Kitabı oku: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 407, September, 1849», sayfa 13

NEW LIGHT ON THE STORY OF LADY GRANGE

Before we offer our readers some new light on this renowned mystery, it is necessary that we should give them, in a sentence, the briefest possible outline of the oft-told tale, so far as it has been hitherto known. John Erskine, Lord Grange, a judge of the Court of Session, and a leader of the ultra-religious party in Scotland, was married to the daughter of that Chiesley of Dalry who had shot the Lord President in the High Street of Edinburgh, for giving a decision against him. The marriage was a very unhappy one. The pious leader of a religious party was scandalised in various ways, obliged to live separate from his wife, and subjected to many outrages from her. At length her death was announced, her funeral was duly attended, and the widower preserved the decorous silence of one to whom death has brought relief from what is generally counted a calamity.

This occurred in January 1732. The lapse of nearly nine years had almost consigned the remembrance of the unfortunate woman to oblivion, when strange rumours gained circulation, that she who was believed to be dead and buried was living in bondage in the distant island of St Kilda. The account she subsequently gave of her adventures, bore, that one night in her solitary lodging she was seized by some Highlanders, whom she knew to be retainers of Lord Lovat, and conveyed away, gagged and blindfolded, in the arms of a man seated in a sedan chair. It appears that she was kept in various places of confinement, and subjected to much rough usage, in the Low Country. At length she was conveyed north-westward, towards the Highland line. She passed through the grim solitudes of Glencoe, where recent murder must have awakened in the captive horrible associations, on to the western part of Lord Lovat's country, where any deed of tyranny or violence might be committed with safety. Thence she was transferred to the equally safe country of Glengarry, and, after crossing some of the highest mountains in Scotland, was shipped on the wild Loch Hourn, for ever darkened by the shadow of gigantic mountains falling on its narrow waters. She was kept for some time on the small island of Heskir, belonging to Macdonald of Sleat, and was afterwards transferred to the still more inaccessible St Kilda, which has acquired a sort of celebrity from its connexion with her strange history. In 1741, when a communication from the captive had, through devious courses, reached her friends in Edinburgh, an effort was made to release her; but it was baffled by her transference to another place of confinement, where she died in 1745.

Little did the old judge imagine, at the time when he had so successfully and so quietly got rid of his domestic curse – when the mock funeral had been performed, the family condolences acted over, and the victim safely conveyed to her distant prison, that on some future day the public, frantic with curiosity, would tear to pieces the covering of his great mystery, and expose every fragment of it to the admiring crowd. It was but a simple matter in the eyes of those who were concerned in it. The woman was troublesome – her husband was a judge, and therefore a powerful man – so he put her out of the way. Nor was he cruel or unscrupulous, according to the morality of the circle in which he lived, in the method he adopted to accomplish his end. He had advisers about him, who would have taken a shorter and a more effectual plan for ridding themselves of a troublesome woman, wife or not, and would have walked forth into the world without being haunted by any dread that rumours of remote captivities might rise up to disturb their peace. Indeed, when we remember the character of the instruments to whom Lord Grange committed the kidnapping and removal of his wife, it is only wonderful that they had patience enough to carry out so long and troublesome an operation; and that they did not, out of regard to themselves and to their employer, put a violent termination to the career of their troublesome charge, and send her at once to where the weary are at rest. Had this been her fate, the affair of Lady Grange would have been one of secondary interest. Such things were too easily accomplished in those days. The chances would have been greatly against a discovery, and if it took place, equally great against the conviction and punishment of the offenders, unless the lady had a more powerful party at her back than the daughter of Chiesley the murderer would be likely to command. It would have created, so far as it was known, great excitement, and some little horror at the time, but it would have speedily sunk to the level of the ordinary contents of the criminal records, and would never have bequeathed to the ensuing century an object which antiquarians have hunted out as religiously and zealously as if it had involved the fate of Europe.

