a drunken Border thief and ne’er-do-well. Colonel Hawker, writing of
him in 1812, says: “I should mention that the old man who officiated
for nearly forty years, at £40, £50, and sometimes £100 a job, never
was a blacksmith. Old Joe Paisley, for that was his name, was by trade
a tobacconist. He was a very large, heavy man, and might have died
worth a great deal of money; but from being an intolerable drunkard and
a very unsteady fellow, his money went as lightly as it came, and after
he had solemnised the marriages and dismissed his ‘couple of fools’
they could not possibly be more eager to follow their avocations than
his reverence was to trudge off to a whisky-house.”
In 1791 Paisley, who up to that time lived in a cottage on the Green,
removed to Springfield, a little nearer the Border, where he took the
“King’s Head” inn. With his removal his business largely increased.
He was long an object of curiosity to travellers. At the time of
his death, about 1814, he was an overgrown mass of fat, weighing at
least thirty-five stone; and was grossly ignorant in his mind and
insufferably coarse in his manner. Although an habitual drunkard, he
was seldom or never seen “the worse for” drink, and was accustomed
during the last forty years of his life to drink a Scots pint, equal to
three English quarts, of brandy a day.
[Sidenote: _JOE PAISLEY_]
On one occasion a fellow spirit, one “Ned the Turner,” sat down with
him on a Monday morning to an anker of strong cognac, and before the
evening of the succeeding Saturday they kicked the empty cask out of
the door; neither of them having been drunk, nor had the assistance of
any one in drinking. Paisley was celebrated for his stentorian lungs
and almost incredible muscular powers. He could with ease bend a strong
poker over his arm, and had frequently been known to straighten an
ordinary horse-shoe in its cold state.
It was told of him that he had once, when two couples at the same
time required his services, married the wrong brides and bridegrooms.
They were dismayed, but not Paisley, “Weel, then, ye can jist soort
yersels,” said he. He was no ideal Cupid’s officer, for he was used
cynically to remark that, although well paid for performing marriages,
his fortune would be made in a week if he could with equal ease
pronounce divorces.
We are not to suppose that eloping pairs just went off quietly to the
Border and were allowed to take their time on the journey. Not at all;
and they usually, knowing that parents and guardians would soon be
swiftly on their track, made what haste they could. Whether pursuers
or pursued first reached the Border made all the difference, for
although the Scots law would not help parents and guardians forbidding
the ceremony, it was always possible for the choleric father of a
sentimental young lady to seize her and to give young Lochinvar the
taste of a horse-whip.
Some of the races for Gretna Green were so near that the betting on
the contendants was even amongst the excited spectators of the chase.
A pedestrian on the English high-road within a mile of the Scotch
boundary would be overtaken by a light travelling chariot, drawn at
the rate of sixteen miles an hour by four of the fleetest post-horses
that the host of Carlisle’s chief inn could afford. Each postilion
would give his whip-hand horse a cut with his whip at every bound of
the infuriated creature, whilst as frequently he plunged his spurs into
the reeking flanks of the animal he bestrode. And as the riders passed
him at their perilous speed, pale as death in their faces, whilst they
flogged and spurred like jockeys at the finish of a neck-and-neck
Derby, he would see the bridegroom’s head at the front window of the
vehicle, and hear him screaming frantically, “Go it! Go it! We are
getting away from them! Fifty guineas to each of you if we get there
in time!” Another five minutes and the pursuers—two red-faced elderly
gentlemen, whirled along at the same mad pace in a similar chariot,
drawn by equally fleet horses—would dash past him. “How far ahead?
Shall we catch them?” “Five minutes before you—not more.” The response
would scarcely have been shouted out when the spectator would see the
chase ended abruptly by the fall of a horse, the breaking of a trace,
the upset of the carriage, or some other mishap that might just as well
have befallen the fugitives and given the victory to their pursuers.
