Long ago—you may say in 1808—when I was a boy at Peebles, the
school-children, as a variety in their boisterous amusements,
occasionally bombarded with stones a grievously defaced effigy built
into the walls of a ruinous old church in the neighbourhood. With
savage significance, the unfortunate piece of sculpture was called
Borlum, and as Borlum it had been pelted by several successive
generations. From the dearth of historical knowledge at the spot,
no one could explain who or what was meant by Borlum; and not till
some years afterwards, in the course of reading, did I find out that
by Borlum was meant Brigadier Mackintosh of Borlum, who commanded a
resolute party of Highlanders in Mar’s rebellion of 1715, and who,
by their masterly audacity in marching towards the Border, threw the
southern counties of Scotland into a state of indescribable alarm. To
Borlum, as he was familiarly termed, was thus assigned the character of
a bugbear along the whole course of the Tweed; and long after he had
passed away, and when the political events in which he was concerned
were forgotten, the original terror of his name survived in the
vengefully destructive recreations of school-children. In a vicarious
capacity, a harmless piece of sculpture, which had nothing at all to do
with Borlum, was doomed to suffer for a popular scare nearly a hundred
years previously.
In the history of that miserably managed affair, Mar’s Jacobite
rebellion, Mackintosh of Borlum—or more properly _younger_ of Borlum,
for his father was still living—stands conspicuously out as a military
hero, who threw into the shade many of higher title and pretensions.
How with five hundred of his clan, with banners flying, he marched
to Inverness, and seized that important post. How he hastened on to
the Lowlands, eluded the troops designed to intercept him; crossed
the Firth of Forth with a large force in open boats, and captured
Leith. How, carrying everything before him, he marched onwards to
the Border, in order to join the rebel forces of General Forster
in Northumberland—are all facts belonging to history. His sagacity,
foresight, intrepidity, and daring courage were worthy of a better
cause. Getting into England, and mixed up with half-hearted movements,
Borlum is very much lost sight of. The enterprise, owing to Mar’s
indiscretion, had been shockingly ill considered. The English Jacobites
failed to rise in a body, as they were justified in doing, for the
auxiliaries which had been expected from France never made their
appearance; and the whole thing collapsed, as is well known, by the
humiliating capture of the insurgents by General Carpenter at Preston,
in Lancashire. Surrendering at discretion, the whole were conducted
as prisoners to London—Borlum among the rest. A dreadful downcome to
the proud Highland chief, but not more so than to Lords Derwentwater,
Winton, Nithsdale, Kenmure, Carnwath, Widdrington, and other Jacobite
noblemen.
It is not altogether agreeable to look back on the dynastic struggles
which took place in England in the first half of the eighteenth
century; for with some redeeming traits of character, they give a very
mean view of human nature. The subject has been suggested to us by the
appearance of a work which many will appreciate for its lively account
of scenes and circumstances hitherto imbedded in the dry records of
history. We mean _London in the Jacobite Times_, by Dr Doran, F.S.A. (2
vols. Bentley and Son). The writer, it is sorrowful to learn, passed
away before the work at which he had long patiently laboured had well
been published; and we regret that he has not survived to hear the
praises bestowed on his endeavours to produce a picture of past times
such as is rarely presented. The way the subject is treated is quite
unique. Instead of going into regular historical details, which would
be alike tedious and tiresome, the author writes in a sketchy and
anecdotic style without pause from beginning to end, and we have before
us a drama of unflagging interest, extending over the greater part of
a century. We do not think, however, that the book would have been the
worse of a few preliminary remarks on the strange circumstances by
which the Stuarts forfeited the crown, and placed themselves in the
grotesquely unhappy condition of kings retired from business.
The flight of James II. from England, and practically his abdication of
authority, December 22, 1688, finished the house of Stuart. When a king
runs away from his subjects, and stupidly flings down a magnificent
inheritance, he has a bad chance of being called back again,
particularly when by a course of exasperating and illegal conduct he
has forfeited general esteem. Yet, from the date of that fatal flight
there were successive plots by Jacobite adherents to bring back the
Stuarts to the throne. Throughout the reign of William III. and of
Queen Anne, the plottings were of a comparatively obscure character.
