Part 14

On one occasion he altogether surpassed his previous doings. He had driven a runaway couple to Longtown, and as he thought they were taking it rather too easily, strongly advised them to cross the Border and get married before they dined. They were weary and would not be advised, and so he took his horses back to Carlisle and thought them “just poor silly things.”

He had not long returned before the girl’s mother and a Bow Street officer dashed up to the “Bush” in a post-chaise. There was not a second to lose, and so Jack, saying not a word to any one, jumped on a horse and galloped to Longtown. He had barely time to see the dawdlers huddled into a post-chaise, and to take his seat and clear the “lang toun” when the pursuers loomed in sight. The pursuit was so hot that the only way was to turn sharp down a lane. From it they saw the enemy fly past towards Gretna and so on to Annan, where they found themselves at fault and gave up the pursuit. The coast being thus cleared, Jack would stand no more nonsense, but saw his couple duly married and witnessed before he went back to Carlisle. The signatures of that marriage were always looked at with a certain sad interest, for the bridegroom was killed the next year, at Waterloo. This was Jack’s “leading case.” He was long remembered as a “civil old fellow, perhaps five feet seven if he was stretched out, and with such nice crooked legs.”

One of the most remarkable of these runaway weddings was that of the old and widowed ex-Lord Chancellor, Erskine, to Sarah Buck, his housekeeper, an elderly widow with a numerous family of children, who accompanied them.

[Sidenote: _LORD ERSKINE_]

“In the year 1818,” says Elliot, “as near as I can remember, Lord Chief Justice Erskine came to Gretna in a chaise and four horses, dressed in woman’s clothes, accompanied by an elderly lady and four children. When I first saw them, I took the elderly lady for the mother of the children, and the learned Lord for the grandmother. He asked me many questions relative to Gretna marriages, all of which I answered him as I would a female, until by chance I espied a button of his waistcoat through the opening of a neckerchief which he wore over his breast. After he found that I had discovered his sex, he smiled but made no remark. He afterwards changed his dress, and I married him to the female whom he had brought with him. I asked him why he had come in female attire; he answered that he had his own reasons for it. He gave me twenty pounds, and again resumed his female dress. Twelve months after, at the instigation of his sons by a former wife, he wished to divorce her by Scots law, but found, upon trial, that he could not.”

Erskine was not the first great lawyer, by very many, to exhibit a practical uncertainty as to the law, however certain he might theoretically be. He made no further attempt to upset the legality of the marriage, and in December 1821 a son, christened Hampden Erskine, was born to this odd couple. Erskine died, in his seventy-third year, in 1823.

[Sidenote: _CULMINATING ROMANCE_]

Among the more famous clients of the canny marriage-mongers of Gretna were the heroic Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald, and Miss Katharine Barnes, in 1812. On their heels came Viscount Deerhurst, son of the Earl of Coventry, whose fee to the “priest” was £100. Very late in Gretna’s history came the marriage of Lord Drumlanrig, heir to the sixth Marquis of Queensberry, and Miss Caroline Clayton, in 1840. The lady’s father, General Clayton, had objected to the marriage, on account of her youth, for she was only nineteen at the time; and the couple decided to hie over the Border on the first opportunity. This soon offered, and, discarding the time-honoured post-chaise, they rode horseback all the way, reaching their haven on May 25th. This gallant cavalier became seventh Marquis of Queensberry, and was accidentally shot in 1858, at Kinmont, when out rabbiting. The Marchioness long survived him, and died so recently as February 1904.

The circumstances of the elopement of Lady Rose Somerset, daughter of the seventh Duke of Beaufort, in 1846, with Captain Francis Lovell, show that the old hazards were passing. They took railway tickets, and so, without foam-flecked horses or anxious post-boys, came to Gretna.

