vinegar. He had heard at school of a Drummond Jacobite exile who took
asylum among the Lakes; and there he must often have met Scottish
pedlars; then he indiscriminately “combined his information,” perhaps
led astray by Walter Scott’s glorification of the Highlands. Behind the
Highland line, where a tourist with a knapsack has in our time been
hailed as a pedlar, there went about of old such itinerant dealers, who
seem to have borne a quasi-sacred character when some such safe-conduct
was much needed; but they, like Bryce Snailsfoot, were more apt to be
canny Lowlanders, and so little of teetotallers that, as Scott tells us,
“the chapman’s drouth” was a sly proverb in Scotland, where a colporteur
of tracts could praise the “continual mercy” of a dram at every farm. In
England the pedlar’s trade was so much in the hands of Scots--at one
time counted by thousands across the Border--that these two titles to
somewhat qualified respect appear to have become almost synonymous at
the time when Wordsworth’s pedlar was laying up his little fortune.
Instances of this may be found in that curious novel, _The Spiritual
Quixote_, showing how a young gentleman who took to Methodist preaching
passed among Derbyshire countryfolk as a “Scotch pedlar,” or simply as
“a travelling Scotchman”; while in chapbooks of the period a “rider” is
the term for that more exalted emissary of commerce who came to be a
“traveller” _par excellence_, or a “drummer” in the figurative language
of America. “Traveller” would hardly suit such an one in Scotland, where
to “travel” implies specially the use of Shanks’ Naigie. Both in England
and Scotland those packmen were sometimes looked on with suspicion by
the authorities, accused of being political agitators as well as
newsmongers, and, later on, of diffusing irreligious publications. On
the Continent, also, Scots sought their fortune as pedlars, when no
longer in such demand as soldiers.
Every one does not know how the Scottish pedlar has left heirs of direct
succession in our day of stores and bargain sales. Quiet houses in
certain streets of London that look down on open shops, would be found
to have their back rooms full of drapery goods for hawking about at area
doors or to working-men’s wives, cajolable into making purchases on
credit which may ruin domestic peace. These tempters of humble Eves are
likely to be Scots of the baser sort, and I venture to guess them as
Lowlanders; they are said to be chiefly recruited in Galloway. Their
dubious business is popularly known as the Scotch trade; and this seems
to be responsible for keeping asmoulder among the lower classes such
prejudices against the Scot as were fanned by Wilkes and Johnson,
unequally yoked together in one antipathy. In Scotland, where the law is
less hard-hearted and customers are more hard-headed, the “Scotch trade”
does not now flourish; it is one thing Scottish which we need not be
proud of bringing into England. Of course, there was a time when the
northern pedlar played a useful and grateful part, as he tramped about
out-of-the-way countrysides with his burden of wares and gossip--
A lone pedestrian with a scanty freight,
Wished-for, or welcome, wheresoe’er he came
Among the tenantry of thorpe and vill.
But I would bet all Whiteley’s stock against the poet laureate’s butt
of sherry, that Wordsworth’s Wanderer spake not with the accent of
Atholl but of Paisley or Kirkcudbright.
Having thus criticised an English poet, I venture to raise some doubt as
to whether a native school of minstrels had gone deep into the matter,
when they made lads with the philibeg come down from Atholl, chanting
such ditties as--
The crown was half on Charlie’s head,
Ae gladsome day, ae gladsome day;
The lads that shouted joy to him,
Are in the clay, are in the clay.
The Atholl men had been notably full of fight in older days: when
Mackay’s bayonets were swept away at Killiecrankie, they no doubt took
keen part in the chase; and in the ’15 they gave their quota of slippery
recruits to Mar’s army at Perth. Not that even then all tartans, nor all
fellow-clansmen, were under the same standard. At Killiecrankie a chasm
bears the name of the Soldier’s Leap, the tradition about it being that
a Highlander of Mackay’s army, flying before his own brother’s claymore,
sprang nearly a dozen feet from rock to rock, and, when thus put in
safety, jeeringly flung back his snuff-mull to the pursuer as a
fraternal farewell. In the upper ranks of clandom such oppositions were
more marked. When Dundee marched to Killiecrankie, Blair Castle was
defended against the Revolution by a Jacobite factor, while the shifty
Marquis of Atholl took the Bath waters as excuse for being out of the
way. The first duke intrigued with the Jacobites, but proclaimed King
George; then his heir having been attainted for loyalty to the Old
Pretender, a younger son, James, held the dukedom, who in the ’45 could
not but stand by the House of Hanover, or at least kept himself snug in
London, while three of his brothers were out for Prince Charlie. There
were notable instances at that time of father and son, husband and wife,
taking opposite sides; sometimes, it is understood, by politic
arrangement through which, in any case, the estate might be kept in the
family. There would also be the case of rival claimants to
chieftainship, like that one who provoked Fergus MacIvor’s ambition.
