|We now return from Teviotdale to Tweed, which we left at Kelso. The
river passes through one of its rock-fenced and narrow defiles at the
Trows of Makerstoun, (accent the penultimate,) itself the home from
ancient days of a branch of the once great Argyll clan--and generally
western clan--of Mac-dougal. How they came so far from their Celtic
kindred, potent in Dalriadic Scotland before the Campbells came to the
front as allies of Robert Bruce, is not known to me. As foes of Bruce,
the Macdougals of Lome suffered much loss of lands after the king's
triumph. At the Trows the river splits into very deep and narrow
channels, and to shoot one of them in a canoe needs a daring and a
fortunate paddler.
In former years there were four of these channels, two of very great
depth--thirty feet and more, it is said--but so narrow that, with the
river at summer level, it was possible for an active man to jump from
stone rib to stone rib, across the swift rushing stream. The feat was
attempted once too often, however, with fatal result, and since then the
middle rib has been blasted out, so that it is no longer possible
for any one to tempt fate in this manner. Even an expert and powerful
swimmer, filling in there, would have but a slender chance of coming
out alive, for if he were not sucked under by the eddies of that boiling
current and jammed beneath some sunken ledge, {205}the odds would be
very great on his brains being knocked out amongst the rocks that thrust
their ugly fangs here and there above the surface of the stream. Both
below and above the Trows, the trout fishing--for those who may fish--is
extremely good, but the wading is licklish; pot-holes, ledges, and large
boulders are apt to trap the unwary to their undoing. There are, too,
some excellent salmon casts in the Makerstoun Water, and it was in one
of them that the famous Rob o' the Trows--Rob Kerss, a great character
in Sir Walter's day,--nigh on a hundred years ago landed a fish so huge,
that even a master of the art so skilled as Rob,--Stoddart says he had
few equals as a fisher--was utterly spent when at length his silvery
prize lay gasping on the bank. Before taking the fly from its mouth, Rob
turned half aside to pick up a stone which might conveniently be used
as a "priest"; but even as he turned, out of the tail of his eye he saw
the monster give a wallop. Rob leapt for the fish. Alas! as he
jumped, his foot caught the line and snapped it, and walloping fish and
struggling man plunged together off a shelf into the icy water,--from
which Rob emerged alone. The rod with which Kerss killed so many
hundreds of fish is still in the possession of one of his descendants,
near Beattock. Compared with present-day masterpieces of greenheart or
split cane, it is a quaint and clumsy weapon, of extraordinary thickness
in the butt, and of crushing weight. The writer has handled it, and he
is convinced that one hour's use could not fail to choke off for the
rest of the day even the most enthusiastic of modern salmon fishers.
It is not often that ancient weapons are found in Tweed, but some
years ago, when the river was unusually low, a moss-trooper's spear
was recovered at a spot a little above Makerstoun. It was lying at
the bottom, below what used to be a ford of sorts across the river.
Curiously enough, shaft and head were both intact, and in fair
preservation after their long immersion. If the spear was not used by
some trooper in days when fighting was the Borderer's chief {206}delight
and occupation, it is difficult to imagine to what use it could have
been put. Salmon cannot be successfully speared with a single-pointed
unbarbed weapon; so that it is certain this was no poacher's implement.
Above Makerstoun is Rutherford, once the home of the Rutherfurds of that
Ilk, but now it knows them no more. A like doom, as I write, hangs
over Mertoun, long the beautiful home of the Scotts of Harden, Lord
Polwarth's family.
"And Minstrel Burne cannot assuage
His grief, while life endureth,
To see the changes of this age,
That fleeting Time procureth;
For mony a place stands in hard case,
Where blythe folk ken'd nae sorrow,
Wi' Homes that dwelt on Leader-side,
And Scotts that dwelt in Yarrow!"
Mertoun is a modern house; hard by it, across the river, the strong
ruins of Littledean tower (once the Kers') speak of old Border wars.
Following the curves of Tweed we reach St. Boswells, named after an
Anglo-Saxon saint to whom St. Cuthbert came, laying down his spear, and
entering religion. At St. Boswells are sheep fairs; Hogg preferred
to attend one of these festivals rather than go to London and see the
Coronation of George IV. My sympathies are with the shepherd! The paths
near Lessudden, hard by, are haunted by a quiet phantasm in costume
a minister of the Kirk of the eighteenth century. I know some of the
percipients who have seen him individually and collectively. There is
no tradition about the origin of this harmless appearance, a vision of a
dream of the dead; walking "in that sleep of death."
