NORMAN
MACLEOD
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
_The following Volumes are now ready_--
THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON
ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON
HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK
JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES
ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN
THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE
RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS
SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN BLAIKIE
JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK
TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT SMEATON
FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. OMOND
THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By SIR GEORGE DOUGLAS
NORMAN MACLEOD. By JOHN WELLWOOD
[Illustration: PAGE DECORATIONS]
NORMAN
MACLEOD
BY
JOHN
WELLWOOD
FAMOUS
SCOTS:
SERIES
PUBLISHED BY
OLIPHANT ANDERSON
& FERRIER·EDINBURGH
AND LONDON
The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and
the printing from the press of Morrison & Gibb Limited, Edinburgh.
NOTE
My cordial gratitude is due to Mr. William Isbister--’best of
smokers’--for allowing me (and that with so good a spirit) to quote
from the _Memoir of Norman Macleod_. The present piece will not have
been written in vain, as the saying is, if it sends readers to that
entertaining quarry.
I have also to thank Mr. J. C. Erskine, Hope Street, Glasgow (’Be
calm, Erskine’), for furnishing me with certain letters never before
published, specimens of which will be found in the text.
The extracts from the Queen’s books are made with Her Majesty’s
gracious permission.
J. W.
MANSE OF DRAINIE, _April_ 1897.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 9
CHAPTER I
DESCENT--BOYHOOD--STUDENT YEARS 11
CHAPTER II
MINISTER OF LOUDOUN--NON-INTRUSION CONTROVERSY 28
CHAPTER III
AFTER THE BATTLE--MINISTER OF DALKEITH--EMBASSIES--EVANGELICAL
ALLIANCE--DEATH OF JOHN MACINTOSH 47
CHAPTER IV
THE BARONY PARISH--MACLEOD AS PASTOR--AS PREACHER--HIS
SYMPATHY--POSITION IN GLASGOW 65
CHAPTER V
EDITOR AND AUTHOR 85
CHAPTER VI
BALMORAL 102
CHAPTER VII
TRAVELS--BROAD CHURCH MOVEMENTS 108
CHAPTER VIII
INDIA--THE APEX--THE END 125
NORMAN MACLEOD
INTRODUCTION
If any modern minister has a place, though it were the least, among the
worthies of his nation, he must have been a surprising personality.
When Scottish life was based on Calvinism, and there was a Stuart
deforming the Kirk at the sword’s point, a preacher might rise to be
a leader of the people, if not a virtual ruler in the kingdom. From
Knox to Carstairs the line of famous Scots (such as they are) is black
with Geneva gowns. But for two hundred years the Protestant spirit has
gone all to democracy and the march of intellect, while the clergy have
stood by the vacant symbol, exiled--
‘From the dragon-warder’d fountains
Where the springs of knowledge are,
From the watchers on the mountains
And the bright and morning star.’
So the Church has come down in the world. Her affairs are her own, and
subject to journalistic irony; with few exceptions her leaders, for
all the noise they may make in their day and generation, have only
to die to be forgotten. One calls to mind certain men who were not in
holy orders, mere sages or poets, and knows them for the real teachers
of their times. In Norman Macleod the hero as priest reappears, but at
some cost to the clerical tradition. Making little of dogma, and less
of rites, he went deep down into the common heart for his ground of
appeal, and on his lips love, divine and human, was a tale to move the
philosopher and win the crowd. His work in the world was to make men
good after the pattern of Jesus, and to that work he brought a burning
belief, a boundless sympathy, and rare oratorical and literary gifts.
One in the throng at the funeral of this great minister was heard to
say, ‘There goes Norman Macleod. If he had done no more than what he
did for my soul, he would shine as the stars for ever.’ And the like
might have been confessed by thousands; nay, many who never heard his
voice nor saw his face were better for the rumour of such a man. His
name went from the Church to the nation, and over all English-speaking
lands; and with that of Chalmers has endured.