[Sidenote: _ROBERT ELLIOT_]
The oldest-established and most famous “priest” after Paisley was
Robert Elliot, who married Paisley’s grand-daughter, Ann Graham, at
the beginning of 1811, and lived at the former “King’s Head” from
that date. When he published his “Memoirs” in 1842, he claimed that
he had for the twenty-nine years past been the “sole and only parson
of Gretna Green”; an impudent falsehood disproved by the existence to
this day of the registers kept by David Lang, who from 1792 until 1827
married a great number of people and was particularly famous as having
married Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Miss Ellen Turner, whom he abducted
in 1826. David Lang had been in his youth an itinerant draper. On his
journeys southward, through Lancashire, he was spirited away by the
Press Gang, to serve aboard His Majesty’s ships. After many adventures,
including that of being captured by Paul Jones, the pirate, he settled
down here, and was in the course of time succeeded by his son, Simon,
who died in 1872, and was described by Blanchard Jerrold, who visited
Gretna in 1852, as “a spare old man, dressed with some pretensions to
gentility.” He in turn was succeeded by his son, William Lang, who
was the local postman, and had some faint claims to be considered
a “priest”; whatever such claims may be worth in a place where, as
already shown, any one has an undisputed right to marry any one else.
Elliot, however, was by way of being a literary character, and in
history writ about Gretna Green bulks large, because of his printed
spoutings: the printed word being, even among those who ought to
know better, sacred. The sheer truth of it is that, at one and the
same time, there were no fewer than four prominent establishments
devoted to the marrying trade. The fact is scarcely remarkable, when
we consider the number of them that committed matrimony at Gretna or
Springfield; at that time averaging four hundred annually. Elliot was
but one. He gives a return of the numbers he married, beginning in 1811
with 58, and ending in 1840 with 42. His busiest years were from 1821
to 1836, and the busiest 1824 and 1825, when he married 196 and 198
couples. In all, he married no fewer than 3,872 couples.
[Sidenote: _JOHN LINTON_]
Elliot, in his “Memoirs,” has a view of his inn, which he, with
characteristic effrontery, styles “The Marriage House.” Now if there
was pre-eminently one marriage-house far and away superior to any
other, it certainly was that of Gretna Hall, built in 1710 by one of
the Johnstone family, whose elaborately sculptured coat of arms still
remains over the doorway, even though the Johnstones vanished more
than a century ago, and though in the interval the property has many
times changed hands, and has been an inn and has reverted again to
the condition of a private residence. It was about 1793 that Gretna
Hall became an inn: a very superior inn, indeed, with three avenues
approaching it: an inn where the neatest of “neat post-chaises” were
kept, and where the coaches halted. So it remained until 1851. John
Linton became landlord of Gretna Hall in 1825, and ruled for twenty-six
years. He had been valet to Sir James Graham of Netherby, and was
generally considered a superior man. He did not personally marry his
guests, who were naturally gleaned from the front rank of fugitives;
but generally employed David Lang, and when that worthy died replaced
him by one who was by trade a shoemaker, and thus perhaps predisposed
to join two ardent souls together. He paid his journeymen small sums
for their journey-work, just as your dignified clergy pay curates for
their labours. Notwithstanding this personal abstention on Linton’s
part, he was generally known as “the Bishop.” The nickname at once
shows the superior estimation in which he and his establishment were
held, and carries an implied satire upon Right Reverend Fathers in God.
An account rendered by John Linton to his guests would be a curiosity,
if itemised. A handsome sum was, doubtless, set down for being married,
among the insignificant items for food and lights. Although he did not
officiate, he kept the registers of marriages at his house; and they
are still in existence at Annan.
[Illustration: GRETNA HALL IN THE OLD DAYS.]
[Sidenote: _THE WAKEFIELD CASE_]
A marriage that was really an abduction, and, as such, became a
matter of extraordinary notoriety, to match the amazing audacity of
the man who perpetrated it, was that of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and
Ellen Turner, in 1826. The form of marriage was performed at Gretna
Hall, on March 8th. Wakefield was at the time a widower, aged thirty.
He had been educated at Westminster School, and by the influence of
his first wife’s family had been given an appointment at the British
Legation in Turin. This he resigned, and was living on his wits in
Paris when he chanced to hear of Miss Turner, a beautiful girl sixteen
years of age, and heiress to a great fortune. She was the daughter of
a wealthy merchant—afterwards M.P. for Blackburn, 1832-41—living at
Pott Shrigley, in Cheshire, and was at the time at a boarding-school
in Liverpool. Wakefield invented an ingenious and plausible story
for marrying the girl and so securing her money. Coming to England,
he called at the school in Liverpool with a letter purporting to be
in her father’s handwriting, stating that he was ill and she was to
return home in company with the bearer of the letter. No suspicions
were awakened, and the girl was allowed to depart with him. During
the journey by post-chaise, Wakefield, who seems to have been a
scoundrel of wonderful address, told her that her father’s illness was
really assumed, and that he was then, a ruined man, flying from his
creditors to Scotland. They were to meet him at Carlisle and cross the
Border together. At Carlisle, of course, no father was to be found,
and Wakefield then declared that affairs were so serious that only
a marriage with himself would save her parent from the horrors of a
debtors’ prison. If she married him, he would at once advance her
father £60,000. The story seemed of the crudest and most unconvincing
kind, but it imposed upon Ellen Turner, and she agreed, in order to
save her father, to marry Wakefield at Gretna.
