concerned, somewhat involved, and requires careful explanation. Up to
1830, when the wide-spreading sands of the Esk were bridged, the way
for coaches and all road-traffic lay circuitously through Longtown
to the right of where the fork of the roads now occurs; but in that
year the New Road, or the “English Road,” as it was commonly called,
was opened, causing much interference with what the inhabitants of
Springfield had almost come to regard as their “vested rights.” For, as
the accompanying plan will show, Springfield lay directly on the route
into Scotland; and Gretna Green merely to one side of it. But here
again it behoves the historian to be careful and not rashly to assume
that the early marriages were made at Springfield, and should therefore
have been named after it. As a curious matter of fact, this village
did not come into existence until 1791, when it was built by the then
landowner, Sir William Maxwell, who named it from a farm standing
there. It was then, and for long after, the home of people professing
to be weavers, but really, almost without exception, a set of drunken
Border blackguards who, when not helplessly intoxicated, were smugglers
and poachers and wastrels generally, and, living in the marches of the
two countries, respected the laws of neither.
Springfield, immediately after its rise, took away most of the
marrying business of Gretna, being nearer the magical dividing-line.
[Illustration: MAP OF OLD AND NEW ROADS FROM CARLISLE TO GRETNA GREEN.]
[Sidenote: _THE LONGTOWN ROAD_]
Blackford, on the Longtown road, is of the one unvarying pattern here,
and is followed by the hamlet of West Linton, by the river Lyne,
where a cottage or so, a farm, and the whitewashed “Graham’s Arms,”
with its motto, “N’Oublie,” stand stodged in the mud. Fir-trees and a
laurel-bordered road then lead to the by-way where Arthuret church,
standing solitary, serves for churchless Longtown, half a mile distant.
In Arthuret churchyard there is shown a broken cross, said to mark the
grave of Archie Armstrong, the famous Court fool of James the First
and Charles the First. James brought him south, from the Border, where
he had early distinguished himself as a sheepstealer in Eskdale; and
his impudence and invincible effrontery brought him a long period of
success at Court. But at last he overreached himself, in his enmity
to Archbishop Laud. On one occasion, saying grace at Whitehall, he
exclaimed, “Great praise to God and little laud to the Devil,” and all
the Court sniggered; but when, in 1637, he met Laud at a time when
the Scots were rising against the Archbishop’s attempts at dictation
in religious matters, and asked, “Wha’s fool the noo?” the jester’s
licence had grown beyond endurance, and he was dismissed. He lived
many years longer, and earned the reputation of an extremely usurious
lender of money, to whom no sharp practices came amiss. The cross
shown as marking his resting-place is really a portion of an ancient
Scandinavian monument.
[Sidenote: _SIR JAMES GRAHAM_]
Another character, very notorious in his day, lies in the churchyard:
Sir James Graham of Netherby, who was Home Secretary in 1844, when the
correspondence of Mazzini and other political refugees was opened at
the General Post Office by his direction, and read. Graham received
his orders from the Earl of Aberdeen, Minister for Foreign Affairs,
but it was Graham himself upon whom the whole of the public obloquy
fell, and he remarked, in the true spirit of prophecy, that all else he
had done would be forgotten, and he would be remembered only by this
wretched incident. It surely is a pitiful thing and a real tragedy of
the public service that an honourable gentleman who in private life
would have scorned to do anything mean should go down in history as the
man who violated the sanctity of private correspondence.
[Illustration: ARTHURET CHURCH.]
There are no architectural graces in Longtown. Each house is like its
fellow and every street resembles every other street. How then do the
strayed revellers, returning home “fou,” find the way to their especial
domiciles? An attempt to subdue the stark angularity of Longtown,
though not to give its streets variety, is seen in the somewhat recent
planting of the roads with trees.
Many people suppose the river Esk at Longtown to be the division
between England and Scotland. The supposition is reasonable enough,
for the actual divisor, the Sark, four miles further on, approaching
Springfield, is a very insignificant stream in appearance. The
political and the social significances of it were, however, of very
serious import indeed.
Solway Moss is passed on the way. Turner has made it the subject of one
of the finest plates in his _Liber Studiorum_, and has imported into
the view some mountains that are not there, together with some weather
which, fortunately for the present writer, was equally absent when he
passed this way.