In fact, Lord Grange was what was called in his day "a discreet man." He wished to avoid scandal, and bore a character for religious zeal, which appears to have been on occasion a very serious burden not easily borne. He dreaded scandal and notoriety, and therefore he shrouded his great act of iniquity in the most profound secrecy. Moreover, he kept a conscience – something that, like Rob Roy's honesty, might be called a conscience "after a kind." He said pretty accurately of himself in his Diary– "I have religion enough to spoil my relish and prosecution of this world, and not enough to get me to the next." We may probably believe that, even if he could have performed the deed with perfect secrecy and safety, so far as this world is concerned, he would not have murdered his wife, his conscience recoiling at the dreadful crime – his fear of the world causing him to shrink from exposure. Urged by these two conflicting motives, he adopted the expedient of the secret removal to a desolate and distant spot, believing that he had surrounded the whole project with a deep and impenetrable cloud of mystery. Never was human foresight more signally set at naught. It was this very machinery of intense mystery that, by ministering to one of the cravings of the human imagination, has made the incident one of the most notorious of human events. It is almost satisfactory to know that this dreaded notoriety visited the hoary tyrant, for after he had for nine years enjoyed in secret the success of his plot, and kept his fair fame with the world, we find him, when legal proceedings were commenced against him, bitterly saying that "strange stories were spread all over the town of Edinburgh, and made the talk of coffee-houses and tea-tables, and sent, as I have ground to apprehend, to several other places of Great Britain."²⁰ One may notice, too, in the following discontented mumblings, the bitterness with which he contemplated the divulging of the secret, – it is in a letter to the imprisoned lady's champion, Mr Hope of Rankeillor.

"Any of the smallest discretion will see what a worthy part he acts towards me and mine, and many others, and even towards the person pretended to be cared for, who, in such an occasion, begins by spreading through Great Britain strange stories, unexamined and unvouched, and not so much as communicated to us concerned; and next, when offered satisfaction, yet proceeds to fix such on public records, and to force others to bring on record sad and proved truths, which he himself knows and formerly has acknowledged to be truths, and that ought for ever to be sunk. This cannot be construed to be anything but an endeavour to fix, as far as in him lies, a lasting blot on persons and families. The first was defamation, and the next would be the same, under a cover of a pretended legal shape, but in itself more atrocious. One cannot doubt that this is a serious thing to many more than me, and cannot but be laid to heart."²¹

The text from which we are at present discoursing, is a bundle of confidential letters from Lord Grange, printed in the Miscellany of the Spalding Club, and not the least valuable and curious of the many contributions made by that useful and spirited institution, to the elucidation of Scottish history and manners. At the foot of the high conical hill of Bennochie, in a small group of forest trees, there nestles one of those quaint small turreted mansions of old French architecture so frequently to be seen in the north of Scotland. The owner of this mansion was an Erskine; he was related to Erskine of Grange, and it so happened that this relative was the person in whose ear he poured his secret sorrows, as a disappointed and morbid politician. Such confidential outpourings are not the most interesting of communications, even when one has the fortune to be so far connected with the wailer as to be the chosen vessel into which he pours the anguish of his heart. Some of these letters are portentous – they are absolute pamphlets – in their spirit as yellow and mildewed with discontent, as their outward aspect may have been by the cold damp air of Bennochie, when they were discovered in the worm-eaten chest. It requires a little zeal to peruse the whole series; but, unless we are greatly deceived, we think we can present our readers with a few plums picked out of the mass, which they may find not unacceptable. And here, by the way, let us observe, how great a service is done by those who ransack the repositories of our old Scottish houses, and make their contents accessible to the public. We are convinced that in dusty garrets, in vaults, in musty libraries, and crazy old oak-chests, there is still an almost inexhaustible wealth of curious lore of this description. The correspondence of the old Scottish families is generally far more interesting than that of English houses of the same rank. Since the civil wars of the seventeenth century, England may be said to have been internally undisturbed, and no private papers contain matters of state, save those of the great families whose ancestors have been high in office. But in Scotland, the various outbreaks, and the unceasing Jacobite intrigues, made almost all the country gentlemen statesmen – made too many of them state offenders. The Essex squire, be he ever so rich, was still but the lord of a certain quantity of timber and oxen, grass and turnips. The Highland laird, be he ever so poor, was a leader of men – a person who had more or less the power of keeping the country in a state of war or danger – a sort of petty king reigning over his own people. Hence, while the letters of the last century one might pick up in a comfortable old English mansion, would relate to swing-gates and turnpike roads, game preserves and tithes, those found hidden behind the wainscoat of a gaunt old cheerless Scottish fortalice, would relate to risings at home, or landings from abroad – to the number of broadswords and targets still kept in defiance of the Arms Act – to communications received through French Jesuits, or secret missions "across the water."²²