But by far the most romantic incident in those annals of “over the Border” elopements was the marriage of Miss Penelope Smyth on May 7th, 1836, at Gretna Hall to Charles Ferdinand Bourbon, Prince of the two Sicilies and Capua, brother and heir-presumptive to Ferdinand the Second, King of Naples. The whole affair reads like the vapourings of some extravagant novelist of the old _Family Reader_ type. Miss Smyth was a beautiful Exeter girl, and additionally attractive to an impecunious Prince in the fact of possessing a fortune of £20,000. The circumstances of her being in Italy do not appear, but she seems to have been married to the Prince at Lucca, and again at Rome. They fled from Italy to avoid the fury of the King of Naples, who denied the legality of the union, and claimed that no marriage could be contracted by a Prince of the Blood Royal without the consent of the reigning sovereign. The Prince appears to have relied upon the affection of his sister, the Queen Regent of Spain, to smooth matters over, but was rebuffed at Madrid, the Queen refusing to receive either him or his bride. They then left for Paris, and afterwards for England, after a third ceremony had been performed, and flew to this inevitable refuge, the Border. Then, coming to London, they applied for a license at Doctor’s Commons.

Of the virtuous intentions of this anxious and much-married couple there can be no possible doubt whatever, and the part of “villain of the piece” is taken by the bold bad “Bomba,” the notorious King of Naples, who acted to perfection the character of tyrannical brother. He instructed the Sicilian Ambassador to protest against the license being issued, and it was accordingly refused. The dauntless couple were then married in the ordinary way, by banns, at St. George’s, Hanover Square.

The virtuous lived happily ever after, and the wicked met with the retribution that, by all the canons of dramatic art, was to be expected, for the kingdom of Naples was abolished in 1861, and with it went King Bomba and all questions of succession.

[Sidenote: _GRETNA HALL IN 1852_]

The contributor to _Household Words_ in 1852, found John Linton dead, and the glory of Gretna Hall already departed; but Mrs. Linton was there, and he seems to have been provided with a not unpalatable dinner, while some few good cigars remained. But it was not for dinner or for cigars he came. He wanted some juicy facts for his article. He got some, but they were not so _very_ juicy. Everything, you see, spoke of the Past, and he was reduced to being shown the “registers,” which the widow Lang very jealously displayed to him. They were wrapped in an old silk handkerchief, and when they were untied and he would have handled them, the suspicious old dame gently repulsed his hand, and turned over the leaves herself for his inspection.

Everywhere in the house, vanished visitors had scrawled their names, despite the notice, “Please not to write on the walls, windows, or shutters,” pasted on the looking-glass of the dining-room. Scrawled on a window-pane was the frank confession, perhaps made in disillusioned after years, “John Anderson made a fool of himself in Gretna, 1831”; and in a greasy visitors’ book he found the usual ribald remarks. With the prevailing air of desolation heavy upon everything, he asked how long it was since the last marriage had been celebrated there, expecting a reply in terms of years; but the landlady turned to the maid who was laying the cloth, and said, “Was it Tuesday or Monday last, that couple came?” The maid said it was “Monday.”

Oh! what a surprise.

Gretna Green itself is a small place, and to-day a dull one, too. The Hall, situated in its private grounds, is just a country mansion. No longer do the officers from Carlisle garrison “come once a week to be married,” as the lady there pleasantly suggested to me; and no one will accost the stranger and hint that it is a fine day for a wedding. _Eheu! fugaces._

XXX

[Sidenote: _THE DUMFRIESSHIRE “AUXENT”_]

The Dumfries coach branched off at Gretna, but nowadays only an occasional motor-car halts in the village, its driver perplexed by the multiplicity of roads, and, if he be a Southron, no less perplexed by the broad Dumfriesshire accent in which his inquiries are answered. For, of a sudden—as suddenly as the dividing-line between the two countries—Scotch have succeeded to English people. At Longtown even, the people are English; here and henceforward Scottish talk and Scottish physiognomies, if not the national dress, are prominent. There is no mingling, to this day.

