THE EARL OF WESTMORELAND
Elliot’s most romantic clients were the Earl of Westmoreland and Miss Child, who eloped in 1782. The father of the young lady was the famous London banker, whose great fortune, and the prospect of marrying it, dazzled the Earl quite as much as the beauty of his daughter and heiress. She fell in love with the noble suitor, whose proposal did not, however, commend itself to the banker. “Your blood, my lord, is good,” said he, “but money is better”; and he refused his consent. But the disappointed suitor was not disheartened, and the lovers eloped in a four-horse chaise; his canny lordship having arranged beforehand for relays of horses all the way: prudently, at the strategic point of Shap, hiring every horse to be found there. Mr. Child, enraged, lost no time in following. Using every effort that money could procure, he at last came up with the fugitives changing at High Hesket; and, leaping from his chaise, drew a pistol and shot one of the leaders of their conveyance. At the same moment, one of the Earl’s servants ran behind Mr. Child’s carriage and cut the leather braces suspending the body. The Earl and his love proceeded with three horses, with the father pursuing. Not for long, however, for presently the body fell over, and pursuit became a laggard and hopeless rearguard. One hundred guineas was the fee paid to the fortunate Elliot by the Earl. Mr. Child died within a year of the affair, it is supposed from disappointment and anger at his daughter’s disobedience. Rowlandson has, in his caricature, “Filial Affection,” drawn a more or less close commentary upon this incident. The banker took excellent care that neither of them should have his money, which he devised to any issue of the marriage. Lady Westmoreland died in 1793, leaving six children, and the Earl married again, at which one is instinctively revolted.
The elder daughter of Lord and Lady Westmoreland, Lady Sophia Fane, inherited the fortune, and married the Earl of Jersey; and their daughter, the Lady Adela Corisande Maud Villiers, followed the example set by her grandparents; eloping in 1845, at the age of seventeen, with the youthful Captain Ibbetson, of the 11th Hussars. It was a November night when the ardent pair flitted from the lady’s home at Middleton Park, Bicester. They did not patronise Elliot, but went to Gretna Hall. They reached Mr. Linton’s establishment on the 6th, and were duly married, as the surviving register shows. Lady Adela died fifteen years later, but Captain Ibbetson survived until 1898.
Jack Ainslie, of the “Bush,” Carlisle, was a sworn enemy to parents and guardians. He was perpetually signing his name as a witness to marriages, and was in fact quite a consulting counsel to love-lorn squires and damsels. To have him, in his yellow jacket, on the near wheeler was worth as many points to them as it was for attorneys to retain a leading K.C. When pushed hard, Jack knew of cunning bye-lanes and woods to hide the pursued couples in, and had occupation-roads across farms, and all that sort of geography, at his fingers’ tips.
On one occasion he altogether surpassed his previous doings. He had driven a runaway couple to Longtown, and as he thought they were taking it rather too easily, strongly advised them to cross the Border and get married before they dined. They were weary and would not be advised, and so he took his horses back to Carlisle and thought them “just poor silly things.”
He had not long returned before the girl’s mother and a Bow Street officer dashed up to the “Bush” in a post-chaise. There was not a second to lose, and so Jack, saying not a word to any one, jumped on a horse and galloped to Longtown. He had barely time to see the dawdlers huddled into a post-chaise, and to take his seat and clear the “lang toun” when the pursuers loomed in sight. The pursuit was so hot that the only way was to turn sharp down a lane. From it they saw the enemy fly past towards Gretna and so on to Annan, where they found themselves at fault and gave up the pursuit. The coast being thus cleared, Jack would stand no more nonsense, but saw his couple duly married and witnessed before he went back to Carlisle. The signatures of that marriage were always looked at with a certain sad interest, for the bridegroom was killed the next year, at Waterloo. This was Jack’s “leading case.” He was long remembered as a “civil old fellow, perhaps five feet seven if he was stretched out, and with such nice crooked legs.”
One of the most remarkable of these runaway weddings was that of the old and widowed ex-Lord Chancellor, Erskine, to Sarah Buck, his housekeeper, an elderly widow with a numerous family of children, who accompanied them.
THE OLD SMITHY, GRETNA GREEN.
LORD ERSKINE