On the death of Anne in 1714, and the installation of George I. under
a parliamentary Act of Settlement, came the crisis. The rebellion of
1715 broke out, and being quenched at Preston, the fierce dissensions
of Jacobites and Whigs arose. Dr Doran commences his narrative with the
death of Anne, but scarcely awakes to his subject till the droves of
rebels from Preston enter London and are dispersed through the various
prisons, the more noble of them being conducted to the Tower.
While preserving the forms of law, the government did not put off time
in the examination and trials of the captured rebels. The pulpits rang
with sermons condemnatory of their crimes. Joseph Addison, in his
paper the _Freeholder_, railed upon them with indecent subserviency.
There was no want of evidence to convict the leading spirits in
the insurrection; but matters were considerably simplified by the
voluntarily proffered testimony of the Rev. Robert Patten, who had
been formerly a curate at Preston, and acted as chaplain to the rebel
forces. Clapped into prison with his associates, Patten pondered on the
best means of escaping the gallows; and the longer he thought of it,
he became the more firmly convinced that his best plan was to become
king’s evidence. His testimony was accepted; and at the cost of being
branded throughout all time as a rascal, he daily stood up in court
and told every particular requisite to convict the unhappy noblemen
and gentlemen with whom he had been associated, and whose bread he had
eaten. Very much through the testimony of this wretch, the prisons were
gradually cleared by the exit of batches of convicts on hurdles to
Tyburn. The Tower was similarly relieved of two of its noble inmates,
Derwentwater and Kenmure, who perished on the scaffold; and there would
have been more of them, but for the escape of the Earl of Nithsdale
disguised in his wife’s clothes, and for the fortunate reprieve of
the Lords Widdrington, Nairn, and Carnwath. On the evening of the
day on which the Earl of Derwentwater was beheaded (24th February
1716), London was thrown into a state of commotion by the appearance
in the sky of an extraordinary Aurora, in which there were fancied
resemblances of armies, flaming swords, and fire-breathing dragons—the
Jacobites accepting the phenomenon as a token of the indignation of
Heaven at the cruel murders on Tower Hill, and prognosticating the rise
of the sun of Stuart! On the estates of the Earl of Derwentwater, this
famed aurora was called the ‘Earl of Derwentwater’s Lights;’ and it is
said that an aurora is still so named in the vicinity of Dilston.
The government of George I. had some difficulty in dealing with the
Earl of Wintoun, who contrived to get his trial put off as long as
possible, on the plea that he was not yet prepared with his evidence.
The truth is, the earl was a somewhat eccentric being. In his youth
he had run away from his home at Seton House, went to France, and
hired himself to work as a blacksmith. Returning at the death of his
father, when everybody had given him up for lost, he assumed the
title, George fifth Earl of Wintoun, and was living quietly at Seton
when the rebellion broke out. He had no wish to connect himself with
it; but stung by some outrageous proceedings of the authorities, he
joined the insurrection, and so got himself into trouble. When brought
to the bar of the House of Lords, there was some surprise at the
oddity of his behaviour. Whether from cunning or affectation, he did
not seem to understand why his trial should be hurried on, though in
reality he might have complained of the delay. All the earl’s shifts
did not greatly serve him. Patten, on being questioned, said that he
had seen the Earl of Wintoun on several occasions with a drawn sword
in his hand when the Pretender was proclaimed. After this, of course
Wintoun was found guilty, and condemned to be beheaded. Not a pleasant
drive from Westminster Hall to the Tower, accompanied by the Gentleman
Gaoler, ceremoniously carrying an axe with its edge turned towards
the condemned earl. One feels a degree of satisfaction in knowing
that after all the Earl of Wintoun escaped his doom. Confined to an
apartment in the Tower preparatory to the morning of execution, he
brought his knowledge as a blacksmith into play by cutting through the
iron bars of his window by files supplied by his servant, and dropping
to the ground got clear off. He died at Rome in 1749, his title and
estates being meanwhile forfeited. The title has been latterly revived
in favour of the Earls of Eglintoun. But with the disappearance of the
last of the Setons in the direct line, an ancient and honourable family
was blotted from the Scottish peerage.