[Illustration: SOLWAY MOSS
[_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._
]
[Sidenote: _BATTLE OF SOLWAY MOSS_]
Solway Moss is marked on the maps with the conventional crossed swords
that indicate a battle. It was not an epoch-making battle that was
fought here, November 24th, 1542, but it was one of the most complete
of English victories, and the story of it is compact of a peculiar
terror. The Scots had crossed the Border in force, and were proceeding
on their usual lines of fire and pillage, to the assault of Carlisle,
when they were met at Arthuret by an army under Sir Thomas Wharton, the
stout Warden of the West Marches. The English onset disorganised the
invaders, who fled in the gathering darkness. Ten thousand fugitives
lost their way, and found themselves with the flowing tide upon the
fatal Solway Sands. Some flung away their arms and struggled through,
thousands were drowned, and many surrendered to women. Meanwhile, the
main body, pursued by the English, wandered in the other direction
across the Esk and plunged into the bog of Solway Moss, and were
swallowed up, slain, or taken prisoners. “Never,” says Froude, “in
all the wars between England and Scotland, had there been a defeat
more complete, more sudden, or more disgraceful.” James the Fifth of
Scotland died on December 14th, heartbroken at the disaster. It was a
complete English revenge for the defeat they had suffered at the Sark,
hard by, in 1449, nearly a hundred years before.
[Illustration: THE ROAD PAST SOLWAY MOSS.]
Turner therefore does right in so romantically treating the subject,
and I am merely a pictorial reporter, setting down only what I see.
But at any rate, while Turner might dissuade the pilgrim, with his
storm overhead and his fathomless bog beneath, whence apparently some
wretches are just escaping with their lives, you see by the modern
sketch that there is at least a hard high road running by.
Having come now to the Sark, and across it into the long street of
Springfield, and by the same token into Scotland, it is necessary to
tell at length the story of “Gretna Green” marriages. It could scarce
be told in more forbidding surroundings, for Springfield is one long
street of gaunt, unrelieved commonplace, and neither the once notorious
“Queen’s Head” inn on the right, nor the “Maxwell Arms” on the left,
helps to relieve it in the least degree. But the devil’s in it if
love can’t throw a rosy tinge over even such a scene, and doubtless
Springfield looked entrancing to some.
XXVII
The popularity of Gretna Green elopements dated from the passing of
Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1754, by which it was
declared that “Any person solemnising matrimony in any other place than
a church or public chapel, without banns, or other license, shall,
on conviction, be adjudged guilty of felony, and be transported for
fourteen years, and all such marriages shall be void.”
[Sidenote: _FLEET MARRIAGES_]
This measure was expressly designed to put an end to the long-continued
and growing scandals of the so-called “Fleet marriages,” which had
first attracted attention in 1674. The Fleet marriages, performed by
the chaplains of the Fleet Prison, in London, led to many abuses. Made
on the spur of the moment, between the prisoners there, incarcerated
for debt or other misdemeanours, and the visitors permitted free access
under the lax discipline of that time, the most fearful alliances
were perpetrated by wholesale. Drunken prisoners, dissolute women,
and parsons who richly deserved being unfrocked were the actors in
these scenes, almost exactly matched by the similar clandestine
marriages performed on application, at all hours of day or night, by
the chaplains of the Savoy, and by the clerical owners of proprietary
chapels in Mayfair.
These marriage-merchants earned amazing incomes, the still-existing
records of a Fleet parson’s fees in 1748 showing that in the month
of October alone he received no less than £69 12_s._ 9_d._ for his
services. At the Fleet, on March 25th, 1754, the day before Lord
Hardwicke’s Act became law, there was a grand winding-up of the
business, when 217 marriages were celebrated.
The penalty provided by the Act was not, under the existing
circumstances, too severe; for, in view of the evils wrought by those
practices, it was necessary to provide the greatest discouragement
possible to this traffic. Much more then than now, a marriage, once
performed, was irrevocable. Divorce courts, for redress of matrimonial
injuries, were unknown, and the drunken and the reckless who had taken
part so lightly in a Fleet marriage were held to their bargain for life.
But the Act, beneficent though it was, did not pass without great
opposition, and even when it became law, its operation was confined
to England; with the result that the only difficulty in the way of a
clandestine marriage that should be sufficiently legal was that of
making a journey out of England; whether across the English Channel to
Calais, or into the Isle of Man, or across the Border into Scotland,
was immaterial. The Isle of Man was for a brief period a favourite
place, but the House of Keys, the legislature of that isle, in 1757
passed an Act forbidding marriages other than by banns or special
license, with a penalty identical with that provided by the English Act
for clergymen who should infringe it; while any layman performing any
such ceremony was very roughly dealt with: the penalties in his case
being—
1. To be pilloried.
2. To lose his ears.
3. To be imprisoned until the Governor saw fit to release him, on
payment of a fine not exceeding £50.
