Part 15
What the Campbells were in Argyll and Breadalbane, the Grahams were in Menteith, intruders and agents of civilisation, who had to hang their heads for long through a series of miscalculations and misfortunes. The house of Menteith was an unlucky one ever since one of its sons betrayed Wallace; nor did it prosper by the earldom of Strathearn, through which it claimed to inherit the purest strain of royal blood. It sank into misery and extinction, having passed from Menteiths and Stewarts to the Grahams, on whom also a curse seemed to come through the murder of James I. Other branches of this family gained futile distinction, in the meteoric career of Montrose and the dark fame of Claverhouse, who to an uncovenanting generation looks now not so black as he was once painted. The mysterious murder of Lord Menteith’s heir by an intimate friend has been told in _The Legend of Montrose_. In the next century the empty title was claimed by one who literally died a beggar on the roadside.
The _jeune premier_, though not the hero, in the _Lady of the Lake_, was a Graham who appears no further unfortunate than by having a double allowance of powerful rivals, to hinder his course of true love for the daughter of a once greater house that then lay under heavy clouds of royal disfavour. This heroine, we remember, was Ellen Douglas, conveniently exiled to a nook rather out of the way of Douglas power and pride. Did it ever occur to a careless reader to ask why here she had been brought up by an aunt, taking the place of a mother? Looking away from the Grahams a moment, I should like to quote a piece of commentary which my friend Mr. H. R. Allport believes himself to have made for the first time, in a privately-printed volume.
The heroines of the Waverley Novels, with a single prominent exception, are all of them motherless. They had mothers presumably, but their mothers filled untimely graves. The one prominent exception, of course, is Lucy Ashton, whose mother, Lady Ashton, is an important personage in the story. In _Waverley_ there are two heroines, Flora M’Ivor and Rose Bradwardine, who are both motherless. In _Guy Mannering_ there are also two heroines, Julia Mannering and Lucy Bertram, who are both motherless. In _Rob Roy_ the heroine is Die Vernon, who is motherless. In _Old Mortality_ the heroine is Edith Bellenden, who is motherless. In _The Heart of Midlothian_ the heroine is Jeanie Deans, who is motherless. In _Ivanhoe_ there are again two heroines, Rebecca and Rowena, who are both motherless. In _Kenilworth_ the heroine is Amy Robsart, who is motherless. In _The Pirate_ the heroines are Minna and Brenda Troil, who are motherless. In _The Fortunes of Nigel_ the heroine is Margaret Ramsay, who is motherless. In _Quentin Durward_ the heroine is Isabelle, Countess of Croye, who is motherless. In _Woodstock_ the heroine is Alice Lee, who is motherless. In _The Fair Maid of Perth_ the heroine is Catherine Glover, who is motherless. I need not go through the entire list. I believe that Lucy Ashton is the only exception of note.
It would be interesting to know Scott’s reason for what can hardly be the result of accident. He may possibly have thought that a girl deprived of a mother’s care and control was likely to grow up a more unconventional, and therefore a more picturesque, personage than one more happily circumstanced. But this is a mere guess.
I can think of another guess. It is known how Scott was disappointed in early love, and how he married a lady of French extraction, who makes a very shadowy appearance in biographies of him. Now that his children’s children are dead, there can be no harm in hinting that his wife was accused of a weakness which went to diminish the respect if not the affection of her family. An old friend of my father, still alive, heard the matter put very plainly by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, who told him how he himself had given up dining with the Scotts, because of the state in which he frequently found the lady of the house. That bit of hushed-up scandal would explain why the husband shrank from describing a mother’s influence, as touching a sore point in his own family life. His letters and diaries also dwell far more upon his children than upon their mother.
From this whispered aside, let us turn back to the Grahams of Menteith. At last the race began to flourish steadily in the new dukedom seated on Loch Lomond, forgetting its feuds with Argyll and overcoming its guerrilla neighbours, Macgregors and such-like. The Grahams may now look on themselves as a great clan that has absorbed the sentiment of the heather and the forest among which they made clearings. But they surely came from the south, one sept of them seen by Scott at home in the Debatable Land on the English border. The very name has a hint of darkly dubious origin. One ancient warrior of the race is said to have broken through the Roman wall, which, in memory of that exploit, became known as Graham’s Dyke. But the name Graham’s Dyke turns up in other distant parts of Britain--as, for instance, on Harrow Weald by the house of that dealer in modern “magic and spells,” Mr. W. S. Gilbert, where it is more plausibly interpreted as Grim’s Dyke, a name given in awe by rude Saxons to what seemed the work of supernatural hands, such as near Brighton, with a flourish of legend, has been bluntly christened the Devil’s Dyke. The Grahams had best look out for another forefather. _Quelle généalogie!_ as a Czar of Russia exclaimed in amazement, when he had interpreted to him at the Mansion House that an unknown uniform denoted _un frère aîné de la Trinité_.
We know how more than one “Dyke” was run across the country as a barrier against naked hosts of the North. But this part of the Highland line had a natural boundary in the Forth, of which the saying was that it “bridled the wild Highlandman.” Swimming is an accomplishment given by Scott to Malcolm Graeme and other of his heroes; but it was not common among Highlanders of the last generation; and I am doubtful how far a poet had authority for the statement--
We _swam_ ower to fause English ground And danced ourselves dry to the pibroch’s sound.
