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.