Above Lessudden the Tweed winds round and at the foot of the beautiful
ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, softly mourning for him who lies within that
sound "the dearest of all to his ear," Sir Walter Scott. The great
Magician lies, with Lockhart at {207}his feet, within the ruined walls,
in the place which, as he wrote to his bride that was to be, he had
already chosen for his rest. The lady replied with spirit that she would
not endure any such sepulchral reflections.
[Illustration: 0227]
This is one of the most sacred places, and most beautiful places in
broad Scotland.
Approaching Dryburgh, not from the riverside but from the road, we come
by such a path through a beautiful wood as {208}that in which proud
Maisie was "walking so early," when "bold Robin on the bush singing so
rarely," spaed her fortune. The path leads to a place of such unexpected
beauty as the ruinous palace where the Sleeping Beauty slumbered through
the ages. The beauty is that of Dryburgh itself, delicately fair in her
secular decay; fallen from glory, indeed, but still the last home of
that peace which dwelt in this much harried Borderland in the days
of the first White Friars, and of good St. David the king. They were
Englishmen out of Northumberland, teachers of good farming and of other
good works. What remains of their dwellings is of the age when the round
Norman arch blended with the pointed Gothic, as in the eastern end of
the Cathedral of St. Andrews. Thrice the English harmed it, in the
days of Bruce (1322) during a malicious and futile attack by Edward II;
again, under Robert II, when Richard II played the Vandal; and, lastly,
during the wasting of the Border in 1544, which was the eighth Henry's
rough wooing for his son, of the babe Mary Stuart. The grounds, the
property of a member of the House of Scott's eccentric Earl of Buchan,
are kept in charming order. The Earl was the only begetter of a huge
statue of Sir William Wallace, who used Ettrick Forest now and again
in his guerilla warfare, and from the Forest drew his archers, tall
men whom n death the English of Edward I admired on the lost field of
Falkirk.
The said Earl of Buchan rather amused than consoled Scott, during a
severe illness, by promising to attend to his burial in the place so
dear to him, which, till the ruin of his paternal grandmother, had
belonged to the Haliburtons, also n old days the lords of Dirleton
castle. Readers of Lockhart remember the great Border gathering at
the funeral of the latest minstrel, and how his horses, which drew the
hearse, paused where they had been wont to rest, at a spot where it had
been Sir Walter's habit to stop to admire the landscape. His chief, the
young Duke of Buccleuch, was prevented by important {209}business from
being an attendant. You would never guess what the business was! No
man knows but I only; and if Scott could have known, I doubt whether
he would have drawn his shaggy brows into a frown, or laughed; for the
business was----but I must not reveal so ancient a secret!
Moving up the river on the left bank, we reach that ancient House
concerning which Thomas of Ercildoune's prophecy is still unbroken.
"Betide, Betide, whate'er betide,
There shall aye be a Haig in Bemersyde."
The family were at home in Bemersyde in the days of Malcolm the Maiden.
One of them was condemned to pay a dozen salmon yearly to the monastery
of Melrose, for some scathe done to the brethren. It must have been
an ill year for the angler when Haig expressed a desire to commute the
charge for an equivalent in money as he could not get the fish.
There was scarce a Border battle in which the Haigs did not leave a
representative on the field of honour. Here, too, befell "the Affliction
of Bemersyde," when the laird, after a long fight with a monstrous
salmon, lost him in the moment of victory. The head of the fish would
not go into the landing net, his last wallop freed him; he was picked up
dead, by prowlers,--and he weighed seventy pounds. Probably no salmon
so great was ever landed by the rod from Tweed. Only the Keep of the
mansion is of great antiquity.
It may be worth while to leave the river and climb to Smail-holme
'I'cwer, where Scott's infancy was passed. The tower, standing tall
and gaunt above a tarn, is well known from Turner's drawing, and is the
scene of Scott's early ballad, _The Eve of St. John_. Perhaps the verses
which have lingered longest in my memory are those which tell how
"The Baron of Smailholme rose with day,
And spurred his charger on,
Without stop or stay down the rocky way
That leads to Brotherton."
{210}
[Illustration: 0230]
{211}He did not go, as we remember, to Ancrum fight, but he returned
with armour sorely dinted, having slain in private quarrel a knight
whose cognisance was
"A hound in a silver leash bound
And his crest was a branch of the yew."
