In 1791 Paisley, who up to that time lived in a cottage on the Green, removed to Springfield, a little nearer the Border, where he took the “King’s Head” inn. With his removal his business largely increased. He was long an object of curiosity to travellers. At the time of his death, about 1814, he was an overgrown mass of fat, weighing at least thirty-five stone; and was grossly ignorant in his mind and insufferably coarse in his manner. Although an habitual drunkard, he was seldom or never seen “the worse for” drink, and was accustomed during the last forty years of his life to drink a Scots pint, equal to three English quarts, of brandy a day.

JOE PAISLEY

On one occasion a fellow spirit, one “Ned the Turner,” sat down with him on a Monday morning to an anker of strong cognac, and before the evening of the succeeding Saturday they kicked the empty cask out of the door; neither of them having been drunk, nor had the assistance of any one in drinking. Paisley was celebrated for his stentorian lungs and almost incredible muscular powers. He could with ease bend a strong poker over his arm, and had frequently been known to straighten an ordinary horse-shoe in its cold state.

It was told of him that he had once, when two couples at the same time required his services, married the wrong brides and bridegrooms. They were dismayed, but not Paisley, “Weel, then, ye can jist soort yersels,” said he. He was no ideal Cupid’s officer, for he was used cynically to remark that, although well paid for performing marriages, his fortune would be made in a week if he could with equal ease pronounce divorces.

We are not to suppose that eloping pairs just went off quietly to the Border and were allowed to take their time on the journey. Not at all; and they usually, knowing that parents and guardians would soon be swiftly on their track, made what haste they could. Whether pursuers or pursued first reached the Border made all the difference, for although the Scots law would not help parents and guardians forbidding the ceremony, it was always possible for the choleric father of a sentimental young lady to seize her and to give young Lochinvar the taste of a horse-whip.

Some of the races for Gretna Green were so near that the betting on the contendants was even amongst the excited spectators of the chase. A pedestrian on the English high-road within a mile of the Scotch boundary would be overtaken by a light travelling chariot, drawn at the rate of sixteen miles an hour by four of the fleetest post-horses that the host of Carlisle’s chief inn could afford. Each postilion would give his whip-hand horse a cut with his whip at every bound of the infuriated creature, whilst as frequently he plunged his spurs into the reeking flanks of the animal he bestrode. And as the riders passed him at their perilous speed, pale as death in their faces, whilst they flogged and spurred like jockeys at the finish of a neck-and-neck Derby, he would see the bridegroom’s head at the front window of the vehicle, and hear him screaming frantically, “Go it! Go it! We are getting away from them! Fifty guineas to each of you if we get there in time!” Another five minutes and the pursuers—two red-faced elderly gentlemen, whirled along at the same mad pace in a similar chariot, drawn by equally fleet horses—would dash past him. “How far ahead? Shall we catch them?” “Five minutes before you—not more.” The response would scarcely have been shouted out when the spectator would see the chase ended abruptly by the fall of a horse, the breaking of a trace, the upset of the carriage, or some other mishap that might just as well have befallen the fugitives and given the victory to their pursuers.

ROBERT ELLIOT

The oldest-established and most famous “priest” after Paisley was Robert Elliot, who married Paisley’s grand-daughter, Ann Graham, at the beginning of 1811, and lived at the former “King’s Head” from that date. When he published his “Memoirs” in 1842, he claimed that he had for the twenty-nine years past been the “sole and only parson of Gretna Green”; an impudent falsehood disproved by the existence to this day of the registers kept by David Lang, who from 1792 until 1827 married a great number of people and was particularly famous as having married Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Miss Ellen Turner, whom he abducted in 1826. David Lang had been in his youth an itinerant draper. On his journeys southward, through Lancashire, he was spirited away by the Press Gang, to serve aboard His Majesty’s ships. After many adventures, including that of being captured by Paul Jones, the pirate, he settled down here, and was in the course of time succeeded by his son, Simon, who died in 1872, and was described by Blanchard Jerrold, who visited Gretna in 1852, as “a spare old man, dressed with some pretensions to gentility.” He in turn was succeeded by his son, William Lang, who was the local postman, and had some faint claims to be considered a “priest”; whatever such claims may be worth in a place where, as already shown, any one has an undisputed right to marry any one else.

Elliot, however, was by way of being a literary character, and in history writ about Gretna Green bulks large, because of his printed spoutings: the printed word being, even among those who ought to know better, sacred. The sheer truth of it is that, at one and the same time, there were no fewer than four prominent establishments devoted to the marrying trade. The fact is scarcely remarkable, when we consider the number of them that committed matrimony at Gretna or Springfield; at that time averaging four hundred annually. Elliot was but one. He gives a return of the numbers he married, beginning in 1811 with 58, and ending in 1840 with 42. His busiest years were from 1821 to 1836, and the busiest 1824 and 1825, when he married 196 and 198 couples. In all, he married no fewer than 3,872 couples.

JOHN LINTON