Highways and Byways in the Border / Illustrated

by Andrew Lang; John Lang

And Drygrange, with the milk-white yowes,

Twixt Tweed and Leader standing:

The bird that flees through Redpath trees

And Gladswood banks ilk morrow,

May chant and sing sweet Leader Haughs

And bonnie howms of Yarrow.

It is scarcely possible to conceive a scene more beautiful than that where Leader winds her cheery way through the woods of Drygrange. When the Borderland is starred thick with primroses, and the grassy banks of Leader are carpeted with the blue of speedwell and the red of campion; when a soft air and warm sun hatch out a multitude of flies at which the trout rise greedily, then is the time to see that deep, leafy glen at the bottom of which sparkles the amber-clear water over its gravelly bed. In cliff or steep bank the sides tower up perhaps to the height of a couple of hundred feet, thick clad with rhododendrons and spreading undergrowth, and with mighty larch, beech, elm, or ash, and everywhere the music of Heaven's feathered orchestra smites sweetly on the ear. It is, I think, to this Paradise that good birds go when they die, where the ruthless small boy's raiding hand is kept in check, and every bird may find ideal nesting place.

The district is most famous in ballad, song and story, Leaderdale, being apparently equivalent to Lauderdale, giving a title to the Earl of Lauderdale, the chief of the Maitlands. "They call it Leader town," says the enigmatic ballad of Auld Maitland, speaking of the stronghold of a Maitland of the days of Wallace, a shadowy figure still well remembered in the folk lore of the reign of Mary Stuart. The ballad has some good and many indifferent verses. It was known to the mother and uncle of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. He copied it out for Will Laidlaw, Scott's friend and amanuensis, and this began the long and valuable association of Hogg with the Sheriff. The authenticity of the ballad has been impugned, Hogg and Scott, it has been asserted, composed it and Scott gave it to the world as genuine. This is demonstrably an erroneous conjecture, (as I have shown in Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy). Letters which had not been published refute all suspicions of forgery by Hogg or Scott or both. But the ballad had, apparently, been touched up, perhaps in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, probably by one of the witty and literary family of Maitland. It came to Hogg's mother from "auld Babby Metlan," (Maitland,) housekeeper to the last of the Scotts of Tushielaw; herself perhaps a reduced member of the impoverished family of "the flower of the wits of Scotland," Queen Mary's Secretary of State, Maitland of Lethington.

Though the legendary "Maitland or auld beard grey" may have stoutly held his house of Thirlestane against Edward I, (as he does in the ballad of Auld Maitland), I have found no record of the affair in the State Papers of the period. Thereafter the Maitlands of Lethington, though a family of ancient origin, play no conspicuous part in Scottish history, till we reach old Sir Richard, who died at the age of ninety in 1586. He was not openly recalcitrant against, but was no enthusiast for, the new doctrines of Knox and his company. A learned, humorous, peaceful man, he wrote Scottish verses and collected and preserved earlier poetry in manuscripts.

Of his sons the eldest, William, was—setting Knox aside—the most extraordinary Scott of his time. Knox was essentially Scottish in the good and not so good of his character, and was essentially an extreme Calvinist of his period; "judged too extreme," he says, by his associates. Young Maitland of Lethington, on the other hand, might have been French or Italian, hardly English. He was an absolutely modern man. In religion, even before the revolution of 1559, he was in favour of the new ideas, but also in favour of compromise and, if possible, of peace. We first meet him i i private discussion with Knox,—pleading for compromise, but yielding, with a smile, or a sigh, to the amazingly confident fallacies of the Reformer. He serves the Queen Mother, Mary of Guise, a brave unhappy lady, as Secretary of State, till he sees that her cause is every way impossible, and goes over to the Reformers, and wins for them the alliance of England, and victory. He had a great ideal, and a lofty motive, a patriotic desire for honourable peace and alliance with England. On all occasions when he encountered Knox, he met him with the "educated insolence" of his wit, with the blandest persiflage; Knox writhed and reports his ironies, and—Knox, in the long run, had the better of this smiling modern man, no fanatic, no believer in any preacher's infallibility.