And that same eve the dead man was seen with the lady of Smailholme.
The story is a version of that ancient tale, the Beresford ghost story,
which can be traced from the chronicle of William of Malmesbury to its
Irish avatar in the eighteenth century--and later. Do ghosts repeat
themselves? It looks like it, for the Irish tale is very well
authenticated.
It was not actually in the tower, but in the adjacent farmhouse of
Sandyknowe, his grandfather's, that Scott, at first a puny child, passed
his earliest years, absorbing every ballad and legend that the country
people knew, and the story of {212}every battle fought on the wide
landscape, from Turn Again to Ancrum Moor.
We have reached the most beautiful part ol Tweed, dominated by the
triple crest of the pyramidal Eildons, where the river lovingly embraces
the woods of Gladswood and Ravens-wood, and the site of Old Melrose, a
Celtic foundation of Aidan, while as yet the faith was preached by the
Irish mission aries of St. Columba. This is the very garden of Tweed,
a vast champaign, from which rise the Eildons, and far away above Rule
Water "the stormy skirts of Ruberslaw," with the Lammermuir and Cheviot
hills blue and faint on the northern and southern horizons.
On the ground of Drygrange, above Bemersyde, but on the right bank
of Tweed at Newstead, the greatest stationary camp in Scotland of
Agricola's time has been excavated by Mr. Curie, who also describes it
in a magnificent and learned volume. Here were found beautiful tilting
helmets, in the shape of heads of pretty Greek girls, and here were the
enamelled brooches of the native women who dwelt with Roman lovers. But
these must be sought, with coins, gems, pottery, weapons and implements
of that forgotten day, in the National Museum in Edinburgh.
The chief tributary on the northern side as we mount the stream is
Leader Water, where Homes had aince commanding."
Sing Erslington and Cowdenknowes,
Where Humes had aince commanding;
And Drygrange, with the milk-white yowes,
Twixt Tweed and Leader standing:
The bird that flees through Redpath trees
And Gladswood banks ilk morrow,
May chant and sing sweet Leader Haughs
And bonnie howms of Yarrow.
It is scarcely possible to conceive a scene more beautiful than that
where Leader winds her cheery way through the woods of Drygrange. When
the Borderland is starred thick {213}with primroses, and the grassy
banks of Leader are carpeted with the blue of speedwell and the red of
campion; when a soft air and warm sun hatch out a multitude of flies at
which the trout rise greedily, then is the time to see that deep, leafy
glen at the bottom of which sparkles the amber-clear water over its
gravelly bed. In cliff or steep bank the sides tower up perhaps to the
height of a couple of hundred feet, thick clad with rhododendrons and
spreading undergrowth, and with mighty larch, beech, elm, or ash, and
everywhere the music of Heaven's feathered orchestra smites sweetly on
the ear. It is, I think, to this Paradise that good birds go when they
die, where the ruthless small boy's raiding hand is kept in check, and
every bird may find ideal nesting place.
The district is most famous in ballad, song and story, Leaderdale,
being apparently equivalent to Lauderdale, giving a title to the Earl of
Lauderdale, the chief of the Maitlands. "They call it Leader town," says
the enigmatic ballad of _Auld Maitland_, speaking of the stronghold of a
Maitland of the days of Wallace, a shadowy figure still well remembered
in the folk lore of the reign of Mary Stuart. The ballad has some good
and many indifferent verses. It was known to the mother and uncle of
James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. He copied it out for Will Laidlaw,
Scott's friend and amanuensis, and this began the long and valuable
association of Hogg with the Sheriff. The authenticity of the ballad
has been impugned, Hogg and Scott, it has been asserted, composed it and
Scott gave it to the world as genuine. This is demonstrably an erroneous
conjecture, (as I have shown in _Sir Walter Scott and the Border
Minstrelsy_). Letters which had not been published refute all suspicions
of forgery by Hogg or Scott or both. But the ballad had, apparently,
been touched up, perhaps in the seventeenth or eighteenth century,
probably by one of the witty and literary family of Maitland. It came to
Hogg's mother from "auld Babby Metlan," (Maitland,) housekeeper to the
last of the Scotts of Tushielaw; herself perhaps a reduced {214}member
of the impoverished family of "the flower of the wits of Scotland,"
Queen Mary's Secretary of State, Maitland of Lethington.
