THE COMPANIONS OF PICKLE
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[Illustration: _Walker & Boutall, ph. sc._
_The Earl Marischal_
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THE
COMPANIONS OF PICKLE
_BEING A SEQUEL TO ‘PICKLE THE SPY’_
BY
ANDREW LANG
WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1898
All rights reserved
PREFACE
The appearance of ‘Pickle the Spy’ was welcomed by a good deal of clamour
on the part of some Highland critics. It was said that I had brought a
disgraceful charge, without proof, against a Chief of unstained honour.
Scarcely any arguments were adduced in favour of Glengarry. What could
be said in suspense of judgment was said in the _Scottish Review_, by
Mr. A. H. Millar. That gentleman, however, was brought round to my view,
as I understand, when he compared the handwriting of Pickle with that of
Glengarry. Mr. Millar’s letter on the subject will be found in this book
(pp. 247, 248).
The doubts and opposition which my theory encountered made it desirable
to examine fresh documents in the Record Office, the British Museum, and
the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, while General Alastair Macdonald
(whose family recently owned Lochgarry) has kindly permitted me to read
Glengarry’s MS. Letter Book, in his possession. The results will be found
in the following pages.
Being engaged on the subject, I made a series of studies of persons
connected with Prince Charles, and with the Jacobite movement. Of these
the Earl Marischal was the most important, and, by reason of his long
life and charming character—a compound of ‘Aberdeen and Valencia’—the
most interesting. As a foil to the good Earl, who finally abandoned
the Jacobite party, I chose Murray of Broughton, who, though he turned
informer, remained true in sentiment, I believe, to his old love. His
character may, perhaps, be read otherwise, but such is the impression
left on me by his ‘Memorials,’ documents edited recently for the Scottish
History Society by Mr. Fitzroy Bell.
In Barisdale, whose treachery was perfectly well known at the time, and
was punished by both parties, we have a picture of the Highlander at
his worst. Culloden made such a career as that of Barisdale for ever
impossible.
In the chapters on ‘Cluny’s Treasure’ and ‘The Troubles of the Camerons’
I have, I hope, redeemed the characters of Cluny and Dr. Archibald
Cameron from the charges of flagrant dishonesty brought against them by
young Glengarry. Both gentlemen were reduced to destitution, which by
itself is incompatible with the allegations of their common enemy.
‘The Uprooting of Fassifern’ illustrates the unscrupulous nature of
judicial proceedings in Scotland after Culloden. A part of Fassifern’s
conduct is not easily explained in a favourable sense, but he was
persecuted in a strangely unjust and intolerable manner. Incidentally it
appears that public indignation against this sort of procedure, rather
than distrust of ‘what the soldier said’ in his ghostly apparitions,
procured the acquittal of the murderers of Sergeant Davies.
‘The Last Days of Glengarry’ is based on a study of his MS. Letter Book,
while ‘The Case against Glengarry’ sums up the old and re-states the new
evidence that identifies him with Pickle the Spy.
The last chapter is an attempt to estimate the social situation created
in the Highlands by the collapse of the Clan system.
I have inserted, in ‘A Gentleman of Knoydart,’ an account of a foil to
Barisdale, derived from the Memoirs of a young member of his clan, John
Macdonell, of the Scotus family. The editor of _Macmillan’s Magazine_ has
kindly permitted me to reprint this article from his serial for June 1898.
A note on ‘Mlle. Luci’ corrects an error about Montesquieu into which I
had fallen when writing ‘Pickle the Spy,’ and throws fresh light on Mlle.
Ferrand.
It is, or should be, superfluous to disclaim an enmity to the Celtic
race, and rebut the charge of ‘not leaving unraked a dunghill in search
for a cudgel wherewith to maltreat the Highlanders, particularly those
who rose in the Forty-five.’ This elegant extract is from a Gaelic
address by a minister to the Gaelic Society of Inverness.[1] I have not
raked dunghills in search of cudgels, nor are my sympathies hostile to
the brave men, Highland or Lowland, who died on the field or scaffold
in 1745-53. The perfidy of which so many proofs come to light was in
no sense peculiarly Celtic. The history of Scotland, till after the
Reformation, is full of examples in which Lowlanders unscrupulously
used the worst weapons of the weak. Historical conditions, not race,
gave birth to the Douglases and Brunstons whom Barisdale, Glengarry,
and others imitated on a smaller scale. These men were the exceptions,
the rare exceptions, in a race illustrious for loyalty. I have tried
to show the historical and social sources of their demoralisation, so
extraordinary when found among the countrymen of Keppoch, Clanranald,
Glenaladale, Scotus, and Lochiel.
I must apologise for occasional repetitions which I have been unable to
avoid in a set of separate studies of characters engaged in the same set
of circumstances.
My most respectful thanks are due to Her Majesty for her gracious
permission to study the collection of Cumberland Papers in her library
at Windsor Castle. Only a small portion of these valuable documents
has been examined for the present purpose. Mr. Richard Holmes, Her
Majesty’s Librarian, lent his kind advice, and Miss Violet Simpson aided
me in examining and copying these and other papers referred to in their
proper places. Indeed I cannot overestimate my debt to the research and
acuteness of this lady.
To General Macdonald I have to repeat my thanks for the use of his
papers, and the Duke of Atholl has kindly permitted me to cite his
privately printed collections, where they illustrate the matter in hand.