CHAPTER I
1812-1837
DESCENT--BOYHOOD--STUDENT YEARS
Nothing astonished Dr. Johnson so much, when he was roving in the
Hebrides, as to find men who lived in huts and quoted Latin. These
were the ‘gentlemen tacksmen,’ and no more remarkable tenantry was
ever seen on any soil. What they did for agriculture I cannot say; as
much, perhaps, as their destroyers, who made a solitude and called it
sheep: but they had bread to eat and raiment to put on (though they
_might_ sometimes sleep with their feet in the mire), and their praise
is that they sent forth a splendid race to the fields of honour. Their
sons, scant of cash, yet with the air of nobles, thronged the colleges,
nor was there any career in which laurels were not won by men from
the mountains and the isles. Picture some judge or general gazing at
the ruins of a shieling, and then sneer at the old Highland tacksmen.
From this class Norman Macleod was descended. His great-grandfather,
the earliest ancestor of whom we have any record, lived in Skye, at
Swordale, near Dunvegan Castle, about the middle of last century. The
tradition is that he was a good man and the first in his neighbourhood
to introduce family worship. His dearest wish was to see his first-born
a minister of the Church of Scotland. The estate of the Laird of
Macleod was then a sort of feudal Utopia, in which the ruling idea was
the advancement of the youth. There was a conspiracy of education.
After the schoolmaster (a good hand at the classics for certain) came
a college-bred tutor, who was maintained by a number of families in
common. Then the Chief made interest at the University for his lads,
and in the vacations entertained the professors at his castle, where
they met their students as fellow-guests. No wonder so many notable
lines sprang from Skye, if, as was said, these students were all
gentlemen.
Norman Macleod, Swordale’s eldest son, having finished his studies
for the Church, acted for some time as tutor in his native district.
Thus he was at home in _September 1773_, and, being a favourite at
Dunvegan--you understand? Yes, he met Dr. Johnson. ‘And he used to
tell, with great glee, how he found him alone in the drawing-room
before dinner, poring over some volume on the sofa, and how the
doctor, before rising to greet him kindly, dashed to the ground the
volume he had been reading, exclaiming in a loud and angry voice,
“The author is an ass!”’ In the following year this young man was
preferred to a parish which to name is to spring all the romance of
the Highlands,--_Morven_. Upwards of six feet in height, and of a noble
countenance, the stranger from Skye would be welcome as at least ‘a
pretty man’; but was there none, in that land of seers, to foretell
how this minister should reign in Morven, and his son after him, each
for half a century or more, and how he should be the founder of a
clerical dynasty that would last for ever? Norman the First presents a
rare figure in an age in which the clergy were noted for anything but
ecclesiastical zeal. He had all the culture that was going, but did not
prefer Horace to David, nor Virgil to Isaiah, and could hate fanaticism
without reducing religion to a cauld clash of morality. He was the
ideal of a Highland minister, daring the stormy strait and the misty
mountain, swaying the wild Celtic heart by tender or fiery appeals, and
drawing the poor and the troubled to his door from the remotest glens.
The living was of the smallest, but he acted upon the precept, ‘Do what
you can, and leave the rest to God.’ He had a large family of sons and
daughters, and there were various workers and dependents settled on the
glebe. So at Fiunary, above the rocky shore of the Sound of Mull (not
far from the inn where the Lad with the Silver Button had to go from
the fireside to his bed, wading over the shoes), there was a little
community by itself, living a beautiful and wholesome life. The glebe
was a scene of cheerful industry, and, labour done, the bagpipes would
be skirling. In the manse there might be a tutor and a governess, but
the daughters were their own dressmakers, and the sons worked in their
father’s fields. But the chief part of their education was play; they
all rejoiced in the open air, and Morven entered into their blood. The
boys went fishing and sailing, hunted the wild cat and the otter, and
roamed the heather in quest of game. By the winter hearth what singing
of Gaelic songs! The minister himself played the fiddle, and liked to
set his children dancing of a night. In this family religion was no
formal lesson: it was the atmosphere they breathed.
