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.
He was a living, a strenuous protest in perpetual kilt against the civilisation, the taming, the softening of mankind. He was essentially wild. His virtues were those of human nature in the rough and unreclaimed, open and unsubdued as the Moor of Rannoch. He was a true autochthon, terrigena,—a son of the soil,—as rich in local colour, as rough in the legs, and as hot at the heart, as prompt and hardy, as heathery as a gorcock. Courage, endurance, staunchness, fidelity and warmth of heart, simplicity, and downrightness were his staples; and with them he attained to a power in his own region and among his own people quite singular. The secret of this was his truth and his pluck, his kindliness and his constancy. Other noblemen put on the kilt at the season, and do their best to embrown their smooth knees for six weeks, returning them to trousers and to town; he lived in his kilt all the year long, and often slept soundly in it and his plaid among the brackens; and not sparing himself, he spared none of his men or friends—it was the rigour of the game—it was Devil take the hindmost. Up at all hours, out all day and all night, often without food—with nothing but the unfailing pipe—there he was, stalking the deer in Glen Tilt or across the Gaick moors, or rousing before daybreak the undaunted otter among the alders of the Earn, the Isla, or the Almond; and if in his pursuit, which was fell as any hound’s, he got his hand into the otter’s grip, and had its keen teeth meeting in his palm, he let it have its will till the pack came up,—no flinching, almost as if without the sense of pain. It was this gameness and thoroughness in whatever he was about that charmed his people—charmed his very dogs; and so it should.... But he was not only a great hunter, and an organiser and vitaliser of hunting, he was a great breeder. He lived at home, was himself a farmer, and knew all his farmers and all their men; had lain out at nights on the Badenoch heights with them, and sat in their bothies and smoked with them the familiar pipe. But he also was, as we have said, a thorough breeder, especially of Ayrshire cattle. It was quite touching to see this fierce, restless, intense man—impiger, acer, iracundus—at the great Battersea show doating upon and doing everything for his meek-eyed, fine-limbed, sweet-breathed kine.
Besides doing much to stock his domain with the best cattle honestly come by, this duke fell in with the fashion set by his royal mistress in keeping up its Highland character and sentiment. A German visitor, Herr Brand, took a note how tartans had faded out of Scotland, except in the case of soldiers; but he modified that statement when he got the length of Blair and came in for the Atholl Gathering, to see a whole regiment of the duke’s dependents, gamekeepers, gardeners, herds and the like, paraded for this holiday occasion as kilted Highlanders. The Atholl men can even claim to have added a new feature to the Highland dress, by the Glengarry cap worn in the army, which has almost entirely replaced the old broad bonnet and the “Balmorals” of my youth. But if Fergus McIvor could have risen from his grave to behold an Atholl Gathering, what would have most amazed him would be the fact of the duke’s honorary bodyguard being captained by a Robertson of Struan.