We believe that the passages from these documents, on which we are now to comment, in the first place exhibit to us pretty plainly the motive of Lord Grange for the deportation of his wife; and, in the second place, prove that he entertained designs of a similar character against another female with whom he was nearly connected.

When Lady Grange's strange history was first communicated to the public, it was believed that the cause of her abduction was not merely her violent temper, but her possession of certain secrets which would enable her to compromise the safety of her husband and his friends, by proving their connexion with the Jacobite intrigues of the period. The view more lately taken of the mystery, has been that she was merely a mad woman, and that her abduction, with all its laborious mystery, was only an attempt to accommodate the judge with a resource in which Scotland was then deficient – a lunatic asylum for insane relatives. Though, as we shall presently see, his confidential communications give other and darker revelations, this was the light in which Lord Grange wished the matter to be viewed, after his plot had been discovered; and in his controversial letter to Mr Hope, already referred to, he gives an account of her frantic outbreaks, which certainly affords a picture of one likely to have been a most distressing partner in life to a grave judge, having a few secrets to conceal which required him to be peculiarly circumspect in his walk; and holding a high, but a rather precarious position, in the opinion of the religious world. After stating that she had agreed to a separation, he continues —

"Then it was hoped that I and the children (who she used to curse bitterly when they went dutifully to wait on her) would be in quiet; but she often attacked my house, and from the streets, and among the footmen and chairmen of visitors, cried and raged against me and mine, and watched for me in the streets, and chased me from place to place in the most indecent and shameless manner, and threatened to attack me on the bench, which, dreading she would do every time I went to it, made my duty there very heavy on me, lest that honourable Court of Session should be disturbed and affronted on my occasion. And not content with these, and odd and very bad contrivances about the poor children, she waited on a Sunday's afternoon that my sister, Lady Jane Paterson, with my second daughter, came out of the Tron Church, and on the street, among all the people, fell upon her with violent scolding and curses, and followed her so down Merlin's Wynd, till Lady Jane and the child near the bottom of it got shelter from her and being exposed to the multitude in a friend's house. You also know, and may well remember, that before you and the rest advised the separation, and till she went from my house, she would not keep herself in that part of it (the best apartment) which was assigned her, but abused all in the family, and when none were adverting, broke into the room of ane old gentlewoman, recommended to me for housekeeper, and carried off and destroyed her accompts, &c., and committed outrages, so that at length I was forced to have a watch in my house, and especially in the night time, as if it had been in the frontier of an enemy's country, or to be spoiled by robbers."²³

