In the year 1766, seven years after the birth of Burns, and five before that of Scott, there was born, in the old house of Gask in Strathearn, Perthshire, a certain Carolina Oliphant, the third child of Laurence Oliphant the younger, who, by the death of his father the next year, became the Laird of Gask and the representative of the old family of the Oliphants.
They were a Jacobite family to the core. The Laird and his father had been out in the Rebellion of 1745; they had suffered much in consequence and been long in exile; and not till a year or two before the birth of this little girl had they been permitted to return and settle on their shattered estates. They were true to their Jacobitism even then, acknowledging no King but the one “over the water,” praying for him, corresponding with him, and keeping up the recollection of him in their household as almost a religion. Carolina was named Carolina because, had she been a boy, she was to have been named Charles, and she used to say that her parents had never forgiven her for having been born a girl. But two boys were born at last, and there were sisters both older and younger; and so, among Oliphants, and Robertsons of Struan, and Murrays, and other relatives, all Jacobite, and all of the Scottish Episcopal persuasion, Carolina grew up in the old house of Gask, hearing Jacobite stories and Highland legends from her infancy, and educated with some care. The mother having died when this, her third, child was but eight years of age, the Laird was left with six young ones. “A poor valetudinary person,” as he describes himself, he seems, however, to have been a man of fine character and accomplishments, and to have taken great pains with his children. King George III., hearing somehow of his unswerving Jacobitism and the whimsicalities in which it showed itself, is said to have sent him this message by the member for Perthshire: “Give my compliments, not the compliments of the King of England, but those of the Elector of Hanover, to Mr. Oliphant, and tell him how much I respect him for the steadiness of his principles.”
Somewhat stately and melancholic himself, and keeping up the ceremonious distance between him and his children then thought proper, the Laird of Gask had those liberal and anti-morose views of education which belonged especially to Scottish nonjuring or Episcopalian families. A wide range of reading was permitted to the boys and the girls; dancing, especially reel-dancing, was incessant among them,—at home, in the houses of neighbouring lairds, or at county-balls; in music, especially in Scottish song, they were all expert, so that the rumour of a coming visit of Neil Gow and his violin to Strathearn, with the prospect it brought them of a week extraordinary of combined music and reel-dancing, would set them all madly astir; but the most musical of the family by far was Carolina. She lived in music, in mirth, legend, Highland scenery, and the dance, a beautiful girl to boot, and called “the Flower of Strathearn,” of tall and graceful mien, with fine eyes, and fine sensitive features, slightly proud and aquiline. And so to 1792, when her father, the valetudinary laird, died, some of his children already out in the world, but this one, at the age of twenty-six, still unmarried.
For fourteen years more we hear of her as still living in the old house of Gask with her brother Laurence, the new Laird, and with the wife he brought into it in 1795,—the even tenor of her existence broken only by some such incident as a visit to the north of England. During this time it is that we become aware also of the beginnings in her mind of a deep new seriousness, a pious devoutness, which, without interfering with her passionate fondness for song and music, or her liking for mirth and humour and every form of art, continued to be thenceforth the dominant feeling of her life, bringing her into closer and closer affinity with the “fervid” or “evangelical” in religion in whatever denomination it appeared. All this while, or for the greater part of it, there was an engagement between her and a half-cousin of hers, Captain Nairne. He was of Irish birth, but of the Scottish family of the Perthshire Nairnes, and heir, after his elder brother’s death, to the Nairne peerage, should that peerage, which had been attainted after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, be ever revived. Of that there seemed no hope, and Captain Nairne’s fortunes and prospects were of the poorest. Not till the year 1806, therefore, when he was promoted to the brevet rank of Major, and obtained the appointment of Assistant-Inspector-General of Barracks in Scotland, were the betrothed cousins able to marry, she then in her fortieth year, and he nine years older.
