macaronies.’ The headdresses of the latter were something like those of women very recently, and were almost as nasty. The women of that day sailed through the park in head-gear that made them look top-heavy, and long skirts which might be described in the words which Scripture applies to the skirts of Jerusalem. Thieves of every degree were busy among the thoughtless crowd; but gentlemanly young fellows would gallantly protect strange young ladies across the park when it grew dusk, and strip them of everything valuable before they were half across it. A detected thief, however, might think himself lucky if he escaped undrowned from the Serpentine water and unsuffocated from the Serpentine mud. Other dangers came from the park. Rifle practice went on there very actively--so actively that at last the landlord of the King’s Arms, Paddington, naturally complained at a ball, intended for the target, having crashed through his windows, and lodged in the wood of one of the boxes in his tap-room. At this exercise and at the reviews, the belles of the day used to muster in Amazonian uniforms corresponding with those of the regiments they intended to compliment. Blind Lord Derehurst used to ride through the old grass-road full gallop, but with a friend at his side, whereby he once came into collision with a furious rider who _could_ see his way. Both were half killed by the shock; but when the blind lord recovered the use of his limbs he terrified everybody by galloping about the park more furiously than ever. When the men took to four-in-hand driving it was done with a perfection which may be still equalled, but also with a splendour of appointments which is not followed. The ladies, too, took up the reins, and condescended even ‘to whistle sweet their diuretic strains.’ The lady drivers had above a fifty years’ reign, from the days of Young’s Delia, who, in 1728, smacked the silken thong, ‘graceful as Jehu,’ to the period when Lady Archer ‘tooled’ her four white horses through the park, and Mrs. Gordon, in 1783, drove her phaeton and bays almost as rashly as Phaeton himself drove his father’s chariot and broke down before he got to the end of his course.

In the last century, while the charioteers exhibited themselves in Hyde Park, the promenaders took possession of that part of St. James’s known as the Mall. Along a portion of the road, Charles I., had walked his dolorous way to the scaffold at Whitehall; but he walked it like a true gentleman. The gay throng that succeeded remembered little of that King, in connection with the Park. They had lighter things to think of. At one time the scene was as animated as that of Venice in the old Carnival time, especially as long as visor-masks were in fashion. The Mall was the first place in which a newly-appointed chaplain to a lord fluttered his new black silk scarf, the sign and symbol of his dignity. His quality was known by the flag he hung out. The scarf had just been handed to him by my lord’s butler, who kept one or two samples of the article by him, ready to be delivered to any new chaplain named by my lord, in return for which the reverend gentleman was expected to drop into the butler’s hand at least a half-guinea. Even young officers in the Mall had little, if any, advantage of the young chaplain, as long as his scarf bore its new lustre, and his address had the necessary audacity. Old and young men of pleasure lounged in the Mall and idled in the chocolate houses. The ladies were there in beautiful, patched, painted, and scented crowds, the soft evening hours being their particular season. They criticised each other, and each admired herself. There Prior took the air to make himself fat, and Swift to make himself thin. There were walks to suit all tastes. That by Rosamond’s Pond for lovers, sentimental persons, and elegiac poets. The Green Walk had its scandal-mongers and beaux with their hats, not on their heads, but under their arms. Now and then a French or a Frenchified fop was to be seen, as Tom Brown has etched him, with both his hands in his pockets, carrying all his plaited coat before to show his silk breeches. Other figures grouped in the park picture included senators talking, or seeming to talk, of state affairs; milk-people crying ‘A can of milk, ladies! a can of red cow’s milk, sir!’ St. James’s Park had also its Close Walk, at the head of Rosamond’s Pond, in the south-west corner of the park. This got the name of the Jacobites’ Walk before there was one in Hyde Park. It was the resort of Tories in the latter years of William’s reign, whereas the Jacobite Walk in Hyde Park was the favourite conversing ground of the friends of the old and young Pretenders. The park was manifestly losing its fashionable aspect when Warburton ridiculed, while pretending to praise it. What could be more pastoral than the cows and milk-women near Spring Gardens? Comedy, Farce, Satire, were in all the walks. Rosamond’s Pond was the resource of hearts ill at ease. Madrigals and sonnets might best be composed in Birdcage Walk. Georgics and didactic poetry would find inspiration on Duck Island, for which, however, Warburton gives the very poor reason, that ‘the governor of it, Stephen Duck, can both instruct our friend (Mason) in the breed of the wild fowl and lend him of his genius to sing their generations.’ St. James’s has grown common, without lacking any people of the high quality that used to gather there in animated groups. King Charles loitered there for hours amid his birds, to the great delight of the crowds who watched him, killing time. Queen Caroline, George II.’s queen, would fain have had the park to herself, as Elizabeth had, but failing that, she only visited it in her sedan. But where those great personages tarried, for pleasure, personages equally great only hurry along, bent on business. A sovereign drives in the centre of the Mall, to open or close Parliament, or passes along the side of it on her way to hold a levee. But even this is a rare sight now. As for peers and senators of less degree, whichever way they go, they seem bent upon getting out of the park in the quickest way possible.