This was doubtless the truth, but not the whole truth. Founding apparently on these statements, which are Lord Grange's vindication of himself, the editor of the collection of letters says – "The letters now printed must considerably impair the mystery of the reasons which led to the abduction of Lady Grange. They may be held conclusively to refute the supposition that the affair had any connexion with the political intrigues of the period." On the contrary, we cannot read the confidential portion of the correspondence without feeling that it almost conclusively establishes the fact, that the affair had a "connexion with the political intrigues of the period;" and that the reason why so many people of rank and political influence aided the plot, why the removal was conducted with so much secrecy, and the place of seclusion was so remote and inaccessible, was because Lady Grange was possessed of dangerous secrets, which compromised her husband and his friends. The general tone of the letters, and their many cautious and mysterious, yet unmistakeable references to the proceedings of friends across the water, show that the judge confided to the owner of the old mansion at the foot of Bennochie some things which it would be dangerous for an enemy to know. But we shall cite just one passage, which we consider sufficient of itself to support our position. It is taken from a letter dated 22d March 1731, just ten months before his wife was seized and carried off. There is something very peculiar in the structure of the letter; and, whether in pursuit of some not very appreciable joke, or to waylay the penetration of any hostile party who, might take the liberty of opening the packet on its journey, the writer speaks of himself during the most curious and important part of it, in the third person. Talking of a very difficult and hazardous project in which he is about to be engaged, he thus passes a neat commendation on himself, – "but I am sure he never yet was frightened from what was right in itself, and his duty towards his friends, by his own trouble or danger, and he seems as little frighted now, as ever in his life." He then approaches the subject of his wife's character and intentions, like a man treading on the verge of a frightful pitfall. "I have found that, in such a case, there is no bounds set to such mischief, and it is pushed on though it should go the length of your utter ruin, and of Tyburn itself, or the Grassmarket," – the one being the place where the gibbet of London, the other where that of Edinburgh stood. From such portentous associations he passes immediately to his wife and her proceedings. To make the passage more distinct, we fill up the names, of which the letter contains only the first and last letters; it will be remarked that he still assumes the third person, and that he himself is the person about to depart for London.

"Then I am told that Lady Grange is going to London. She knows nothing of his going, nor is it suspected here, nor shall be till the day before he goes off, and so she cannot pretend it is to follow him. She will certainly strive to get access to Lady Mary Wortley, Lady Mar's sister, (whom she openly blesses for her opposition to our friends,) and to all where her malice may prompt her to hope she can do hurt to us. You will remember with what lying impudence she threatened Lord Grange, and many of his friends, with accusations of high treason and other capital crimes, and spoke so loud of her accusing directly by a signed information to Lord Justice-Clerk, that it came to his ears, and she was stopped by hearing he said, that, if the mad woman came to him, he would cause his footmen turn her down stairs. What effect her lies may have, where she is not so well known, and with those who, from opposition to what Lord Grange is about, may think their interest to encourage them, one cannot certainly know; but if proper measures be not fallen on against it, the creature may prove troublesome; at any rate, this whole affair will require a great deal of diligence, caution, and address."²⁴

He talks of her as mad: and so far as passion and the thirst of vengeance make people mad, she undoubtedly was so. He speaks of her intended accusations as lies – that is, of course, a convenient expression to use towards them. But what is very clearly at the bottom of all the trepidation, and doubt, and difficulty, is, that she might be able, mad and false as she was, to get facts established which called up very ugly associations with Tyburn and the Grassmarket. A minute incident stated in the common histories of the affair, that Lady Grange planned a journey to London for the purpose of taking her accusation to the fountain-head of political power, is confirmed by this extract. It may easily be believed that, among Grange's official colleagues – some of whom had also their own secrets to keep – the lady's frantic accusations met with little encouragement. The Justice-Clerk referred to in the extract, Adam Cockburn of Ormiston, was, like Grange himself, a great professed light of the church, and what sort of interview he would have held with the furious lady, may be inferred from the character given of him by a contemporary, – "He became universally hated in Scotland, where they called him the curse of Scotland; and when ladies were at cards, playing the nine of diamonds, commonly called 'the curse of Scotland,' they called it the Justice-Clerk. He was, indeed, of a hot temper, and violent in all his measures."²⁵

In the old narratives of the affair, it is stated that Grange felt his position to be the more dangerous, as some letters had been intercepted tending to inculpate him with the Jacobites on the Continent. It is singular that this should also be pretty satisfactorily proved by the present correspondence. It will be remembered that Grange was a brother of the Earl of Mar, whose prominence in the affairs of 1715 had driven him into exile. A strong attachment to this unfortunate man is, on the whole, the most pleasing feature in the character of the more cautious and more fortunate judge. It was natural that the brothers should keep up a correspondence, and quite as natural that Sir Robert Walpole should be particularly anxious to discover what they said to each other. Grange conducted some negotiations with the government for his brother's pardon and restoration, and we find him defeated in his aim, and receiving some very significant hints about the nature of his correspondence.