Mackintosh of Borlum—called by mistake Borland by Dr Doran—was confined
along with General Forster and a host of others in Newgate. Borlum and
Forster are stated to have often quarrelled regarding the military
conduct of the insurrection, their angry debates often furnishing
amusement in the corridors, court-yard, and common room in the prison,
to which visitors were admitted without hinderance, as to a tavern,
for the more eating and drinking there were the better it was for Mr
Pitt, the governor. Pitt, himself, was never disinclined to lend his
assistance in eating a dinner, or in finishing a bowl of punch. So
countenanced, the revelries in Newgate were boundless. Dr Doran affords
a glimpse of this state of things. Visitors and sympathisers supplied
the prisoners with money. ‘While it was difficult to change a guinea
almost at any house in the street, nothing was more easy than to have
silver for gold in any quantity, and gold for silver, in the prison;
those of the fair sex, from persons of the first rank to tradesmen’s
wives and daughters, making a sacrifice of their husbands’ and parents’
rings and other precious movables for the use of the prisoners. The aid
was so reckless, that forty shillings for a dish of early peas and
beans, and thirty shillings for a dish of fish, with the best French
wine, was an ordinary regale!’
Forster was to be tried on the 18th April, but a week previously the
town was startled with the intelligence that he had broken bounds;
he was off. ‘His escape,’ says Doran, ‘was well planned and happily
executed. His sharp servant found means to obtain an impression of
Pitt’s master-key, from which another key was made and conveyed to
Forster, without difficulty. Pitt loved wine, and Forster seems to have
had a cellar full of it. He often invited the governor to get drunk
on its contents. One night, Pitt got more drunk than usual, finished
the wine, and roared for more. Forster bade his servant to fetch up
another bottle. This was the critical moment. The fellow was long,
and Forster declared he would go and see what the rascal was at. On
going, he locked the unconscious Pitt in the room; and the way being
prepared by his servant, and turnkeys, as it would seem, subdued by
the “oil of palms,” master and servant walked into the street, where
friends awaited them. Pitt sounded the alarm, but everything had been
well calculated. A smack lay at Holly Haven, on the Thames, which had
often been employed by the Jacobites in running between England and
France.’ By this means, Forster effected his escape, and ‘the joy of
the Jacobites was incontrollable.’ The government shut up Pitt in one
of his own dungeons, and offered a thousand pounds for the recovery of
‘General Forster;’ but pursuit was useless. The general was safe in
France.
Borlum, who knew that his trial would speedily take place, meditated
on plans for emulating the success of Forster. Strange to say,
notwithstanding a knowledge of the irregularities that were carried on
in Newgate, the public authorities made no change in the administration
of affairs. Wine flowed, punch was sent round, and the prisoners
suffered scarcely any stint in their indulgences. Things were indeed
rather worse than better—all which was favourable to a plan concocted
by Borlum and his fellow-captives. ‘The prisoners,’ says Dr Doran,
‘might cool themselves after their drink, by walking and talking,
singing and planning, in the court-yard, till within an hour of
midnight. Evil came of it. On the night of the 4th [May] the feast
being over, nearly five dozen of the prisoners were walking about the
press-yard. Suddenly, the whole body of them made an ugly rush at the
keeper with the keys. He was knocked down, the doors were opened, and
the prisoners swept forth to freedom. All, however, did not succeed in
gaining liberty. As the attempt was being made, soldiers and turnkeys
were alarmed. The fugitives were then driven in different directions.
Brigadier Mackintosh, his son, and seven others overcame all
opposition. They reached the street, and they were so well befriended,
or were so lucky, as to disappear at once, and to evade all pursuit.
They fled in various directions.’ Some others less fortunate were
secured, ‘and were not only heavily ironed and thrust into loathsome
holes, but treated with exceptional brutality.’ What a picture of a
metropolitan prison in the reign of George I.!