One summer day in the closing year of last century, General Macleod,
chief of the clan, visited the manse of Fiunary, and took away with
him to Dunvegan his young namesake, the minister’s eldest son, Norman
the Second. Nothing could have been more delightful to the boy, who
cared little for study, preferring any day the seas and the hills,
and was already at sixteen a Highland patriot, with his head full of
the legends of that old castle in the shadow of which his ancestors
were born. The reception by the clan, especially the piping of a
Macrimmon, was never to be forgotten. During his stay at Dunvegan,
where he was treated like a son, he met many chiefs, some of them
distinguished soldiers home from the wars. So he returned to Morven
more a Highlander than ever, and with a double measure of the martial
spirit that was then abroad in his native county. He joined the
Argyllshire Fencibles, and rose to the rank of corporal! If this is an
anti-climax, suppose that he was moved less by military ardour than
the love of manly exercises. At all events it was as an athlete that
he chiefly excelled in his youth. The glory of his college days was
that in physical contests he alone could rival John Wilson, who was
to be known as Christopher North. And remembering the influences by
which his character was moulded at home, have we not here the promise
of a fresh type of the Christian priest? After serving for about two
years as assistant at Kilbrandon in Lorn, he became in 1808 minister of
Campbeltown. Hardly was he settled in his place when a little crisis
occurred in which his mettle was revealed. The sacrament of the Lord’s
Supper was at hand, and Macleod thought it necessary to have services
in the open air as well as in the church. His fellow-presbyters, all
but one, refused to assist him in what they regarded as juvenile folly.
Nothing daunted, the young minister had a tent set up, and on the
Sunday morning preached to four thousand. In the church he held five
communion services, while his friend in turn officiated at the tent.
Towards the close, when the church was crammed,--passages, stairs, and
all,--some of the fathers and brethren appeared, but their proposals
of help were declined. In a short time his popularity had become such
that, when there was a rumour of his going away, the dissenters offered
to contribute, equally with his own people, for the augmentation of
his stipend. He was to rise to honour in the Church, and be adored
throughout the Highlands; but long before he died he was effaced by his
son.
At Aros, in Mull, lived Mr. Maxwell, the Duke of Argyll’s chamberlain,
a person of note in his day and place, and a fine man at home. He
traced his descent to a youth who had fled from the Border, all the way
to Kintyre, before the soldiers of Claverhouse; and in his choice of
reading (for one thing) he betrayed the Lowland strain. His daughter
Agnes passed her early girlhood in Knapdale, where she was educated by
old songs and ballads, and the rapture that was on the lonely shore.
For the rest (not to speak of the inevitable finishing in Edinburgh),
imagine Aros such another home school as Fiunary. The two houses stood
facing each other on opposite sides of the Sound, and the minister’s
son--Leander in a boat--married the chamberlain’s daughter.
The eldest child of this pair, the third Norman, who may be called
Norman the Great, was born in Campbeltown on June 3, 1812. From his
earliest years he was remarkable for ardent affections, the eager
interest he took in everything, and the humour and imagination with
which he seized his little world. Talking and telling stories at the
nursery fire, his tongue never lay. When only six he could mimic
various characters of the town; and, later, he had an attic fitted
up, in which he and his companions acted plays. For study he had no
aptitude, and at the burgh school the classics were ill taught; but
he entered with a will into the life of the boyish community, making
passionate friendships, contending with the ‘shore-boys,’--those
raiders of the playground,--and heading expeditions against the
French, and chasing pirates in a punt. But his great delight as a boy
was to visit the vessels at the quay; he would spend hours on board,
learning the name and the use of everything, and consorting with the
sailors,--all in a world of romance. Other savours of life on the ocean
wave he had in society, which abounded in naval officers, some attached
to the revenue cruisers, some ‘half-pays’ who had, perhaps, fought with
Nelson. There also were two or three retired soldiers of distinction,
and as many aristocratic spinsters (drifts from the county), living on
their annuities, and the sheriff with his top-boots and queue. These,
with several old families of the place, and the usual dignitaries of
a burgh, were the quality; and, cut off as they were from the rest of
the world (Campbeltown being then as an ocean isle for isolation),
they make a quaint picture, like a set in some ancient novel. Norman
mixed in this company, and the heroes of the services, and the queer
old maids--he _saw_ them every one, and was glad. Not less did he
mark the fishermen’s sons, with their ‘codlike faces and huge hands
like flat-fish,’ or the fools and beggars that were the heroes of the
streets. This varied and stirring experience, which was of inestimable
account in the making of the man, fell in with the ideal of training
that had been set at Fiunary.