Sir Thomas Gibson Carmichael was good enough to lend me, for
reproduction, his miniature of the Duke of York and Prince Charles.
The earlier portrait of the Earl Marischal is from the Scottish National
Museum, the later (of 1752?) is from the National Portrait Gallery. It
gives a likeness of one of the good Earl’s menagerie of young heathens.
The miniature of Prince Charles (p. 140) is a copy or replica of one
given by him to a Macleod of the Raasay house in September, 1746. The
Royal Society of Edinburgh kindly permitted me to have copies made
of several of the Earl Marischal’s letters to David Hume, in their
possession. In some of these (unprinted) the Earl touches on a theme for
which _le bon David_ frankly expresses his affection in a letter to the
Lord Advocate.
_CORRIGENDA_
P. 12, note, _for_ twenty-two in 1716, _read_ twenty-three
P. 17, note, _for_ 33,900 _read_ 33,950
Transcriber’s Note: These corrections didn’t need making: presumably the
printers did it, but neglected to remove this list.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE LAST EARL MARISCHAL 1
II. THE EARL IN RUSSIAN SERVICE 42
III. MURRAY OF BROUGHTON 69
IV. MADEMOISELLE LUCI 92
V. THE ROMANCE OF BARISDALE 97
VI. CLUNY’S TREASURE 129
VII. THE TROUBLES OF THE CAMERONS 147
VIII. JUSTICE AFTER CULLODEN 158
IX. A GENTLEMAN OF KNOYDART 176
X. THE LAST YEARS OF GLENGARRY 198
XI. THE CASE AGAINST GLENGARRY 216
XII. OLD TIMES AND NEW 254
APPENDIX
I. PICKLE’S LETTERS 289
II. MACLEOD 294
INDEX 297
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE EARL MARISCHAL (1717) _Frontispiece_
THE EARL MARISCHAL (_circ._ 1750) _to face_ p. 60
PRINCE CHARLES (_circ._ 1744) ” 140
THE DUKE OF YORK AND PRINCE CHARLES (_circ._ 1735) ” 184
THE COMPANIONS OF PICKLE
I
THE LAST EARL MARISCHAL
In a work where we must make the acquaintance of some very unfortunate
characters, it is well to begin with a _preux chevalier_. If there
was a conspicuously honest man in the eighteenth century, one ‘whose
conscience might gild the walls of a dungeon,’ as an observer of his
conduct declared, that man was the Earl Marischal, George Keith. The name
of the last Earl Marischal of Scotland haunts the reader of the history
of the eighteenth century. He appears in battles for the Stuart cause in
1715 and 1719, he figures dimly in the records of 1745, and of Charles
Edward, after the ruin of Culloden. We find him in the correspondence
of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, and Frederick the Great, and even in
Casanova. He is obscurely felt in the diplomacy which ended in Pitt’s
resignation of office. Many travellers describe his old age at Potzdam,
and d’Alembert wrote his _Éloge_. He was the last direct representative
of that historical house of Keith whose laurels were first won in the
decisive charge of Bruce’s handful of cavalry on the English archers at
Bannockburn. Though the Earl Marischal of the confused times after the
death of James V. was a pensioner of Henry VIII., like so many of the
Scottish _noblesse_, the House was Royalist, and national as a rule.
Yet, after a long life of exile as a Jacobite, the last Earl Marischal,
always at heart a Republican, reconciled himself to the House of Hanover.
The biography of the Earl has never been written, though few Scottish
worthies have better deserved this far from uncommon honour.
Materials for a complete life of the Earl do not exist. We are obliged
to follow him by aid of slight traces in historical manuscripts,
biographies, memoirs, and letters, published or unpublished. Even in
this unsatisfactory way, the Earl is worth pursuing: for if he left
slight traces on history, and was never successful in action, he was
a man, and a humourist, of singular merit and charm, a person almost
universally honoured and beloved through three generations. This last of
the Earls Marischal of Scotland was certainly one of the most original
and one of the most typical characters of the eighteenth century.
Losing home, lands, and rank for the cause of Legitimism, the Earl was
the reverse of a fanatical Royalist; indeed he seems to have become a
Jacobite from Republican principles. These were strengthened, no doubt,
by his great experience of kings; but even when he was a young man his
bookplate bore the motto _Manus hæc inimica tyrannis_. Then probably, as
certainly in later life, he loved to praise Sidney, and others who (in
his opinion) died for freedom. Yet the Earl was ‘out,’ for no Liberal
cause, in 1715, and in 1719: while he was plotting against King George
and for King James, till 1745. He was admitted to the secret of the
rather Fenian Elibank Plot in 1752, and only reconciled himself with the
English Government in 1759. On his death-bed he called himself ‘an old
Jacobite,’ while, for twenty years at least, his favourite companions had
been the advanced thinkers, prelusive to the Revolution, Rousseau, Hume,
d’Alembert, Voltaire, Helvetius.