What with the puzzling division of opinion among their chiefs, and with
a growing civilisation beside the Lowland border, the Atholl men might
well halt between two opinions; and many of them had no more mind to die
for Prince Charlie than for the “German lairdie.” The exiled Duke
William, on the retreat to Culloden, turned out some couple of hundred
men only by the strong measure of burning their houses over their heads.
Lord George Murray, making a raid into his own country, gathered another
force by sending round the Fiery Cross, for the last time on record,
according to Mr. Walter Blaikie; but the heather thus set on fire soon
smouldered out. The tenant of a snug farm in Strath Tay or Strath
Tummel, within reach of market towns, had been somewhat fattened out of
the ancestral taste for bloodshed, and was more inclined to look on at a
game now played by professionals. But in such a time of transition,
would-be spectators could not yet look on at ease, like the newspaper
audiences of our distant wars. A good deal of plundering and burning
came about, requisitioning of horses and vivers on both sides, both
alike in a want of pay, when men were pressed into the service of one or
the other, sometimes of both in turn, then naturally took the first
excuse to desert.
Here is one specimen of the seamy side in that last romantic episode of
our history. Its prosaic hero was a Glenalmond farmer, one Gregor
Macgregor, who, his own clan being proscribed, had taken the name of
Murray on coming under the patronage of Atholl. Arrested as a rebel
after Culloden, from the Dunkeld tolbooth he pitifully makes affidavit,
that may or may not be the whole truth, but represents the straits to
which many Atholl men would be put in times to try men’s souls, and also
their speculating judgment. He declares that, as a peaceable subject and
a faithful tenant, he raised a force of his neighbours to join Cope’s
army, with which he marched north for several days, “each living on his
own pocket,” till the deponent for one was reduced to a sixpence, and no
more pay being forthcoming, “the men withdrew and dispersed themselves.”
He then lived quietly at home “till attacked” by Duke William, “who, as
the elder brother assuming a right to us, made several insinuations and
we as many refusals; at length threatened with military executions and
devastation, I, to eschew these impendent threatenings, took up arms and
witnessed the raising of the men, and with reluctancy marched, and all
the journey was to Crieff, about two miles from our own country, where
we gradually dispersed.” When “orders upon orders came to raise and
rally again ... so often did we at times make a show and at other times
wink at.” Duke William, coming by once more after Falkirk, “set us
again on foot, and in a march for Perth; where I gave it as advice every
man to make way for himself, upon which we again dispersed and ever
since continue peaceably at home. And when His Gr/s orders were issued
to bring in all our arms in or before 24 Feb. current, my resolution was
and can be made appear, I intended to obey that day. But was intercepted
by a party on the 22,”--and so unworthily lie in prison, who deserve
rather reward from the winning side.
Other Perthshire lairds had the same complaint to make of their tenants
as wanting in chivalry at this time; and several legal depositions might
be quoted to show what force was put upon such reluctant warriors. The
ladies of Jacobite families seem to have been especially active in
sticking white cockades “into the bonnets of such as would allow them.”
It was easy for the minstrel of Gask to make Charlie a darling in
retrospect; but he may well have seemed a nuisance to tenants whom the
Lady Nairne of the ’45 is described as ordering to turn out on pain of
eviction and seizure of their cattle; and the Duchess of Perth abused
the Whiggish Crieff folk as “d--d Judases to their master, the Duke.” At
farm towns, as well as kirk towns, men were now beginning to question
hereditary masterships. Of course unwillingness to take arms on the
beaten side would be made the most of immediately after the Rebellion;
but it seems to have been quite as genuine a sentiment as that of the
ladies and gentlemen who in our day sing so sweetly of dying for the
young Chevalier, not to speak of stronger enthusiasts who have devised a
postage-stamp bearing the
[Illustration: THE FALLS OF TUMMEL]
effigy of the Bavarian princess they recognise as their legitimate
sovereign--with which, indeed, “for the sake of practical convenience,”
they are advised to use also the head of “the Lord Edward,” turned
upside down.
