Part 12

Carlisle of to-day has a commercial reputation. It makes hats and whips, and textile fabrics, to say nothing of dye-works, where the citizens of Carlisle are prepared (at a price) to dye for their country. The manufacture of gingham, too, the secret of it stolen long ago from Guingamp, its native place, in Brittany, occupies a good deal of attention, and the production of biscuits and cardboard-boxes makes up the tale of the city’s activities. But Carlisle, for all these developments, looks a poor place, and by no means a merry. All the fun ceased when raiding and murdering went out of date, and the only merry-making nowadays to be seen and heard is not indigenous. It is to be found at the great Carlisle Joint Station, at unseasonable hours, and is provided, free, gratis, all for nothing, by travelling theatrical companies bound for Scotland. For two generations past, the low comedians of the companies have whiled away the weary waiting sometimes to be done on Carlisle platforms, and astonished the tired porters by dancing Scotch reels and sword-dances, accompanied by fiendish yelps, or have expressed a desire to have a “willie waucht,” to “dee for Annie Laurie,” to be “fou the noo,” or anything else supposedly Scottish. It is one of the most cherished conventions of the theatrical profession on tour.

This great joint railway station—the Citadel Station, as it is called—is neighboured by two enormous mediæval-looking drum towers of red sandstone, restorations of two of the same character built in the sixteenth century. They look none the less gloomy because they serve merely the purpose of Assize Courts, instead of fortifications. You must needs pass between them on entering Carlisle from the London road, and they are among the first things to dispel any idea the stranger may have brought with him that Carlisle is really “merry.”

There is that about the modern appearance of Carlisle which irresistibly reminds one of a ragged urchin clothed in some full-grown man’s trousers. Many things are too large for its circumstances. Two prominent things among the many that suggest this comparison are the unnecessary electric tramways and the noble Eden Bridge, carrying the road across the river to Stanwix. The bridge, built a hundred years ago, is monumental, and even the lamp-standards, designed for it at the same time, are fine. But the over-head trolley-wires are an offence to the spirit of the thing, and the city of Carlisle cares so little for it that ugly electric light standards are placed at intervals, and the fine old iron lamps that might so easily and handsomely have been adapted, now serve no useful purpose.

XXVI

[Sidenote: _THE WALL_]

Crossing to Stanwix, we are at last on the Border, for here ran the Roman wall, on its way from Wallsend, near Newcastle-on-Tyne, to Bowness, dividing the civilisation of that time from the unknown savagery further north. Built about A.D. 121, at the instance of the Emperor Hadrian, it kept the painted, skin-clad “Picts” in their own wild country for over three hundred years, and employed a considerable garrison to patrol it and exercise a continual vigilance along those bitter, wind-swept miles. Many a gallant centurion, condemned to mounting guard in these ancient marches, has doubtless in the long ago leant over the ramparts of the Wall, and gazing into the shaggy forest and brushwood beyond, called down curses upon the “forward policy” in Rome, that pushed the limits of Empire into the frozen north, before the southernmost provinces were fully settled. Here was no society, and no glory in fighting with savages to be compared with that to be gained in campaigns against the armies of Carthage or of Greece.

Here, at this wall-fortress of _Convagata_, there was, at any rate, the neighbourhood of _Luguvallum_, apparently well-settled, but the solitary life of these wardens of old Rome in the lonely mile-castles of the wall must have been so exceedingly dull that the dangers of an occasional Pict raid would be welcomed.

Even in times so comparatively modern as the beginning of the seventeenth century the Border was little known. Camden spoke of the northern reaches of this road, before he visited Cumberland in 1607, as a part of the country “lying beyond the mountains toward the Western Ocean,” and was greatly exercised with the hazards of even nearing these remote fastnesses. He approached the Lancashire people with “a kind of dread”; but, trusting to the protection of God, determined at last to “run the hazard of the attempt.” He did indeed come to the Border, but found, in exploring the Roman Wall dividing England and Scotland, that the Wall was not only a division between two countries, but marked the confines of civilisation. He accordingly returned, shivering with apprehension, leaving his projected work incomplete.

Stanwix, site of _Convagata_, obtains its name from the “stone way” the Saxons found here. Truth to tell, modern Stanwix is a sorry spot on which to meditate upon the departed colonial fortunes of Imperial Rome, for the Wall is gone and Stanwix church and churchyard stand upon the site of the fort. A precious ugly church, too, it is that has been built here: Early English only by intention; with a dismally crowded churchyard around it. A pathetic story is told by one of the epitaphs: “Here lie the mortal bodies of five little sisters, the much-loved children of A. C. Tait, Dean of Carlisle, and of Catherine, his wife, who were all cut off within five weeks.” They died during an epidemic of scarlet-fever, in 1856. A memorial window to them is in the north transept of the Cathedral. “A. C. Tait” was, of course, Archibald Campbell Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.