After the passing of this Act we hear little or nothing of clandestine
marriages being celebrated in the Isle of Man.
The Channel Islands, and particularly Guernsey, were then occasionally
favoured, but the difficulties of access prevented them ever becoming
popular with the love-lorn, who very generally, while prepared to
suffer many things, drew the line at sea-sickness.
[Illustration: FILIAL AFFECTION.
[_After Rowlandson._
]
[Sidenote: _BORDER ELOPEMENTS_]
The Border, in fact, was destined to be, above all others, _the_
place to which eloping couples sped. “When Britain first at Heaven’s
command, arose from out the azure main,” she was sealed to a high
destiny; and when the Border was set between the kingdoms of England
and Scotland, it seems, at different times and periods, to have been
provided for the express purpose of affording a refuge and a living
for moss-troopers, cattle-lifters, and the generally lawless people of
the frontiers. It was thus quite in keeping with old Border history
that, when brute force went out and legal enormities took its place, it
should be the refuge of eloping lovers, of whom a very large proportion
were fortune-hunting scamps running away with silly, sentimental
schoolgirls.
The flight into Scotland afforded exceptional facilities, for marrying
across the Border has ever been (and still is) the simplest of affairs;
the chief difficulty being still, as Lord Eldon long ago observed, to
find out what does _not_ constitute a marriage in Scotland. My lord
himself spoke as doubly an expert, for he was not only the great legal
authority of his time, but himself had been married across the Border.
Indeed, Lord Deas was of opinion that mere consent, even in the absence
of witnesses, constituted lawful wedlock, just as in those primitive
days when the man only went to the woman’s home and took her to his
own. Pope Innocent III., who does not appear to have been so innocent
as his name would imply, in 1198 put an end to this simple plan.
Preposterous although it may seem, the difficulty in Scotland is, not
to get married, but how not. The mere verbal acknowledgments exchanged,
“This is my wife,” “This is my husband,” are all-sufficient, and
equally binding as the most formal marriage-license ever issued by a
bishop to his “dearly beloved”; and even words spoken in jest, without
any wish or desire that they should be seriously considered, are
binding. It is not to be supposed that novelists have remained ignorant
of these quaint customs, and indeed Gretna Green in particular, and
the Scottish marriage-laws in general, give point to Wilkie Collins’s
“Man and Wife,” Mrs. Henry Wood’s “Elster’s Folly,” and J. M. Barrie’s
“Little Minister,” among other novels.
[Illustration: “A FALSE ALARM ON THE ROAD: ‘TIS ONLY THE MAIL!”
[_After C. B. Newhouse._
]
[Sidenote: “_HAND-FASTING_”]
Bound intimately up with these affairs, and thought to have originated
these singularly loose methods, was the old Scottish custom of
“hand-fasting,” still practised in the opening years of the nineteenth
century, but with the increase of education, and still more the growth
of comfort, then fast dying out. These barbaric customs, resembling in
degree some old Welsh observances, mattered little to a peasantry sunk
in ignorance, but with the growth of wage-earning and of property, and
the consequent sense of responsibility, they could by no possibility
survive. “Hand-fasting” was the selection, on approval, of a wife or
husband, who would live together for one year on trial. If mutually
satisfactory at the close of the year, they became man and wife for
good and all; if not, they parted, and were free to choose again.
Children, if there were any, were the charge of the non-content partner.
The Border must have seemed a Heaven-provided resort to couples bent
on evading Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, but, strangely enough, the
sufficient virtue of the first step across the dividing-line was not
at first generally recognised, and fleeting lovers were originally not
content until they had come, post haste, to Edinburgh, where, in the
Canongate, they found a crowd of blackguardly scoundrels idling about
in greasy and tattered Geneva gowns and pretending to be clergymen, who
did their business for them at any prices the circumstances seemed to
warrant, from a shilling and a glass of whiskey, up to five guineas.
Thus were the runaway Lord George Lennox and Lady Louisa Ker, daughter
of the Earl of Ancrum, married, in 1759.
Thus, although even so early as 1753, the year before the Marriage Act
became law, a “Gretna Green wedding” was performed by Joseph Paisley,
the first “Gretna Priest,” it was not until 1771 that the marrying at
Gretna Green grew such a recognised institution that registers began to
be kept.
