Consequently the verse quoted from the Percy MS. of Archie o’ Cafield may be improved and placed in the lips of Lord Scrope, in Kinmont Willie. But there is no evidence that Scott ever saw or even heard of this Percy MS., and probably he got the verse from recitation.
Now the affair of the rescue of Kinmont Willie was much more important and resonant than the two other rescues, and was certain to give rise to a ballad, which would contain much the same formulæ as the other two. The ballad-maker, like Homer, always uses a formula if he can find one. But Kinmont Willie is so much superior to the two others, so epic in its speed and concentration of incidents, that the question rises, had Scott even fragments of an original ballad of the Kinmont, “much mangled by reciters,” as he admits, or did he compose the whole? No MS. copies exist at Abbotsford. There is only one hint. In a list of twenty-two ballads, pasted into a commonplace book, eleven are marked X (as if he had obtained them), and eleven others are unmarked, as if they were still to seek. Unmarked is Kinmount Willie.
Did he find it, or did he make it all?
In 1888, in a note to Kinmont Willie, I wrote: “There is a prose account very like the ballad in Scott of Satchells’ History of the Name of Scott” (1688). Satchells’ long-winded story is partly in unrhymed and unmetrical lines, partly in rhymes of various metres. The man, born in 1613, was old, had passed his life as a soldier; certainly could not write, possibly could not read.
Colonel Elliot “believes that Sir Walter wrote the whole from beginning to end, and that it is, in fact, a clever and extremely beautiful paraphrase of Satchells’ rhymes.” [130a]
This thorough scepticism is not a novelty, as Colonel Elliot quotes me I had written years ago, “In Kinmont Willie, Scott has been suspected of making the whole ballad.” I did not, as the Colonel says, “mention the names of the sceptics or the grounds of their suspicions.” “The sceptics,” or one of them, was myself: I had “suspected” on much the same grounds as Colonel Elliot’s own, and I shall give my reasons for adopting a more conservative opinion. One reason is merely subjective. As a man, by long familiarity with ancient works of art, Greek gems, for example, acquires a sense of their authenticity, or the reverse, so he does in the case of ballads—or thinks he does—but of course this result of experience is no ground of argument: experts are often gulled. The ballad varies in many points from Satchells’, which Colonel Elliot explains thus: “I think that the cause for the narrative at times diverging from that recorded by the rhymes (of Satchells), is due, partly to artistic considerations, partly to the author having wished to bring it more or less into conformity with history.” [131a]
Colonel Elliot quotes Scott’s preface to the ballad: “In many things Satchells agrees with the ballads current in his time” (1643–88), “from which in all probability he derived most of his information as to past events, and from which he occasionally pirates whole verses, as we noticed in the annotations upon the Raid of the Reidswire. In the present instance he mentions the prisoner’s large spurs (alluding to fetters), and some other little incidents noticed in the ballad, which therefore was probably well known in his day.”
As Satchells was born in 1613, while the rescue of Kinmont Willie by Buccleuch, out of Carlisle Castle, was in 1596, and as Satchells’ father was in that adventure (or so Satchells says) he probably knew much about the affair from fresh tradition. Colonel Elliot notices this, and says: “The probability of Satchells having obtained information from a hypothetical ballad is really quite an inadmissible argument.”
This comes near to begging the question. As contemporary incidents much less striking and famous than the rescue of Kinmont Willie were certainly recorded in ballads, the opinion that there was a ballad of Kinmont Willie is a legitimate hypothesis, which must be tested on its merits. For example, we shall ask, Does Satchells’ version yield any traces of ballad sources?
My own opinion has been anticipated by Mr. Frank Miller in his The Poets of Dumfriesshire (p. 33, 1910), and in ballad-lore Mr. Miller is well equipped. He says: “The balance of probability seems to be in favour of the originality of Kinmont Willie,” rather than of Satchells (he means, not of our Kinmont Willie as Scott gives it, but of a ballad concerning the Kinmont). “Captain Walter Scott’s” (of Satchells) “True History was certainly gathered out of the ballads current in his day, as well as out of formal histories, and his account of the assault on the Castle reads like a narrative largely due to suggestions from some popular lay.”