Part 5
In those woods he might be sure Many and strange adventures would be found, But deeds, there wrought, were, like the place, obscure, And, for the greater part, not bruited round.
Here meet the borders of Perth, Argyll, and Inverness; and this wilderness must often have been wet by the blood of plaided warriors if not of mailed knight-errants. In our time, I am told, a lad fishing in one of the Rannoch lochs brought up a rusty sword to confirm the local legend of a meeting between Atholl and Lochiel to discuss a boundary dispute. Each chief was to come unattended; but each, like Roderick Dhu, had a force of clansmen hidden close at hand. When they got to hot words, Atholl first gave the signal, at which--
Instant from copse and heath, arose, Bonnets and spears and bended bows.
“These are Atholl wethers!” was their proud chief’s explanation, to which Lochiel replied by whistling up a troop of Camerons, whom he introduced as “Lochaber dogs.” But before it went beyond showing teeth the rivals drew upon that Caledonian prudence often found mingled with hot Highland blood. They agreed to settle their difference peacefully, in token whereof their claymores were hurled together, like Excalibur, into the dark waters of the mere.
In my own youth, this region still seemed a hunting-ground for adventurous experience. It is nearly half a century ago that I started out to walk through Atholl with some vague idea of roaming farther. From morn to eve I tramped on from Stanley, and got the length of Blair, some ten leagues. But a boy’s will, one knows, is the wind’s will: I found a train due at Blair, and took it home, I no longer remember why, unless that the day was hot and dusty, as it may well be on this sunny side of the Grampians, where, as a local guide-book puts it, the rain-clouds are apt to “have the bottom knocked out of them by the mountain peaks” fencing Atholl towards the Atlantic. But that fiasco of a walking tour I turned to account by writing a description, which I had the temerity to send to a London magazine. Strange to say, it found favour with the editor, perhaps because--heaven forgive me!--it was spiced by an affectation of Cockney jocularity as the point of view; and so appeared my first magazine article, which now, after many years, strikes me with shame and confusion. How many sympathetic authors might tell the same tale of callow efforts that filled them with pride to appear in print, but the day came when they would gladly have repaid tenfold that once welcome cheque, could they but cancel those pages, which at least may have the luck to blush unseen in some cobwebbed volume!
Coming back to Atholl after many days, my pen hopes to be guided in writing its name consistently. In my spelling days, it would be rather _Athole_ and _Argyle_; but the ducal lords of these regions seem to have set a fashion for the double _ll_. Also, by the light of nature, I pronounce the first syllable long and broad, as _Aw_tholl, whereas those of more picked speech say _Ah_tholl, which is easier to say than to sing. As to the spelling, Wordsworth appears to follow an older form--
Among the hills of _Athol_ was he born.
Was he, though? The poet makes no doubt of it. “The Boy of whom I speak,” came from a “native glen” among “Garry’s hills,” where his parents, though “exceeding poor,” had a “small hereditary farm.” This son of an Atholl bonnet-laird had duly gone “equipped
with satchel to a school,” and so well improved his opportunities of elementary education that in old age he was able “with an eye of scorn” to turn over the leaves of Voltaire in the original. He had a thorough Caledonian respect for the Sabbath, and for
Those godly men Who swept from Scotland, in a flame of zeal, Shrine, altar, image.
He even refused “wine and stouter cheer,” when offered by a fellow Atholman, who must have unlearned the native teetotalism while serving abroad--
Chaplain to a military troop Cheered by the Highland bagpipe, as they marched In plaided vest.