On the other hand, it is and almost always has been the business of pleasure-seekers to linger in Hyde Park. They go thither with alacrity; tarry with delight; wend their way homeward with regret, and return to the park with renewed zest. It has ever been so. The last century ended a long season of park joys; the present century added to them. People of the highest rank took the dust there, and seemed to enjoy it. The park had not been desecrated in their eyes by footmen fighting duels in it, like their masters. Ladies, indeed, not nicer than jockeys, were lauded for nothing but their riding. One Amazon of the Row was complimented by being likened to Diana, in everything but chastity. The greatest beau of the park at the end of the last century was also the greatest, among a hundred eccentrics, long after the beginning of this: namely, Beau Brummell. He is more familiar to us than Colonel Hanger, who spent 900_l._ a year on his dress--if he really paid his tailor. Republican France influenced Hyde Park to this extent, that ladies were nearest the French fashion who wore the least amount of dress. They needed only to show their faces to be the most attractive, as was often told them, but they heeded it not, except when they mounted the box to drive four in hand, and even then they looked as much like young coachmen as dress could make them. For years, on succeeding Sundays, Martin Von Butchell, the eccentric doctor, was there, beard and all, on his painted pony, a very good advertisement for the doctor. When death overtook the old man, who had an idea he was immortal, he was more missed than Romeo Coates, with his lofty phaeton, in shape and colour of a sea-shell, and his crest of a cock, with its motto, ‘While I live I’ll crow.’ The park, without Von Butchell and his variously painted pony, may be compared to the Haymarket stage without Compton.

All sorts of oddities were to be seen there, on the old-fashioned Sundays. A Polish countess proved to be a Drury Lane ballet-girl; a magnificent lady turned out to be a lady’s maid; and real ladies stooped to copy the fashions set by the counterfeits. But space fails to permit us to do more than refer to the dainty Petersham, the curled Geramb, the Four-in-hand and the Tandem clubs, the dandies who ruled when the _men_ were at the wars, and the men who came back with the Don Cossacks and the allied sovereigns, and showed themselves in Hyde Park, as a proof that heroes were again upon the throne of fashion. The throne still exists and a full and splendid gathering is around it, on court days. In its way, Hyde Park is one of the most attractive of sights, when the season is at its brightest, and the Somebodies are there, with their kinsfolk eager to admire and imitate them. From royalty downwards, indeed, every class is to be seen in that moving panorama. Princes and mechanics, princesses and flower-girls, every grade is there, and not the least remarkable are those Anonymas, who dress with such exquisite propriety lest they should be mistaken for modest women.

_SOME SCOTSWOMEN._

In the poetry of no nation are the ‘lasses’ more exquisitely courted than in that of Scotland. But old women, with one or two exceptions only, come off with ungallant treatment. This incivility may perhaps have been born of the suspicion that old women had a strong tendency towards growing into witches. On the other hand, witchery was common enough with the younger wenches. There are few things more remarkable in social history than the existence of women in Scotland who professed to be witches, and the cruel punishments inflicted, not only on women who were professed, but on those also who were suspected witches.

