#A. a.# Kinloch MSS, V, 9. #b#. ‘Laird of Drum,’ Kinloch’s Ancient
Scottish Ballads, p. 199.
#B.# ‘The Laird of Doune’ [miswritten for Drum], Skene MS., p. 78.
#C.# MS. copy formerly in the possession of Sir Walter Scott.
#D. a.# Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 194. #b#. ‘The
Laird of Drum,’ Buchan’s MSS, II, 101; Dixon, Scottish Traditional
Versions of Ancient Ballads, p. 53, Percy Society, vol. xvii. #c#.
The New Deeside Guide, by James Brown, [1832,] p. 11. #d#. Gibb MS.,
p. 21.
#E.# ‘The Laird of Drum,’ MS., inserted in Dr Joseph Robertson’s
interleaved copy of The New Deeside Guide, Aberdeen [1832].
#F. a.# ‘The Ladye o the Drum,’ Loudon MS., p. 7. #b#. ‘The Laird o
the Drum,’ Macmath MS., p. 13.
First taken into a collection by Kinloch, 1827, who remarks that the
ballad had been printed as a broadside in the North, and was extremely
popular. #B#, the oldest version that has been recovered, was written
down in 1802–3. There are verbal agreements between #B#, especially, and
a fragment in Herd’s MSS (I, 55, II, 187, Herd’s Scottish Songs, 1776,
II, 6), and there has been borrowing from one side or the other. Herd’s
fragment belongs to a ballad of a shepherd’s daughter and an earl which
is preserved in two copies in Motherwell’s MS. (I, 37, 252). No 397 of
The Musical Museum, communicated to Johnson, says Stenhouse, by Burns,
[1792,] and probably in a large measure his work, begins with stanzas
which may have been suggested by the ballad before us or by the other.
See an appendix.
The copy in Christie, I, 24, was epitomized from #A b#, with some
alterations. That in The Deeside Guide, 1889, p. 17, is Aytoun’s,
compounded of #A b# and #D a#.
Alexander Irvine, the young laird of Drum, says Spalding, was married to
the lady Mary Gordon on December 7, 1643: Memorials of the Trubles in
Scotland, etc., II, 296. Lady Mary Gordon was fourth daughter to George
the second Marquis of Huntly, and niece to the Marquis of Argyll. The
Laird of Drum suffered extremely in his worldly fortunes through his
fidelity to the cause of the Stuarts. This would have been a natural
reason for his declining a peerage offered him at the Restoration, and
for his marrying, the second time, to win and not to spend. He took for
his second wife Margaret Coutts (#A# 9), “a woman of inferior birth and
manners, which step gave great offence to his relations.” (Kinloch.) He
died in 1687. After the death of Irvine of Drum, Margaret Coutts married
Irvine of Cults. She died in 1710, at the age of only forty-five.[137]