The young Forth, known in its cradle as the _Avon Dhu_, soon gathers strength as it drains the flats of Flanders Moss, which is taken to be the dregs of a forest cut down by Roman soldiery; and its only safe passage, even that impracticable in spate weather, was by the Fords of Frew, where Rob Roy made his bold escape from Montrose’s horsemen. This point proved so important as to be guarded by a fortalice, when there was no wale of bridges on the Highland line. Scott confesses to an anachronism in accommodating Aberfoyle with a bridge in Rob Roy’s day. The first bridge was at Stirling, one of great antiquity, as shown by the part it played in Wallace’s victory over the English knights heedlessly divided on the crossing. A public-spirited tradesman of Stirling, Robert Spittall, “Tailor to King James IV.” built a bridge over the Teith at Doune, as an inscription upon it records. Once across this, an invading army from the North had still to pass the Forth, its bridge guarded by Stirling Castle.
The value of this double line of defence for the Lowlands was well shown in 1715. When Mar lay so long idle at Perth with the largest Jacobite army ever mustered could he have held it together, his inactivity was caused not only by want of skill and decision, but by the fact of the Forth fords being swollen by a wet winter, while Argyll had broken down the Teith Bridge at Doune. Mar found it easier to ship a detachment across the Firth of Forth than to get over the river near its source, an enterprise in which sly Rob Roy seems to have been in vain expected to guide him. When he did advance on Stirling it was by Allan Water, above which he met Argyll on Sheriffmuir, for that strange battle in which both sides were half-losers, half-winners.
Argyll’s moral victory appears to have been partly due to the Ochil boglands being frozen so as to bear the heavy regular dragoons. A little later and the frost would have been hard enough to make the unbridged rivers passable, as the Highland army could retreat from Perth across the ice-bound Tay. When Charles Edward advanced upon the Lowlands it was in a dry September that let him easily over the Forth, to march on in bravado within cannon-shot of Stirling Castle. To hinder his retreat he found Stirling Bridge broken down, which was repaired in haste for Cumberland’s march to the north.
Sheriffmuir, if we may trust historians like Blind Harry, was arena of an older and a bloodier battle, when Wallace is said to have exterminated an English army ten thousand strong; and scattered standing stones here are taken by the country-folk as memorials of that victory. The little town of Dunblane, with its restored Cathedral and its monuments of nobility, was well known to armies marching north and south on the road up Strathallan into Strathearn. Prince Charlie and Butcher Cumberland were lodged here in turn; and local legend makes the latter narrowly escape an end worse than that of Pyrrhus. A servant lass whose heart had been won by the Prince’s graciousness when she cleaned his boots, undertook to souse the Duke with boiling oil thrown from a window as he rode out of Dunblane; but the scalding douche lighted on his horse’s haunch, so that he got off with being flung into the mud.
Doune Castle guarded another road into the Highlands by way of Callander. In the ’45, as Captain Waverley found, it was held by the Jacobites to secure their passage of the Teith, and seems to have been the only spot in which they heard the mouse squeak rather than the lark sing. For a time it had for commander that “Black Knee” nephew of Rob Roy, who earned golden opinions in the neighbourhood by the considerate way in which he exercised his authority, not allowing dubious auxiliaries like Donald Bean Lean to have their will of the poor country-folk’s cattle and chickens. Even then it was in no case to stand a hot siege; and Scott found it “a noble ruin, dear to my recollections from associations which have been long and painfully broken.” It once made a stronghold for royal blood, the Dukes of Albany and the “bonnie Earls of Moray,” none of them so well remembered as the boy who came to dream among their memorials, and to retrace on pony-back the ways of audacious caterans and adventurous knights.
Well-known was all this country to young Walter Scott, when he spent long holidays at Cambusmore and other friendly mansions hereabout, his hosts as little thinking as himself how this idle callant was one day to increase the value of property in Menteith. Indeed, it is extraordinary how much at home he shows himself in most parts of Perthshire, so far from his native eyry. Through that heart of Scotland as we wandered together, the tales by which I have tried to cheer the reader’s way are mostly to be found transfused into his romances or tacked on them as illustrations in his lively introductions and notes. If I have forborne to repeat hackneyed epithets about the scenery of this region, it is because I take for granted that its features are familiar in Scott’s verse, which, let certain critics shut their ears as they will, still plays to general admiration the drum and trumpet part in the orchestra of British poets, not without interludes of sweeter strain that will be remembered long after more elaborate compositions have been whistled down the winds of fame.
We all know where to look for descriptions of Perthshire scenery; and I am the less bound to labour on word-painting, since in my case it may be hoped, after the words of another poet, that “the pictures for the page atone.” The artist here has done his part for both of us. The author modestly presents himself, rather, as a gossiping companion to the guide-book, which, in its up-to-date form, dwells more on details of useful information, and has less room for giving strangers some notion what life was in this region before its flush of romance had died away like an Alpine glow.
But soon now we are out of Perthshire, crossing the Forth into Stirling, whose citadel, “the bulwark of the North,” has been our beacon as we gossiped our way down the green Menteith Mesopotamia. The “Sons of the Rock” may receive me with a frown, declaring their county and not mine to be the true heart of Scotland, which I admit to have been for a time its central ganglion, whence the nerves of civilisation thrilled out through Highlands and Lowlands. We can both agree that the fat Lothians and the smoky Clyde were mere excrescences, which made a narrow escape of becoming no better than English borderlands. Stirling cannot at least complain that I failed to do it due honour in _Bonnie Scotland_. Now once more let us mount its castled rock to look back on such a prospect of Perthshire that nowhere could one have a nobler standpoint for bidding--
Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow! Farewell to the straths and green valleys below! Farewell to the forest and wild-hanging woods! Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods!
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Heart of Scotland, by A. R. Hope Moncrieff