I do not suppose the Dumfriesshire folk will realise the existence of their Doric. They will be like the friends of that farmer who went southwards and on returning home complained that the “Enklish” made “remairks” about his speech. ‘Mon,’ said they, ‘we didna ken ony o’us had ony auxent at a’.’

Scotland was of old an almost unknown land to the English, and indeed it largely so remained until Queen Victoria’s preference for North Britain brought about a fashionable exploitation of Caledonia; but such ignorance as that of the lady who declared she “never went to Scotland because the crossing made her sea-sick” cannot ever have been common.

Thomas Kirke, who surely, from his name, should himself have been a Scot, published in 1679 a “Modern Account of Scotland” which was either a joke (in bad taste) or an attempt to exploit this ignorance. “Scotland,” he wrote, “is compared to a louse, whose legs and engrailed edges represent the promontories and buttings-out into the sea, with more nooks and angles than the most conceited of my Lord Mayor’s Custards; nor does the comparison determine here; A Louse preys upon its own Fosterer and Preserver, and is productive of those Minute Animals called Nitts; so Scotland, whose Proboscis joyns too close to England, has suckt away the nutriment from Northumberland.”

Thomas Kirke, it will be observed, did not love Scotsmen. But he could be a good deal more abusive than the specimen already quoted.

“_Nemo ne impune Læcessit_,” he continues: “true enough: whoever deals with them shall be sure to smart for it.... The thistle was nicely placed there, partly to show the ‘fertility’ of the country, Nature alone producing plenty of these gay flowers; and partly as an emblem of the people, the top thereof having some colour of a flower, but the bulk and substance of it is only sharp, and poysonous pricks.”

[Sidenote: _USEFUL INFORMATION_]

A good deal of fine, unreliable information may be culled from the classic pages of Thomas Kirke. Thus, “Scotland is from Scota, daughter of Pharaoh, King of Egypt. That the Scots derived from the Egyptians is not to be doubted, from divers considerable circumstances: the plagues of Egypt being entailed upon them: that of Lice (being a Judgment unrepealed) is an ample testimony. These loving animals accompanied them from Egypt, and remain with them to this day, never forsaking them (but as Rats leave a House) till they tumble into their Graves. The Plague of Biles and Blains is hereditary to them, as a distinguishing mark from the rest of the World, which (like the Devil’s cloven hoof) warns all men to beware of them. The Judgment of Hail and Snow is naturalized and made free Denizan here, and continues with them from the Sun; first ingress into Aries, till he has passed the 30th degree of Aquary.

“The Plagues of Darkness was said to be thick darkness, to be felt, which most undoubtedly these people have a share in: the darkness being appliable to their gross and blockish understandings (as I had it from a scholar of their own Nation).

“Woods they have none: that suits not with the frugality of the people, who are so far from propagating any, that they destroy those they had upon this politick State Maxim, that Corn will not grow on the land pestered with its Roots, and their branches harbour Birds, Animals above their humble conversation, that exceeds not that of Hornless Quadrupedes; marry, perhaps some of their houses lurk under the shelter of a plump of trees (the Birds not daring so high a presumption) like Hugh Peters Puss in her Majesty, or an Owl in an Ivy-Bush. Some fir-woods there are in the High-lands, but so inaccessible, that they serve for no other use than Dens for those ravenous Wolves with 2 hands, that prey upon their neighbourhood and shelter themselves under this Covert; to whom the sight of a stranger is as surprizing as that of a Cockatrice. The Vallies for the most part are covered with Beer or Bigg, and the Hills with Snow.

“If the air was not so pure and well-refined by its agitation, it would be so infected with the stinks of their Towns and the steam of the Nasty Inhabitants that it would be pestilential and destructive.

“The people are Proud, Arrogant, Vainglorious boasters; Bloody, Barbarous and Inhuman Butchers. Couzenage and Theft is in perfection among them, and they are perfect English-haters. Their spirits are so mean that they rarely rob, but they take away life first. Lying in Ambush, they send a brace of bullets through the traveller’s body, and to make sure work they sheath their Durks in his liveless trunk.