Their married life of four-and-twenty years was spent almost wholly in Edinburgh. Residing first in a cottage in one of the suburbs of the town, they were known for a good while there as a gentleman and lady of slender means, but distinguished family connections, having an only son, of delicate constitution, whom they were educating privately, and on whose account they lived in a rather retired manner, cultivating a few select friendships, but not going much into general society. Ravelston House, at the foot of the Corstorphine Hills, of which Mrs. Nairne’s younger sister became mistress in 1811 by her marriage with the then Keith of Ravelston, was one of the few places in which Mrs. Nairne and her husband were regularly to be seen at parties. Though this and occasional meetings elsewhere must have brought her into talking acquaintance with Scott,—in whose life Ravelston House was so dear and familiar that it became the suggestion of his castle of Tullyveolan in Waverley,—there is no evidence of any intimacy between the two; nor does Mrs. Nairne’s name once occur, I think, in Lockhart’s Life of Scott, full though that book is of allusions to persons and things memorable in Edinburgh while the great wizard was its most illustrious inhabitant. One of the many kindly acts of Scott’s life, however, had some influence on the fortunes of Mrs. Nairne. During the visit of George IV. to Edinburgh in 1822, Scott took occasion to suggest to him that the restoration of the attainted Jacobite families to their titles would be a graceful and popular act of his reign, and the consequence was a Bill for the purpose which passed Parliament and received the royal assent in 1824. Thus, at the age of sixty-seven, Major Nairne became Baron Nairne of Nairne in Perthshire, and his wife, at the age of eight-and-fifty, Baroness Nairne. It seems to have been about this date, or shortly afterwards, though I am not quite sure, that they had a temporary residence in Holyrood Palace. At all events, I have been informed that at one time they had apartments there.
In 1830, six years after the recovery of his title, Lord Nairne died. This broke Lady Nairne’s domiciliary tie to Edinburgh. She removed first to the south of England, to be with some of her relatives; thence to Ireland, where she lived a year or two; and thence in 1834 to the Continent, on account of the ill-health of her son, the new Lord Nairne, then a young man of six-and-twenty. For the next three years, she, her son, and her widowed sister Mrs. Keith, moved about, through France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, mainly for the recreation and recruiting of the sickly young Lord, who, however, died at Brussels in December 1837, in his thirtieth year, and was there buried.
The widowed Baroness, thus childless and lonely in the world, continued to live abroad for a year or two longer, chiefly in Germany and in Paris. Her consolations in her bereavement were in correspondence with her nephews and nieces at home, in readings in religious and other good books, in her interest in Christian missions and other movements of Protestant Evangelism, and in secret acts of charity in aid of such missions and movements, or in relief of private distresses. A foreign waiting-maid, who was long in her service abroad, described her afterwards in these words: “My lady was as near to an angel as human weakness might permit.” But she was not to die abroad. In the year 1843, just after the Disruption of the Scottish Church,—in which event, though she remained a loyal Scottish Episcopalian as before, her interest was remarkably deep,—she was persuaded to return to Scotland and take up her residence once more at Gask: not now in the old house in which she had been born, but in the new mansion that had been built by her nephew, James Blair Oliphant, then Laird of Gask. Here she lived two years more, in the serene piety of a beautiful old age, and in deeds, every week or every day, of benevolence and mercy. She was able to visit Edinburgh once or twice; and it was there, in the year 1844, that she consulted Dr. Chalmers, whom she admired greatly and with whom she had already been in correspondence, as to fit objects for such charitable donations as her thrift enabled her to spare. She gave him, besides other smaller sums, the £300 which enabled him to accomplish the object he had then most at heart by acquiring a site for the schools and church he had resolved to plant, and did plant, amid what he called the “heathenism” of the West Port, in the very labyrinth of closes in that rank neighbourhood which had been made hideous by the Burke and Hare murders of 1828. Dr. Chalmers alone knew of the gift; no one else. A few months more of invalid existence at Gask House, with failing memory, and somewhat paralytic, and the saintly lady’s life was over. She died October 27, 1845, in the house of Gask, at the age of seventy-nine. Her remains rest in a chapel near that house, erected for Episcopal service on the site of the old parish church, in the midst of the scenery of her native Strathearn, which she loved in life so well.
That this woman had ever written a line of verse was a secret which she all but carried to the grave with her. And yet for fifty years, no less, people all round her had been singing her songs and talking about them with admiration, and phrases from them had become household words throughout Scotland, and some of them were universally spoken of as the finest Scottish songs, the songs of keenest and deepest genius, since those of Burns.