All this appears the reverse of consistent. The Earl gave up everything,
and risked his life often, for the White Rose, while his opinions,
religious and political, tended in the direction of the Red Cap of
Liberty and the Rights of Man. The explanation is that the Earl, when
young, a patriotic Scot, and a persecuted Episcopalian, saw ‘freedom’
in the emancipation of Scotland from a foreign tyrant, the Elector of
Hanover; in the Repeal of the Union, and in the relief of his religious
body from the tyranny of the Kirk. Till his death he was all for liberty,
and could not bear to see even a caged bird. These were the unusual
motives (these, and the influence of his mother, a Jacobite by family and
sentiment) which converted a born Liberal into a partisan of the King
over the Water. Thus this representative of traditional and romantic
Scottish loyalty to the Stuarts was essentially a child of the advanced,
and emancipated, and enlightened century which succeeded that into which
he was born.
Original in his political conduct, the Earl was no less unusual in
personal character. He was one of those who, as Plato says, are
‘naturally good,’ naturally examples of righteousness in a naughty
world. Nature made him temperate, contented, kind, charitable, brave,
and humorous—one who, as Montaigne advises, never ‘made a marvel of his
own fortunes.’ His virtue, as far as can be learned, owed nothing to
religion. He was ‘born to be so,’ as another man is born to be a poet. He
had a native genius for excellence.
He was ruined without rancour, and all the buffets of unhappy fortune,
all the political and social vicissitudes of nearly a century, could not
cloud his content, or diminish his pleasure in life and the sun. He was
true to his exiled Princes, till they, or one of them at least, ceased
to be true to themselves. He was perhaps the only friend whom Rousseau
could not drag into a quarrel or estrange, and the only companion whom
Frederick the Great loved so well that he never made experiments on him
in the art of tyrannical tormenting. Familiar, rather than respectful,
with Voltaire, the Earl, who remembered Swift in his prime, was fond of
gossiping with Hume and of bantering d’Alembert. Kind and charitable
to all men, he was especially considerate and indulgent to the young,
from the little exiled Duke of York to the soured Elcho, and the still
unsuspected Glengarry. One exception alone did the Earl make (unless we
believe Rousseau): he could not endure, and would not be reconciled to,
Prince Charles. If in this he may seem severe, no other offence is laid
to his charge, though modern opinion may condemn his cool acquiescence
in desperate plots which he probably never expected to be carried into
action. Otherwise the Earl presents the ideal of a good and wise man of
the world, saved from all excess, and all disappointment, by the gifts
of humour and good-humour. When we add that ‘the violet of a legend,’ of
unfortunate but life-long love, blows on the grave of the good Earl, it
will be plain that, though not a hero, like his brother, Marshal Keith,
he was a character of no common distinction and charm. His life, too, is
almost an epitome of the Jacobite struggle from 1715 to 1757. The Earl
was ever behind the scenes.
Though tenth Earl (the first of the hereditary Marischals to be ‘belted
earl’ was William, in 1458), George Keith was apt to mock at hereditary
_noblesse_. _Stemmata quid faciunt?_ He had a story of a laird who
grumbled, during a pestilence, ‘In such times a gentleman is not sure of
his life.’ The date of his birth was never known. In old age he cast an
agreeable mystery about this point. He was once heard to say that he was
twenty-seven in 1712; if so, he died at ninety-three (1778). Others date
his birth in 1693, others in 1689; d’Alembert says (on the authority of
one who had the fact from Ormonde) that he was _premier brigadier_ of
that general’s army in 1712. An engraving from a portrait of the Earl
as a young man represents him as then twenty-three years of age. If the
engraving was done in Paris, as seems probable, in 1716, he would be born
in 1693. Oddly enough the pseudo-Memoirs of Madame de Créquy (who is made
to speak of him as her true love) throw a similar cloud over the year of
her birth. Concerning the Earl’s father, Lockhart of Carnwath writes that
he had great vivacity of wit, an undaunted courage, and a soul capable of
great things, ‘but no seriousness.’ His mother, of the house of Perth,
was necessarily by birth a Jacobite. The song makes her say:
I’ll be Lady Keith again
The day the King comes o’er the water.
The Earl’s tutor was probably Meston, the Jacobite wit and poet.
The Earl succeeded his father in 1712. His own first youth had been
passed in Marlborough’s wars; from 1712 to the death of Queen Anne, and
the overthrow of hopes of a Restoration by the Tories, he lived about
town, a brilliant colonel of Horse Guards, short in stature and slight in
build, but with a beautiful face, and dark, large eyes. So we see him in
the portrait of about 1716.
The following letter, the earliest known letter of the Earl, displays him
as a disciplinarian. Conceivably the mutinous Wingfeild was a Jacobite,
but, by September 12, 1714, the chance for a rising of the Guards for
King James had passed, Queen Anne was dead, and the Earl was still
colonel in the army of George I.
_To Lord Chief Justice Parker_
Stowe MSS. 750, f. 58.
‘September 12, 1714.
‘My Lord,—As soon as I heard that your Lordship had granted
a Habeas Corpus for Thomᵃˢ Wingfeild one of the private men
of His Majesties Second Troop of Horse Grenadier Guards under
my Command, I sent a Gentleman to wait upon your Lordship and
to acquaint you with the reasons for my ordering Wingfeild to
be confin’d to the Marshall of the Horse Guards according to
the practice of the Army, but your Lordship was not then at
your Chambers; I now take the liberty to inform you that the
Prisoner has not only been guilty of uttering menacing words &
insolently refusing to comply with the establisht Regulations
of the Troop, (to which Regulations he has subscribd) but has
also been endeavouring to raise a mutiny therein, which crimes
among Soldiers being of dangerous Consequences I did intend to
have him try’d by a General Court Martial, that he might have
been exemplarily punisht as far as the Law allows to deter
others from the like practices: but as there is no warrant for
holding a Court Martial for the Horse Guards extant, & I being
unwilling to trouble their Excellᶜⁱᵉˢ the Lords Justices on
this occasion, I had ordered my officers to hold a Regimental
Court Martial upon him yesterday in order to break him at
the head of the Troop, which is the only punishment they can
inflict, but they did not proceed then on accoᵗ of the Habeas
Corpus; this I thought fit to acquaint your Lordship with and
to assure you that I am &c.