It may be more by good luck than good guidance that the poet does not try for a stroke of local colour in letting his abstinent hero sit down to a supper of “Atholl Brose.” The above hints of character, which will be recognised by patient Excursionists, go to show how Daddy Wordsworth, though he had the advantage of a visit to the Atholl Highlands, made the common English mistake about their inhabitants. John Bull will not understand how Scotland is inhabited by two different stocks, whose differences were much less blended in that Wanderer’s youth. It could then be said that the Sabbath had not yet got above the Pass of Killiecrankie; and it will be remembered how the Captain of Knockdunder proposed to deal with any “sincere professor” who scrupled to join in a unanimous call to whatever pastor pleased the duke and his deputy. Even in the poet’s day nobody seems to have rebuked him when he drove his poor beast along Highland roads on Sunday. An Atholl man’s clearest memory of Covenanters would be the check given to the victors of Killiecrankie when Cleland’s Cameronians held Dunkeld against those ex-oppressors of “godly” Whigs. The most “moderate” Presbyterian ministers had sometimes to be inducted by force in the Highlands, where still many of the people cling to the old faith. The Sandemanians sent missionaries into Atholl, who were received with indifference or ridicule; it was only two generations later that such evangelical gospellers as J. A. Haldane and Rowland Hill succeeded in blowing up, through the far North, a new flame of Calvinist enthusiasm, which in our time has turned this end of Scotland into a sanctuary for strict Sabbatarianism, much relaxed among city folk and even among the descendants of westland Whigs.
The Highlanders of the old dispensation had virtues of their own, but the poet was much left to himself when he conceived Glengarry as cradle for his idealised Scot, brought up among such a good Presbyterian family as would be more at home in the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_ upon the Carrick border--a picture quoted in full by Gilpin as an illustration of Highland manners!
Pure livers were they all, austere and grave, And fearing God, the very children taught Stern self-respect, a reverence for God’s word, And an habitual piety, maintained With strictness scarcely known on English ground.
The plain truth is that Wordsworth here was for confusing oil and vinegar. He had heard at school of a Drummond Jacobite exile who took asylum among the Lakes; and there he must often have met Scottish pedlars; then he indiscriminately “combined his information,” perhaps led astray by Walter Scott’s glorification of the Highlands. Behind the Highland line, where a tourist with a knapsack has in our time been hailed as a pedlar, there went about of old such itinerant dealers, who seem to have borne a quasi-sacred character when some such safe-conduct was much needed; but they, like Bryce Snailsfoot, were more apt to be canny Lowlanders, and so little of teetotallers that, as Scott tells us, “the chapman’s drouth” was a sly proverb in Scotland, where a colporteur of tracts could praise the “continual mercy” of a dram at every farm. In England the pedlar’s trade was so much in the hands of Scots--at one time counted by thousands across the Border--that these two titles to somewhat qualified respect appear to have become almost synonymous at the time when Wordsworth’s pedlar was laying up his little fortune. Instances of this may be found in that curious novel, _The Spiritual Quixote_, showing how a young gentleman who took to Methodist preaching passed among Derbyshire countryfolk as a “Scotch pedlar,” or simply as “a travelling Scotchman”; while in chapbooks of the period a “rider” is the term for that more exalted emissary of commerce who came to be a “traveller” _par excellence_, or a “drummer” in the figurative language of America. “Traveller” would hardly suit such an one in Scotland, where to “travel” implies specially the use of Shanks’ Naigie. Both in England and Scotland those packmen were sometimes looked on with suspicion by the authorities, accused of being political agitators as well as newsmongers, and, later on, of diffusing irreligious publications. On the Continent, also, Scots sought their fortune as pedlars, when no longer in such demand as soldiers.
Every one does not know how the Scottish pedlar has left heirs of direct succession in our day of stores and bargain sales. Quiet houses in certain streets of London that look down on open shops, would be found to have their back rooms full of drapery goods for hawking about at area doors or to working-men’s wives, cajolable into making purchases on credit which may ruin domestic peace. These tempters of humble Eves are likely to be Scots of the baser sort, and I venture to guess them as Lowlanders; they are said to be chiefly recruited in Galloway. Their dubious business is popularly known as the Scotch trade; and this seems to be responsible for keeping asmoulder among the lower classes such prejudices against the Scot as were fanned by Wilkes and Johnson, unequally yoked together in one antipathy. In Scotland, where the law is less hard-hearted and customers are more hard-headed, the “Scotch trade” does not now flourish; it is one thing Scottish which we need not be proud of bringing into England. Of course, there was a time when the northern pedlar played a useful and grateful part, as he tramped about out-of-the-way countrysides with his burden of wares and gossip--
A lone pedestrian with a scanty freight, Wished-for, or welcome, wheresoe’er he came Among the tenantry of thorpe and vill.