There was a grossly immoral side to this story, and the immorality was just the attractive part to individuals who could but practise it under the character of warlocks and witches. The latter, combined with the devil, established a reign of licentiousness in spite of all laws. We believe that the women and the devil did really, in a certain sense, come together, that is, in some cases. The fiend usually went abroad by night. He had a strong kindness for young witches only. Take all as merely human elements, and we know what wicked human nature could make of them. It cannot be doubted that many a licentious scoundrel passed himself off as the devil, and promised supernatural powers to all young witches who would obey him. Hallucinations would come of it; and desire to be witches, with power to severely punish all enemies, would spread among people of diseased minds. The fact that this devil was a worse sort of Don Giovanni, a hard drinker, and that he often piped while the young witches danced, in cutty sarks, or without sarks at all, were circumstances which tend to show a depraved humanity taking advantage of a humanity too weak to resist. Moreover, generally speaking, the devil had little regard for old witches. Nevertheless, these hags sometimes went to the stake asserting their might of sorcery. When they recanted, or urged their complete guiltlessness, they were not believed. In some instances they were proud of belonging to the Amazons of Hell.

The supernatural hags were long in dying out. Even Norna of the Fitful Head was not the last of the mystic queens of storm and rulers of the winds. _’Tis sixty years since_, and a woman was then living in Stromness, an old weird woman, who sold winds to mariners at a remarkably low figure. For the small charge of sixpence, ‘awfu’ Bessie Miller’ would sell a wind to a skipper from any point of the compass he chose to have it. One relic of youthful beauty added dread fascination to this storm-witch. The bright blue eyes, that in their time had been the lode-stars of many a laddie’s heart, were bright and blue as ever. All else was old age in its most withered aspect, and the eyes were as two dazzling lights in a skull. The calm or storm vendors have ceased to be; but in the Orkneys there are old women who still earn an ‘honest penny’ by controlling nature; there is not a pain--from the first that a child can cause, to the last a mortal endures in getting well-rid of his mortality--but these crones profess to relieve. We learn too, on competent authority, that old Orkney women still retain an unaccountable aversion to turbot, and avoid naming it when crossing sounds and bays in boats.

Midnight courtships were quite as injurious as midnight meetings of young witches and rattling warlocks. Among the agricultural classes the ordinary time for courting is still, in many parts of Scotland--as it used to be universally--the middle of the night. A farmer’s swain--with an all-overishness about him for a particular lass, with whom he may have had a _crack_ ‘’twixt the gloaming an’ the murk, when the kye comes hame’--will rise at midnight, walk over to his lady’s bower, and find her ready and willing to let him in, as the lady did Finlay, in the ballad, or go down to him, and walk and talk and enjoy ‘courtship,’ till the dawn, if it be summer-time, bids the rustic Romeo and Juliet depart. The report of the Royal Commissioners may be studied for the prose as well as the poetical side of this strange method of wooing--a method sanctioned by parents and not ill-thought of by friends, seeing that such was the course of their wooing an’ wedding, an a’. This custom is, doubtless, referred to in Joanna Baillie’s ballad--‘It fell on a morn when we were thrang’--

When the clocksy laird o’ the warlock glen,
Wha waited without, half blate, half cheery,
And lang’d for a sight o’ his winsome deary,
Raised up the lattice an’ cam’ crousely ben.

His coat was new an’ his o’erlay was white;
His mittens an’ hose were cozie and bien;
But a wooer that comes in braid daylight
Is no like a wooer that comes at e’en.

We may conclude, on other ballad evidence, that it was right unseemly for the lassie to make the first step in this owl-like courtship. The ballad of ‘The Maid gaed to the Mill’ is a warning. She pretended to go merely to get her corn ground, but really that the miller might make love to her--

The maid’s gane to the mill by night,
Hech hey, sae wanton!
The maid’s gane to the mill by night,
Hey, sae wanton she!