‘MARISCHALL.’
From Lockier, Spence got the familiar anecdote of the Earl’s conduct
at Queen’s Anne’s death, before the projects for a Restoration of the
Chevalier were completed. Ormonde, Atterbury, and the Earl met, when
Atterbury bade Marischal go out (with the Horse Guards) and proclaim King
James. Ormonde wished to consult the Council. ‘Damn it,’ says Atterbury
in a great heat (for he did not value swearing), ‘you very well know
that things have not been concerted enough for that yet, and that we
have not a moment to lose.’ That moment they lost, and a vague anecdote
represents the Earl as weeping, after the battle of Sheriffmuir, over the
many dead men who might have been alive had he taken Atterbury’s advice.
D’Alembert, who does not mention Atterbury, attributes the idea of an
instant stroke for the King to the Earl himself.[2]
When the rising of 1715 was in preparation, the Earl, according to
d’Alembert, wrote to James, telling him that ‘a sovereign deprived of
his own must share the dangers of those who risked their lives for his
sake,’ and so made him ‘leave his retreat’ at Bar-le-Duc. But James’s
natural brother, the Duke of Berwick, on July 16, 1715, had already
given the same advice. ‘Your honour is at stake, your friends will give
over the game if they think you backward.’ James replied that he hoped
to be at Dieppe by the 30th of the month. Within five days Berwick was
crying off from the task of accompanying his brother, who replied with a
repressed emotion, ‘You know what you owe to me, what you owe to your own
reputation and honour, what you have promised to the Scotch and to me....
I shall not, therefore, bid you adieu, for I expect that we shall soon
meet.’
It was now not the King who turned laggard, but Berwick who advised
delay. ‘_I find Rancourt_’ (the King), he says, ‘very much set on his
_journey_.’ In brief, it was Berwick and Bolingbroke who kept James
back, though with great difficulty. He needed no urging (as d’Alembert
suggests) by our Earl. ‘I fear I shall scarce be able to hinder him from
passing the sea,’ says Berwick (August 6).
Then Louis XIV. died, all was confusion, and the Regent Orléans detained
Berwick in France, exactly at the time when Mar went to raise the
Highlands. What with Bolingbroke, Berwick, the death of Louis XIV., and
the intrigues of Orléans in the Hanoverian interest, James, travelling
disguised through an Odyssey of perils, did not leave France for Scotland
till mid-December. A month before (November 13) Mar had been practically
defeated at Sheriffmuir, and Forster, Mackintosh, Derwentwater and
Kenmure had surrendered at Preston. The King thus came far too late, but
certainly by no lack of readiness on his part.
D’Alembert makes the Earl utter a fine constitutional speech on the
duties of a king when he proclaimed James at Edinburgh. Unluckily, on
this occasion James was never proclaimed at Edinburgh by anybody. The
_Éloge_ of d’Alembert is eloquent, but it is not history. It has been the
chief source for the Earl’s biography.
The Earl had doubtless been won over by Mar to resign his English
commission, and desert King George for King James. The story is told
that, as he rode North from London in 1715 to join Mar in the Highlands,
he met his young brother James riding South to take service with King
George. He easily induced his brother to share his own fortunes, and
Prussia ultimately gained the great soldier thus lost to England. The
Covenanting historian, Wodrow, avers that ‘Marischal was bankrupt,’
and therefore eager for _res novæ_. But he would have been a Jacobite
in any case. As to the Earl’s conduct when Mar’s ill-organised and
ill-supplied rising drew fatally to a head at Sheriffmuir, his brother,
the Field-Marshal of Prussia, in his fragmentary Memoir, tells all that
we know. The Earl, with ‘his own squadron of horse’ and some Macdonalds,
was sent to occupy a rising ground, the enemy being, as was thought,
in Dunblane. From the height, however, the whole hostile army was seen
advancing, and the Earl sent to bid Mar bring up his forces. There was
much confusion, and the Earl’s squadron of horse was left in the centre
of the line. Mar’s right with the Earl routed Argyll’s left, while
Argyll’s left routed Mar’s right. ‘In the affair neither side gained much
honour,’ says Keith, ‘but it was the entire ruin of our party.’ Half of
Mar’s force, having thrown down their plaids,[3] were now unclothed: many
had deserted; the evil news of the Preston surrender came, the leaders
were at odds among themselves, 6,000 Dutch troops were advancing from
England. Seaforth and Huntly took their followers back to the North, and
when King James arrived at Perth, late in December, he found a wintry
welcome, soldiers few and dispirited, and dissensions among the officers.
The army wasted away while Cadogan, Argyll, and the Dutch troops, greatly
outnumbering the Jacobites, advanced on Perth through the snow.