“Their cruelty descends to their Beasts, it being a custom in some places to feast upon a living Cow. They tie it in the middle of them, near a great fire, and then cut collops off this poor living beast, and broil them on the fire, till they have mangled her all to pieces: nay, sometimes they will only cut off as much as will satisfy their present Appetites, and let her go till their greedy Stomachs call for a new supply: such horrible cruelty as can scarce be paralleled in the whole world.”

[Sidenote: _MANNERS AND CUSTOMS_]

“The Highlanders talk only Erse, the Lowlanders understand and talk English, but they are so currish that if a stranger enquires the way in English they will certainly answer in Erse, and find no other language until you force it from them with a Cudgel.”

Let us hope, for the travellers’ own sakes, that they did not take this advice. But let us follow Mr. Kirke indoors. This, according to him, was a Scottish interior: “To enter a kitchen is to enter Hell alive: the stew and stink enough to suffocate you,” while “Musick they have, but not the Harmony of the Spheres, but loud Terrene noises, like the bellowing of beasts: the loud Bagpipe is their chief delight.”

As for the inns: “Change-houses they call them, poor small cottages, where you must be content to take what you find, perhaps Eggs with Chicks in them, and some Long Cale; at the better sort of them a dish of chop’d Chickens, which they esteem a dainty dish, and will take it unkindly if you do not eat very heartily of it.”

Oddly enough, he says nothing of porridge. But St. Jerome attributed the heresy of Pelagius to his feeding upon oatmeal porridge, which may perhaps be responsible for more religious difficulties than we are aware of. The heresy of Pelagius (whose real name was Morgan, and himself therefore presumably a Welshman), was divided into six points, chief of them being what one is tempted to characterise as the “common-sense” view that Adam’s sin was confined to his own person. The daring Pelagius was condemned, A.D. 418, as an heretic, but he lived on, notwithstanding, to the age of threescore years and ten: a jolly, fat man, by all accounts, and of distinctly anti-celibate views.

It is rarely, nowadays, you see a plaid, and not often a kilt. Nowhere is the sight now seen that once astonished travellers: the sight of countryfolk walking barefoot, carrying shoes and stockings in their hands, for sake of economy, until they reached the outskirts of a town, where, for sake of appearance, they put them on. The once poor country has grown a great deal beyond that. But kilts formed the only wear at the time of the rebellion of 1745, when one unhappy detachment of rebels found them rather embarrassing. An English subaltern, in command of a few men, had the good fortune to secure a numerically superior body of rebels, and was sorely at a loss what to do with them on the march to Carlisle; being afraid that they would on their way, finding themselves more powerful, turn upon his small force and wreak a terrible revenge. The happy idea struck him of having the waist-bands of the prisoners’ kilts cut before the march was begun: and thus they went; the Scotsmen being too busily engaged in holding their petticoats up to be in any way dangerous.

Only on festive occasions is the kilt in evidence, in all its barbaric varieties of tartan. The Royal Stuart tartan is an eye-searing affair of bright red, with a pattern of green, black, blue, and white stripes, calculated to make an æsthete faint. The Macmillan tartan would please the old negress who wanted “nothing startling: just plain red and yellow.” It is bright yellow with a plaid pattern in light red. One of the Macdonald clans sports a nice thing in red with bright green patterns. Such a taste in dress seems oddly at variance with the grey, Calvinistic religious temper of Scotland, and a direct challenge to dull northern skies.

[Sidenote: _PRACTICAL SCOTS_]

To argue from this old love of colour in dress a corresponding delight in flowers would be a mistake, for rural Scotland has few indeed of the English type of cottage, with clustered roses and jessamine and a very wealth of colour in its old-fashioned garden. All through Dumfriesshire and Lanarkshire, eighty-five miles along the road to Glasgow, the country cottages are merely un-ornamental living-boxes, and flower-gardens are vanities not indulged in. Perhaps we see in this, again, the Scottish practical character that has advanced Scotland so far along the road to material wealth, has made Glasgow what it is, and has set Scotsmen in commanding positions.