In connection with midnight courtship may be noticed the clandestine ‘Ruglen marriages,’ which were so called because in Rutherglen it was more easy to get legally married in spite of law than elsewhere. A couple of centuries ago an Act of Parliament visited clandestine marriages (that is, without banns) with heavy penalties and imprisonment, but it did not invalidate the marriage itself. The Rutherglen justices broke the law while professing to maintain it, made money thereby, and gave especial delight to the lasses. For example: a lad and lass wish to be quietly married; they got a friend to denounce them to a ‘Ruglen magistrate’ for having broken the law. The offenders were summoned before him; they of course acknowledged, in the presence of the court, that they were man and wife, which acknowledgment made them so legally. They were fined five shillings, and were given a copy of the sentence, which they signed; and this was universally taken as a legal certificate of the union. Other magistrates followed this lucrative business. When they told the young offenders that as to the statute penalty of three months’ imprisonment the court would take time to consider, the lad, lass, court, and assistants all laughed aloud, and the Ruglen marriage was a legal one.

In earlier days than those just referred to great evil arose from the fact that girls of twelve years of age could legally effect a marriage of their own will. We might suppose that the lovers could afford to patiently wait for the nymphs till then. Manœuvring mothers, however, frequently sacrificed lovers content to wait, for others whom the mothers preferred to favour. In 1659 the Countess of Buccleuch (in her own right) was married, when only eleven years of age, to Scott of High Chester, a lad of fourteen. This was the evil work of the bride’s mother, the Countess of Wemyss. The validity of the marriage was disputed, but meanwhile the bride finished her twelfth year, and then married the lad of her own accord. She died very early in her teens, and then her successor (for she was a great heiress), her sister Annie, was married, while still a child, to the natural son of Charles II.--the Duke of Monmouth. Parents and guardians were heavily fined for allowing these marriages when the parties were under age; but as they gained more by selling an heiress than they lost in paying the penalty, this did not deter them. On some occasions a gallant would carry off a child-heiress and keep her till she reached the lawful age. Towards the end of the seventeenth century this freak was looked upon as a crime. When Carnagie, the Earl of Northesk’s brother, thus ran off with Mary Gray of Baledgarnie, men said if he could be got, he deserved hanging, for an example to secure men’s children from such attempts.

This practice had died out, but in 1728, we hear of an ‘abduction in the old style.’ The offender was a Highlander. The damsel was a wright’s niece, named Mowbray. Her ‘gouvernante had betrayed her upon a promise of a thousand marks, the young lady having 3,000_l._ of fortune.’ The uncle luckily caught them near to Queensferry, as they were coming to town to be married. The newspapers add, ‘The gouvernante is committed to prison, as is also the gentleman.’ There were some illegitimate marriages that were severely punished. In the reign of Charles I., a tailor in Currie was beheaded for marrying his deceased wife’s half-brother’s daughter. As late as the reign of William and Mary, we hear of a certain Margaret Paterson, one of the beauties of the then prevailing husseydom. She had drawn into her irresistible toils the two young sons of a kirk minister named Kennedy. For this offence Margaret stood an hour in the ‘jougs,’ was whipped the whole length of the city, and was then transported to the plantations for the term of her natural life.

We have more gentle reminiscences of some Scotswomen, through both poetry and romance--both founded on history. Few maidens are better known in ballad lore than Bessy Bell and Mary Gray. Their true history is not so familiarly known. They were living at the time of the last plague that ever devastated Scotland, A.D. 1645. Bessy was daughter of the Laird of Kincaid: Mary, of the Laird of Lednoch. At the last place, near Perth, Bessy was on a visit to Mary. The plague broke out in the neighbourhood, and raged so fearfully that the young ladies built them a bower, about a quarter of a mile from the mansion, and there dwelt, apart from their family, but not from all human companionship. They were visited and whatever they required was brought to them by a swain who is said to have been equally deeply in love with both--which was a very aggravated symptom of a common sort of plague. Tradition says that death came of it. The lover with two mistresses brought the infection with him. The ladies caught the disease, died, and were buried near where the present mansion stands--a mansion, the name of which has been changed from Lednoch to the more familiar Lynedoch. The gallant soldier who bore that name, built a bower over the graves of a couple of whom we know nothing surely, except that they lived and died.