The escape of Borlum from Newgate with certain other convicts produced
an immense sensation. For decency’s sake, if for nothing else, the Lord
Mayor and Aldermen came down to the prison, and solemnly gathered some
evidence on the subject. The least thing in the way of amends was to
offer a reward for the capture of ‘William Mackintosh, commonly called
Brigadier Mackintosh.’ Placards were profusely posted up describing the
appearance of Borlum. ‘A tall, raw-boned man, about sixty years of age,
fair complexioned, beetle-browed, gray-eyed, speaks broad Scotch.’ The
reward for capturing him was two hundred pounds, to which sum, however,
were added a thousand pounds by the government. Every effort failed
to secure the old Highland chief. He and his son succeeded in getting
on board a vessel in the Thames, by which they reached the coast of
France, and there for the present we must leave him.
These furtive escapes did not slacken operations at Tyburn, to which
doomed men from Newgate were carried in half-dozens, as if for a public
entertainment. We can hardly in the present day realise the brutality
of these exhibitions, to which, however, ladies of quality regularly
adjourned to see the show. Hanging formed a holiday amusement of
the fashionable society of London. Such was the disregard of humane
feeling that officers of the law were not ashamed to practise cruel
deceptions on convicts at the very scaffold. Dr Doran describes a case
of this kind. It was that of a person named David Lindsay, convicted
of traitorous visits to France, who was sentenced to die, and carted
to Tyburn in spite of an amnesty. ‘When his neck was in the noose, the
sheriff tested David’s courage, by telling him he might yet save his
life on condition of revealing the names of alleged traitors. David,
however sorely tempted, declined to save his neck on such terms.
Thereupon, the sheriff ordered the cart to drive on; but even this move
towards leaving Lindsay suspended did not shake his stout spirit. All
this time the sheriff had a reprieve for the unnecessarily tortured
fellow in his pocket. Before the cart was fairly from under Lindsay’s
feet, it was stopped, or he would have been murdered.’ Taken back alive
to Newgate, a very unusual spectacle, Lindsay, after being nearly
starved in a loathsome dungeon, was sent into perpetual banishment;
ultimately he died of hunger and exposure in Holland.
As the hanging of some thousands of rebels would have shocked ordinary
decency, vast numbers were condemned to be banished, as an act of
grace, to the Plantations, or were ‘made over as presents to trading
courtiers,’ who might pardon them for ‘a consideration.’ Think of lords
and ladies at court being presented with groups of convicts on whom
money could be made by selling pardons! The fact throws a new light on
this period of English history. As regards transportation, Dr Doran
gives some not uninteresting and little known particulars concerning
Rob Roy. Twelve years after the rebellion of 1715, Rob was taken to
London in connection with the Disarmament Act, and sentenced with many
others to be transported to Barbadoes. Handcuffed to Lord Ogilvie, he
was marched from Newgate through the streets of London to a barge at
Blackfriars, and thence to Gravesend. ‘This,’ says Dr Doran, ‘is an
incident which has escaped the notice of Walter Scott and of all Rob’s
biographers.’ Before quitting England, the barge-load of convicts were
pardoned and allowed to return home.
Matters had considerably calmed down, when the country was startled
with the rebellion which broke out in 1745, headed by the young
Chevalier, Charles Edward, grandson of James II. It was a daring and
romantic adventure, but as badly conceived and supported as that of
thirty years previously. No promised auxiliaries were supplied from
France; and that the attempt to upset a powerful and settled government
by a handful of adventurous Highlanders and the adherents of a few
discontented noblemen and gentry should have ended disastrously, as it
finally did on the field of Culloden, is not at all surprising. This
fresh outbreak in the reign of George II. affords new material for the
graphic pen of Dr Doran; and to his second volume we must refer for
many painful though curious details concerning the treatment of the
unfortunate prisoners. The manners of the more fashionable classes in
the metropolis do not seem to have improved. We are told that ‘people
of fashion went to the Tower to see the prisoners as persons of lower
quality went there to see the lions. Within the Tower, the spectator
was lucky who saw Murray [of Broughton], Charles Ratcliffe, Lord
Traquair, Lord Cromarty and his son, and the Lord Provost, at their
respective windows. Lady Townshend, who had fallen in love with Lord
Kilmarnock, at the first sight of “his falling shoulders,” when he
appeared to plead at the bar of the Lords, was to be seen under his
window at the Tower.’ The Lord Provost, here alluded to, was Archibald
Stewart, who, known to be of Jacobite proclivities, was charged with
culpable neglect of duty, in having allowed a party of Highlanders
to rush in and take possession of Edinburgh. Stewart was tried and
acquitted. Lord Cromarty’s life was spared; but Lords Kilmarnock,
Balmerino, and Lovat perished by beheading on Tower Hill. Lovat had
expressed a passionate desire to be buried with his head in his own
country in Scotland. The wish was gratified. His head was sewed on
again by the undertaker before the body was despatched northwards! Lord
Traquair was liberated.