Though the legendary "Maitland or auld beard grey" may have stoutly held
his house of Thirlestane against Edward I, (as he does in the ballad
of _Auld Maitland_), I have found no record of the affair in the State
Papers of the period. Thereafter the Maitlands of Lethington, though a
family of ancient origin, play no conspicuous part in Scottish history,
till we reach old Sir Richard, who died at the age of ninety in 1586. He
was not openly recalcitrant against, but was no enthusiast for, the new
doctrines of Knox and his company. A learned, humorous, peaceful man,
he wrote Scottish verses and collected and preserved earlier poetry in
manuscripts.
Of his sons the eldest, William, was--setting Knox aside--the most
extraordinary Scott of his time. Knox was essentially Scottish in the
good and not so good of his character, and was essentially an extreme
Calvinist of his period; "judged too extreme," he says, by his
associates. Young Maitland of Lethington, on the other hand, might have
been French or Italian, hardly English. He was an absolutely modern man.
In religion, even before the revolution of 1559, he was in favour of the
new ideas, but also in favour of compromise and, if possible, of peace.
We first meet him i i private discussion with Knox,--pleading for
compromise, but yielding, with a smile, or a sigh, to the amazingly
confident fallacies of the Reformer. He serves the Queen Mother, Mary
of Guise, a brave unhappy lady, as Secretary of State, till he sees that
her cause is every way impossible, and goes over to the Reformers,
and wins for them the alliance of England, and victory. He had a great
ideal, and a lofty motive, a patriotic desire for honourable peace and
alliance with England. On all occasions when he encountered Knox, he
met him with the "educated insolence" of his wit, with the blandest
_persiflage_; Knox writhed and reports his ironies, and--Knox, in the
long run, {215}had the better of this smiling modern man, no fanatic, no
believer in any preacher's infallibility.
Maitland served Queen Mary loyally, while he might; when things went
otherwise than he wished, was behind the scenes of the murder of Riccio;
but was frankly forgiven as the husband of the dearest of the Four
Maries, Mary Fleming, and as Indispensable. He and his brother John,
later the able minister of James VI, were in the conspiracy to murder
Darnley; that is the central mystery in his career, his part In that
brutal, blundering needless crime. He was partner with the violent
Bothwell, a brute of culture, who hated, captured, bullied, and
threatened him; for Maitland discountenanced, with remarkable and
solitary courage, Bothwell's marriage. Escaping from Bothwell's grip, he
fled to the nobles who had risen against Bothwell; he corrupted Mary's
commander in Edinburgh Castle; when she was a captive, he is said,
by the English agent, Randolph, to have urged that she should be
slain,--for, as she said, "she had that in black and white which would
hang Lethington." She escaped, and his policy was, in his own interests,
to appear to prosecute her, and secretly to advise and aid her; to win,
if not her forgiveness, an amnesty, if she returned to power, which
he believed to be inevitable. She hated no man more bitterly, but she
needed no man so much. As he had lost for her Edinburgh Castle,
he gained it for her once more by winning to her cause the gallant
Kirkcaldy of Grange, commanding therein for her enemies. He lived, a
disease-stricken man. through the siege of the castle, meeting Knox once
or twice with the old insolent smooth-spoken disdain of the prophet. He
escaped the gibbet by a natural death, when the castle surrendered and
Kirkcaldy was hanged. This "Michael Wiley," (Scots for Macchiavelli,)
had trusted too absolutely to his own wit, his own command over violent
men.--trusted too much to sheer intellect; been too contemptuous of
honour There is no one who at all resembles him in the history of
Scotland; he {216}fascinates and repels us; one likes so much in him,
and detests so much.
From a brother's descendants came the notorious Lauderdale of the
Covenant and the Great Rebellion; a scholar; at one time professedly
godly; the natural and deadly opposite of the great Montrose, the coarse
voluptuary and greedy governor of Scotland, and the servile buffoon of
Charles II during the Restoration. He paid a trifling pension to the
descendants of Lethington, who are so impoverished that I guess at one
of them in "auld Babby Metlan," "other than a gude ane," who handed on
the ballad of _Auld Maitland_ and was housekeeper to the last Scott of
Tushielaw on upper Ettrick.
