reaching Buccleuch, who at once raised an angry protest. Scrope, the
English Warden, received this with an evasive and obviously trumped-up
counter-charge of Kinmont Will having first broken truce. Moreover, he
said, he was a notorious enemy to law and order, and must bear the
penalty of his misdeeds. This was more than the bold Buccleuch could
stomach.
"He has ta'en the table wi' his hand,
He garr'd the red wine spring on hie--
'Now Christ's curse on my head,' he said,
'But avenged of Lord Scrope I'll be!
O, is my basnet a widow's curch?
Or my lance a wand o' the willow-tree?
Or my arm a ladye's lilye hand,
That an English lord should lightly me?'"
No time was lost in making an appeal to King James, which resulted in an
application to the English Government. But while the English authorities
quibbled, paltered, and delayed--with a little evasion, a little extra
red-tapism, a little judicious procrastination--the days of Kinmont
Willie were being numbered by his captors. The triumph of putting an end
to the daring deeds of so bold a Scottish reiver when they had him
safely in chains in Carlisle Castle, was one that they were not likely
lightly to forego. It would be indeed a merry crowd of English Borderers
that flocked to Haribee Hill on the day that Will of Kinmont dangled
from the gallows.
Buccleuch saw that he had no time to lose. He himself must strike at
once, and strike with all his might.
The night of April 13, 1596, was dark and stormy. All the Border burns
and rivers were in spate; the winds blew shrewd and chill through the
glens of Liddesdale, and sleet drifted down in the teeth of the gale.
The trees that grew so thick round Woodhouselee bent and cracked, and
sent extra drenching showers of rain down on the steel jacks of a band
of horsemen who carefully picked their way underneath them, on to the
south. Buccleuch was leader, and with him rode some forty picked men of
his friends and kinsmen, to meet some hundred and fifty or so of other
chosen men. Scotts, Elliots, Armstrongs, and Grahams were there, and
although Buccleuch had requested that only younger sons were to risk
their lives in the forlorn hope that night, Auld Wat o' Harden and many
another landowner rode with their chief. "Valiant men, they would not
bide," says Scott of Satchells, whose own father was one of the number.
Kinmont Willie's own tower of Morton, on the water of Sark, about ten
miles north of Carlisle, was their rallying point. Buccleuch had
arranged every detail most carefully at a horse-race held at Langholm a
few days before, and one of the Grahams, an Englishman whose countrymen
were not yet aware that the Graham clan had allied themselves to that of
the Scotts, had conveyed his ring to Kinmont Willie to show him that he
was not forgotten by his feudal lord. One and all, the reivers were well
armed, "with spur on heel, and splent on spauld," and with them they
carried scaling ladders, picks, axes, and iron crowbars. The Esk and
Eden were in furious flood, but no force of nature or of man could stay
the reivers' horses that night.
"We go to catch a rank reiver
Has broken faith wi' the bauld Buccleuch."
That was the burden of their thoughts, and although they well knew that
ere the dawning each one of them might be claiming the hospitality of
six feet of English sod, their hearts were light. To them a message that
the fray was up was like the sound of the huntsman's horn in the ears of
a thoroughbred hunter.
"'Where are ye gaun, ye mason lads,
Wi' a' your ladders, lang and hie?'
'We gang to berry a corbie's nest,
That wons not far frae Woodhouselee.'"
No light matter was it to harry that corbie's nest. Carlisle Castle was
a strong castle, strongly garrisoned, and to make a raid on an English
town was a bold attempt indeed. But fear was a thing unknown to the
Border reivers, and the flower of them rode with Buccleuch that
night--close on his horse's heels Wat o' Harden, Walter Scott of
Goldielands, and Kinmont's own four stalwart sons--Jock, Francie,
Geordie, and Sandy. As the dark night hours wore on, sleet and wind were
reinforced by a thunderstorm.
"And when we left the Staneshaw-bank,
The wind began full loud to blaw,
But 'twas wind and weet, and fire and sleet,
When we came beneath the castle wa'."
When the besiegers reached the castle they found some of the watch
asleep, and the rest sheltering indoors from the storm. The outside of
the castle was left to take care of itself. It was dismaying to find the
scaling ladders too short to be of any use, but a small postern gate was
speedily and quietly undermined. Drifting sleet, growling thunder, and
the wails of the wind drowned all sounds of the assault, and soon there
was no further need for concealment, for the lower court of the castle
was theirs. The guard started up, to find sword-blades at their throats;
two of them were left dead, and the rest were speedily overpowered.