In legend--one which was born of sad truth, and has passed into Italian opera--there is no maiden more famous than the Bride of Lammermoor. In melancholy prose, the lady was the Honourable Janet Dalrymple, daughter of the first Lord Stair. She and young Lord Rutherford had plighted their troth, had broken a silver coin between them, and had invoked malediction on whichever of the two should be false to the compact. The parents of Lady Janet insisted on her marrying Dunbar of Baldoon. The mother, Lady Stair, was most cruel in forcing her daughter to this match. Janet, broken-hearted and helpless, had an interview with her lover, and sobbed out a text from Numbers xxx. 2, 3, 4, 5, as an excuse for her obedience to her mother’s commands. The lovers parted in sorrow; Rutherford in anger. He had not in him the spirit of young Lochinvar, nor Janet the wit to run away with him herself. The poor thing was, in fact, scared. She was carried to church to be wed, in a semi-crazed and more than half-dead state. At night a hurricane of shrieks came from the bridal chamber, where the bridegroom was found on the ground, profusely bleeding from a stab, and the bride sat near him in her night-gear, bidding them ‘Take up your bonny bridegroom!’ She died insane in less than three weeks. Dunbar of Baldoon recovered, but he was never known to open his lips on the causes which led to the catastrophe. Baldoon evidently took things as they came; after his death, some thirteen years later, in 1682, Andrew Simpson wrote an elegy upon him, in which the romantic adventurer upon marriage with another man’s love was described as a respectable country gentleman who had introduced many improvements into agriculture! Lord Rutherford, the lover, died childless, in 1685. As Dunbar would never suffer the catastrophe to be alluded to, good-natured people invented a story that Rutherford himself was in the chamber before Baldoon reached it, and had stabbed him as soon as he entered it. There is no shadow of the slightest grain of substance for _this_ part of a sufficiently calamitous history.

Janet Dalrymple was a strong-minded woman. She and her contemporaries descended from mothers and grandmothers who were both strong-minded and wrong-headed. Among the Scotswomen who may be so designated may be reckoned those who were accustomed in the latter half of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries to go about in men’s attire. Indeed the sexes would often change clothes. This was done sometimes at bridals, sometime at burials, always in a spirit of jollification, and there is an instance of women and men making this travesty and rioting through Aberdeen, in celebration of their recovery from the plague, but while the foul stigmata of the disease were still upon them! The magistrates had infinite trouble with the women. Fines did not frighten the offenders. Other means were adopted. In March, 1576, certain women ‘tryit presently as dancers in men’s claiths, under silence of night, in houses and through the town;’ the magistrates inform them that if they are caught ‘they shall be debarrit fra all benefit of the kirk and openly proclaimit in the pulpit.’ This masquerading was not confined to women of low degree. Queen Mary Stuart and her ladies, once at least, frolicked through Edinburgh in disguise--that is to say, they went their joyous way as young market-women; this unseemly frolic occurred when weak and ill-starred Darnley was on the point of wedding with the widowed but then light-hearted queen.

Of all the wilful Scotswomen of whom Scottish records make mention, one of the most singular was the Hon. Susan Cochrane, daughter of John, the fourth Earl of Dundonald. At fifteen, she married the Earl of Strathmore, who was accidentally killed three years later, A.D. 1728. Twenty years after this the childless widow married her groom, according to the Rev. Mr. Roger--her ‘factor,’ or bailiff, according to the peerage books. The second husband’s name was Forbes. ‘The groom,’ says Mr. Roger, ‘at first (when she offered herself in marriage to him) thought that the countess had become mentally disordered, but when he perceived she was serious he gladly embraced the good fortune which had so unexpectedly fallen in his way.’ There was a daughter of this marriage. The mother ultimately carried the girl with her to France, when Forbes made the home unfit for a commonly decent woman to live in. Lady Strathmore died in that country in 1754, leaving her daughter, Miss Forbes, in a convent at Rouen. Forbes married again, and then sent for his daughter, who returned to his house. She was so cruelly treated that at last she ran away, wandered through the country, and, when nearly irrecoverably exhausted, was taken into a farm-house, in Fifeshire, by a family named Lauder. The fugitive told her tale, and the Lauders gave her a permanent home. After a while, the eldest son fell in love with and married her. Happiness seemed secured to her at last, but it did not continue long. Her husband fell into adversity, and the honest fellow died under the crushing pressure of it. What the daughter of Lady Strathmore suffered it would be too painful only to conjecture. In 1821 she was found living in a miserable cottage near Stirling, and her influential neighbours took up her case. They represented it to the families of Dundonald and Strathmore, to whom the appeal was not made in vain. They contributed to furnish her with an annuity of 100_l._ a year. It was thankfully received, and it proved all-sufficient for the wants of the granddaughter of two earls.

