* * * * *
“_EDINBURGH, April 21, 1817._”
In memory of the event, Lady Clerk always wore the cockade, along with
a white rose, upon her birthday. It has been said that she presented
it to George IV. on the occasion of his visit to Scotland, and its
existence, unfortunately, cannot now be traced: but a still living
connection of the family informs us that she had seen the relic in the
possession of Lady Clerk, at a more recent date than that of the royal
progress.
It will be remembered that Scott, to whom in his youth Sir John and
Lady Clerk had been kind, with his keen and appreciative eye for the
picturesque, has seized upon this incident and turned it to excellent
account in the opening chapter of “The Monastery.”
That white cockade, the symbol of a cause so full of poetry and
romance, seems to have brought a benison with it to the babe Rosemary
Dacre, to have dowered her with beauty, and gifted her with an
unusually magnetic attractiveness. As she grew into fairest womanhood
she had many lovers, declared and undeclared, and in the hearts of
those who failed to win the lady her memory seems to have lingered
tenderly with no touch of bitterness; to have been, to some of them, a
kind of lifelong inspiration, evoking gentle wistful feelings, such as
Dante Rossetti has so exquisitely recorded in one of the finest of his
earlier poems, his “First Love Remembered.”
Some curious records, some strange hints of the potent part which
the lady of the white cockade, and the memory of her, played in the
lives of certain men whom she never wedded are preserved at Penicuik,
casketed in the dainty little Chippendale workbox that once was hers,
among other personal relics,—her long black gloves, with a space of
black lace inlet from palm to top; her cap edged with delicate lace;
a long tress of her dark brown hair, marked “June the 6th, 1794, aged
48”; and her silhouette, cut in black paper, showing a strong dignified
profile, beneath a tall hat, wound round with a veil.
Two of the interesting letters preserved in this quaint old workbox
are from Lord Chancellor Eldon, who in his youth, as they clearly
indicate, had been a lover of Rosemary Dacre; though the impression can
hardly have been overwhelmingly deep or very permanent, for he was only
twenty-one when he eloped with Bessy Surtees, a step which entailed the
loss of his Oxford fellowship, closed his hopes of preferment in the
Church, and obliged him with “a most kind Providence for my guide,” as
he says, to take to the study of law, one of his earliest legal efforts
being the delivery, as Deputy-Vinerian Professor for Sir Robert
Chambers, of a lecture on “the statute of young men running away with
maidens.” But in his youth the future Lord Chancellor was, as he used
to confess, “very susceptible.” “Oh,” he would say, “these were happy
days; we were always in love then.”