But in Campbeltown the boy could not grow up to be a Highlander after
his father’s heart; so in his twelfth year he was sent to Morven. The
old minister was now gone, and his youngest son was reigning in his
stead. Norman was boarded with the parish schoolmaster, his business
being to learn Gaelic and get acquainted with the peasantry. Many an
evening he spent in some hut,--the floor the bare earth, the ceiling
a roost for hens; around the fire (which was in the middle of the
apartment, the smoke escaping through a hole in the roof) a group would
gather,--the lasses knitting, the lads busking hooks; and, heedless of
the storm, they made the hours fly, telling tales and singing songs of
their land. He gloried in the shore, and was to be seen perched upon a
rock, fishing the deep pools. With his relatives, again (who claimed
him when the school-week was over), he wandered on moor and mountain,
or if they went sailing in the Sound, they would sometimes camp for the
night on some distant island, and see the loveliest dawns.
Here the romance of Norman’s boyhood came to an end; he was to exchange
Morven, not for ships and sailors, but for a far other environment in
the Lowlands. In 1825 his father was presented by the Crown, on the
recommendation of all the principal heritors, to Campsie, a parish in
Stirlingshire, within twelve miles of Glasgow. The minister accepted
the living for the sake of his family, but it cost him some pangs to
leave his congregation. ‘I preached my farewell sermon,’ he says in his
fragment of autobiography, ‘and could I have known beforehand the scene
which I then witnessed, and the feelings that I myself experienced, I
do believe that no inducement could have tempted me to leave them.’ In
his new parish there was a large manufacturing population; yet he might
almost have forgotten that he was not in the Highlands, the rural part
being a mountainous wild, and the manse near that goal of excursions,
Campsie Glen. The church was a wretched little structure, and away in
the country; but the minister set to work, and, after much trouble, had
a new one built in the town. For the sake of his countrymen, of whom
there were many in the parish, he held special services in their native
tongue; and it was during this period of his ministry that he began his
career as a literary apostle to the Gaelic-speaking race.
Of Norman as a boy in Campsie there is nothing to tell, except that
he attended the parish school; nay, and there is a letter in which he
complains, with a twinkle in his eye, of having salmon and legs of
roasted lamb crammed down his throat. ‘O my dear mamma, it is only
now that a fond mother is missed, when dangers and misfortunes assail
us.’ Hardly less meagre is the record of his early college life;
indeed, before we get a full view of the student he is a man, and the
strange thing is not that he was undistinguished in his classes, but
that (so far as appears) he was not even interested in the academic
scene. In 1827, when he entered the University, the old College
of Glasgow--now a railway station--and the old High Street--now a
sanitary thoroughfare--were as they had been in the days of Andrew
Melville,--the one with its hoary walls and turrets, the other with
its picturesque narrows; and in the grounds there was still that ‘sort
of wilderness’ where the duel of the two Osbaldistones was stopped
by Rob Roy. But Norman, the most voluminous of diarists, has no word
of the history or romance of the place; nor of his fellow-students,
though he might have remarked one Tait (already with the grave brows
befitting an archbishop), and a certain youth in homespun, with wild
eyes and flaming hair, George Gilfillan; nor yet of his professors,
among whom at least three were worthy of note,--Sir Daniel Sandford,
the brilliant Grecian and fervid orator, Robert Buchanan, of whom,
under the name of ‘Logic Bob,’ reminiscences may be heard to this day
in manses, and one less distinguished in his place, but likely to
be remembered longest, because he was the friend and biographer of
Burns, Josiah Walker. Macleod was nicknamed ‘the sailor’; he wore the
dress and affected the gait of a Jack tar. For learning, he dabbled
in science and read poetry, especially Shakespeare and Wordsworth. At
home, whither he repaired on the Fridays, he was all fun and frolic,
and carried mimicry so far that he would speak in any character but his
own. ‘Cease your buffoonery,’ his father wrote, and (unkindest cut of
all) ‘I was much pleased with the manner of the Stewart boys.’ But this
humour was an extravagant form of that sympathy which was to make him
great. Good Stewart boys! ‘on’y,’ as Long John says, ‘where are they?’