Returning to days before the Reformation, it seems to have been then a sort of practical joke on the part of leaders of military bands to quarter their officers and men in convents, which were also places where young ladies of quality were educated and lodged. There were generally means available to get rid of this unmanly intrusion. Similar circumstances, with similar results, occurred in Scotland after the Reformation. The first notice of a regular professional governess in Scotland occurs under the date of 1685. In a petition to the Privy Council this lady, Isabel Cumming, describes herself as a widow and stranger, who has been invited to Edinburgh (in which place she considered that the centre of the virtue of the whole kingdom was to be found!) to instruct young gentlewomen in all sorts of needlework, playing, singing, and several other excellent pieces of work, becoming ladies of honour. She had not only succeeded, but, she says, she was continually improving herself for the advantage of young ladies of quality. This exemplary Isabel petitioned to be made exempt from the affliction of having soldiers quartered upon her; otherwise, what would become of all her young ladies? Their heads would be turned from study, and their hearts would be beating to nought but military airs. The Lords of the Council, who had young kinswomen, perhaps, among the pupils, prudently and promptly granted Mrs. Cumming’s request.

These young ladies, grown into wives, often sorely troubled their lords by going to conventicle instead of to church, as the Act of Charles II., the religious head of that church, ordered them to do, under severe penalty, which, of course, the husband had to pay. The wife of Balcanqui of that ilk so often offended in this way, that her lord at last grew tired of paying her fines. He protested to the king’s council that he conformed himself, but that his wife stoutly refused. He was therefore, desirous, he said, to deliver her up to the council, to be disposed of at their pleasure. The considerate council declared that men like Balcanqui were not to be ruined by the mad and wilful opinions of fanatical wives; and they agreed to remit the fine, if he would send them the lady.

On the other hand, there was at least one lady who was willing, not only to give up her lord for conventicle-haunting, but to see him hanged as a Nonconformist. Her name has not lived in history, but Wodrow records the fact. She was a graceless virago. She mocked him in family prayer, cursed him when he went to conventicle, and flung stools at him when he returned. She had him up to the court at Glasgow, and entreated my lords ‘to hang him.’ They refused, on the ground that hanging could be nothing compared with having to live with _her_. This fearful sort of woman constantly comes to the front in Scottish annals. Indeed, the question as to woman’s rights was settled in Scotland before it was thought of in England. Take, for example, the ladies who mobbed the Chancellor Stair and Archbishop Sharpe, in Charles’s reign. They cried out that the Gospel was starving in Scotland through rampant prelacy. One of the ladies struck the prelate on the back of the neck as he passed into the Parliament House, crying out, at the same time, that _that_ (his neck) should pay for it ere all was done! The prelate’s life was said to have been in danger. The whole scene, with the beautiful furies pelting the archbishop with epithets of ‘Judas’ and ‘Traitor,’ and hinting at murder, is almost inconceivable now. We should have something like it if the Mrs. Fitzhighflyers were to mob the Dean of Westminster in his own cloisters, and try to hang him from one of his own gargoyles.