But I would bet all Whiteley’s stock against the poet laureate’s butt of sherry, that Wordsworth’s Wanderer spake not with the accent of Atholl but of Paisley or Kirkcudbright.
Having thus criticised an English poet, I venture to raise some doubt as to whether a native school of minstrels had gone deep into the matter, when they made lads with the philibeg come down from Atholl, chanting such ditties as--
The crown was half on Charlie’s head, Ae gladsome day, ae gladsome day; The lads that shouted joy to him, Are in the clay, are in the clay.
The Atholl men had been notably full of fight in older days: when Mackay’s bayonets were swept away at Killiecrankie, they no doubt took keen part in the chase; and in the ’15 they gave their quota of slippery recruits to Mar’s army at Perth. Not that even then all tartans, nor all fellow-clansmen, were under the same standard. At Killiecrankie a chasm bears the name of the Soldier’s Leap, the tradition about it being that a Highlander of Mackay’s army, flying before his own brother’s claymore, sprang nearly a dozen feet from rock to rock, and, when thus put in safety, jeeringly flung back his snuff-mull to the pursuer as a fraternal farewell. In the upper ranks of clandom such oppositions were more marked. When Dundee marched to Killiecrankie, Blair Castle was defended against the Revolution by a Jacobite factor, while the shifty Marquis of Atholl took the Bath waters as excuse for being out of the way. The first duke intrigued with the Jacobites, but proclaimed King George; then his heir having been attainted for loyalty to the Old Pretender, a younger son, James, held the dukedom, who in the ’45 could not but stand by the House of Hanover, or at least kept himself snug in London, while three of his brothers were out for Prince Charlie. There were notable instances at that time of father and son, husband and wife, taking opposite sides; sometimes, it is understood, by politic arrangement through which, in any case, the estate might be kept in the family. There would also be the case of rival claimants to chieftainship, like that one who provoked Fergus MacIvor’s ambition.
What with the puzzling division of opinion among their chiefs, and with a growing civilisation beside the Lowland border, the Atholl men might well halt between two opinions; and many of them had no more mind to die for Prince Charlie than for the “German lairdie.” The exiled Duke William, on the retreat to Culloden, turned out some couple of hundred men only by the strong measure of burning their houses over their heads. Lord George Murray, making a raid into his own country, gathered another force by sending round the Fiery Cross, for the last time on record, according to Mr. Walter Blaikie; but the heather thus set on fire soon smouldered out. The tenant of a snug farm in Strath Tay or Strath Tummel, within reach of market towns, had been somewhat fattened out of the ancestral taste for bloodshed, and was more inclined to look on at a game now played by professionals. But in such a time of transition, would-be spectators could not yet look on at ease, like the newspaper audiences of our distant wars. A good deal of plundering and burning came about, requisitioning of horses and vivers on both sides, both alike in a want of pay, when men were pressed into the service of one or the other, sometimes of both in turn, then naturally took the first excuse to desert.