But if Stanwix be so ugly and commonplace, the scenery in which it is placed is extremely beautiful. The greater, then, the crime of those who have made it what it is. There is a lovely steep grassy descent, plenteously wooded with noble trees, that falls away from the ridge of Stanwix down to the Eden, and thus skirts the river for a mile or more. “Rickerby Holmes” is the name of this beautiful feature. From this point you gain the finest view of Carlisle.

[Sidenote: _THE BORDER_]

It is a flat, featureless country that stretches north from Stanwix across the nine miles to the Border-line. Miserable villages that are merely collections of gaunt cottages little better than hovels, often built of “dubbin,” _i.e._ clay and straw, occur at intervals. Nearly all of comparatively modern date, they point unmistakably to the fact that it is not so very long since to live in the Debatable Land was hazardous, and not to be thought of by the law-abiding. Very well indeed for moss-trooping vagabonds and cow-stealers, but not for the responsible, or those who wished for a quiet life.

Passing Goslin Syke, where a marshy stream crosses the road, we come to Kingstown, where the road branches right and left. On this, the last stage to the Border, this parting of the ways meant much to eloping couples, bound for Scotland and marriage immediately on reaching Scottish soil.

The geography of Gretna and the Border is, so far as roads are concerned, somewhat involved, and requires careful explanation. Up to 1830, when the wide-spreading sands of the Esk were bridged, the way for coaches and all road-traffic lay circuitously through Longtown to the right of where the fork of the roads now occurs; but in that year the New Road, or the “English Road,” as it was commonly called, was opened, causing much interference with what the inhabitants of Springfield had almost come to regard as their “vested rights.” For, as the accompanying plan will show, Springfield lay directly on the route into Scotland; and Gretna Green merely to one side of it. But here again it behoves the historian to be careful and not rashly to assume that the early marriages were made at Springfield, and should therefore have been named after it. As a curious matter of fact, this village did not come into existence until 1791, when it was built by the then landowner, Sir William Maxwell, who named it from a farm standing there. It was then, and for long after, the home of people professing to be weavers, but really, almost without exception, a set of drunken Border blackguards who, when not helplessly intoxicated, were smugglers and poachers and wastrels generally, and, living in the marches of the two countries, respected the laws of neither.

Springfield, immediately after its rise, took away most of the marrying business of Gretna, being nearer the magical dividing-line.

[Sidenote: _THE LONGTOWN ROAD_]

Blackford, on the Longtown road, is of the one unvarying pattern here, and is followed by the hamlet of West Linton, by the river Lyne, where a cottage or so, a farm, and the whitewashed “Graham’s Arms,” with its motto, “N’Oublie,” stand stodged in the mud. Fir-trees and a laurel-bordered road then lead to the by-way where Arthuret church, standing solitary, serves for churchless Longtown, half a mile distant.

In Arthuret churchyard there is shown a broken cross, said to mark the grave of Archie Armstrong, the famous Court fool of James the First and Charles the First. James brought him south, from the Border, where he had early distinguished himself as a sheepstealer in Eskdale; and his impudence and invincible effrontery brought him a long period of success at Court. But at last he overreached himself, in his enmity to Archbishop Laud. On one occasion, saying grace at Whitehall, he exclaimed, “Great praise to God and little laud to the Devil,” and all the Court sniggered; but when, in 1637, he met Laud at a time when the Scots were rising against the Archbishop’s attempts at dictation in religious matters, and asked, “Wha’s fool the noo?” the jester’s licence had grown beyond endurance, and he was dismissed. He lived many years longer, and earned the reputation of an extremely usurious lender of money, to whom no sharp practices came amiss. The cross shown as marking his resting-place is really a portion of an ancient Scandinavian monument.

[Sidenote: _SIR JAMES GRAHAM_]

Another character, very notorious in his day, lies in the churchyard: Sir James Graham of Netherby, who was Home Secretary in 1844, when the correspondence of Mazzini and other political refugees was opened at the General Post Office by his direction, and read. Graham received his orders from the Earl of Aberdeen, Minister for Foreign Affairs, but it was Graham himself upon whom the whole of the public obloquy fell, and he remarked, in the true spirit of prophecy, that all else he had done would be forgotten, and he would be remembered only by this wretched incident. It surely is a pitiful thing and a real tragedy of the public service that an honourable gentleman who in private life would have scorned to do anything mean should go down in history as the man who violated the sanctity of private correspondence.

There are no architectural graces in Longtown. Each house is like its fellow and every street resembles every other street. How then do the strayed revellers, returning home “fou,” find the way to their especial domiciles? An attempt to subdue the stark angularity of Longtown, though not to give its streets variety, is seen in the somewhat recent planting of the roads with trees.