Buccleuch, the fifth man in, gave the command to proclaim aloud their
triumph:
"'Now sound out trumpets!' quoth Buccleuch;
'Let's waken Lord Scroope right merrilie!'
Then loud the Warden's trumpet blew--
_'O wha daur meddle wi' me?'_"
While Buccleuch himself kept watch at the postern, two dozen stout
moss-troopers now rushed to the castle gaol, a hundred yards from the
postern gate, forced the door of Kinmont Willie's prison, and found him
there chained to the wall, and carried him out, fetters and all, on the
back of "the starkest man in Teviotdale."
"Stand to it!" cried Buccleuch--so says the traitor, a man from the
English side, who afterwards acted as informer to the English
Warden--"for I have vowed to God and my Prince that I would fetch out of
England, Kinmont, dead or alive."
Shouts of victory in strident Scottish voices, the crash of picks on
shattered doors and ruined mason-work, and that arrogant, insolent,
oft-repeated blast from the trumpet of him whom Scrope described in his
report to the Privy Council as "the capten of this proud attempt," were
not reassuring sounds to the Warden of the English Marches, his deputy,
and his garrison. Five hundred Scots at least--so did Scrope swear to
himself and others--were certainly there, and there was no gainsaying
the adage that "Discretion is the better part of valour." So, in the
words of the historian, he and the others "did keip thamselffis close."
But no sooner had the rescue party reached the banks of the Eden than
the bells of Carlisle clanged forth a wild alarm. Red-tongued flames
from the beacon on the great tower did their best, in spite of storm and
sleet, to warn all honest English folk that a huge army of Scots was on
the war-path, and that the gallows on Haribee Hill had been insulted by
the abduction of its lawful prey.
"We scarce had won the Staneshaw-bank,
When a' the Carlisle bells were rung,
And a thousand men on horse and foot,
Cam' wi' the keen Lord Scroope along.
Buccleuch has turn'd to Eden Water,
Even where it flow'd frae brim to brim,
And he has plunged in wi' a' his band,
And safely swam them through the stream.
He turned them on the other side,
And at Lord Scroope his glove flung he--
'If ye like na' my visit in merry England,
In fair Scotland come visit me!'
All sore astonished stood Lord Scroope,
He stood as still as rock of stane;
He scarcely dare to trew his eyes,
When through the water they had gane.
'He is either himsel' a devil frae hell,
Or else his mother a witch maun be;
I wadna' have ridden that wan water
For a' the gowd in Christentie.'"
At a place called "Dick's Tree," not far from Longtown, there still
stands the "smiddy" where lived the blacksmith who had the honour of
knocking off Kinmont Willie's fetters. Sir Walter Scott has handed on
the story of the smith's daughter who, as a little child, was roused at
daybreak by a "sair clatter" of horses, and shouts for her father,
followed, as the smith slept soundly, by a lance being thrust through
the window. Looking out in the dim grey of the morning, the child saw
"more gentlemen than she had ever seen before in one place, all on
horseback, in armour, and dripping wet--and that Kinmont Willie, who sat
woman-fashion behind one of them, was the biggest carle she ever
saw--and there was much merriment in the party."
Furious was the hive of wasps that Buccleuch brought about his head by
thus insultingly casting a stone into the English bike. The wrath of
Queen Elizabeth was unappeasable. Scrope found it sounded better to
multiply the number of the raiders by five, but Scottish tongues were
not slow to tell the affronting truth, and the Englishmen of Carlisle
had the extra bitterness of being butts for the none too subtle jests of
every Scot on the Border. The success of so daring a venture made the
Scottish reivers arrogant. Between June 19 and July 24 of that year, the
spoils of the western Marches were a thousand and sixty-one cattle and
ninety-eight horses, and some thirty steadings and other buildings,
mostly in Gilsland, were burned. The angry English made reprisals. It
was in one of them that the Scots who were taken were leashed "like
doggis," and for this degradation Buccleuch and Ker of Cessford made the
English pay most handsomely. Together those "twoo fyrebrandes of the
Border" led an incursion into Tynedale, where, in broad daylight, they
burned three hundred steadings and dwelling-houses, many stables, barns,
and other outhouses, slew with the sword fourteen of those who had been
in the Scottish raid, and brought back a handsome booty.