James’s army now beat a retreat, with no point to make for, as Inverness
was in the hands of the enemy. Mar, therefore, advised James, who had not
ammunition enough for one day’s fight (thanks to Bolingbroke, said the
Jacobites), to take ship at Montrose. If he stayed, the enemy would make
their utmost efforts to come up with and capture him. If he departed,
the retreating Highlanders would be less hotly pursued. James consulted
Marischal, who wished to offer no opinion, alleging ‘his age and want of
experience,’ says Keith.[4] Finally, he privately admitted to Mar that
‘he did not think it for the King’s honour, nor for that of the nation,
to give up the game without putting it to a tryall.’ Powder enough for
one day’s fight could be got at Aberdeen; he hoped to gain recruits as
they went North, and, at worst, James, if beaten, could escape from the
West coast. ‘Mar seemed to be convinced of the truth of this’ (very like
Bobbing John); ‘however, a ship was already provided,’ and James, with
Mar, Melfort, and others, eloped; the King characteristically leaving
all his money to recompense the peasants who had suffered by the war.
James was no coward, he had charged the English lines repeatedly, at
the head of the Royal Household, in the battle of Malplaquet, where he
was wounded. In his journey from Lorraine to the coast he had run the
gauntlet of Stair’s cut-throats. But a Scottish winter, a starveling
force, no powder, and Mar’s advice, had taken the heart out of the
adventurer.
According to Mar, the Earl had orders to sail with the King, ‘who waited
on the ship above an hour and a half, but, by what accident we yet
know not, they did not come, and there was no waiting longer.’[5] ‘The
King and we are in no small pain to know what is become of our friends
wee left behind.’ D’Alembert says that the Earl refused to sail. ‘Your
Majesty is to protect yourself for your friends. I shall share the
sorrows of those who remain true to you in Scotland, I shall gather them,
and shall not leave without them.’ If Mar tells truth, the Earl can
have made no such speech. A modest man, he remained at his duty without
rhetoric.
The dispirited and deserted Highland army moved North, and the Earl was
sent to ask Huntly whether he would join them—in which case they would
fight at Inverness—or not. ‘He easily perceived by Huntly’s answer
that nothing was to be expected from him.’ They, therefore, marched
to Ruthven, whence they scattered, Keith and the Earl fared westwards
with Clanranald’s men, and made for the Islands. Hence they sailed in a
French ship on May 1, and reached St. Pol de Léon on May 12. There were
a hundred officers of them together, and all this destroys d’Alembert’s
romance, modelled on the adventures of Prince Charles, about the Earl’s
dangers and the noble behaviour of the crofters among whom he was
wandering. An English force was, indeed, at one time within thirty miles
of the fugitives, but there was nobody to whom Clanranald’s men could
have been betrayed, not that any one was likely to betray them, and the
Earl Marischal and James Keith with them. In truth, d’Alembert confused
this occasion with another, after Glenshiel fight, in 1719.
Many of the fugitives went to James at Avignon, but Keith stayed in
Paris, where Mary of Modena received him well. ‘Had I conquered a kingdom
for her she could not have said more.’ She gave him 1,000 livres, while
James granted what he could, 200 crowns yearly. Keith does not say that
the Earl was in Paris, where his portrait was probably painted at this
date. There, however (as is known from an unpublished MS.), he certainly
was, and he might even, by Stair’s mediation, have obtained his pardon.
But he supposed that the cause would presently triumph, and declined to
make any advances to George I. He was now in correspondence with General
Dillon, James’s military representative in Paris. In August, 1717, Dillon
writes to him about one ‘Prescot,’ who is suspected of intending to
murder James in Italy; he refers to Lord Peterborough, who was arrested
on this impossible charge at Bologna in September 1717.[6] In 1719 the
Earl and his brother went to Spain. There was then war between Spain and
England, Ormonde was with Alberoni, and was to be employed. Keith would
have gone thither earlier, but ‘I was then too much in love to think of
quitting Paris.’
Here, in Paris, 1717-18, if ever, would have to be fixed the Earl’s
legendary romance with Mademoiselle de Froullay (Madame de Créquy). The
story, a very pretty one, is given in this lady’s Mémoires, an ingenious
but fraudulent compilation.
An author best known for his plagiarisms seized on Madame de Créquy as a
likely old person to have left memoirs behind her. By aid of gossip and
books he patched up the amusing but mythical records which he attributed
to the lady. Why he selected the Earl as the lover of her girlhood we can
only guess; but dates and facts make the pretty tale incredible, though
it has found its way into Chambers’s account of the Earl’s career. Thus,
for example, it is averred by Sainte-Beuve, on the authority of her man
of business, M. Percheron, that Madame de Créquy was born in 1714. The
love story of 1717, told in her Memoirs, beginning in the Earl’s attempt
to teach her Spanish and English, and interrupted by the fact that he was
a ‘Calvinist,’ is therefore improbable. The lady was but three years old
when her affections, according to her apocryphal Memoirs, were blighted.
The lovers met again, when the Earl was Prussian Ambassador at Versailles
in 1753. ‘We had not had the time to discover each other’s faults, we
had not suffered each by the other’s imperfections, both remained under
that illusion which experience destroyed not: we were happy in the sweet
thought of ineffable excellence, and when we met in the wane of life,
and either saw the other’s white hair, we felt an emotion so pure, so
tender, and so solemn, that no other sentiment, no other impression
known to mortals, can be compared to it.’ All this is charming, but it
cannot conceivably be true! The Earl composed his one madrigal under the
influence of this elderly emotion (say the pseudo-Memoirs), a tear stole
down his withered cheek, and he assured Madame de Créquy that they would
meet in Heaven. ‘I loved you too much not to embrace your religion.’ So
runs the romance of the pseudo-Madame Créquy.