Gretna stands to all the world for runaway matches, but although by far
the most popular place, it was by no means the only one. Any spot on
the long lonely seventy miles of Border served the same purpose, and
Lamberton Toll, north of Berwick, and Coldstream were not without their
advantages, especially from Newcastle-on-Tyne, to which they lay quite
handy. The future Earl of Eldon, who ran away as a lad with his Bessie
Surtees, got married at Lamberton or at Coldstream.
On this West Coast, however, on the “new” road to Gretna, the actual
crossing of the Border is at the passage of the little river Sark, half
a mile before you come to that more famous hamlet. Although Gretna is
pre-eminently famed, and Springfield, just short of it, comes second in
popular estimation, a very good case might be made out for giving Sark
Bar prominence in this strange history.
[Illustration: SARK BAR.]
[Sidenote: _THE FATEFUL TOLL-HOUSE_]
It is nothing but an old toll-house on the north, or Scottish side of
the river. But there’s the rub. It is the first spot on Scottish soil,
and much virtue accordingly attached to it. The name of Gretna obscured
those of all other places in the minds of strangers, but those on the
spot, together with every post-boy between Carlisle and the Border,
knew better; and those runaways who were so hard-pressed that the extra
half-mile on to Springfield or Gretna meant all the difference between
success and failure had cause to bless Sark Toll Bar, or Alison’s Bank
Bar, as it is sometimes called. This was an inimical spot to parents
and guardians, and a sad disillusion to all pursuers. Here fathers, hot
on the heels of fugitives, were commonly foiled in the very cynthia of
the minute. At the moment of triumphantly thinking they would, in that
further half-mile, overtake their prey, Simon Beattie, the toll-keeper,
was spiriting the fluttering young things into his innocent-looking
whitewashed toll-house, and in the presence of the necessary two
witnesses, including the grinning post-boy, was asking them the simple
questions that sufficed: “Were they single?” and “Did they wish to
become man and wife?” It was all over by the time the foaming enemy
was cursing and kicking outside the barred and bolted door; and when
Beattie unbolted it and introduced the newly-wed, there was nothing to
do but try and look pleasant, or perhaps in extreme cases give young
hopeful a horse-whipping; which, after all, was scarce politic.
Simon Beattie, between four o’clock on a Saturday morning and the
Sunday evening following, in November 1842, married no fewer than
forty-five couples at Sark Toll Bar, and his successor, John Murray,
in one night performed the same office for sixty-one. No wonder Murray
thought it possible to amass a fortune here. He reared the “Sark Bar”
inn close by, on the English side of the Sark, but he had not finished
it when Lord Brougham’s Act, of 1856, ruining all these fugitive
proceedings, came into operation; and there was an end of his hopes.
[Sidenote: _RAILWAYS AND GRETNA GREEN_]
But it was evidently in existence in 1852, for it is referred to in
an article in _Household Words_ of that year, written by Blanchard
Jerrold, who describes how he left Carlisle by train and came to
Gretna station, where he alighted and found a couple who alighted at
the same time being “addressed eagerly by one or two men of common
appearance. Are these individuals making offers for the conveyance
of the couple’s luggage? The station-master looks on at the warm
conference with a sardonic grin; and with a quick twitch of the head,
draws the attention of the guard to the interesting group. The train
goes forward, and the conference breaks up. One of the men conducts
the lady and gentleman to a little red-brick hotel close by; and the
others retire discontentedly. I inquire about this rivalry, and am
informed that it is a clerical contest. The little red-brick hotel is
the property of Mr. Murray, who also inhabits the famous toll-bar which
is on the Scotch bank of the stream. Thus this sagacious toll-keeper
pounces upon the couples at the station; removes them to his ‘Gretna
Hotel,’ and then drives them down a narrow lane, and over the bridge
to the toll-bar, where he marries them. In this way it appears Murray
has contrived to monopolise five-sixths of the trade matrimonial. It is
to be observed, however, that there is a Gretna station, and a Gretna
Green station, and that the latter is the point which deposits happy
couples opposite Gretna Hall.”
Competition was evidently most extraordinarily keen for it to have gone
the length of inducing a Border marriage-monger to build an hotel on
the English side of the Sark, and for his agents and others to have
wrangled and disputed for business on a railway platform, like so many
cab-touts. The romance of Gretna obviously departed, leaving only the
sordid dregs, when the Glasgow and South-Western Railway was made,
1848-50, and linked up with Carlisle and the whole of England.