King Jamie was in a most uncomfortable position. Queen Elizabeth
demanded Buccleuch's punishment, and he argued. She nagged, and he
wriggled. Finally, after continual angry remonstrances from the insulted
English monarch, he had to give in, and Buccleuch and Ker had both, at
different periods, to suffer imprisonment for the sin, in the virgin
Queen's eyes, of the rescue of Kinmont Willie, and of its bloody
consequences. We realise what was the reputation of Buccleuch and of his
followers when we see into what a state of panic the mere prospect of
having the Border chieftain as prisoner at Berwick-on-Tweed threw Sir
John Carey, the governor. To Lord Hunsdon he wrote: "I entreat your
Lordship that I may not become the jailor of so dangerous a prisoner or,
at least, that I may know whether I shall keep him like a prisoner or
no? for there is not a worse or more dangerous place in England to keep
him than this; it is so near his friends, and, besides, so many in this
town willing to pleasure him, and his escape may be so easily made; and
once out of this town he is past recovery. Wherefore I humbly beseech
your honor, let him be removed from hence to a more secure place, for I
protest to the Almightie God, before I will take the charge to kepe him
here, I will desire to be put in prison myself, and to have a keeper of
me. For what care soever be had of him here, he shall want no
furtherance whatsoever wit of man can devise, if he himself list to make
an escape. So I pray your Lordship, even for God's sake and for the love
of a brother, to relieve me from this danger." But there was no attempt
at a rescue of Buccleuch. He did not desire it. Not as a criminal, but
as a state prisoner he gave himself up to the English governor, and,
having given his parole, he kept it, like the gentleman of stainless
honour that he was.
Two years after his imprisonment at Berwick-on-Tweed, Buccleuch, on his
way with two hundred followers to serve with Prince Maurice of Nassau in
the Low Countries--a raid from which many a Borderer never returned--was
sufficiently received into favour to be permitted to go to London and
kiss the hand of her most gracious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. The
remembrance of Kinmont Willie still rankled in that most unforgiving of
royal breasts.
"How dared you," she imperiously demanded, "undertake an enterprise so
desperate and presumptuous?"
"Dared?" answered Buccleuch; "what is it that a man _dares_ not do?"
Elizabeth turned impetuously to a lord-in-waiting. "With ten thousand
such men," she said, "our brother of Scotland might shake the firmest
throne in Europe."
That Kinmont Willie avenged himself not once, but many times, on those
who had treacherously trapped him and done their best to make him meat
for the greedy English gibbet, is not a matter of surmise, but one of
history. His ride into Carlisle on that bleak March day, and the long
days and dreary nights he spent in chains in the English gaol, were
little likely to engender a gentle and forgiving spirit in the breast of
one of the most fiery of the "minions of the moon." When, in 1600, he
raided Scrope's tenants, they were given good cause to regret the
happenings in which Scrope had taken so prominent a part.
We have no record of the end of Kinmont Willie, and can but hope, for
his sake, that he died the death he would have died--a good horse under
him almost to the end, a good sword in his hand, open sky above him, and
round him the caller breeze that has blown across the Border hills. In a
lonely little graveyard in the Debatable Land, close to the Water of
Sark, and near the March dyke between the two countries, his body is
said to rest. Does there never come a night, when the moon is hidden
behind a dark scud of clouds, and the old reiver, growing restless in
his grave, finds somewhere the shade of a horse that, in its day, could
gallop with the best, and rides again across the Border, to meet once
more his "auld enemies" of England, and, to the joyous accompaniment of
the lowing of cattle and the jingle of spurs, returns to his lodging as
the first cock crows, and grey morning breaks?
"O, they rade in the rain, in the days that are gane,
In the rain and the wind and the lave;
They shoutit in the ha' and they routit on the hill,
But they're a' quaitit noo in the grave."
IN THE DAYS OF THE '15
Close on two hundred years back from the present time there stood far up
the South Tyne, beyond Haltwhistle, on the road--then little better than
a bridle-track--running over the Cumberland border by Brampton, an inn
which in those days was a house of no little importance in that wild and
remote country.