The day following the marriage, Wakefield hurried her with him across
England, and to Calais. From that strategic point he proposed to
communicate with the girl’s father, and come to terms, but Wakefield
very soon found himself arrested by the French police and sent over to
England, to stand his trial at the Lancaster Assizes, for abduction,
Mr. Turner in the meanwhile claiming his daughter.
Wakefield and a brother who had aided him were awarded the very light
sentence of three years’ imprisonment apiece. In the following month
the marriage was annulled by a special Act of Parliament. A curious
point was raised during the trial, Serjeant Cross, for the prosecution,
stating that “Had the offence been committed on English ground, the
defendants would in the course of the law have been condemned to an
ignominious death.”
Wakefield afterwards emigrated to Australia, and in 1838 acted as
secretary to Lord Durham, in Canada. Apologists have stated that he
redeemed his early faults by usefulness in the Colonies, but to most it
will seem that he was an extremely dangerous man, only too leniently
dealt with. He died in 1862.
XXIX
[Sidenote: _THE EARL OF WESTMORELAND_]
Elliot’s most romantic clients were the Earl of Westmoreland and Miss
Child, who eloped in 1782. The father of the young lady was the famous
London banker, whose great fortune, and the prospect of marrying it,
dazzled the Earl quite as much as the beauty of his daughter and
heiress. She fell in love with the noble suitor, whose proposal did
not, however, commend itself to the banker. “Your blood, my lord, is
good,” said he, “but money is better”; and he refused his consent. But
the disappointed suitor was not disheartened, and the lovers eloped
in a four-horse chaise; his canny lordship having arranged beforehand
for relays of horses all the way: prudently, at the strategic point of
Shap, hiring every horse to be found there. Mr. Child, enraged, lost
no time in following. Using every effort that money could procure,
he at last came up with the fugitives changing at High Hesket; and,
leaping from his chaise, drew a pistol and shot one of the leaders
of their conveyance. At the same moment, one of the Earl’s servants
ran behind Mr. Child’s carriage and cut the leather braces suspending
the body. The Earl and his love proceeded with three horses, with the
father pursuing. Not for long, however, for presently the body fell
over, and pursuit became a laggard and hopeless rearguard. One hundred
guineas was the fee paid to the fortunate Elliot by the Earl. Mr. Child
died within a year of the affair, it is supposed from disappointment
and anger at his daughter’s disobedience. Rowlandson has, in his
caricature, “Filial Affection,” drawn a more or less close commentary
upon this incident. The banker took excellent care that neither of them
should have his money, which he devised to any issue of the marriage.
Lady Westmoreland died in 1793, leaving six children, and the Earl
married again, at which one is instinctively revolted.
The elder daughter of Lord and Lady Westmoreland, Lady Sophia Fane,
inherited the fortune, and married the Earl of Jersey; and their
daughter, the Lady Adela Corisande Maud Villiers, followed the example
set by her grandparents; eloping in 1845, at the age of seventeen, with
the youthful Captain Ibbetson, of the 11th Hussars. It was a November
night when the ardent pair flitted from the lady’s home at Middleton
Park, Bicester. They did not patronise Elliot, but went to Gretna Hall.
They reached Mr. Linton’s establishment on the 6th, and were duly
married, as the surviving register shows. Lady Adela died fifteen years
later, but Captain Ibbetson survived until 1898.
Jack Ainslie, of the “Bush,” Carlisle, was a sworn enemy to parents
and guardians. He was perpetually signing his name as a witness to
marriages, and was in fact quite a consulting counsel to love-lorn
squires and damsels. To have him, in his yellow jacket, on the near
wheeler was worth as many points to them as it was for attorneys to
retain a leading K.C. When pushed hard, Jack knew of cunning bye-lanes
and woods to hide the pursued couples in, and had occupation-roads
across farms, and all that sort of geography, at his fingers’ tips.