Civil war brought sufferings in high as well as in low life, when Lord
George Murray besieged his own ancestral seat of Blair, garrisoned by
English soldiers, and tried to set it on fire with red-hot balls, but
had to make off towards Culloden. He, who had taken part in all the
Jacobite movements of the century, escaped to die in France; and his son
eventually succeeded to the dukedom. Less fortunate was poor Duke
William, the eldest brother, who bore the second title of the family,
while the Pretender decked him with a vain dukedom of Rannoch. He died
in the Tower, betrayed for a reward of a thousand pounds by a Scot who
earned also the scorn of the English officers concerned. Lord George,
the best soldier of the Prince’s army, got little enough gratitude from
the master who frowned on him in their common adversity. All along he
seems to have been much distrusted by his own party; and his fame has
not always fared better with posterity, though now well-armed champions
come forward to clear his memory from such charges as the “no quarter”
order at Culloden.
Duke James, who throve at the expense of his brothers, did not play a
very heroic part at this time, appearing on the scene only in the Duke
of Cumberland’s tail, to find his castle half ruined by that siege;
then, perhaps at a hint from Government, he dismantled its
fortifications, turning it into a _château_. But that second duke cuts a
misty figure as possible hero of romance, the heroine, in real life,
being a rich Hammersmith widow whom he married. To this couple’s wooing
is attributed the well-known song of “Huntingtower,” a Scottish variant
of the “Nut Brown Maid” and of Prior’s “Henry and Emma,” in which, after
representing himself as poor, a married man with three children, and a
gay deceiver, the lover declares that he has been only trying the lady’s
heart--“And all that’s mine is thine, lassie.”
Except “St. Johnston’s Bower,” thrown in for rhyme, the properties
enumerated in the song did belong to the Duke of Atholl; this Duke seems
the only “Jamie” of the race; and his first bride was a Jean. But this
must in any case be a much idealised account of a courtship, probably
carried on more by means of lawyers’ settlements than of sentimental
duets. A more clear case of romance, turned the other way out, seems to
be that the Duke’s second wife, Jean Drummond, had jilted a less
eligible lover, Dr. Austin, who revenged himself by the song, “For lack
of gold she left me O!” but eventually, in marrying another lady of
rank, found consolation for the heart-breaking of what is also an old
story:
She me forsook for a great Duke,
And to endless woe she has left me O!
A star and garter have more art
Than youth, a true and faithful heart;
For empty titles we must part--
For glittering show she has left me O!
Murray, the Atholl duke’s family name, on to which have been grafted two
of Perthshire’s proudest titles, is an exotic here, like the larches
that, the earliest on British soil, were transplanted from Tirol to
Dunkeld; and, indeed, the same thing may be said of several great
Highland families, no more autochthonous in their present habitat than a
brick suburb on a chalky soil. The presumed Murray ancestor is said to
have been a Flemish knight, who, like other foreign adventurers, set up
a Scottish house in the service of feudalising kings. If he took his
name from Moray, it was not in this region that his family struck deep
root. The historical earls of Moray bore other names, while in the
upsetting time of Bruce and Baliol, the Murrays are seen gaining
charters on the Forth and the Clyde; then presently they have crept
northwards into Strathearn, and under the James reigns came to be firmly
seated in the Perthshire Highlands, overlaying there the royal name of
Stewart, that also had spread from the south. The Atholl earldom they
got by marriage with a Stewart. Their dukedom dates from the beginning
of the eighteenth century, when the Government sought to bind in
strawberry leaves several of those Highland Samsons.
At that time the Duke of Atholl seemed the most powerful of them all. In
1715 he was reckoned as having 6000 claymores at his call, as many as
the two great Campbell families put together; but the call behoved to be
against the Government, for most of the clan followed his sons in
intermittent service of the Pretender. Through their chief taking the
prosaic side, or through the growth of new conditions of life, by 1745
his influence had shrunk so that his following was estimated as having
fallen by a half; then, as we have seen, it did not rise heartily either
at his bidding, or at his Jacobite brother’s. There seems hint of a
reason for this in the fact that Lord George Murray’s own regiment was
counted not among the Highland but the Lowland contingent of Prince
Charlie’s army; then a recently published official report, written 1750,
on the state of the clans, hardly mentions Atholl, treating it rather as
brought to Lowland law and order. Leases, as once charters, came to be a
solvent for the old adhesiveness of clan life.