In after years Macleod bitterly regretted his neglect of scholarship,
feeling himself at a certain disadvantage in an age of intellectual
ferment. But every man to his vocation, and that of Norman Macleod was
the therapeutics of religion. For that he was unconsciously preparing
himself by his absorption in the panorama of existence. He knew he was
to be a minister, but he could never have been the man his country
admired, had his boyish thoughts been focused on his destination, and
not taken up with comrades, and the appearances of life.
Soon he was to hear, in the lectures of Chalmers, a trumpet call.
Having finished the curriculum of Arts, he proceeded in 1831 to the
Divinity Hall at Edinburgh, where, at the feet of the first of Scottish
ministers and men, he awoke to the seriousness and mystery of life, and
anticipated with joy his part in the evangelical crusade. Chalmers,
alike by his teaching and his character, was singularly fitted to be
the spiritual master of Macleod. Almost at once they recognised each
other for kindred natures, and the sympathy of the pupil was repaid by
the professor’s trust.
Another influence at this period went to deepen his religious feelings,
the death of a brother. He had that passionate attachment to relatives
in general which marks the Celt, and between Norman and James there
had been a peculiar bond of affection. On the last occasion of their
meeting, Norman had engaged in prayer (for the first time in company),
and the invalid had said, ‘I am so thankful, mother; Norman will be
a good man.’ The death of James was not only an awful blow at the
moment, it marks an epoch in the other’s life. Immediately after the
bereavement, Norman wrote--’I know not, my own brother, whether you
now see me or not. If you know my heart, you will know my love for
you, and that in passing through this pilgrimage, I shall never forget
you, who accompanied me so far.’ Nor did he ever forget; again and
again, and long years after, he recalled that pale face, and thought of
immortality.
On the recommendation of Chalmers, Macleod had been appointed tutor to
a young English gentleman, the son of Henry Preston, of Moreby Hall,
Yorkshire. In the spring of 1834, at the close of his theological
course at Edinburgh, he went with his pupil to Weimar, carrying letters
for the ducal Court. These were from Lady Vavasour, who had drilled
him ‘how to speak to Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess, sister
to the late Empress of Russia.’ The Court of Weimar! that was indeed
a change. But there and thereabout he was to be for a whole year,
mixing in the very society which, a few years before, had been adorned
by Goethe. ‘There are indeed many advantages for young men here,’
the seer wrote to Carlyle in 1828, ‘especially for those of your own
country. The Double-Court of the reigning Grand Duke and the Hereditary
Family, at which they are always kindly and generously received,
constrains them by this mark of distinction to a refined demeanour at
social entertainments of various kinds.’ Imagine Norman waltzing at
the State balls, dressed in cocked hat and sword, with silk stockings
and buckled shoes, and haunting the gardens, the cafés, the theatres,
and the glorious park ‘where the nightingales never ceased to sing.’
Nevertheless he kept his head, constituting himself mentor (always a
favourite rôle of his) to the young English residents. As he observed
the German laxity he called for a new Luther, though he condemned the
contrary vice of the Church at home, that would measure his piety by
his reading a newspaper on Sunday. He made excursions, one as far as
the Tyrol, in the course of which he visited the picture galleries of
Vienna, Munich, and Dresden. But the great event of his life in Weimar
was his falling in love with the Court beauty,--’La Baronne,’ he calls
her,--which he did in a fashion of poetic worship, worthy of a hero of
romance or song. For years afterwards, let him hear old Weimar tunes
upon the piano, and his heart will overflow with thoughts that he
cannot utter; a German waltz, and his brain will reel.