On one occasion he altogether surpassed his previous doings. He had
driven a runaway couple to Longtown, and as he thought they were taking
it rather too easily, strongly advised them to cross the Border and get
married before they dined. They were weary and would not be advised,
and so he took his horses back to Carlisle and thought them “just poor
silly things.”
He had not long returned before the girl’s mother and a Bow Street
officer dashed up to the “Bush” in a post-chaise. There was not a
second to lose, and so Jack, saying not a word to any one, jumped on a
horse and galloped to Longtown. He had barely time to see the dawdlers
huddled into a post-chaise, and to take his seat and clear the “lang
toun” when the pursuers loomed in sight. The pursuit was so hot that
the only way was to turn sharp down a lane. From it they saw the enemy
fly past towards Gretna and so on to Annan, where they found themselves
at fault and gave up the pursuit. The coast being thus cleared, Jack
would stand no more nonsense, but saw his couple duly married and
witnessed before he went back to Carlisle. The signatures of that
marriage were always looked at with a certain sad interest, for the
bridegroom was killed the next year, at Waterloo. This was Jack’s
“leading case.” He was long remembered as a “civil old fellow, perhaps
five feet seven if he was stretched out, and with such nice crooked
legs.”
One of the most remarkable of these runaway weddings was that of
the old and widowed ex-Lord Chancellor, Erskine, to Sarah Buck, his
housekeeper, an elderly widow with a numerous family of children, who
accompanied them.
[Illustration: THE OLD SMITHY, GRETNA GREEN.]
[Sidenote: _LORD ERSKINE_]
“In the year 1818,” says Elliot, “as near as I can remember, Lord Chief
Justice Erskine came to Gretna in a chaise and four horses, dressed
in woman’s clothes, accompanied by an elderly lady and four children.
When I first saw them, I took the elderly lady for the mother of the
children, and the learned Lord for the grandmother. He asked me many
questions relative to Gretna marriages, all of which I answered him as
I would a female, until by chance I espied a button of his waistcoat
through the opening of a neckerchief which he wore over his breast.
After he found that I had discovered his sex, he smiled but made no
remark. He afterwards changed his dress, and I married him to the
female whom he had brought with him. I asked him why he had come in
female attire; he answered that he had his own reasons for it. He gave
me twenty pounds, and again resumed his female dress. Twelve months
after, at the instigation of his sons by a former wife, he wished to
divorce her by Scots law, but found, upon trial, that he could not.”
Erskine was not the first great lawyer, by very many, to exhibit
a practical uncertainty as to the law, however certain he might
theoretically be. He made no further attempt to upset the legality of
the marriage, and in December 1821 a son, christened Hampden Erskine,
was born to this odd couple. Erskine died, in his seventy-third year,
in 1823.
[Sidenote: _CULMINATING ROMANCE_]
Among the more famous clients of the canny marriage-mongers of Gretna
were the heroic Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald, and Miss Katharine
Barnes, in 1812. On their heels came Viscount Deerhurst, son of the
Earl of Coventry, whose fee to the “priest” was £100. Very late in
Gretna’s history came the marriage of Lord Drumlanrig, heir to the
sixth Marquis of Queensberry, and Miss Caroline Clayton, in 1840.
The lady’s father, General Clayton, had objected to the marriage, on
account of her youth, for she was only nineteen at the time; and the
couple decided to hie over the Border on the first opportunity. This
soon offered, and, discarding the time-honoured post-chaise, they rode
horseback all the way, reaching their haven on May 25th. This gallant
cavalier became seventh Marquis of Queensberry, and was accidentally
shot in 1858, at Kinmont, when out rabbiting. The Marchioness long
survived him, and died so recently as February 1904.
The circumstances of the elopement of Lady Rose Somerset, daughter of
the seventh Duke of Beaufort, in 1846, with Captain Francis Lovell,
show that the old hazards were passing. They took railway tickets, and
so, without foam-flecked horses or anxious post-boys, came to Gretna.