Not only in Scotland was Atholl’s Duke a great man. By the spindle side,
he inherited the Derby Earl’s kingship of the Isle of Man, a too
pretentious title abridged to that of Lord, and finally sold to the
Crown for nearly half a million in all, which went to tame and adorn
Atholl. When claymores could be beaten into ploughshares, the dukes were
not behind other great Highland proprietors in improving their estate,
turning robbers’ lairs into snug farms, the camps of turbulent
chieftains into trim parks, and covering the bare glens with lordly
plantations, among which tens of thousands of trees came to be blown
down by that storm that wrecked the Tay Bridge. One of those dukes is
said to have planted trees by the million. At the same time they
cultivated what may be called an ornamental Highland feeling; and if
nowadays they are not so wealthy as British nobles enriched from City
moneybags or American pork butcheries, they have a considerable holding
in sentimental loyalty not wholly uprooted by sheriff courts and
railways. An hereditary taste for sport helped to win the hearts of a
people cherishing so much of their ancestral instincts, while efforts to
keep the northern wilds of Atholl as a deer forest rather than a tourist
ground did not go to gild this coronet in the eyes of Southerners. The
most outstanding of the race in our times was that Duke of the Victoria
and Albert days, of whom hard things were said in newspapers when he
tried to shut up Glen Tilt. In _Bonnie Scotland_ I echoed those
revilings, so now, _per contra_, let me quote Dr. John Brown’s
appreciation of this last of the Highland chiefs.
He was a living, a strenuous protest in perpetual kilt against the
civilisation, the taming, the softening of mankind. He was
essentially wild. His virtues were those of human nature in the
rough and unreclaimed, open and unsubdued as the Moor of Rannoch.
He was a true autochthon, _terrigena_,--a son of the soil,--as rich
in local colour, as rough in the legs, and as hot at the heart, as
prompt and hardy, as heathery as a gorcock. Courage, endurance,
staunchness, fidelity and warmth of heart, simplicity, and
downrightness were his staples; and with them he attained to a
power in his own region and among his own people quite singular.
The secret of this was his truth and his pluck, his kindliness and
his constancy. Other noblemen put on the kilt at the season, and do
their best to embrown their smooth knees for six weeks, returning
them to trousers and to town; he lived in his kilt all the year
long, and often slept soundly in it and his plaid among the
brackens; and not sparing himself, he spared none of his men or
friends--it was the rigour of the game--it was Devil take the
hindmost. Up at all hours, out all day and all night, often without
food--with nothing but the unfailing pipe--there he was, stalking
the deer in Glen Tilt or across the Gaick moors, or rousing before
daybreak the undaunted otter among the alders of the Earn, the
Isla, or the Almond; and if in his pursuit, which was fell as any
hound’s, he got his hand into the otter’s grip, and had its keen
teeth meeting in his palm, he let it have its will till the pack
came up,--no flinching, almost as if without the sense of pain. It
was this gameness and thoroughness in whatever he was about that
charmed his people--charmed his very dogs; and so it should.... But
he was not only a great hunter, and an organiser and vitaliser of
hunting, he was a great breeder. He lived at home, was himself a
farmer, and knew all his farmers and all their men; had lain out at
nights on the Badenoch heights with them, and sat in their bothies
and smoked with them the familiar pipe. But he also was, as we have
said, a thorough breeder, especially of Ayrshire cattle. It was
quite touching to see this fierce, restless, intense man--_impiger,
acer, iracundus_--at the great Battersea show doating upon and
doing everything for his meek-eyed, fine-limbed, sweet-breathed
kine.
Besides doing much to stock his domain with the best cattle honestly
come by, this duke fell in with the fashion set by his royal mistress in
keeping up its Highland character and sentiment. A German visitor, Herr
Brand, took a note how tartans had faded out of Scotland, except in the
case of soldiers; but he modified that statement when he got the length
of Blair and came in for the Atholl Gathering, to see a whole regiment
of the duke’s dependents, gamekeepers, gardeners, herds and the like,
paraded for this holiday occasion as kilted Highlanders. The Atholl men
can even claim to have added a new feature to the Highland dress, by the
Glengarry cap worn in the army, which has almost entirely replaced the
old broad bonnet and the “Balmorals” of my youth. But if Fergus McIvor
could have risen from his grave to behold an Atholl Gathering, what
would have most amazed him would be the fact of the duke’s honorary
bodyguard being captained by a Robertson of Struan.