Here is one specimen of the seamy side in that last romantic episode of our history. Its prosaic hero was a Glenalmond farmer, one Gregor Macgregor, who, his own clan being proscribed, had taken the name of Murray on coming under the patronage of Atholl. Arrested as a rebel after Culloden, from the Dunkeld tolbooth he pitifully makes affidavit, that may or may not be the whole truth, but represents the straits to which many Atholl men would be put in times to try men’s souls, and also their speculating judgment. He declares that, as a peaceable subject and a faithful tenant, he raised a force of his neighbours to join Cope’s army, with which he marched north for several days, “each living on his own pocket,” till the deponent for one was reduced to a sixpence, and no more pay being forthcoming, “the men withdrew and dispersed themselves.” He then lived quietly at home “till attacked” by Duke William, “who, as the elder brother assuming a right to us, made several insinuations and we as many refusals; at length threatened with military executions and devastation, I, to eschew these impendent threatenings, took up arms and witnessed the raising of the men, and with reluctancy marched, and all the journey was to Crieff, about two miles from our own country, where we gradually dispersed.” When “orders upon orders came to raise and rally again ... so often did we at times make a show and at other times wink at.” Duke William, coming by once more after Falkirk, “set us again on foot, and in a march for Perth; where I gave it as advice every man to make way for himself, upon which we again dispersed and ever since continue peaceably at home. And when His Gr/s orders were issued to bring in all our arms in or before 24 Feb. current, my resolution was and can be made appear, I intended to obey that day. But was intercepted by a party on the 22,”--and so unworthily lie in prison, who deserve rather reward from the winning side.
Other Perthshire lairds had the same complaint to make of their tenants as wanting in chivalry at this time; and several legal depositions might be quoted to show what force was put upon such reluctant warriors. The ladies of Jacobite families seem to have been especially active in sticking white cockades “into the bonnets of such as would allow them.” It was easy for the minstrel of Gask to make Charlie a darling in retrospect; but he may well have seemed a nuisance to tenants whom the Lady Nairne of the ’45 is described as ordering to turn out on pain of eviction and seizure of their cattle; and the Duchess of Perth abused the Whiggish Crieff folk as “d--d Judases to their master, the Duke.” At farm towns, as well as kirk towns, men were now beginning to question hereditary masterships. Of course unwillingness to take arms on the beaten side would be made the most of immediately after the Rebellion; but it seems to have been quite as genuine a sentiment as that of the ladies and gentlemen who in our day sing so sweetly of dying for the young Chevalier, not to speak of stronger enthusiasts who have devised a postage-stamp bearing the
effigy of the Bavarian princess they recognise as their legitimate sovereign--with which, indeed, “for the sake of practical convenience,” they are advised to use also the head of “the Lord Edward,” turned upside down.
Civil war brought sufferings in high as well as in low life, when Lord George Murray besieged his own ancestral seat of Blair, garrisoned by English soldiers, and tried to set it on fire with red-hot balls, but had to make off towards Culloden. He, who had taken part in all the Jacobite movements of the century, escaped to die in France; and his son eventually succeeded to the dukedom. Less fortunate was poor Duke William, the eldest brother, who bore the second title of the family, while the Pretender decked him with a vain dukedom of Rannoch. He died in the Tower, betrayed for a reward of a thousand pounds by a Scot who earned also the scorn of the English officers concerned. Lord George, the best soldier of the Prince’s army, got little enough gratitude from the master who frowned on him in their common adversity. All along he seems to have been much distrusted by his own party; and his fame has not always fared better with posterity, though now well-armed champions come forward to clear his memory from such charges as the “no quarter” order at Culloden.
Duke James, who throve at the expense of his brothers, did not play a very heroic part at this time, appearing on the scene only in the Duke of Cumberland’s tail, to find his castle half ruined by that siege; then, perhaps at a hint from Government, he dismantled its fortifications, turning it into a _château_. But that second duke cuts a misty figure as possible hero of romance, the heroine, in real life, being a rich Hammersmith widow whom he married. To this couple’s wooing is attributed the well-known song of “Huntingtower,” a Scottish variant of the “Nut Brown Maid” and of Prior’s “Henry and Emma,” in which, after representing himself as poor, a married man with three children, and a gay deceiver, the lover declares that he has been only trying the lady’s heart--“And all that’s mine is thine, lassie.”