If its old walls could speak, what, for instance, might they not have
told of Jacobite plottings? Beneath its roof was held many a meeting of
the supporters of the King "over the water," James the Eighth; and here,
riding up from Dilston, not seldom came the unfortunate Earl of
Derwentwater, to take part in the Jacobite deliberations. The young lord
and the horse he usually rode were figures familiar and welcome to the
country folk around, and at the inn they were as well known as was the
landlord himself. It was not long after a secret meeting held here in
the earlier half of the year 1715 that the warrants were issued which
led to Derwentwater's flight from Dilston, and precipitated the Rising
that within a few months rolled so many gallant heads in the dust of the
scaffold.
It might perhaps have been better for Lord Derwentwater had he been
less beloved in Northumberland, and had his devoted admirers been unable
to send him notice of the coming of the warrant for his arrest. He might
not then have had opportunity to commit himself so deeply; and there
might have been a romantic and pathetic figure the less in the doleful
history of that unhappy period. As it was, he had time to get clear
away, and was able to lie securely hid, partly in farmhouses, partly
near Shaftoe Crags, till the news reached him that Forster had raised
the standard of rebellion. On 6th October 1715, at the head of a little
company of gentlemen and armed servants, he joined Forster at Greenrig.
A poor affair at the best, this muster in Northumberland; and though the
county was seething with excitement, and a few notable men went out with
the Earl, his personal following did not exceed seventy in all. Then
followed the march which ended so disastrously in pitiful surrender at
Preston that fatal November day. However gallant personally, Forster was
an incapable soldier, no leader of men, and General Wills had but to
spread wide his net to sweep in the bulk of the insurgents--Forster,
Derwentwater, Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carwath, Wintoun, and men less exalted
in rank by the score and the hundred. The bag was a heavy one, that day
of disaster to the Stuart cause; and alas, for many of those who filled
it! Alas, too, for the wives and the mothers who sat at home, waiting!
Not to everyone was given the opportunity to dare all for husband or
son; to few came such chance as was seized by the Countess of Nithsdale,
who so contrived that her husband escaped from the Tower disguised in
woman's clothing. It was boldly schemed, and success followed her
attempt. Others could but pray to God and petition the King. She not
only prayed, but acted. Would that there might have been one so to act
for Derwentwater! More happy had it been, perhaps, for his Countess had
she never uttered the taunt that ended his hesitation to join in the
Rebellion: "It is not fitting that the Earl of Derwentwater should
continue to hide his head in hovels from the light of day, when the
gentry are up in arms for their lawful sovereign." They say that her
spirit mourns yet within the tower of Dilston.
Away up the valley of the Tyne, amongst the wild Northumberland hills,
news went with lagging gait, those leisurely days of the eighteenth
century; even news of battle or of disaster did not speed as it is the
wont of ill news to do: "For evil news rides fast, while good news
baits." Tidings, in those good old days, but trickled through from ear
to ear, slowly, as water filters through sand. Little news, therefore,
of Lord Derwentwater, or of the Rising, was heard in or around
Haltwhistle after the insurgent force left Brampton; no man knew for a
certainty what fortune, good or bad, had waited on the fortunes of his
friends.
Night was closing down on the desolate Border hills on a drear November
evening of 1715. Throughout a melancholy day, clinging mist had blurred
the outline of even the nearest hills; distance was blotted out. Thin
rain fell chillingly and persistently, drip, dripping with monotonous
plash from the old inn's thatched eaves; a light wind sobbed fitfully
around the building, moaning at every chink and cranny of the
ill-fitting window-frames. "A dismal night for any who must travel,"
thought the stableman of the inn, as he looked east and then west along
the darkening road. No moving thing broke the monotony of the depressing
outlook, and the groom turned to his work of bedding down for the night
the few animals that happened to be in his charge. They were not many;
most of those that so frequently of late had stood here were away with
their owners, following the fortunes of the Earl of Derwentwater;
business was dull at the inn. Well, let the weather be what it liked, at
least the groom's work was over for the night, and he might go sit by
the cheerful peat fire in the kitchen, and drink a health to the
King--the rightful King, God bless him; and it was little harm, thought
he, if he drank another to the Earl--whom might the Saints protect.
Even as he turned to go, in the dusk at the door, framed, as it were, in
a picture, there appeared a horseman leading a tired horse, the reins
loose over his arm. Though seen only in that half light, the outline of
man and beast were familiar to the stableman. Both seemed far spent; the
horse held low its head, and sweat stood caked and thick on neck and
heaving flanks, and dripped off inside down by the hocks.
"Ye've ridden hard, sir," said the groom, bustling forward to take the
horse.