Many people suppose the river Esk at Longtown to be the division between England and Scotland. The supposition is reasonable enough, for the actual divisor, the Sark, four miles further on, approaching Springfield, is a very insignificant stream in appearance. The political and the social significances of it were, however, of very serious import indeed.

Solway Moss is passed on the way. Turner has made it the subject of one of the finest plates in his _Liber Studiorum_, and has imported into the view some mountains that are not there, together with some weather which, fortunately for the present writer, was equally absent when he passed this way.

[Sidenote: _BATTLE OF SOLWAY MOSS_]

Solway Moss is marked on the maps with the conventional crossed swords that indicate a battle. It was not an epoch-making battle that was fought here, November 24th, 1542, but it was one of the most complete of English victories, and the story of it is compact of a peculiar terror. The Scots had crossed the Border in force, and were proceeding on their usual lines of fire and pillage, to the assault of Carlisle, when they were met at Arthuret by an army under Sir Thomas Wharton, the stout Warden of the West Marches. The English onset disorganised the invaders, who fled in the gathering darkness. Ten thousand fugitives lost their way, and found themselves with the flowing tide upon the fatal Solway Sands. Some flung away their arms and struggled through, thousands were drowned, and many surrendered to women. Meanwhile, the main body, pursued by the English, wandered in the other direction across the Esk and plunged into the bog of Solway Moss, and were swallowed up, slain, or taken prisoners. “Never,” says Froude, “in all the wars between England and Scotland, had there been a defeat more complete, more sudden, or more disgraceful.” James the Fifth of Scotland died on December 14th, heartbroken at the disaster. It was a complete English revenge for the defeat they had suffered at the Sark, hard by, in 1449, nearly a hundred years before.

Turner therefore does right in so romantically treating the subject, and I am merely a pictorial reporter, setting down only what I see. But at any rate, while Turner might dissuade the pilgrim, with his storm overhead and his fathomless bog beneath, whence apparently some wretches are just escaping with their lives, you see by the modern sketch that there is at least a hard high road running by.

Having come now to the Sark, and across it into the long street of Springfield, and by the same token into Scotland, it is necessary to tell at length the story of “Gretna Green” marriages. It could scarce be told in more forbidding surroundings, for Springfield is one long street of gaunt, unrelieved commonplace, and neither the once notorious “Queen’s Head” inn on the right, nor the “Maxwell Arms” on the left, helps to relieve it in the least degree. But the devil’s in it if love can’t throw a rosy tinge over even such a scene, and doubtless Springfield looked entrancing to some.

XXVII

The popularity of Gretna Green elopements dated from the passing of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1754, by which it was declared that “Any person solemnising matrimony in any other place than a church or public chapel, without banns, or other license, shall, on conviction, be adjudged guilty of felony, and be transported for fourteen years, and all such marriages shall be void.”

[Sidenote: _FLEET MARRIAGES_]

This measure was expressly designed to put an end to the long-continued and growing scandals of the so-called “Fleet marriages,” which had first attracted attention in 1674. The Fleet marriages, performed by the chaplains of the Fleet Prison, in London, led to many abuses. Made on the spur of the moment, between the prisoners there, incarcerated for debt or other misdemeanours, and the visitors permitted free access under the lax discipline of that time, the most fearful alliances were perpetrated by wholesale. Drunken prisoners, dissolute women, and parsons who richly deserved being unfrocked were the actors in these scenes, almost exactly matched by the similar clandestine marriages performed on application, at all hours of day or night, by the chaplains of the Savoy, and by the clerical owners of proprietary chapels in Mayfair.

These marriage-merchants earned amazing incomes, the still-existing records of a Fleet parson’s fees in 1748 showing that in the month of October alone he received no less than £69 12_s._ 9_d._ for his services. At the Fleet, on March 25th, 1754, the day before Lord Hardwicke’s Act became law, there was a grand winding-up of the business, when 217 marriages were celebrated.

The penalty provided by the Act was not, under the existing circumstances, too severe; for, in view of the evils wrought by those practices, it was necessary to provide the greatest discouragement possible to this traffic. Much more then than now, a marriage, once performed, was irrevocable. Divorce courts, for redress of matrimonial injuries, were unknown, and the drunken and the reckless who had taken part so lightly in a Fleet marriage were held to their bargain for life.

But the Act, beneficent though it was, did not pass without great opposition, and even when it became law, its operation was confined to England; with the result that the only difficulty in the way of a clandestine marriage that should be sufficiently legal was that of making a journey out of England; whether across the English Channel to Calais, or into the Isle of Man, or across the Border into Scotland, was immaterial. The Isle of Man was for a brief period a favourite place, but the House of Keys, the legislature of that isle, in 1757 passed an Act forbidding marriages other than by banns or special license, with a penalty identical with that provided by the English Act for clergymen who should infringe it; while any layman performing any such ceremony was very roughly dealt with: the penalties in his case being—

1. To be pilloried.

2. To lose his ears.

3. To be imprisoned until the Governor saw fit to release him, on payment of a fine not exceeding £50.

After the passing of this Act we hear little or nothing of clandestine marriages being celebrated in the Isle of Man.