The proverbial tenacity of the Scot has fathered many good stories, of which that of the farmer returning from market is one of the best. Attacked by three burly ruffians for sake of the gold he was supposed to be carrying, he fought desperately, felling one of his assailants with a blow that knocked him senseless, until at last a well-delivered butt in the stomach laid him low; whereupon the footpads went thoroughly over his pockets. But searching diligently though they did, all they could find was a sixpenny-piece, instead of the expected wealth.

“My goodness!” exclaimed one of them, feeling his bruised face, “if he’d had eighteen-pence he would have killed the three of us.”

The pawky “canny” qualities of the Scots were never more admirably illustrated than on that occasion in the football season of 1905, when the visit of the New Zealand team, known as the “All Blacks,” was under arrangement. The Glasgow authorities had not at the time arrived at anything like a proper idea of the New Zealanders’ qualities, nor of the great assemblage of spectators that any game in which they were engaged would attract; and so they cautiously refused the offer of half the gate-money and stipulated for a guarantee of £50 or so, conceding the “gate” to the visitors.

An agreement was arrived at upon that basis, but as the season advanced and the extraordinary triumphs of the New Zealanders elsewhere made it abundantly evident that the “gate” at the Glasgow match would be phenomenal, the Glaswegians made heroic attempts to alter the arrangement—without success.

An incredible number of saxpences went bang over that affair, for the Glasgow folks received £50 and paid over £1,000, taken at the gates. And the New Zealanders won the game, in addition to pouching the boodle. Scotland was sair humeeliated the day, ye ken, and showed it sourly. The New Zealanders came without a welcome into the city, were “booed” in the field, and left amid something like a hostile demonstration.

XXXI

[Sidenote: _MERKLAND CROSS_]

There is nothing at all of the “Caledonia stern and wild” description of scenery along these first few miles. The country becomes pleasantly undulating, villages are placed here and there along the road, and a railway runs companionably by, with the stream of Kirtle Water neighbouring it. Kirkpatrick is the first village. Beyond it the old road of pre-Telford days goes off to the right, for nearly two miles, and joins the modern road again at Merkland, passing an ancient granite boundary-cross surrounded by holly-bushes. A very great deal of highly untrustworthy “history” may be acquired about this cross by him who seeks wayside information. At the roadside smithy, hard by, the blacksmiths tell you it is the memorial of a man who was shot from Robgillt Tower—or “Toe-er,” in the local pronunciation. Whether the man who was shot was worth the memorial is more than any one can say, but the shot itself certainly would deserve a monument. A long shot, indeed, for it is a good mile away to Robgillt Tower! Bonshaw Tower, closer at hand, seems more likely. Another story, very popular in the neighbourhood, is that the men of this district sold their wives here.

Passing Kirtlebridge and its railway station, and crossing Kirtle Water and Mein Water, we come by some very pretty woodland and parklike scenery, to Ecclefechan: a very celebrated place now, and a place of pilgrimage since Thomas Carlyle died, in 1881. For Ecclefechan was the native village of that latter-day prophet, hero-worshipper, and apostle of work.

But there lies to the left of the road at the approach to Mein Water and the park of Burnfoot, a little-known Carlyle landmark that should be noted. The little graveyard of Pennersaughs contains the tombs of his grandfather and great-grandfather, among others.

A great deal of argument has been expended upon the meaning of Ecclefechan. “Ecclesia Fechanis” is said to be the origin of the name; but who St. Fechan was, who is supposed to have founded the original church here, is more than any one is prepared to definitely say. The sceptical stoutly declare him a myth: a saintly “Mrs. Harris”; while Welshmen might declare that “Ecclefechan” is “Eglwys vychan,” _i.e._ “Little Church,” and none would be able to prove himself correct.

[Sidenote: _CARLYLE’S BIRTHPLACE_]