The case of Charles Ratcliffe was peculiar. He was a younger brother
of Lord Derwentwater who was executed in 1716, and he had himself only
evaded the same fate at that time by being one of the prisoners who
escaped from Newgate and took refuge in France. Assuming the title of
Earl of Derwentwater, he was made prisoner in 1745, on board a French
vessel on its way to Scotland with supplies for Prince Charles. The
sentence of death which had been passed on him thirty years before
was now raked up. He was condemned to be executed; and giving him the
benefit of his assumed title of nobility, he was beheaded on Tower
Hill, his manly courage and proud bearing not deserting him at the last
dreadful scene.
Like Patten, in the former rebellion, Murray of Broughton, who had
acted as secretary to Charles Edward, was saved by basely turning
king’s evidence, and sending many better men than himself to the
scaffold. He retreated into private life under a deserved load of
infamy. Years afterwards, as we learn from Lockhart, Murray, several
times in disguise, visited Mr Scott, father of Sir Walter, for the
sake of professional advice. On one of these occasions, Mrs Scott,
from curiosity, intruded with the offer of a cup of tea, which Murray
accepted. When he withdrew, Mr Scott lifted the window-sash, and threw
the empty cup into the street. The lady exclaimed for her china, but
was silenced by the remark: ‘I may admit into my house, on a piece of
business, persons wholly unworthy to be treated as guests by my wife.
Neither lip of me nor of mine comes after Mr Murray of Broughton.’ As a
memento of this curious incident, Sir Walter made prize of the saucer,
which he preserved.
The executions of the untitled prisoners were conducted in a wholesale
manner on Kennington Common, to which crowds flocked to see the hideous
show. Drawers attended to supply wine to the culprits while the ropes
were put round their necks, for the Jacobites drank treasonous toasts
till the last. At one of these tragic ceremonials, ‘Captain Wood, after
the halter was loosely hung for him round his neck, called for wine,
which was supplied with alacrity by the prison drawers. When it was
served round, the captain drank to the health of the rightful king,
James III.’ The slight delay so caused was lucky for another culprit,
Captain Lindsay, who was coming up with a second batch. ‘While the wine
was being drunk, Lindsay was “haltering,” as the reporters called it.
He was nice about the look of the rope, but just as he was courteously
invited to get in and be hanged, a reprieve came for him, which saved
his life.’ At this period, London could not be deemed a pleasant place
of residence for any one with delicate feelings. The entrances to the
town were lined with decaying bodies hanging in chains. At length the
sights became so offensive as to cause public remonstrance.
Dr Doran winds up his dramatic narrative with some graceful remarks
on the altered state of feeling towards the Jacobites in the reign of
George III. By the decease of Charles Edward in 1788, after having sunk
to the character of a sot, the Jacobite fanaticism was considerably
abated, and only lingered as an expiring sentiment till the death of
Charles’s brother, Henry, Cardinal York, 1807, when the house of Stuart
was extinct.
It is pleasant to know that the royal family always spoke with sympathy
of the Stuarts. Charles Edward, as is well known, was unhappy in
his marriage with Louise, Countess of Albany, daughter of Count von
Stolberg. She left him for a convent in 1780, and subsequently to his
death became the wife of the Italian poet, Vittorio Alfieri. By a
strange turn in the wheel of fortune, she sought an asylum in England,
on the outbreak of the French Revolution, and was well received at the
court in St James’s Palace, the king and queen vying to do her honour.