The Channel Islands, and particularly Guernsey, were then occasionally favoured, but the difficulties of access prevented them ever becoming popular with the love-lorn, who very generally, while prepared to suffer many things, drew the line at sea-sickness.

[Sidenote: _BORDER ELOPEMENTS_]

The Border, in fact, was destined to be, above all others, _the_ place to which eloping couples sped. “When Britain first at Heaven’s command, arose from out the azure main,” she was sealed to a high destiny; and when the Border was set between the kingdoms of England and Scotland, it seems, at different times and periods, to have been provided for the express purpose of affording a refuge and a living for moss-troopers, cattle-lifters, and the generally lawless people of the frontiers. It was thus quite in keeping with old Border history that, when brute force went out and legal enormities took its place, it should be the refuge of eloping lovers, of whom a very large proportion were fortune-hunting scamps running away with silly, sentimental schoolgirls.

The flight into Scotland afforded exceptional facilities, for marrying across the Border has ever been (and still is) the simplest of affairs; the chief difficulty being still, as Lord Eldon long ago observed, to find out what does _not_ constitute a marriage in Scotland. My lord himself spoke as doubly an expert, for he was not only the great legal authority of his time, but himself had been married across the Border. Indeed, Lord Deas was of opinion that mere consent, even in the absence of witnesses, constituted lawful wedlock, just as in those primitive days when the man only went to the woman’s home and took her to his own. Pope Innocent III., who does not appear to have been so innocent as his name would imply, in 1198 put an end to this simple plan.

Preposterous although it may seem, the difficulty in Scotland is, not to get married, but how not. The mere verbal acknowledgments exchanged, “This is my wife,” “This is my husband,” are all-sufficient, and equally binding as the most formal marriage-license ever issued by a bishop to his “dearly beloved”; and even words spoken in jest, without any wish or desire that they should be seriously considered, are binding. It is not to be supposed that novelists have remained ignorant of these quaint customs, and indeed Gretna Green in particular, and the Scottish marriage-laws in general, give point to Wilkie Collins’s “Man and Wife,” Mrs. Henry Wood’s “Elster’s Folly,” and J. M. Barrie’s “Little Minister,” among other novels.

[Sidenote: “_HAND-FASTING_”]

Bound intimately up with these affairs, and thought to have originated these singularly loose methods, was the old Scottish custom of “hand-fasting,” still practised in the opening years of the nineteenth century, but with the increase of education, and still more the growth of comfort, then fast dying out. These barbaric customs, resembling in degree some old Welsh observances, mattered little to a peasantry sunk in ignorance, but with the growth of wage-earning and of property, and the consequent sense of responsibility, they could by no possibility survive. “Hand-fasting” was the selection, on approval, of a wife or husband, who would live together for one year on trial. If mutually satisfactory at the close of the year, they became man and wife for good and all; if not, they parted, and were free to choose again. Children, if there were any, were the charge of the non-content partner.

The Border must have seemed a Heaven-provided resort to couples bent on evading Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, but, strangely enough, the sufficient virtue of the first step across the dividing-line was not at first generally recognised, and fleeting lovers were originally not content until they had come, post haste, to Edinburgh, where, in the Canongate, they found a crowd of blackguardly scoundrels idling about in greasy and tattered Geneva gowns and pretending to be clergymen, who did their business for them at any prices the circumstances seemed to warrant, from a shilling and a glass of whiskey, up to five guineas. Thus were the runaway Lord George Lennox and Lady Louisa Ker, daughter of the Earl of Ancrum, married, in 1759.

Thus, although even so early as 1753, the year before the Marriage Act became law, a “Gretna Green wedding” was performed by Joseph Paisley, the first “Gretna Priest,” it was not until 1771 that the marrying at Gretna Green grew such a recognised institution that registers began to be kept.

Gretna stands to all the world for runaway matches, but although by far the most popular place, it was by no means the only one. Any spot on the long lonely seventy miles of Border served the same purpose, and Lamberton Toll, north of Berwick, and Coldstream were not without their advantages, especially from Newcastle-on-Tyne, to which they lay quite handy. The future Earl of Eldon, who ran away as a lad with his Bessie Surtees, got married at Lamberton or at Coldstream.

On this West Coast, however, on the “new” road to Gretna, the actual crossing of the Border is at the passage of the little river Sark, half a mile before you come to that more famous hamlet. Although Gretna is pre-eminently famed, and Springfield, just short of it, comes second in popular estimation, a very good case might be made out for giving Sark Bar prominence in this strange history.

[Sidenote: _THE FATEFUL TOLL-HOUSE_]