Lord and Lady Grange had been married upwards of twenty years, and
had had several children, when, in 1730, a separation was determined
on between them. It is usually difficult in such cases to say in what
degree the parties are respectively blamable; how far there have been
positive faults on one side, and want of forbearance on the other, and
so forth. If we were to believe the lady in this instance, there had
been love and peace for twenty years, when at length Lord Grange took a
sudden dislike to his wife, and would no longer live with her. He, on
the other hand, speaks of having suffered long from her ‘unsubduable
rage and madness,’ and of having failed in all his efforts to bring her
to a reasonable conduct. There is too much reason to believe that the
latter statement is in the main true; although, were it more so, it
would still leave Lord Grange unjustifiable in the measures which he
took with respect to his wife. It is traditionally stated that in their
unhappy quarrels the lady did not scruple to remind her husband whose
daughter she was—thus hinting at what she was capable of doing if she
thought herself deeply aggrieved. However all this might be, in the
year 1730 a separation was agreed to (with great reluctance on the part
of the lady), his lordship consenting to give her a hundred a year for
her maintenance so long as she should continue to live apart from him.
After spending some months in the country, Lady Grange returned to
Edinburgh, and took a lodging near her husband’s house, for the
purpose, as she tells us, of endeavouring to induce him to take her
back, and that she might occasionally see her children. According to
Lord Grange, she began to torment him by following him and the children
on the street ‘in a scandalous and shameful manner,’ and coming to
his house, and calling reproaches to him through the windows,[181]
especially when there was company with him. He thus writes: ‘In his
house, at the bottom of Niddry’s Wynd, where there is a court through
which one enters the house, one time among others, when it was full of
chairs, chairmen, and footmen, who attended the company that were with
himself, or his sister Lady Jane Paterson, then keeping house together,
she came into this court, and among that mob shamelessly cried up
to the windows injurious reproaches, and would not go away, though
entreated, till, hearing the late Lord Lovat’s voice, who was visiting
Mr E——, and seeing two of his servants among the other footmen, “Oh,”
said she, “is your master here?” and instantly ran off.’ He speaks of
her having attacked him one day in church; at another time she forced
him to take refuge with his son in a tavern for two hours. She even
threatened to assault him on the bench, ‘which he every day expected;
for she professed that she had no shame.’
The traditionary account of Lady Grange represents her fate as having
been at last decided by her threatening to expose her husband to the
government for certain treasonable practices. It would now appear that
this was partially true. In his statement, Lord Grange tells us that
he had some time before gone to London to arrange the private affairs
of the Countess of Mar, then become unable to conduct them herself,
and he had sent an account of his procedure to his wife, including
some reflections on a certain great minister (doubtless Walpole), who
had thwarted him much, and been of serious detriment to the interests
of his family in this matter. This document she retained, and she
now threatened to take it to London and use it for her husband’s
disadvantage, being supported in the design by several persons with
whom she associated. While denying that he had been concerned in
anything treasonable, Lord Grange says, ‘he had already too great a
load of that great minister’s wrath on his back to stand still and
see more of it fall upon him by the treachery and madness of such a
wife and such worthy confederates.’ The lady had taken a seat in a
stage-coach for London.[182] Lord Grange caused a friend to go and make
interest to get her money returned, and the seat let to another person;
in which odd proceeding he was successful. Thus was the journey stayed
for the meantime; but the lady declared her resolution to go as soon as
possible. ‘What,’ says Lord Grange, ‘could a man do with such a wife?
There was great reason to think she would daily go on to do mischief to
her family, and to affront and bring a blot on her children, especially
her daughters. There were things that could not be redressed in a court
of justice, and we had not then a madhouse to lock such unhappy people
up in.’
The result of his lordship’s deliberations was a plan for what he calls
‘sequestrating’ his wife. It appears to have been concerted between
himself and a number of Highland chiefs, including, above all, the
notorious Lord Lovat.[183] We now turn to the lady’s narrative, which
proceeds to tell that, on the evening of the 22nd of January 1732, a
party of Highlandmen, wearing the livery of Lord Lovat, made their
way into her lodgings, and forcibly seized her, throwing her down and
gagging her, then tying a cloth over her head, and carrying her off
as if she had been a corpse. At the bottom of the stair was a chair
containing a man, who took the hapless lady upon his knees, and held
her fast in his arms till they had got to a place in the outskirts of
the town. Then they took her from the chair, removed the cloth from her
head, and mounted her upon a horse behind a man, to whom she was tied;
after which the party rode off ‘by the lee light of the moon,’ to quote
the language of the old ballads, whose incidents the present resembles
in character.
The treatment of the lady by the way was, if we can believe her own
account, by no means gentle. The leader, although a gentleman (Mr
Forster of Corsebonny), disregarded her entreaties to be allowed to
stop on account of cramp in her side, and only answered by ordering a
servant to renew the bandages over her mouth. She observed that they
rode along the Long Way (where Princes Street now stands), past the
Castle, and so to the Linlithgow road. After a ride of nearly twenty
miles, they stopped at Muiravonside, the house of Mr John Macleod,
advocate, where servants appeared waiting to receive the lady—and
thus showed that the master of the house had been engaged to aid in
her abduction. She was taken upstairs to a comfortable bedroom; but a
man being posted in the room as a guard, she could not go to bed nor
take any repose. Thus she spent the ensuing day, and when it was night,
she was taken out and remounted in the same fashion as before; and the
party then rode along through the Torwood, and so to the place called
Wester Polmaise, belonging to a gentleman of the name of Stewart,
whose steward or factor was one of the cavalcade. Here was an old
tower, having one little room on each floor, as is usually the case in
such buildings; and into one of these rooms, the window of which was
boarded over, the lady was conducted. She continued here for thirteen
or fourteen weeks, supplied with a sufficiency of the comforts of life,
but never allowed to go into the open air; till at length her health
gave way, and the factor began to fear being concerned in her death. By
his intercession with Mr Forster, she was then permitted to go into the
court, under a guard; but such was the rigour of her keepers that the
garden was still denied to her.
[Illustration: THE CASTLE
from Princes Street.