"Sir Robert told me in wrath that he would have nothing to do with Lord Mar, that he had dealt ill with him, and he should not have his pardon; and he would by no means give me any reason for it, but Lord Townsend did, whom they had stirred up; for he in anger told me Sir Robert had intercepted his letters to me with very odd things in them, injurious to Sir Robert and his friends… Soon after this, Ilay, with cloudy looks, began to make insinuations of some discoveries against me too, and at length told me that Sir Robert said that he had also intercepted bad letters of mine to Lord Mar, but confessed they were not directed to Lord Mar, and neither subscribed by me nor in my hand of write, but that by the contents they knew them to be mine to Lord Mar. I answered that they might assert what they pleased of letters said to be directed to me, and which they owned I had never seen, but that I must know of letters wrote by myself, and that I ever wrote any such was a damned, villainous, malicious lie; and let Sir Robert or any else be the asserter of it, whoever did assert it, was a liar."²⁶

This is a very successful outbreak of virtuous indignation, and does considerable credit to its author, as a pupil of that school of which his dear friend Lord Lovat was the undoubted head.

We cannot help considering that it is a question of some historical interest and importance whether the abduction of Lady Grange was or was not a measure adopted for political reasons, and that the letters before us, by finally deciding the question, throw an important light on the political state of Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century. If we suppose that the lady was carried under circumstances of such profound mystery, and by the agency of some conspicuous and distinguished personages, to the distant island of St Kilda, merely because she was a lunatic who required to be in custody, we only see that many important and sagacious people were taking a very complex and cumbrous method of accomplishing what might have been done with ease; for in those days, few would have troubled themselves about the wretched woman, if her husband had chosen to keep her in any place of confinement, telling the neighbourhood that she was insane. But when we find that the Jacobite party in Scotland were powerful enough to kidnap a person obnoxious to them, and keep her for nine years in a place to which the laws of the realm and the authority of the crown nominally extended, but where their own power was the real operative authority, we have a very formidable notion of the strength and compactness of the Jacobite union during Walpole's apparently powerful ministry.

The correspondence of Lord Grange admits its reader to a species of confidential intercourse with him, which can scarcely be called agreeable. It exhibits one of the most disgusting of all the moral diseases – the rankling of the arrow of disappointment in the heart of a defeated political schemer. It is not the man of brave and bold designs baffled, or the utopian enthusiast disappointed of the fulfilment of his golden dreams, or the adherent of one absorbing political idea looking at it lying broken to pieces at his feet: in all of these there is a dash of noble and disinterested sentiment, and the politician defeated in his conflict with the world has still the consolation of an honest if mistaken heart, into which he can retire without the sting of self-reproach. But all Grange's disappointments were connected with paltry schemes of personal aggrandisement. Fawn and flatter as he might, Sir Robert Walpole, and his Scottish coadjutor Ilay, knew him and distrusted him, and, when he came to court them, gave him but fair words, and sometimes not even that. With Sir Robert he carried on an unequal war. Believing that he could scourge the minister in parliament, while he was a judge of the Court of Session, he resolved to obtain a seat, and thereupon the all-powerful minister at once checkmated him, by carrying an act to prohibit judges of the Court of Session from holding seats in the House of Commons – it was a less invidious proceeding than the dismissal of his lordship from the bench would have been, and it had the appearance of being dictated by a desire for the public good. Grange preferred the senate to the bench, and resigned his judgeship, but he never achieved political eminence. In the mean time he acquired Dr Johnson's desideratum of an honest hatred towards his enemy, and indeed hatred appears to have been the only honest ingredient in his character. He expressed it so well towards Walpole, that we must quote his confidential opinion of that mighty statesman: —