Painters and engravers found the romance of Gretna greatly to their
minds, and numerous pictures exist of scenes upon the road, and at
Gretna itself. Two of the most striking are those by C. B. Newhouse,
showing “A False Alarm on the Road: ’Tis only the Mail,” and “One
Mile from Gretna: The Governor in sight, with a Screw loose.” In the
first we see the love-lorn ones, halted in front of a wayside inn, the
post-boys running out with fresh horses, while with a rush the Royal
Mail suddenly dashes by. They think for the moment they are overtaken,
but sink back with the heartfelt ejaculation, “’Tis only the Mail.”
In the second picture we have the post-boys whipping and spurring on
the frantic horses, and the prospective bridegroom standing up in
the chaise, holding out a further inducement to speed, in the shape
of a bag which, by the size of it, would appear to contain a modest
competency for life. On the summit of a distant hill the governor’s
chaise appears to have met with an accident, and the chase is virtually
over.
The “Deaf Postilion,” pictured by George Cruikshank, seems to have been
a real person, and the incident he illustrates to have really happened.
He was stone-deaf, and when furiously driving an anxious couple towards
the goal of their hopes, failed to notice that, in the lurching and
plunging of the chaise, the springs had broken, leaving the body
behind, while he hastened on, blissfully unconscious of the disaster,
with the fore-carriage.
[Illustration: “ONE MILE FROM GRETNA: THE GOVERNOR IN SIGHT, WITH A
SCREW LOOSE.”
[_After C. B. Newhouse._
]
XXVIII
[Illustration: THE DEAF POST-BOY.
[_After Cruikshank._
]
[Sidenote: _INN AND REGISTRAR’S OFFICE_]
In the merry days of the road, Springfield was alert. The two inns, the
“King’s Head” (as it was then) and the “Maxwell Arms,” combined the
parts of registrar’s office and hostelry: the innkeepers doubling the
characters of “priests” and hosts: while at Gretna Green itself stood
Gretna Hall, a most comfortable, and indeed aristocratic, hotel. But,
indeed, any one could, would, and did marry all who asked, anywhere.
There was absolute Free Trade in it; only some were sharper than others
to turn the privilege to account. Even women might perform the simple
formula, although it does not appear that a woman ever did.
The inns, of course, took the pick of the business; for the convenience
of coming, tired out with the long-continued excitement of being
pursued out of one country into another, to be married and refreshed
under one roof was so obvious that it need not be insisted upon.
Prices, naturally enough, varied. They ruled low or high, according to
whether you appeared to be poor or wealthy, moderately leisured, or in
a frantic haste, and marriages have been “celebrated”—the circumstances
would hardly permit the use of the word “solemnised”—for the sake, at
one extreme, of a glass of whiskey and a pleasant word, and, at the
other extremity, for so high a fee as £100, and “D—n you, be quick
about it!” There have even been times when the offer of that sum has
not availed; not, we may be sure, because the keen-witted natives stood
out for more, but solely on account of the excruciating circumstances.
You are required to imagine such a case: the hour midnight; the more or
less innocent folk of Springfield and Gretna asleep. A chaise, driven
at a headlong gallop, appears, closely followed by exultant parents.
The village is awake in a trice, for it sleeps always with one ear
cocked; and rival “priests” are hurrying on their clothes, as quick as
may be, eager to earn a fee, which, judging from the circumstances,
should be a substantial one. And even as they hurry, they hear a
hoarse, despairing voice exclaiming in the empty street, “A hundred
pounds to the man who marries me!” It is the expectant bridegroom; but
before they can reach him and his bride-elect, the pursuers have come
up, and snatched the lady away.
[Sidenote: _THE “BLACKSMITH” LEGEND_]
The “blacksmith” is a myth, deriving, no doubt, from the more or
less poetic idea of indissoluble bonds being forged. There were no
blacksmiths’ forges here then, and despite old prints showing couples
being married over the anvil, with post-boy looking on, no blacksmith
seems ever to have been known as a “priest.” That term was, of course,
absolutely an indefensible assumption; but there is this excuse,
perhaps, for the “blacksmith” idea. It seems that, among those who
conducted weddings, was one “Tom the Piper,” properly Thomas Little,
of the “Maxwell Arms” inn, who, with his son, hit upon the attractive
title of the “Gretna Wedding” inn, and hung out a painted sign
representing the afterwards famous smithy scene.