CHAPTER I
THE GREGORIES
‘The moon’s on the lake, and the mist’s on the brae,
And the clan has a name that is nameless by day.
Then gather, gather, gather Grigalach!’
The Macgregor’s Gathering—Scott.
The able Scots family of Gregorie can trace its descent from the Macgregors of Roro, the younger branch of the Glenlyon family. The name Gregorie,—which is the Saxon form of M’Gregor—had, most fortunately for its owners, been assumed before 1603, the darkest time in the annals of that clan. The proscription which then fell upon everyone bearing the name of M’Gregor could not touch the Gregories; but the change of name, which saved them from the penalties that fell so heavily upon their Highland cousins could not and did not alter their natures, and all the Gregories, with perhaps the single exception of the Dean of Christ Church, were at heart M’Gregors. Nothing that civilisation, education, wealth and society could do to modify their disposition was able entirely to obliterate in them the warlike character of their Highland forefathers. We remember this, and when in the nineteenth century we see a learned professor of the Practice of Physic beating his fellow-professor in Edinburgh University quadrangle, we know that he was not really James Gregory but James M’Gregor.
The claim of the Gregories to recognition in Scottish biography does not rest on the outstanding genius of any individual member of the family, so much as on the number of great and brilliant men belonging to it, who have, in their day, formed and educated generations of the youth of Scotland. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, with a gap of only a few years, some of the Gregorie connection were professing either mathematics or medicine in one or other of the Scottish universities. They were great teachers, lucid, clear-sighted and advanced in their views, and naturally leaders of men. Galton, in his book on Hereditary Genius, in which he ‘endeavoured to speak of none but the most illustrious names,’ cites the Gregories as a striking example of hereditary scientific gifts. He considers that the mathematical power came into the family with Janet Anderson, who married the Rev. John Gregorie, parish minister of Drumoak in the year 1621. From these two are descended no less than fourteen professors, and as there is no record of special power in the Gregorie family till we come to the sons of John Gregorie, it may be taken for granted that the ability came from the Andersons, who were distinguished in the foregoing generations.
Janet Anderson was the daughter of David Anderson of Finzeach, in Aberdeenshire; a man who was possessed of such universal talent that he was popularly called ‘Davie do a’ thing.’ Two of his deeds come down to posterity; the one, the building of St Nicholas steeple in Aberdeen, upon which he himself is said to have placed the weather-cock; and the other, the removal of a great boulder, called Knock Maitland, which lay in the entrance to Aberdeen harbour and endangered the passage of every ship sailing in or out. This he removed by placing chains under it at low tide, and fastening them to a huge raft, which at high tide lifted up the rock and carried it out to the open sea.
Janet Anderson’s near kinsman was the Professor of Mathematics in the University of Paris, and she herself was a great mathematician and is said to have taught her sons. If that was the case, one at least of her pupils did her great credit, for her younger son, James, lived to take a foremost place among the mathematicians of his day, and to be the inventor of the Gregorian Telescope.
In 1621, when the Rev. John Gregorie married Janet Anderson, he was the minister of Drumoak, a remote parish on the Dee, where in peaceful times he might have fulfilled his quiet duties with little to disturb him. Towards the end of the first half of the seventeenth century, however, Scotland was in a ferment, and in a state of civil and religious turmoil which made itself felt throughout the land. In Aberdeenshire, both the clergy and the laity were in sympathy rather with Laud and Prelacy than with Henderson and Presbytery. This brought them into violent collision with the party in power, and among the rural clergy there were few names more distasteful to the Covenanters than the name of John Gregorie. When therefore in 1639, the government sent an army to coerce refractory Aberdeenshire, he knew that he would receive no toleration and fled, meaning to join the king at Newcastle. The ship in which he tried to escape was boarded, and the fugitives were made to return, and in the following year Gregorie’s fears were realised, for General Monro, who was then stationed near Aberdeen on the outlook for rebels from the Covenant—especially rich ones—remembered the minister of Drumoak. Spalding tells us the pitiful story.