For, man, ye never paid money to me!
Naturally Telfer did not pay to Elliot: he paid to Buccleuch, if to any one. More, till after the Union of 1603, and the end of Border raids, Gilbert Elliot, a cousin and friend of Buccleuch, was not the owner of Stobs. The Hon. George Elliot pointed out this fact in his Border Elliots and the Family of Minto: Colonel Elliot rightly insists on this point.
The Scott version is therefore as hopelessly false as the Elliot version. The Elliot version, with the Buccleuch incident, is “too absurd to be believed,” and could not have been written (except in banter of Buccleuch), while men remembered the customs of the sixteenth century. The Scott version, again, could not be composed before the tradition arose that Gilbert Elliot was laird of Stobs before the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Now that tradition was in full force on the Border before 1688. We know that (see chapter on Kinmont Willie, infra), for, in 1688, a man born in 1613, Captain Walter Scott of Satchells, in his Metrical History of the Honourable Families of the Names of Scott and Elliot, represents Gilbert Elliot of Stobs as riding with Buccleuch in the rescue of Kinmont Willie, in 1596. [95a] Now Satchells’s own father rode in that fray, he says, [95b] and he gives a minute genealogy of the Elliots of Stobs. [95c]
Thus the belief that Gilbert Elliot was laird of Stobs by 1596 was current in the traditions of a man born seventeen years after 1596. The Scott version rests on that tradition, and is not earlier than the rise of that erroneous belief.
Neither the Scott nor Elliot version is other than historically false. But the Scott version, if we cut out the reference to auld Gibby Elliot, offers a conceivable, though not an actual, course of events. The Elliot version, if we excise the Buccleuch incident, does not. Cutting out the Buccleuch incident, Telfer goes all the way from Ettrick to Liddesdale, seeking help in that remote country, and never thinks of asking aid from Buccleuch, his neighbour and chief. This is idiotic. In the Scott version, if we cut out the refusal of Gilbert Elliot of Stobs, Telfer goes straight to his brother-in-law, auld Jock Grieve, within four miles of Buccleuch at Branksome; thence to another friend, William’s Wat, at Catslockhill (now Branksome-braes), and so to Buccleuch at Branksome. This is absurd enough. Telfer would have gone straight to Branksome and Buccleuch, unless he were a poor shy small farmer, who wanted sponsors, known to Buccleuch. Jock Grieve and William’s Wat, both of them retainers and near neighbours of Buccleuch, were such sponsors. Granting this, the Scott version runs smoothly, Telfer goes to his sponsors, and with his sponsors to Buccleuch, and Buccleuch’s men rescue his kye.
III
COLONEL ELLIOT’S CHARGE AGAINST SIR WALTER SCOTT
Colonel Elliot believes generally in the historical character of the ballad as given in the Elliot version, but “is inclined to think that” the original poet “never wrote the stanza” (the stanza with Buccleuch’s refusal) “at all, and that it has been inserted at some later period.” [97a] In that case Colonel Elliot is “inclined to think” that an Ettrick farmer, robbed by the English, never dreamed of going to his neighbour and potent chief, but went all the way to Martin Elliot, high up in Liddesdale, to seek redress! Surely few can share the Colonel’s inclination. Why should a farmer in Ettrick “choose to lord” a remote Elliot, when he had the Cock of the Border, the heroic Buccleuch, within eight miles of his home?
Holding these opinions, Colonel Elliot, with deep regret—
I wat the tear blinded his ee—
accuses Sir Walter Scott of having taken the Elliot version—till then the only version—and of having altered stanzas vii.–xi. (in which Jamie goes to Branksome, and is refused succour) into his own stanzas vii.–xi., in which Jamie goes to Stobs and is refused succour. This evil thing Scott did, thinks Colonel Elliot. Scott had no copy, he thinks, of the ballad except an Elliot copy, which he deliberately perverted.