It would be interesting to know Scott’s reason for what can hardly be the result of accident. He may possibly have thought that a girl deprived of a mother’s care and control was likely to grow up a more unconventional, and therefore a more picturesque, personage than one more happily circumstanced. But this is a mere guess.
I can think of another guess. It is known how Scott was disappointed in early love, and how he married a lady of French extraction, who makes a very shadowy appearance in biographies of him. Now that his children’s children are dead, there can be no harm in hinting that his wife was accused of a weakness which went to diminish the respect if not the affection of her family. An old friend of my father, still alive, heard the matter put very plainly by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, who told him how he himself had given up dining with the Scotts, because of the state in which he frequently found the lady of the house. That bit of hushed-up scandal would explain why the husband shrank from describing a mother’s influence, as touching a sore point in his own family life. His letters and diaries also dwell far more upon his children than upon their mother.
From this whispered aside, let us turn back to the Grahams of Menteith. At last the race began to flourish steadily in the new dukedom seated on Loch Lomond, forgetting its feuds with Argyll and overcoming its guerrilla neighbours, Macgregors and such-like. The Grahams may now look on themselves as a great clan that has absorbed the sentiment of the heather and the forest among which they made clearings. But they surely came from the south, one sept of them seen by Scott at home in the Debatable Land on the English border. The very name has a hint of darkly dubious origin. One ancient warrior of the race is said to have broken through the Roman wall, which, in memory of that exploit, became known as Graham’s Dyke. But the name Graham’s Dyke turns up in other distant parts of Britain—as, for instance, on Harrow Weald by the house of that dealer in modern “magic and spells,” Mr. W. S. Gilbert, where it is more plausibly interpreted as Grim’s Dyke, a name given in awe by rude Saxons to what seemed the work of supernatural hands, such as near Brighton, with a flourish of legend, has been bluntly christened the Devil’s Dyke. The Grahams had best look out for another forefather. Quelle généalogie! as a Czar of Russia exclaimed in amazement, when he had interpreted to him at the Mansion House that an unknown uniform denoted un frère aîné de la Trinité.
We know how more than one “Dyke” was run across the country as a barrier against naked hosts of the North. But this part of the Highland line had a natural boundary in the Forth, of which the saying was that it “bridled the wild Highlandman.” Swimming is an accomplishment given by Scott to Malcolm Graeme and other of his heroes; but it was not common among Highlanders of the last generation; and I am doubtful how far a poet had authority for the statement—
We swam ower to fause English ground
And danced ourselves dry to the pibroch’s sound.
The young Forth, known in its cradle as the Avon Dhu, soon gathers strength as it drains the flats of Flanders Moss, which is taken to be the dregs of a forest cut down by Roman soldiery; and its only safe passage, even that impracticable in spate weather, was by the Fords of Frew, where Rob Roy made his bold escape from Montrose’s horsemen. This point proved so important as to be guarded by a fortalice, when there was no wale of bridges on the Highland line. Scott confesses to an anachronism in accommodating Aberfoyle with a bridge in Rob Roy’s day. The first bridge was at Stirling, one of great antiquity, as shown by the part it played in Wallace’s victory over the English knights heedlessly divided on the crossing. A public-spirited tradesman of Stirling, Robert Spittall, “Tailor to King James IV.” built a bridge over the Teith at Doune, as an inscription upon it records. Once across this, an invading army from the North had still to pass the Forth, its bridge guarded by Stirling Castle.
The value of this double line of defence for the Lowlands was well shown in 1715. When Mar lay so long idle at Perth with the largest Jacobite army ever mustered could he have held it together, his inactivity was caused not only by want of skill and decision, but by the fact of the Forth fords being swollen by a wet winter, while Argyll had broken down the Teith Bridge at Doune. Mar found it easier to ship a detachment across the Firth of Forth than to get over the river near its source, an enterprise in which sly Rob Roy seems to have been in vain expected to guide him. When he did advance on Stirling it was by Allan Water, above which he met Argyll on Sheriffmuir, for that strange battle in which both sides were half-losers, half-winners.
Argyll’s moral victory appears to have been partly due to the Ochil boglands being frozen so as to bear the heavy regular dragoons. A little later and the frost would have been hard enough to make the unbridged rivers passable, as the Highland army could retreat from Perth across the ice-bound Tay. When Charles Edward advanced upon the Lowlands it was in a dry September that let him easily over the Forth, to march on in bravado within cannon-shot of Stirling Castle. To hinder his retreat he found Stirling Bridge broken down, which was repaired in haste for Cumberland’s march to the north.
Sheriffmuir, if we may trust historians like Blind Harry, was arena of an older and a bloodier battle, when Wallace is said to have exterminated an English army ten thousand strong; and scattered standing stones here are taken by the country-folk as memorials of that victory. The little town of Dunblane, with its restored Cathedral and its monuments of nobility, was well known to armies marching north and south on the road up Strathallan into Strathearn. Prince Charlie and Butcher Cumberland were lodged here in turn; and local legend makes the latter narrowly escape an end worse than that of Pyrrhus. A servant lass whose heart had been won by the Prince’s graciousness when she cleaned his boots, undertook to souse the Duke with boiling oil thrown from a window as he rode out of Dunblane; but the scalding douche lighted on his horse’s haunch, so that he got off with being flung into the mud.
Doune Castle guarded another road into the Highlands by way of Callander. In the ’45, as Captain Waverley found, it was held by the Jacobites to secure their passage of the Teith, and seems to have been the only spot in which they heard the mouse squeak rather than the lark sing. For a time it had for commander that “Black Knee” nephew of Rob Roy, who earned golden opinions in the neighbourhood by the considerate way in which he exercised his authority, not allowing\[Pg (\d+)\]([a-z])([’|”])([a-z]) dubious auxiliaries like Donald Bean Lean to have their will of the poor country-folk’s cattle and chickens. Even then it was in no case to stand a hot siege; and Scott found it “a noble ruin, dear to my recollections from associations which have been long and painfully broken.” It once made a stronghold for royal blood, the Dukes of Albany and the “bonnie Earls of Moray,” none of them so well remembered as the boy who came to dream among their memorials, and to retrace on pony-back the ways of audacious caterans and adventurous knights.