The Robertsons, for all their Lowland-sounding name, were the oldest and
once the proudest clan known to history as seated in those glens, their
chiefs holding princedom over Atholl before Murrays had pushed
themselves across the Highland line. They own to being sprung out of
the MacDonalds, but from the chieftain of a vigorous offshoot they
called themselves Clan Donnachie, sons of Duncan. This hero was a
comrade and favourite of Robert Bruce, who no doubt stood godfather to
his son, then the name came to be anglicised as Robertson. To King
James’s wit is ascribed a saying that while all the other
_sons_--Wilsons, Watsons, Thomsons and so on--were carles’ sons, the
Struan Robertsons were gentlemen. They were ignorant Parisians who, at a
later date, mistook the _chef_ of Clan Donnachie for a cook.
Along with other clans, this one came into fresh favour with the Crown
by lending a hand to apprehend the murderers of James I. Then by obscure
defeats, mistakes, and turns of fortune, Clan Donnachie in turn lost its
pre-eminence in Perthshire. In 1745 it still counted some hundreds of
claymores; and perhaps Scott had it in his eye as a prototype of the
MacIvors, divided by a frequent contention as to headship. Now, while
their name is as widely scattered over the world as that of any other
Highland stock, most of them have half forgotten their Highland descent,
and a melancholy burial-place at Dunalaister, near Loch Rannoch, is the
monument of their old glory, in a country where Struan has become best
known as a link of tourist travel, and another seat of their chief, at
the farther end of the lake, is or was styled The Barracks, as having
been built for the soldiers of King George.
The most notable member of this stock in modern times was that Alexander
Robertson, whose memory gave Scott one model for his Baron of
Bradwardine, a no doubt composite picture for which Lord Pitsligo is
also said to have sat. This Robertson seems to have been an “original,”
bearing among his neighbours the nickname “Elector of Struan,” and not
quite such an honourable reputation as did Waverley’s father-in-law. He
was “out” in all the Jacobite risings, from Killiecrankie to
Prestonpans, yet, with intervals of exile, he managed to live jovially
for the most part in his own country; and his great age in 1745 perhaps
induced the Government to let him die peacefully at home a few years
later, when his funeral was attended by two thousand mourners on a march
of a dozen long miles. His heir, indeed, had some of the woeful
experiences of lurking out of the way of capture, as described in
_Waverley_. The old laird was in more danger from bailiffs, against
whose invasions he had the passes guarded, and once got into trouble
with the law through his “tail” having stripped one of these venturesome
enemies and ducked him almost to death. He was a poet and a scholar as
well as a warrior, who in his youth had run away from St. Andrews
University to join Dundee. His verses are hardly remembered now, unless
for those specimens of classical translation put by Scott into the
Baron’s mouth.
Cruel love has garter’d low my leg,
And clad my hurdies in a philabeg.
Also his vernacular rendering of _Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis,
acer_--
A fiery etter-cap, a fractious chiel,
As het as ginger, and as stieve as steel.
--which may have been a fair description of the poet’s
[Illustration: THE MOOR OF RANNOCH]
own personality, when sober. Much of his verse was not fit for
publication, his Muse being evidently nursed more on brandy and claret
than on the midnight oil. A little volume published in his name a few
years after his death, contains a good deal of Strephon, Damon, and
such-like, with other hints of classical inspiration, but also religious
pieces that read as if written in headachy morning hours. He appears a
mixture of pedant, soldier, and sot, whose life, prolonged over
fourscore years, makes no edifying example for teetotallers.
That worthy would certainly not have stooped to serve under the Duke of
Atholl, as did his descendant, of whom also Dr. John Brown speaks in
warmly reminiscent terms which this “Captain of the Atholl Guard” seems
to have well deserved. In my youth a rival chieftain gave himself bold
advertisement, a fuliginous personage--I think he was a coal merchant by
trade--who under the style of Dundonnachie, stalked about Perth in fiery
tartans, and carried on raids upon the duke as to freeing the bridge of
Dunkeld from toll, by which he got himself into duress vile, but was not
otherwise taken very seriously.