“In the year 1818,” says Elliot, “as near as I can remember, Lord Chief Justice Erskine came to Gretna in a chaise and four horses, dressed in woman’s clothes, accompanied by an elderly lady and four children. When I first saw them, I took the elderly lady for the mother of the children, and the learned Lord for the grandmother. He asked me many questions relative to Gretna marriages, all of which I answered him as I would a female, until by chance I espied a button of his waistcoat through the opening of a neckerchief which he wore over his breast. After he found that I had discovered his sex, he smiled but made no remark. He afterwards changed his dress, and I married him to the female whom he had brought with him. I asked him why he had come in female attire; he answered that he had his own reasons for it. He gave me twenty pounds, and again resumed his female dress. Twelve months after, at the instigation of his sons by a former wife, he wished to divorce her by Scots law, but found, upon trial, that he could not.”
Erskine was not the first great lawyer, by very many, to exhibit a practical uncertainty as to the law, however certain he might theoretically be. He made no further attempt to upset the legality of the marriage, and in December 1821 a son, christened Hampden Erskine, was born to this odd couple. Erskine died, in his seventy-third year, in 1823.
CULMINATING ROMANCE
Among the more famous clients of the canny marriage-mongers of Gretna were the heroic Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald, and Miss Katharine Barnes, in 1812. On their heels came Viscount Deerhurst, son of the Earl of Coventry, whose fee to the “priest” was £100. Very late in Gretna’s history came the marriage of Lord Drumlanrig, heir to the sixth Marquis of Queensberry, and Miss Caroline Clayton, in 1840. The lady’s father, General Clayton, had objected to the marriage, on account of her youth, for she was only nineteen at the time; and the couple decided to hie over the Border on the first opportunity. This soon offered, and, discarding the time-honoured post-chaise, they rode horseback all the way, reaching their haven on May 25th. This gallant cavalier became seventh Marquis of Queensberry, and was accidentally shot in 1858, at Kinmont, when out rabbiting. The Marchioness long survived him, and died so recently as February 1904.
The circumstances of the elopement of Lady Rose Somerset, daughter of the seventh Duke of Beaufort, in 1846, with Captain Francis Lovell, show that the old hazards were passing. They took railway tickets, and so, without foam-flecked horses or anxious post-boys, came to Gretna.
But by far the most romantic incident in those annals of “over the Border” elopements was the marriage of Miss Penelope Smyth on May 7th, 1836, at Gretna Hall to Charles Ferdinand Bourbon, Prince of the two Sicilies and Capua, brother and heir-presumptive to Ferdinand the Second, King of Naples. The whole affair reads like the vapourings of some extravagant novelist of the old Family Reader type. Miss Smyth was a beautiful Exeter girl, and additionally attractive to an impecunious Prince in the fact of possessing a fortune of £20,000. The circumstances of her being in Italy do not appear, but she seems to have been married to the Prince at Lucca, and again at Rome. They fled from Italy to avoid the fury of the King of Naples, who denied the legality of the union, and claimed that no marriage could be contracted by a Prince of the Blood Royal without the consent of the reigning sovereign. The Prince appears to have relied upon the affection of his sister, the Queen Regent of Spain, to smooth matters over, but was rebuffed at Madrid, the Queen refusing to receive either him or his bride. They then left for Paris, and afterwards for England, after a third ceremony had been performed, and flew to this inevitable refuge, the Border. Then, coming to London, they applied for a license at Doctor’s Commons.
Of the virtuous intentions of this anxious and much-married couple there can be no possible doubt whatever, and the part of “villain of the piece” is taken by the bold bad “Bomba,” the notorious King of Naples, who acted to perfection the character of tyrannical brother. He instructed the Sicilian Ambassador to protest against the license being issued, and it was accordingly refused. The dauntless couple were then married in the ordinary way, by banns, at St. George’s, Hanover Square.
The virtuous lived happily ever after, and the wicked met with the retribution that, by all the canons of dramatic art, was to be expected, for the kingdom of Naples was abolished in 1861, and with it went King Bomba and all questions of succession.
GRETNA GREEN.