If a minister took a wife from women of the temper indicated above, he must have soon felt that the same temper would always regulate home affairs. Very fearful bodies were some of those ministers’ wives. James Fraser, of Ross-shire, who wrote a work on Sanctification during the first half of the last century, had about the worst of them. She kept him tightly up to the collar, worked him hard, and starved him outright. She gloried in her tyranny. It might be said of her, as some say of Bismark, human anguish was a sensual delight. The good man’s neighbours put food in his way when he was permitted to walk abroad, or they treated him hospitably in their houses, where he dared tarry, however, very briefly. In winter, his Fury allowed him neither light nor fire in his study. He worked in it by day and meditated in it by night, when not at a scanty meal. At a ministers’ festival meeting ‘Our Wives’ was one of the toasts. Fraser, on being sportively asked if he would drink it, exclaimed, ‘Aye, heartily! Mine brings me to my knees in prayer a dozen times daily, which is more than any of you can say of yours!’ On the day of Fraser’s death, several ministers, on a formal visit of condolence, waited on her, and found her gaily busy among the poultry which she reared and sold. ‘Oh aye, he’s gane!’ said the widow. ‘Ye can gang in, if ye will, and look at the body!’ and she scattered corn the while, crying, ‘Chick! chick! chick!’ The sentiment of Mrs. Fraser towards her husband was very like that of the Scotswoman in the old song:--

I wish that you were dead, goodman,
An’ a green sod on your head, goodman,
That I might wear my widowhood
Upon a ranting Highlandman.

There’s sax eggs in the pan, goodman,
There’s sax eggs in the pan, goodman.
There’s ane to you, and twa to me,
An’ three to our John Highlandman!

Another Scottish widow reminds us of the widow in Voltaire’s ‘Zadig’ for delicate fidelity towards a deceased husband. The relict in question was one day in spring seen by the clerk of her parish crossing the churchyard with a watering-pot and a bundle. ‘Ah, Mistress Mactavish,’ said the clerk, ‘what’s yer bus’ness, wi’ sic like gear as that y’are carryin’?’ ‘Ah, weel, Mr. Maclachlan,’ replied the widow, ‘I’m just goin’ to my gudeman’s grave. I’ve got some hay-seeds in my bundle, the which I’m goin’ to sow upon it; and the water in the can is just to gi’e ’em a spring like!’ ‘The seeds winna want the watering,’ rejoined the clerk, ‘they’ll spring finely o’ themselves.’ ‘That may well be,’ rejoined the widow; ‘but ye dinna ken that my gudeman, as he lay a-deeing, just got me to make promise that I’d never marry agin till the grass had grown aboon his grave. And, as I’ve had a good offer made me but yestreen, ye see, I dinna like to break my promise, or to be kept a lone widow, as ye see me!’ The minister’s aide-de-camp looked on the widow, indeed, with a mirthful expression. ‘Water him weel, widow,’ said the clerk; ‘Mactavish aye was drouthy!’ The above took place within the Georgian era, when both old and young ladies in Scotland broadly called things by their names. We are not sure that it was not the same everywhere. As a Scottish sample, we take the last duchess of the house of Douglas, who was a ‘jolly’ lady in manner and matter; broad in figure and in speech, and not to be offended by word or innuendo. When the duchess was in Paris with several Scottish gentlemen, in the reign of George III., 1762, the language and ideas of the whole party were of a sort, it is said, to make the hair of the fastest of our day to stand on end. One of the gentlemen suggested that when the duchess went to court she should claim the right to occupy a _tabouret_, or low seat, in the royal presence, by virtue of her late husband’s ancestors having held a French dukedom (Touraine). Robert Chambers, who had the story from Sir James Stuart of Coltness, one of the party, says that the old lady made all sorts of excuses in her homely way; but when Boysock started the theory that the real objection lay in her grace’s fears as to the disproportioned size of the _tabouret_ for the correlative part of her figure, he was declared, amidst shouts of laughter, to have divined the true difficulty--her grace enjoying the joke as much as any of them. The story may remind some readers of the assembly at Mrs. Montague’s, when that bluntest of ladies asked Dr. Johnson to take a chair, and how that learned savage, in the coarsest way, intimated that there were fewer seats than persons to be seated.

