He was kindness itself, and loved giving; from Rousseau he met, we are told, the usual amount of gratitude after the quarrel with Hume. But, judging from what Rousseau himself says, on this occasion he was not ungrateful. If he heard, in conversation, a tale of misery, he made no remark, but sought out and succoured the person in distress. To every one who visited him he insisted on making some little present. He maintained a poor woman in comfort; nay, ‘down to spiders and frogs, he was the friend of all created things.’ Being a piquet player of the first force, he would only stake halfpence, and, when his winnings accumulated, laid them out in a feast of fat things for Snell, his big dog. Like Lionardo da Vinci, he could not bear to see a caged bird.
In his last years he was drawn about in a garden chair, his legs failing him. His mortal agony was long and patiently borne: never before had he been ill. ‘Can your physic take fifty years off my life?’ he asked the doctor. He died merely of long life, on May 25, 1778. In 1770 he had described himself to his kinsman, Sir Robert Murray Keith, as ‘nearly eighty.’ In 1778, then, he cannot have been ninety-two, as Mr. Carlyle supposed—probably he was about eighty-five. Years of trouble and sorrow these years would have been to another, but ‘a merry heart goes all the way.’ Physically, and mentally, and morally, the Earl had ever been an example of soundness. In his latest illness he was never peevish. Once ‘he wished he were among the Eskimo, for they knock old men on the head.’
The Earl was not a great man. In conspiracy, in war, in government, in diplomacy, he was a rather oddly ineffectual man. He had, in short, a genius for goodness, and an independence of spirit, a perfect disinterestedness, an inability to blind himself to disagreeable facts, and to the merits of the opposite side—a balance, in fact, of temperament and of humour—which are inconsistent with political success. We may wish that his taste in jokes had been less that of the philosophes. We may wish that, if the Cause was indeed hopeless, he had deserted it without reproaching his old master. He might have abstained from disseminating the tattle of Helvetius. There is very little else which mortal judgment can find to reprehend in brave, honest, generous, humorous, kind George Keith, who was, without Christian faith, the pattern of all the Christian virtues. He was of two worlds—the old Royalist world, and the Age of Revolution—yet undisturbed in heart he lived and died,
Vetustæ vitæ imago,
Et specimen venientis ævi.[33]
III
MURRAY OF BROUGHTON
In black contrast to the name, the character, the happy life and peaceful, kindly end of the good Earl Marischal stand the infamy, the ruined soul, the wretched existence and miserable death of John Murray of Broughton. ‘No lip of me or mine comes after Broughton’s!’ said the Whig father of Sir Walter Scott, as he threw out of window the teacup from which the traitor had drunk. Murray was poisonous; was shunned like a sick, venomed beast. His name was blotted out of the books of the Masons’ lodge to which he belonged; even the records of baptisms in his Episcopal chapel attest the horror in which he was held for thirty years, for half his life. Yet this informer remained, through that moiety of his degraded existence, true in heart to the Cause which the Earl Marischal forsook and disdained, true to his affection for his Prince; and it is even extremely probable that, after he became titular King, Charles, on a secret expedition to England, visited Murray in his London house.
The vacant, contemned years, when his beautiful wife had ceased to share his infamy, were partly beguiled in the composition of the ‘Memorials,’ which Mr. Fitzroy Bell has edited, with reinforcements from the Stuart MSS., the papers in the Record Office, and the archives of the Quai d’Orsay. In these we find a spectacle which is rare: a traitor convicted, exposed, detested, yet still clinging to the Cause which he wrought for and sold, still striving to batter himself into his own self-respect, and to extenuate or bluster out his own dishonour. The Earl Marischal has left us no memoirs; a manuscript which he gave to Sir Robert Murray Keith has been lost. But Murray’s papers are still in the possession of his great-grandson by a second marriage, Mr. George Siddons Murray, who has generously sanctioned their publication.