The stranger said no word, but himself led the tired animal into an
empty stall. Yet, as the groom remembered later, of the other horses in
the stable, not one raised its head, or whinnied, or took any notice
whatever as the new-comer entered.
The stableman turned to lift his lantern, and when, an instant later, he
again faced about, he stared to find himself alone; the strange horseman
was nowhere to be seen. And the horse in the stall? Him the groom knew
well; there was no possibility of mistake; it was the well-known grey on
which Lord Derwentwater had ridden away to cast in his lot with Forster.
"Mistress! Mistress!" he cried, hurrying into the house, "has his
lordship come in? He's led his grey gelding into the stable the noo, and
niver a word wad he say to me or he gaed oot. An' I'm feared a's no weel
wi' him; he was lookin' sair fashed, an' kind o' white like."
"His lordship i' the inn? Guide us!" cried the landlady, snatching up a
tallow dip and hurrying into the unlit guest-room.
"Ye hae gotten back, my lord? And is a' weel wi' your lordship?
And--e-eh! what ails--?" she gasped, as a tall figure, seated in the
great oak chair by the smouldering fire, turned on her a face wan and
drawn, disfigured by bloody streaks across the cheek. Slowly, like a man
in pain, or one wearied to the extreme of exhaustion, the seated figure
rose, stood for a moment gazing at her, and then, ere the landlady could
collect her scattered wits, it had vanished. Vanished, too, was the grey
horse that the groom had seen brought into the stable; and, what was
more, the bedding in the stall where the animal had stood was entirely
undisturbed, and showed no trace of any beast having been there.
It was long that night ere anybody slept within the walls of the old
inn, and broken was their sleep. None doubted but that the Earl was
killed, or if not killed, at least soon to die; and the news of Preston,
when it came, was to those faithful friends no news, only confirmation
of their fears. None, after that, dared hope; they knew that he must
die. And the 24th of February 1716 saw a countryside plunged in grief,
for that day fell on the scaffold the head of one whom everybody loved,
who was every man's friend, who never turned empty away those who went
to him seeking help.
Blood-red were the northern lights that flashed and shimmered so wildly
in the heavens that night, red as the blood that had soaked into the
sawdust of a scaffold; never before in the memory of living man had
aurora gleamed with hue so startling. But the sorrow in the hearts of
his people passed not away like the fading of the northern lights. His
memory lives still in Northumberland; still, when they see the gleam and
flicker of the aurora, folk there call it "Lord Derwentwater's Light";
and even yet it is a tradition that dwellers by the stream which flows
past Dilston were wont to tell how, on that fatal day, its waters ran
red like blood.
When "a' was done that man could do, and a' was done in vain," there
remained but to convey his headless body, if it might be, to the spot
where his forebears lie at rest.
"Albeit that here in London Town,
It is my fate to die,
O, carry me to Northumberland,
In my fathers' grave to lie."
The Earl's body had been buried at St. Giles-in-the-Fields, and of those
who went to recover it and to bring it home, there was one famous in
Northumberland story, Frank Stokoe of Chesterwood. A remarkable man was
Stokoe, of enormous personal strength and of great height--in stature a
veritable child of Anak--a man without fear, brave to recklessness, a
good friend and a terrible enemy. Added to all this, he was an
extraordinarily expert swordsman. He was a man, too, of much influence
and acknowledged authority in the county--a useful man to have on the
side of the King--one to whom the people listened, and to whom often an
appeal for help was made in ticklish affairs.
There was, for instance, that affair of the feud between Lowes of
Willimoteswick Castle and Leehall of Leehall, which kept a great part of
Tynedale in hot water for so many years. Leehall appears to have been
physically the better man; at any rate, on more than one occasion Lowes
seems to have escaped from the clutches of his enemy solely by the
superior speed of the horse he rode, or possibly he was a light, and his
enemy a heavy, weight, which would make all the difference in a rousing
gallop across deep ground or heathery hill. In any case, as a general
rule, Lowes was more often the hunted than the hunter. Yet, to the
followers of Lowes--there must always be two sides to a story--it was
he, and not Leehall, who was the finer man, for, of an encounter between
the pair near Bellingham, when Lowes' horse was killed by a sword-thrust
directed at the rider's thigh, the old ballad says:
"Oh, had Leehall but been a man
As he was never ne-an,
He wad have stabbed the rider
And letten the horse alean."