Except “St. Johnston’s Bower,” thrown in for rhyme, the properties enumerated in the song did belong to the Duke of Atholl; this Duke seems the only “Jamie” of the race; and his first bride was a Jean. But this must in any case be a much idealised account of a courtship, probably carried on more by means of lawyers’ settlements than of sentimental duets. A more clear case of romance, turned the other way out, seems to be that the Duke’s second wife, Jean Drummond, had jilted a less eligible lover, Dr. Austin, who revenged himself by the song, “For lack of gold she left me O!” but eventually, in marrying another lady of rank, found consolation for the heart-breaking of what is also an old story:
She me forsook for a great Duke, And to endless woe she has left me O! A star and garter have more art Than youth, a true and faithful heart; For empty titles we must part-- For glittering show she has left me O!
Murray, the Atholl duke’s family name, on to which have been grafted two of Perthshire’s proudest titles, is an exotic here, like the larches that, the earliest on British soil, were transplanted from Tirol to Dunkeld; and, indeed, the same thing may be said of several great Highland families, no more autochthonous in their present habitat than a brick suburb on a chalky soil. The presumed Murray ancestor is said to have been a Flemish knight, who, like other foreign adventurers, set up a Scottish house in the service of feudalising kings. If he took his name from Moray, it was not in this region that his family struck deep root. The historical earls of Moray bore other names, while in the upsetting time of Bruce and Baliol, the Murrays are seen gaining charters on the Forth and the Clyde; then presently they have crept northwards into Strathearn, and under the James reigns came to be firmly seated in the Perthshire Highlands, overlaying there the royal name of Stewart, that also had spread from the south. The Atholl earldom they got by marriage with a Stewart. Their dukedom dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the Government sought to bind in strawberry leaves several of those Highland Samsons.
At that time the Duke of Atholl seemed the most powerful of them all. In 1715 he was reckoned as having 6000 claymores at his call, as many as the two great Campbell families put together; but the call behoved to be against the Government, for most of the clan followed his sons in intermittent service of the Pretender. Through their chief taking the prosaic side, or through the growth of new conditions of life, by 1745 his influence had shrunk so that his following was estimated as having fallen by a half; then, as we have seen, it did not rise heartily either at his bidding, or at his Jacobite brother’s. There seems hint of a reason for this in the fact that Lord George Murray’s own regiment was counted not among the Highland but the Lowland contingent of Prince Charlie’s army; then a recently published official report, written 1750, on the state of the clans, hardly mentions Atholl, treating it rather as brought to Lowland law and order. Leases, as once charters, came to be a solvent for the old adhesiveness of clan life.
Not only in Scotland was Atholl’s Duke a great man. By the spindle side, he inherited the Derby Earl’s kingship of the Isle of Man, a too pretentious title abridged to that of Lord, and finally sold to the Crown for nearly half a million in all, which went to tame and adorn Atholl. When claymores could be beaten into ploughshares, the dukes were not behind other great Highland proprietors in improving their estate, turning robbers’ lairs into snug farms, the camps of turbulent chieftains into trim parks, and covering the bare glens with lordly plantations, among which tens of thousands of trees came to be blown down by that storm that wrecked the Tay Bridge. One of those dukes is said to have planted trees by the million. At the same time they cultivated what may be called an ornamental Highland feeling; and if nowadays they are not so wealthy as British nobles enriched from City moneybags or American pork butcheries, they have a considerable holding in sentimental loyalty not wholly uprooted by sheriff courts and railways. An hereditary taste for sport helped to win the hearts of a people cherishing so much of their ancestral instincts, while efforts to keep the northern wilds of Atholl as a deer forest rather than a tourist ground did not go to gild this coronet in the eyes of Southerners. The most outstanding of the race in our times was that Duke of the Victoria and Albert days, of whom hard things were said in newspapers when he tried to shut up Glen Tilt. In _Bonnie Scotland_ I echoed those revilings, so now, _per contra_, let me quote Dr. John Brown’s appreciation of this last of the Highland chiefs.