Other ladies of ducal families had their peculiarities--which even in those days excited remark. A very few years have elapsed since there died the old soldier Duncan Mackenzie. He could remember when he kissed the Duchess of Gordon in taking the shilling from betwixt her teeth to become one of her regiment, the Gordon Highlanders. Ladies of rank in England at that time, when elections were hotly contested, bought votes with their kisses. A few years ago there passed away from society, almost unnoticed, a Scottish lady who had made no little noise in her time. We allude to the beautiful Lady Charlotte C., daughter of the Duke of A----. In 1796 she married her namesake, ‘Handsome Jack’ C., of the Guards. At that time the bride was perhaps unequalled for her beauty, and she was not shy of showing it. Indeed, after Lady Charlotte first went to court as a wife, Queen Charlotte sent her word that if she ever came there again she must first take a tuck or two out of her skirts. In Glasgow crowds used to follow this audacious beauty; and no wonder, for local historians say she would walk down the most fashionable street in petticoats almost as short as a Highlander’s kilt. On one occasion, when thus lightly attired, and walking with a lady and a young gentleman, the whole city seemed to gather about them, wondering, admiring, and criticising. Finding themselves mobbed, they took shelter in a shop, whose owner, further to protect them, put up his shutters and locked his door. Instead of dispersing, the mob increased. The shopkeeper, fearing an attack on his premises, by which his goods and his guests would alike suffer, jumped out of a back-window and ran for the guard. A sergeant and three or four men were sent down and posted in front of the premises. Meanwhile, Lady Charlotte C. followed the shopkeeper’s example. She lightly leapt from the back-window into an unfrequented lane, made her way into a decent house, told her story, sent for a coach, and quietly rode to her inn unrecognised. During this flight and escape the mob grew denser and more impatient. At length the shop-door was opened. The tradesman informed the people how Lady Charlotte had got away, and asked undisturbed passage for the young lady and gentleman who remained. This was granted, for there was nothing eccentric about this couple, who were civilly allowed to ‘gang their gait.’ The reigning beauty lived to a great age--between eighty and ninety. Age did not bring wisdom with it, if the story be true that when she was old she went to court in a dress every way as objectionable as that with which, in her youth, she ruffled the plumes of Queen Charlotte’s propriety. In her declining years she had not only lost the once handsome Jack, but his estates too: Islay and Woodhall had gone to creditors. The old lady, however, married a clergyman named Bury, turned to literary pursuits, and, among other books, produced in 1839 the Diary illustrative of the times of George IV., which was edited by Galt.

Lady Grisell Baillie has been called ‘the bravest of all Scotch heroines.’ Her career lasted from 1665 to 1746. In that life of fourscore years and one she wrote one famous song, ‘Were my Heart licht I wad dee,’ and rendered a million good services to her fellow-creatures. One of the eighteen children of Sir Patrick Home, afterwards Earl of Marchmont, she learned the trick of serving her kindred so early and so well that she could not give it up when she was a fine old lady. Till her eighty-first year she rose the earliest of her family, and managed the most difficult of their affairs. When her father was in hiding from the scaffold, and Grisell was eighteen, she walked alone every night, over a dark road, and through an ill-reputed churchyard, to carry food to the fugitive, who was concealed in the family vault. Sir Patrick is described as lying on a mattress wrapped in a Kilmarnock cloak, among the mouldering bones of his ancestors, with nothing to help to spend the time but repeating some of Buchanan’s Latin psalms. Grisell had to be cautious, for there were hostile soldiers in her father’s house ever on the watch. One night, when she was providing the rations for her parent, she contrived to take a sheep’s head from the table. She was nearly betrayed to the soldiers by the remark of a sister, who, suddenly missing the head, gave loud expressions to her wonder at Grisell having so quickly eaten the whole of it. When in exile in Holland, before the Great Revolution, Sir Patrick wrote home as to how the young people should be brought up. He enjoined dancing every day. ‘Lost estates,’ he said, ‘can be recovered again, but health once lost by a habit of melancholy can never be recovered.’ After Grisell married young Baillie of Jerviswood, ‘he never went abroad but she went to the window to look after him (so she did that very day he fell ill, the last time he was abroad), never taking her eyes from him so long as he was in sight.’ Grisell ranks among Scottish songstresses. Some of her tuneful sisters are worthy of notice.