In the autumn of 1835, after a residence of some months at Moreby Hall,
where he mingled with the local squires, and met certain legislators
fresh from St. Stephen’s, he entered the Divinity Hall at Glasgow. But
he did not now cross the quadrangle as if it were a ship’s deck. For
one thing, he was no longer an idle student, but rose at unearthly
hours to grind, or if he did not, his conscience put in for damages,
which took the form of pages of eloquent remorse. Besides, he was
a great handsome fellow, and, not to speak of his inner life,--so
vitalised by various experience,--he had seen more than most Scottish
students. Add his conversational powers and boundless vivacity, and
he should be something of a lion in college society. He became the
leader of the Tories, and it was in that capacity that he had his first
taste of fame. At the Scottish Universities there falls to be elected
by the students, once in three years, an honorary official called the
Lord Rector. The candidates are usually leaders in the rival political
camps. In Glasgow there seemed to be no chance for a Tory,--men like
Jeffrey, Brougham, Cockburn, and Stanley having carried the day time
out of mind;--but in 1836, under Norman Macleod’s leadership, the Whig
tradition was broken by the triumphant return of Sir Robert Peel. At
the Peel Banquet, which is almost historical, as the rise of the
Tory tide dates from the oration delivered by the honoured guest,
Norman made his first public appearance, replying to the toast of the
Conservative students. ‘I think I can see him now,’ says Principal
Shairp, ‘standing forth prominently conspicuous to the whole vast
assemblage, his dark hair, glossy as a black-cock’s wing, massed over
his forehead, the purple hue of youth on his cheek.’ His speech was
striking, and impressed even Peel. Thus, if the first period of his
college career was obscure, the last ended in a blaze of glory.
The family were now resident in Glasgow (his father having been
translated to St. Columba’s), and in the house a number of young
gentlemen, some of them boarders, pursued their college studies under
Norman’s supervision. The scene of their work was ‘the coffee-room,’
and it was always a great moment when their tutor burst in upon them
from his own den, radiant with life and joy. Among them was John
Macintosh and John Campbell Shairp. Macintosh had come from Edinburgh
with the laurels of first pupil of the New Academy. In Glasgow College
he was at the head of all his classes, and his scholarship was not more
remarkable than his piety. He was the sort of boy that takes all the
prizes, including the prize for good conduct. As for Shairp, there is
no one with a knowledge of the best Scotsmen of the last generation
but reveres and loves the memory of that gifted and high-souled man.
Though Macleod was more impressed by the saintly Macintosh, he found in
Shairp, owing to the wider range of their mutual sympathies, a fitter
companion. They were both Wordsworthians. Macleod could tell how his
enthusiasm had once carried him to Ambleside, how he had seen and
talked with the poet, how the old man had appeared in a brown greatcoat
and a large straw hat, and had read ‘in his deep voice some of his
own imperishable verses.’ The two students, many a night under the
frosty starlight, walking home from the Peel Club (of which Macleod was
president), kept firing at each other quotations from their favourite
bard.
For Wordsworth’s poetry Macleod had been prepared, because its
materials were within his own emotional experience. Passage after
passage only interpreted and defined for him feelings which he had long
known in the presence of wild nature. Of the influences that went to
form his moral constitution not the least marked was that of Highland
scenery. Even amidst the gaieties of Weimar, he would shut his eyes,
and, whistling a Highland tune, see the old hills. The autumn after
he was licensed--1837--the last before his life-work began--was spent
in Morven and Skye. He speaks of ‘passionate hours in the lonely
mountains,’ and, to judge from his journal, his excitement in these
scenes was wonderful, varying from ecstatic delight to solemn awe and
worship. On a peak of the Coolins he burst out singing the Hundredth
Psalm. Along with this must be taken his keen consciousness of the
hereditary associations. During his holiday he preached in ‘the same
pulpit where once stood a revered grandfather and father.’ ‘As I went
to the church,’ he writes, ‘hardly a stone or knoll but spoke of
something which was gone, and past days crowded upon me like the ghosts
of Ossian, and seemed, like them, to ride even on the passing wind
and along the mountain tops. What a marvellous, mysterious world is
this, that I in this pulpit, the third generation, should now, by the
grace of God, be keeping the truth alive on the earth, and telling how
faithful has been the God of our fathers.’