But by far the most romantic incident in those annals of “over the
Border” elopements was the marriage of Miss Penelope Smyth on May
7th, 1836, at Gretna Hall to Charles Ferdinand Bourbon, Prince of the
two Sicilies and Capua, brother and heir-presumptive to Ferdinand the
Second, King of Naples. The whole affair reads like the vapourings
of some extravagant novelist of the old _Family Reader_ type. Miss
Smyth was a beautiful Exeter girl, and additionally attractive to an
impecunious Prince in the fact of possessing a fortune of £20,000.
The circumstances of her being in Italy do not appear, but she seems
to have been married to the Prince at Lucca, and again at Rome. They
fled from Italy to avoid the fury of the King of Naples, who denied the
legality of the union, and claimed that no marriage could be contracted
by a Prince of the Blood Royal without the consent of the reigning
sovereign. The Prince appears to have relied upon the affection of his
sister, the Queen Regent of Spain, to smooth matters over, but was
rebuffed at Madrid, the Queen refusing to receive either him or his
bride. They then left for Paris, and afterwards for England, after a
third ceremony had been performed, and flew to this inevitable refuge,
the Border. Then, coming to London, they applied for a license at
Doctor’s Commons.
Of the virtuous intentions of this anxious and much-married couple
there can be no possible doubt whatever, and the part of “villain of
the piece” is taken by the bold bad “Bomba,” the notorious King of
Naples, who acted to perfection the character of tyrannical brother. He
instructed the Sicilian Ambassador to protest against the license being
issued, and it was accordingly refused. The dauntless couple were then
married in the ordinary way, by banns, at St. George’s, Hanover Square.
The virtuous lived happily ever after, and the wicked met with the
retribution that, by all the canons of dramatic art, was to be
expected, for the kingdom of Naples was abolished in 1861, and with it
went King Bomba and all questions of succession.
[Illustration: GRETNA GREEN.]
[Sidenote: _GRETNA HALL IN 1852_]
The contributor to _Household Words_ in 1852, found John Linton dead,
and the glory of Gretna Hall already departed; but Mrs. Linton was
there, and he seems to have been provided with a not unpalatable
dinner, while some few good cigars remained. But it was not for dinner
or for cigars he came. He wanted some juicy facts for his article. He
got some, but they were not so _very_ juicy. Everything, you see, spoke
of the Past, and he was reduced to being shown the “registers,” which
the widow Lang very jealously displayed to him. They were wrapped in
an old silk handkerchief, and when they were untied and he would have
handled them, the suspicious old dame gently repulsed his hand, and
turned over the leaves herself for his inspection.
Everywhere in the house, vanished visitors had scrawled their names,
despite the notice, “Please not to write on the walls, windows, or
shutters,” pasted on the looking-glass of the dining-room. Scrawled on
a window-pane was the frank confession, perhaps made in disillusioned
after years, “John Anderson made a fool of himself in Gretna, 1831”;
and in a greasy visitors’ book he found the usual ribald remarks.
With the prevailing air of desolation heavy upon everything, he asked
how long it was since the last marriage had been celebrated there,
expecting a reply in terms of years; but the landlady turned to the
maid who was laying the cloth, and said, “Was it Tuesday or Monday
last, that couple came?” The maid said it was “Monday.”
Oh! what a surprise.
Gretna Green itself is a small place, and to-day a dull one, too. The
Hall, situated in its private grounds, is just a country mansion. No
longer do the officers from Carlisle garrison “come once a week to be
married,” as the lady there pleasantly suggested to me; and no one
will accost the stranger and hint that it is a fine day for a wedding.
_Eheu! fugaces._
XXX
[Sidenote: _THE DUMFRIESSHIRE “AUXENT”_]
The Dumfries coach branched off at Gretna, but nowadays only an
occasional motor-car halts in the village, its driver perplexed by the
multiplicity of roads, and, if he be a Southron, no less perplexed by
the broad Dumfriesshire accent in which his inquiries are answered.
For, of a sudden—as suddenly as the dividing-line between the two
countries—Scotch have succeeded to English people. At Longtown even,
the people are English; here and henceforward Scottish talk and
Scottish physiognomies, if not the national dress, are prominent. There
is no mingling, to this day.
I do not suppose the Dumfriesshire folk will realise the existence of
their Doric. They will be like the friends of that farmer who went
southwards and on returning home complained that the “Enklish” made
“remairks” about his speech. ‘Mon,’ said they, ‘we didna ken ony o’us
had ony auxent at a’.’