In fact, the Earl remained a member of the persecuted Episcopal Church
in Scotland. In Rome a priest tried to convert him, beginning with the
Trinity. ‘Your Lordship believes in the Trinity?’ ‘I do,’ said the Earl;
‘but that just fills up my measure. A drop more and I spill all.’
Madame de Créquy’s Mémoires are obviously a daring forgery, but the
‘violet of a legend’ has a fragrance of its own. The Earl was in 1716,
as his portrait shows, a singularly handsome young man, with large hazel
eyes and an eager face, with a complexion like a girl’s beneath his brown
curls. Madame de Créquy is made to say, by way of giving local colour,
that he greatly resembled a portrait of _le beau Caylus_, a favourite of
Henri III. The portrait was in her family.
In 1719, to return to facts, the two Keiths were received in Spain by the
Duc de Liria, son of the Duke of Berwick, who had heard of an intended
expedition to England. In Barcelona the splendour of their welcome, they
travelling incognito, amazed them. They had been, in fact, mistaken for
their rightful King and one of his officers, who were expected. From
Barcelona they went to Madrid, whence Alberoni sent the Earl posting all
about the country after Ormonde, who was to command the invading forces.
Ormonde was a kind of figure-head of Jacobite respectability. He was
presumed to be the idol of the British army at the time of Queen Anne’s
death; he had added his mess to the general chaos of Tory imbecility in
1714, and, in place of playing Monk’s part in a new Restoration, had fled
abroad. A few of his letters of 1719 to the Earl survive: he hopes for
‘the justice which the Cause deserves,’ and when his fleet is scattered
in the usual way, reports the uneasiness of James about the Earl.[7]
The Earl in Spain arranged what he could with the Cardinal, while
Keith passed through France, then hostile to Spain, and met the exiled
Tullibardine in Paris. Here all was confusion, the Jacobites—Seaforth,
Glendarule, and Tullibardine—being deep in the accustomed jealousies.
They sailed, however, and reached the Lewes, where Keith met his
brother, the Earl; but here divided counsels and squabbles about rank
and commissions arose. The Earl succeeded in bringing the Spanish
auxiliary forces to the mainland, and was for marching at once against
Inverness. The other faction, that of Seaforth and Tullibardine, dallied:
the ammunition, stored in a ruinous old castle on an island, was mostly
seized by English vessels. News arrived that Ormonde’s fleet, sailing
from Spain, had been dispersed on the seas, and the Highlanders came in
very reluctantly. The Jacobites landed at the head of Loch Duich, and
were posted on a hillside in Glenshiel, commanding the road to Inverness.
Hence the English forces drove them to the summit of the mountain, and
night fell. They had neither food, powder, nor any confidence in their
men, so the Spaniards surrendered, the Highlanders dispersed, and Keith
thus began his glorious military career in a style somewhat discouraging.
Lord George Murray, later the general in the Rising of 1745, was also in
this rather squalid engagement. Keith was suffering from a fever, and
he with his brother ‘lurcked in the mountains.’ On this occasion, no
doubt, the Earl profited by the loyalty of his countrymen, among whom
(says an anonymous informant of d’Alembert’s) he moved without disguise.
He is even said to have been present when a proclamation was read aloud
offering a reward for his apprehension. His adventures increased his love
for his own people: indeed, he certainly espoused the Jacobite cause as a
national Scottish patriot, not for dynastic reasons.
Keith and his brother, after ‘lurcking’ for months in the Northern
wilds, escaped from Aberdeen to Holland, in September 1719. Thence they
made for Spain, intending to enter France by Sedan. But as they had no
passports they were stopped in France and imprisoned. Keith hit on an
ingenious way of getting rid of their Spanish commissions, which would
have been compromising, and a letter to the Earl from the Princesse de
Conti served as a voucher for their respectability, and procured their
release. They reached Paris when the fever of the Mississippi Scheme
was at its height. Jacobites as needy as they, the Oglethorpe girls
and George Kelly, probably got hints from Law, the great financial
adventurer, and founder of the Mississippi Scheme. The young Jacobite
ladies bought in at par and sold at a huge premium. They thus won their
own _dots_, and married great French nobles. Even poor George Kelly had
a success in speculation. He was, at this time, Atterbury’s secretary,
and being involved in his fall, passed fourteen years in the Tower. In
1745 he was one of the famed Seven Men of Moidart, but none the dearer
on that account to the Earl, who never trusted him, and, in 1750, caused
him to be banished from the service of the Prince. All these adventurers,
Law, the Oglethorpes, Olive Trant, Kelly, and the Keiths, may have met in
Paris, after Glenshiel. But the Earl and his brother did not make their
fortunes in the Mississippi Scheme. They had no money, and Keith frankly
expresses his contempt for the speculations after which all the world
was running mad. The brothers passed to Montpellier, Keith attempted to
enter Spain by Toulouse, the Earl by the Pyrenees. Months later Keith
tried the Pyrenees passes, and there, at an inn, met his brother, who had
been arrested and imprisoned for six weeks. The King of France had just
set him free, with orders to leave the kingdom, and the wandering pair
of exiles went to Genoa, then a focus of Jacobite intrigue, whence they
sailed to Rome, to see ‘the King, our Master.’