"An insolent and rapacious minister, who has kept us under the expense of war in time of peace, yet hindered us to fight to vindicate our trade, so grossly violated by Spanish robberies, and when we could have put a stop to it, and corrected them without drawing upon us the arms of any other nation, maintained his hollow and expensive peace by ridiculous contradictory treaties, trying us to take part in all the quarrels of Europe, and sometimes to be on both sides, and at the same time allowing confederacies to go on so powerful, and which we are not of, that now when a war is breaking out we know not where to turn us; laying plots to devour the land by new swarms of officers of the revenue, to put the merchants' stocks in the possession of these vermin, and trade under their power, &c., as by that most damned excise scheme; openly protecting the frauds and villains that plunder the stocks and ruin multitudes, and must sink the kingdom; plundering the revenue, and using all his art, and power, and bribes to stop all inquiry into, or the least amendment of these things, either by parliament or otherwise; openly ridiculing all virtue and uprightness; enhancing all power to himself and his brother, and suffering almost none else to do or know anything; barefaced and avowed bribing of members of parliament and others, and boasting of it; heaping up immense wealth to himself and his most abject profligate creatures of both sexes, while the public treasure and trade of the nation is ruined; suffering and encouraging these locusts to get large bribes, and giving considerable employment at their recommendation, while men of merit and service, and of the best families and interest, are neglected or abused, employing insignificant brutes or the greatest rogues, and favouring almost none but such; maltreating and insulting all whom his rascals and jades complain of. But the list is too long to go through with here."²⁷

Grange thought at one time that he had great claims on Walpole, and Lord Ilay; and he seems to have very diligently performed one class of duties which politicians sometimes think sufficient to establish a claim for reward – he had been an indefatigable petitioner for ministerial favours. We have heard somewhere of a story of a political economist, who during a long walk is pestered by an Irish beggar, who asks his honour just to give him a sixpence, "for the love of God." The economist turns round to argue the matter: "I deny," says he, "that I would be showing my love to the Deity by giving an idle rascal like you money; if you can state any service you have ever done to me worth the sixpence, you shall have it." – "Why, then," says the mendicant thus appealed to, "haven't I been keeping your honour in discourse this half hour?" Such seems to have been the character of Grange's claim on the ministry – he kept them in unceasing "discourse" as a petitioner. Not that he did not profess some claims of another kind. "During all this time," he says, "I ran their errands and fought their battles in Scotland." Nor did he fail sometimes to allude to his services as a religious professor, so ill-requited, that he taunts Ilay with having "already effectually interposed for Tom (now Baron) Kennedy, who had been Queen's advocate, and obnoxious to all the Presbyterian party, which I was not." And how was he rewarded for all this running errands, fighting battles, and being religious enough not to be obnoxious? "Ilay showed me no countenance, and Argyle shunned to see me… He [Ilay] never speaks nor writes to me of any business, but to shame me (as you have seen) about my own: and, these three or four years past, has visibly to all the world drawn off by degrees from all familiarity with me, and has dropped me even from his conversation about trifles or mirth. I could give you many strong instances of this." Here is an incident told with a pathos sufficient to move a whole antechamber to tears: —

"Before I came from London in November last, he bade me wait on Sir Robert at his levee. I told him I had always done so, but was not in the least noticed, or had so much as a smile or a gracious nod from him. But said he, 'I promise you I'll tell him to take particular notice of you, and to assure you of favour, and that he will do for you: which (said his lordship) will make my game more easy when I ask anything for you;' and he bid me come to him that he might carry me to the levee in his coach. This was done, and I set myself in Sir Robert's eye in the front of the crowd that surrounded him, and Ilay was by and looking on. Sir Robert came and went by me without the least regard. Ilay slipt into another room; and, that I might not wait longer in so silly a figure, I made up without being called to the great knight; and told him I came to testify my respect, and ask his commands for Scotland. His answer, with a very dry look, and odd air was, 'I have nothing to say to you, my lord. I wish you a good journey.' I saw Ilay afterwards, and he said there was nothing in it. Sir Robert had only forgot, and I am sure (said he) he will do for you what I desired him."²⁸

In the sequel he exclaims, "Can such usage be bore, even by the spirit of a poor mouse!" – deeming probably that its endurance by a rat was quite out of the question.