These two are the great men of Leader Water (an ideal trout stream if
not poached out), Lethington and--St. Cuthbert! It was while he watched
his flocks by night on the braes of Leader that Cuthbert saw, either
some meteoric phenomenon which he misconstrued, or the soul of Bishop
Aidan passing heavenward in glory. Next day he walked or rode to Old
Melrose, leaned his spear on the wall at the portal, and confided to
Boisil (St. Boswells) his desire to enter into religion. From his noble
biography by the Venerable Bede (he has "got his step" now, I think, and
is Blessed Bede, _beatus_), we know this great and good man, Cuthbert,
chief missionary on the violent Border, who sleeps in Durham Cathedral.
The English have captured him, the great glory of Leader Water, but m
his region, in his day, the people were already English by blood to
a great degree, and in language. Cuthbert, despite the Reformation,
continued to be a favourite Christian name north of Tweed, witness
Cuddie Headrig, whose mother, Mause, had nothing papistical in her
convictions!
By a burn that takes its rise far up Leader near a summit of the
Lammermuirs called Nine Cairn Edge, is the Well of the Holy Water
Cleuch. It was here that St. Cuthbert spent his shepherd boyhood; here
that he saw the vision which sent {217}him to Mailros. And here, after
Cuthhert's death, they built in his honour, beside the Holy Well, the
Childeschirche, the name of which survives to us now as Channelkirk.
Were one of Border birth to quit "sweet Leader Haughs," leaving
unnoticed "True Thomas," Thomas of Ercildoune, I do not know how he
might again face his fellow Borderers. For, though Thomas may not have
been a great man, in the same sense that St. Cuthbert and Lethington
were great, yet to most of his countrymen he is better known than
either. For one at the present day to whom the name of Cuthbert is
familiar, or one to whom "Lethington" conveys any very definite idea,
you will find a hundred who take an intelligent interest in Thomas the
Rhymer, and who believe with Spottis-woode, who wrote of him early in
the seventeenth century: "Sure it is that he did divine and answer true
of many things to come." Fact regarding the Rhymer is so vague, and so
beautifully blended with fiction, that I doubt if most Borderers do not
more than half persuade themselves still to accept as fact much of the
fiction that they learned of him in childhood. To Border children, not
so very long ago, nothing was more real than the existence of a tree,
still alive and growing somewhere about the enchanted land of Eildon,
which must necessarily be _the_ Eildon Tree:
"Syne he has kissed her rosy lips
All underneath the Eildon Tree;"
nothing was more certain than that True Thomas, at the call of the Queen
of Faëry, rose and obediently followed the hart and the hind into the
forest, and returned no more.
"First he woxe pale, and then woxe red,
Never a word he spake but three;--
'My sand is run, my thread is spun,
This sign regardeth me.'"
No spot was looked on, in early youth, with more awe than that Bogle
Burn whose stony bed crossed over the St. Boswells and Melrose road in
the cheerless hollow beside a gloomy wood; it was here that True Thomas
beheld things unseen by mere mortal eye. Who could doubt? Was there not
still standing in Earlston the remains of his old tower to confute all
scoffers!
[Illustration: 0238]
"The hare sail kittle on my hearth stane,
And there never will be a Laird Learmunt again."
And, a hundred years ago and more, did not a hare actually produce
its young on the shattered, grass-grown hearth-stone of the Rhymer's
dwelling? So everybody believed. But if doubt yet lingered anywhere
regarding some portion of True Thomas's story, it was easily set at rest
by the words cut on that old stone built into the wall ot the church at
Earlston.
"Auld Rymer's race
Lyes in this place,"
it says; and somehow it gave one a peg to hang one's faith upon. The
whole, or at least a sufficient part of it, is quite real in that
countryside by the Rhymer's Glen where True Thomas lay "on Huntlie
bank." and where flourished the Eildon Tree; and that True Thomas's
still unfulfilled prophecies will yet one day come to pass, is a sound
article of belief. Though how the ruthless prediction is to come about
regarding the house of Cowdenknowes, (which is not far removed from the
Rhymers old tower,) one does not quite see. But it was a doom pronounced
against a pitiless Home who there "had aince commanding." And the Homes
are gone.
"Vengeance! Vengeance! when and where?
On the house of Coldingknow, now and ever mair!"
Perhaps, too, that was not of True Thomas's foretelling. One prefers
rather to think of Cowdenknowes in connection with the ballad:
"O the broom, and the bonny, bonny broom,
And the broom of the Cowdenknowes!
And aye sae sweet as the lassie sang,
I' the bught, milking the ewes."
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