Jacobites lived in an eternal hurry-scurry. James had been driven
from France to Lorraine; then to Avignon, where Stair planned his
assassination;[8] then to Urbino, Bologna, and Rome. Sailing for Spain,
in 1719, he had been obliged to put in near Hyères, and there to dance
all night—the melancholy monarch—at a ball in a rural inn. Spain could do
nothing for him, and he returned to Rome, whither Charles Wogan brought
him a bride, fair, unhappy Clementina Sobieska, just rescued from an
Austrian prison. Keith says nothing of her, but tells how, at Cestri
de Levanti, his brother called on Cardinal Alberoni, now fallen from
power and in exile. The Earl, with some lack of humour, wanted to tell
the Cardinal all about the Glenshiel fiasco, but was informed that the
statesman had no longer the faintest concern with the affairs of Spain or
interest in the gloomy theme.
From Leghorn the brothers went by land through Pisa, Florence, and
Siena to Rome. The King, ‘who knew we were in want of money,’ sent Hay
to borrow 1,000 crowns from the Pope, ‘which was refused on pretence of
poverty; this I mention only to shew the genious of Clement XI., and
how little regard Churchmen has for those who has abandoned all for
religion.’ His Majesty, therefore, raised the money from a banker. The
exiled King’s chief occupation was providing for his destitute subjects:
most of his letters were begging letters.
The point for which the Keiths had been making ever since their escape
from Scotland was Spain. Baffled in attempting to cross the Pyrenees,
and penniless, they reached Spain by taking Rome on their way, James
providing the funds with the difficulty which has been described. From
Civita Vecchia they sailed back to Genoa. Now, Jacobite privateers, under
Morgan, Nick Wogan, and other wandering knights, were rendering Genoa
unluckily conspicuous by making the harbour their head-quarters. The tiny
squadron for years hung about all coasts to aid in a new rising.
The English Minister, D’Avenant, threatened to bombard the town if the
Keiths were not expelled, while, if they _were_, the Spanish Minister
said that he would insist on the banishment of all the Catalan refugees
in Genoa. To oblige the Senate of Genoa in their awkward position,
Keith and the Earl departed, and coasted from the town to Valentia in a
felucca, sleeping on shore every night.
It is probable that the brothers were suspected of a part in that form
of the Jacobite plot which chanced to exist at the moment. From 1688
to 1760, or later, there had been really but one plot, handed on from
scheming sire to son, and adapting itself to new conditions as they
happened to arise. The study of the plot is, indeed, a pretty exercise
in evolution. The object being a Restoration, the most obvious plan is
a landing of foreign troops in England, with a simultaneous rising of
the faithful. First France is to send the foreign troops; and she did
actually despatch them, or try to despatch them, at various times—witness
La Hogue, Dunkirk, and Quiberon Bay. When France will not stir, other
Powers are approached. Sweden would have played this part, in 1718, but
for the death of Charles XII. Then Spain made her effort, in 1719, with
the usual results. There were hopes, again, from Russia, as from Sweden,
and from Prussia in 1753.
After each failure in this kind, the Jacobites tried ‘to do the thing
themselves,’ as Prince Charles said, either by assassination schemes
(which Charles Edward invariably set his foot on), or by a simultaneous
rising in London and the Highlands, or by such a rising aided by Scots
or Irish troops in foreign service landed on the coast. From the failure
at Glenshiel to 1722 this was the aspect of the plot. Atterbury, Oxford,
Orrery, and North and Grey were managers in England, Mar and Dillon in
Paris, while Morgan and Nick Wogan commanded the poor little fleet.[9]
Ormonde, in Spain, was to carry over Irish regiments in Spanish service.
The Jacobites had the ship prepared years before for the expedition of
Charles XII., with two or three other vessels. The gallant Nick Wogan,
who, as a mere boy, had been pardoned, after Preston, for rescuing a
wounded Hanoverian officer under fire, was hovering on the seas from
Genoa to the Groin. George Kelly was going to and fro between Paris
and London, ‘a man of far more temper, discretion, and real art’ than
Atterbury, says Speaker Onslow.
When the scheme for Ormonde’s amateur invasion failed, a mob-plot of
Layer’s followed it; but all was revealed. Kelly and Atterbury were
seized; Atterbury was exiled, Kelly lay in the Tower, and Layer was
hanged.
Keith says nothing of any part borne by his brother or himself in these
feeble conspiracies. One Neynho, arrested in London, averred that the
Earl Marischal had been in town on this business, in disguise, and had
shared his room. Neynho merely guessed that his companion was the Earl,
who certainly was on friendly terms with Atterbury. Long afterwards he
wrote (1737): ‘I was told in Italy that Pope had thought of publishing
a collection of familliair letters, particularly of ye Bishop; as I was
honoured with Many, I sent copys of a part and parts (_sic_) to Pope.’