At how early a period in her life she, who could sing songs so well and who knew so many, may have tried to write one, we cannot tell; but it was in or about the year 1793, when Burns was in the full flush of his fame, and his exertions for improving and reforming Scottish Song by providing new words for old airs had kindled her enthusiasm, that she penned her first known lyric. It was called The Pleughman, and was written to be sung by her brother at a dinner of the Gask tenantry. Having been successful in that form, it was afterwards circulated by him, but with every precaution for keeping it anonymous. Had Burns lived a year longer than he did, he might have heard not only of this Pleughman, but also of another song from the same unknown hand that would have touched him a thousand times more, as it has touched all the world since,—The Land o’ the Leal. That song was written, it is believed, by Carolina Oliphant in 1797, when she was in her thirty-second year. Had the fact been known, how she would have been honoured and pointed at everywhere, all her life after, wherever she went! But the secret was kept; The Land o’ the Leal came to be attributed to Burns, and was printed at last in editions of Burns as indubitably his; and the true authoress came into Edinburgh, to live in that city, close to Scott, for four-and-twenty years; and through all that time he, who would have limped across the room with beaming eyes to single her out in chief had he been aware of the reality, remained ignorant that the handsome, but no longer young, lady whom he sometimes met at Ravelston had any other distinction than that of being the sister-in-law of Sandy Keith, and the wife of Major Nairne, Assistant-Inspector-General of Barracks. Yet this very time of her residence in Edinburgh as Mrs. Nairne was the time also, it appears, of the production of not a few additional songs of hers, some of them nearly as popular, with all or most of which Scott must have been familiar. Here particularly it was that in 1821, as we learn from the slight memoirs of her now extant, she, in concert with a small committee of other Edinburgh ladies, all sworn to secrecy, became a contributor, under the name of “Mrs. Bogan of Bogan” or under other aliases, to a collection of national airs, called The Scottish Minstrel, brought out in parts by Mr. Robert Purdie, a music-publisher of the city. She continued to contribute; and the work was completed in six volumes in 1824, the year in which she became Baroness Nairne. Mr. Purdie himself never knew who this valuable contributor to his collection was, nor did any one else out of the circle of her most intimate lady-friends. Her own husband, Lord Nairne, I am credibly informed, remained ignorant to his dying day that his wife had been guilty of song-writing or of any other kind of literary performance. Nor was silence broken on the subject through the subsequent fifteen years of Lady Nairne’s widowhood. Away in England, Ireland, or abroad, through thirteen of those years, she would still pen a little Scottish lilt occasionally, when some feeling moved her; and so till, returning to Scotland in her old age, with no one knows what memories of private sadness under her semi-aristocratic reticence and her gentle Christian faith, she lingered out her last year or two, and then died. Her secretiveness as to the authorship of the songs that might have made her famous when living was preserved to the last. Just before her death she had consented that a collective edition of them should be published, but without her name. Two months after her death, when Dr. Chalmers thought himself absolved from his promise of secrecy as to the name of the donor of the £300 for his church and schools in the West Port, he announced at a public meeting that the donor, then in her grave, had been “Lady Nairne, of Perthshire.” Even he cannot have then known of any other title of hers to regard; for, if he had, and if I know Dr. Chalmers, he would have added, with all the emotion of his great heart, “authoress of The Land o’ the Leal.” It occurs to me sometimes that in that very year 1844, when this Scottishwoman of genius was on her last visit to Edinburgh, and in occasional conferences with Dr. Chalmers in his house in Morningside, I might myself have seen her in his company or neighbourhood. But, with the rest of the world, I knew nothing then of her literary claims; and, when I read or heard The Land o’ the Leal, I thought the words were by Burns.
Only since 1846, the year after Lady Nairne’s death, can she be said to have taken her place by name in the literature of her country. In that year, her surviving sister Mrs. Keith thinking there could be nothing wrong now in letting the truth be known, there appeared the projected collective edition of the songs in the form of a thin folio, with this title-page: “Lays from Strathearn, by Caroline, Baroness Nairne, Author of ‘The Land o’ the Leal,’ etc.: Arranged, with Symphonies and Accompaniments, for the Pianoforte, by Finlay Dun.” In a subsequent edition several pieces that had been omitted in this one were added; and now perhaps the most complete collection of the songs is that edited by Dr. Charles Rogers in 1869 in a small volume containing the words without the music, and having a memoir prefixed. The number of pieces there printed as Lady Nairne’s is ninety-eight in all.