She went to see the king in the House of Lords with the crown on his
head, when proroguing parliament, 1791. Hannah More speaks of seeing
the Countess of Albany on that occasion seated among ladies ‘just at
the foot of the throne which she might once have expected to have
mounted.’ Finding London dull, with ‘crowds but no society,’ and that
the climate of England did not suit her, she returned to the continent.
In his latter years Cardinal York was supported by a pension of four
thousand pounds a year from George III.; an act of kindness which was
handsomely responded to by the Cardinal giving up to the king the crown
diamonds which James II. had carried away with him to France. On the
death of the Cardinal, the Countess of Albany became the recipient of
an annuity from the king. This she enjoyed till her decease as plain
Madame Fabre at Montpelier, in France, in 1824. Such was the sorrowful
ending of the broken-down and much-tried widow of Charles Edward Stuart.
We feel that our desultory sketch would be incomplete without some
account of Borlum subsequent to his escape to France in 1716. For any
such account, however, there are very slender materials in history. To
a writer in the _Celtic Magazine_ (Inverness, 1877) we are indebted for
some of the following particulars. Borlum remained in France only one
or two years, during which his father died, whereupon he became the
chief of his house. On what terms, if any, he was allowed to return
to his own country there is no statement. At all events, he was again
in Scotland in 1719, for in that year he took part in the mad attempt
at insurrection by the aid of Spanish soldiers, which was immediately
stamped out. That Mackintosh of Borlum should have engaged in so wild
an adventure, is an evidence of his Jacobite fervour and indiscretion.
He was once more a fugitive, but for a time contrived to elude
detection. At length, he was apprehended in the wilds of Caithness, and
was conveyed as a state prisoner to Edinburgh Castle.
Few, perhaps, among the gay crowds who throng Princes Street, and
cast a glance at the buildings of the castle perched on the summit of
rugged cliffs, are aware that in one of these buildings, long used as
a state prison, poor Mackintosh of Borlum was confined for the last
years of his life. Certainly, a hard fate for the old Jacobite! Cribbed
and confined in his airy but miserable den, Borlum did not spend his
time uselessly. Before being involved in political troubles he had
devoted himself to the improvement and planting of lands. He is said to
have planted a row of trees which still ornament the public road near
Kingussie. Now that he was locked up, he wrote an Essay on the best
means of inclosing and improving lands, which was printed in Edinburgh
in 1729. Our authority adds: ‘On the 7th January 1743, after a rough
earthly pilgrimage of eighty years, the gallant old soldier passed to
his rest, true to the last to the principles which had influenced his
whole life. One of his last acts, it is said, was to dedicate one of
his teeth to the service of his exiled master, by writing with it on
the wall of his room an invocation of God’s blessing on King James!’
How long Borlum was immured in that dismal prison on the castle rock,
is not clearly ascertained. The obituary in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_
speaks of his having been confined in the castle ‘fifteen years.’ By
the authority above quoted, he is said to have been imprisoned ‘for
nearly a quarter of a century.’ Truth may lie somewhere between—from
twenty to twenty-one years. The _Caledonian-Mercury_, in noticing his
decease at the age of ‘about eighty-five,’ gives him a high character
as ‘a complete gentleman, friendly, agreeable, and courteous;’ and for
what he had written as regards the improvement of land, he is to be
lastingly esteemed as ‘a lover of his country.’ Nowhere is a word said
of the cruelty of confining so aged and accomplished a person in the
worst species of prison till he was released by death. For the seeming
harshness of this prolonged imprisonment, an excuse may perhaps be
found in the political apprehensions of the period; but this scarcely
lessens our compassion for the sufferings of a man in so many respects
estimable. With all his faults, Borlum must be admitted to have
possessed that quality of earnestness of purpose which in the ordinary
concerns of life is now so feebly demonstrated. It could be wished
that some one had done full justice to his biography; for Borlum was
undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary men of his time.