These, however, could not have been political epistles. The originals
must have perished when the Earl burned all his papers, as d’Alembert’s
authorities report, in 1745.[10]
On the whole, it seems certain that Keith, at least, was not in the plots
of 1720-22; Keith, indeed, lay ill in Paris in 1723-24, suffering from a
tumour. The Earl now held a commission from Spain, which secured for him
a pension, irregularly paid; but, being a Protestant, he never received
an active command, except once, in an affair with the Moors. There was
no harm, it seemed, in sending a heretic to fight against infidels. His
great friend in Spain was the Duchess of Medina Sidonia, who was anxious
to convert him.
‘She spoke to him of a certain miracle, of daily occurrence in her
country. There is a family, or caste, which, from father to son, have
the power of going into the flames without being burned, and who by dint
of charms permitted by the Inquisition can extinguish fires. The Earl
promised to surrender to a proof so evident, if he might be present and
light the fire himself. The lady agreed, but the _questadore_, as these
people are called, would never try the experiment, though he had done so
on a former occasion; he said that fire had been made by a heretic, who
mingled charms with it, and that he felt them from afar.’
This was unlucky, as these families whom fire does not take hold on
exist to-day in Fiji, as of old among the Hirpi of Mount Soracte.
The Earl had no trouble with the Inquisition, being allowed to have what
books he pleased, as long as he did not lend them to Spanish subjects.
‘His religious ideas were far from strict ... but he could not endure
to hear these questions touched on when women were present, or the
poor in spirit: it was a kind of talk which in general he carefully
avoided,’—except among _philosophes_.[11] Hume tells us that the Earl
Marischal and Helvetius thought they were ascribing an excellent
quality to Prince Charles when they said that he ‘had learned from the
philosophers at Paris to affect a contempt of all religion.’ It seems
improbable that the Earl was more ‘emancipated’ than Hume, but his
wandering life had made him acquainted with the extremes of Scottish
Presbyterianism, with the Inquisition in Spain, the devotions of his King
in Rome, the levities of Voltaire and Frederick, and all the contemptuous
certainties of the Encyclopédistes. The Earl rather loved a bold jest
or two, in philosophic company, and his _mots_ were not always in good
taste. As a Norseman’s religion was mainly that of his sword, the Earl’s
appears to have been that of his character, which was instinctively
affectionate, indulgent, and charitable. If he had neither Faith nor
Hope, which we cannot assume, he was rich in Charity.
It is, perhaps, no longer possible to trace all the wanderings of the
Earl after his brother entered the Russian service in 1728. In those
years the exiles were mainly concerned about the quarrels between
James and his wife, which had an ill effect on their Royal reputation
in Europe. The Courts chiefly solicited for aid at this period were
those of Moscow and Vienna. Spain did not pay her pension to James with
regularity, and the Earl Marischal, then as later, may have suffered from
the same inconvenience. This may account for his return to Rome, where he
resided in James’s palace, about 1730-34. ‘He has the esteem of all that
has the honour to be known to him, and may be justly styled the honour
of our Cause,’ writes William Hay to Admiral Gordon, who represented
Jacobite interests in Russia (Feb. 2, 1732). The little Court at Rome
was as full of jealousies as if it had been at St. James’s. Murray,
brother of Lord Mansfield, was Minister, under the title of Lord Dunbar,
while James’s other ‘favourite’ Hay (Lord Inverness) was at Avignon out
of favour, and had turned Catholic. The pair were generally detested by
the other mock-courtiers. These gentlemen had formed themselves into an
Order of Chivalry, ‘The Order of Toboso,’ alluding to their Quixotry.
Prince Charles (aged twelve) and the Duke of York (a hero of seven) were
the patrons. ‘They are the most lively and engaging two boys this day on
earth,’ writes William Hay. The Knights of the Order sent to Gordon in
Russia their cheerful salutations, signed by ‘Don Ezekiel del Toboso’
(Zeky Hamilton), ‘Don George Keith’ (the Earl), and so on. They declined
to elect Murray, because he had ‘the insolence to fail in his respect to
a right honourable lady who is the ever honoured protectress of the most
illustrious Order of Toboso,’ Lady Elizabeth Caryl. A number of insults
to Murray follow in the epistle.[12]
All this was rather dull, distasteful work for the Earl. He received
from James the Order of the Thistle (‘the green ribbon’); but, except
perhaps at Rome, he would not wear a decoration not more imposing than
that of the Toboso Order. Writing to his brother, he drew a pretty
picture of the little Duke of York, who was fond of the Earl, and used
to bring his weekly Report on Conduct to be criticised and sent on to
Keith, far away in Russia. Keith was asked to comment on it, or, if he
did not, the Earl was diplomatist enough to do so in his name. Prince
Charles the Earl seems to have disliked from the first. He had already,
at the age of thirteen, ‘got out of the hands of his governors,’ the Earl
writes, and indeed the Prince’s spelling alone proves the success with
which he evaded instruction. But, to please the little Duke, the Earl
sent for a sword from Russia. The Duke was a pretty child, and wept from
disappointment when his elder brother, in 1734, went off to the siege of
Gaeta, while he, a warrior of nine, remained in Rome.
The Earl disliked the tiny jealous Court; the impotent cabals, the
priests who tried to convert him. Writing to David Hume long afterwards,
in 1762, he said, ‘I wish I could see you, to answer honestly all your
[historical] questions: for, though I had my share of folly with others,
yet, as my intentions were at bottom honest, I should open to you my
whole budget.’ When he wrote thus he had made his peace with England. Why
he did so we shall try to point out later.