THE DEAF POST-BOY.
[After Cruikshank.
INN AND REGISTRAR’S OFFICE
In the merry days of the road, Springfield was alert. The two inns, the “King’s Head” (as it was then) and the “Maxwell Arms,” combined the parts of registrar’s office and hostelry: the innkeepers doubling the characters of “priests” and hosts: while at Gretna Green itself stood Gretna Hall, a most comfortable, and indeed aristocratic, hotel. But, indeed, any one could, would, and did marry all who asked, anywhere. There was absolute Free Trade in it; only some were sharper than others to turn the privilege to account. Even women might perform the simple formula, although it does not appear that a woman ever did.
The inns, of course, took the pick of the business; for the convenience of coming, tired out with the long-continued excitement of being pursued out of one country into another, to be married and refreshed under one roof was so obvious that it need not be insisted upon.
Prices, naturally enough, varied. They ruled low or high, according to whether you appeared to be poor or wealthy, moderately leisured, or in a frantic haste, and marriages have been “celebrated”—the circumstances would hardly permit the use of the word “solemnised”—for the sake, at one extreme, of a glass of whiskey and a pleasant word, and, at the other extremity, for so high a fee as £100, and “D—n you, be quick about it!” There have even been times when the offer of that sum has not availed; not, we may be sure, because the keen-witted natives stood out for more, but solely on account of the excruciating circumstances. You are required to imagine such a case: the hour midnight; the more or less innocent folk of Springfield and Gretna asleep. A chaise, driven at a headlong gallop, appears, closely followed by exultant parents. The village is awake in a trice, for it sleeps always with one ear cocked; and rival “priests” are hurrying on their clothes, as quick as may be, eager to earn a fee, which, judging from the circumstances, should be a substantial one. And even as they hurry, they hear a hoarse, despairing voice exclaiming in the empty street, “A hundred pounds to the man who marries me!” It is the expectant bridegroom; but before they can reach him and his bride-elect, the pursuers have come up, and snatched the lady away.
THE “BLACKSMITH” LEGEND
The “blacksmith” is a myth, deriving, no doubt, from the more or less poetic idea of indissoluble bonds being forged. There were no blacksmiths’ forges here then, and despite old prints showing couples being married over the anvil, with post-boy looking on, no blacksmith seems ever to have been known as a “priest.” That term was, of course, absolutely an indefensible assumption; but there is this excuse, perhaps, for the “blacksmith” idea. It seems that, among those who conducted weddings, was one “Tom the Piper,” properly Thomas Little, of the “Maxwell Arms” inn, who, with his son, hit upon the attractive title of the “Gretna Wedding” inn, and hung out a painted sign representing the afterwards famous smithy scene.
Paisley, already mentioned as the first “priest,” was nothing more than a drunken Border thief and ne’er-do-well. Colonel Hawker, writing of him in 1812, says: “I should mention that the old man who officiated for nearly forty years, at £40, £50, and sometimes £100 a job, never was a blacksmith. Old Joe Paisley, for that was his name, was by trade a tobacconist. He was a very large, heavy man, and might have died worth a great deal of money; but from being an intolerable drunkard and a very unsteady fellow, his money went as lightly as it came, and after he had solemnised the marriages and dismissed his ‘couple of fools’ they could not possibly be more eager to follow their avocations than his reverence was to trudge off to a whisky-house.”