We have more gentle reminiscences of some Scotswomen, through both poetry and romance—both founded on history. Few maidens are better known in ballad lore than Bessy Bell and Mary Gray. Their true history is not so familiarly known. They were living at the time of the last plague that ever devastated Scotland, A.D. 1645. Bessy was daughter of the Laird of Kincaid: Mary, of the Laird of Lednoch. At the last place, near Perth, Bessy was on a visit to Mary. The plague broke out in the neighbourhood, and raged so fearfully that the young ladies built them a bower, about a quarter of a mile from the mansion, and there dwelt, apart from their family, but not from all human companionship. They were visited and whatever they required was brought to them by a swain who is said to have been equally deeply in love with both—which was a very aggravated symptom of a common sort of plague. Tradition says that death came of it. The lover with two mistresses brought the infection with him. The ladies caught the disease, died, and were buried near where the present mansion stands—a mansion, the name of which has been changed from Lednoch to the more familiar Lynedoch. The gallant soldier who bore that name, built a bower over the graves of a couple of whom we know nothing surely, except that they lived and died.
In legend—one which was born of sad truth, and has passed into Italian opera—there is no maiden more famous than the Bride of Lammermoor. In melancholy prose, the lady was the Honourable Janet Dalrymple, daughter of the first Lord Stair. She and young Lord Rutherford had plighted their troth, had broken a silver coin between them, and had invoked malediction on whichever of the two should be false to the compact. The parents of Lady Janet insisted on her marrying Dunbar of Baldoon. The mother, Lady Stair, was most cruel in forcing her daughter to this match. Janet, broken-hearted and helpless, had an interview with her lover, and sobbed out a text from Numbers xxx. 2, 3, 4, 5, as an excuse for her obedience to her mother’s commands. The lovers parted in sorrow; Rutherford in anger. He had not in him the spirit of young Lochinvar, nor Janet the wit to run away with him herself. The poor thing was, in fact, scared. She was carried to church to be wed, in a semi-crazed and more than half-dead state. At night a hurricane of shrieks came from the bridal chamber, where the bridegroom was found on the ground, profusely bleeding from a stab, and the bride sat near him in her night-gear, bidding them ‘Take up your bonny bridegroom!’ She died insane in less than three weeks. Dunbar of Baldoon recovered, but he was never known to open his lips on the causes which led to the catastrophe. Baldoon evidently took things as they came; after his death, some thirteen years later, in 1682, Andrew Simpson wrote an elegy upon him, in which the romantic adventurer upon marriage with another man’s love was described as a respectable country gentleman who had introduced many improvements into agriculture! Lord Rutherford, the lover, died childless, in 1685. As Dunbar would never suffer the catastrophe to be alluded to, good-natured people invented a story that Rutherford himself was in the chamber before Baldoon reached it, and had stabbed him as soon as he entered it. There is no shadow of the slightest grain of substance for this part of a sufficiently calamitous history.
Janet Dalrymple was a strong-minded woman. She and her contemporaries descended from mothers and grandmothers who were both strong-minded and wrong-headed. Among the Scotswomen who may be so designated may be reckoned those who were accustomed in the latter half of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries to go about in men’s attire. Indeed the sexes would often change clothes. This was done sometimes at bridals, sometime at burials, always in a spirit of jollification, and there is an instance of women and men making this travesty and rioting through Aberdeen, in celebration of their recovery from the plague, but while the foul stigmata of the disease were still upon them! The magistrates had infinite trouble with the women. Fines did not frighten the offenders. Other means were adopted. In March, 1576, certain women ‘tryit presently as dancers in men’s claiths, under silence of night, in houses and through the town;’ the magistrates inform them that if they are caught ‘they shall be debarrit fra all benefit of the kirk and openly proclaimit in the pulpit.’ This masquerading was not confined to women of low degree. Queen Mary Stuart and her ladies, once at least, frolicked through Edinburgh in disguise—that is to say, they went their joyous way as young market-women; this unseemly frolic occurred when weak and ill-starred Darnley was on the point of wedding with the widowed but then light-hearted queen.
Of all the wilful Scotswomen of whom Scottish records make mention, one of the most singular was the Hon. Susan Cochrane, daughter of John, the fourth Earl of Dundonald. At fifteen, she married the Earl of Strathmore, who was accidentally killed three years later, A.D. 1728. Twenty years after this the childless widow married her groom, according to the Rev. Mr. Roger—her ‘factor,’ or bailiff, according to the peerage books. The second husband’s name was Forbes. ‘The groom,’ says Mr. Roger, ‘at first (when she offered herself in marriage to him) thought that the countess had become mentally disordered, but when he perceived she was serious he gladly embraced the good fortune which had so unexpectedly fallen in his way.’ There was a daughter of this marriage. The mother ultimately carried the girl with her to France, when Forbes made the home unfit for a commonly decent woman to live in. Lady Strathmore died in that country in 1754, leaving her daughter, Miss Forbes, in a convent at Rouen. Forbes married again, and then sent for his daughter, who returned to his house. She was so cruelly treated that at last she ran away, wandered through the country, and, when nearly irrecoverably exhausted, was taken into a farm-house, in Fifeshire, by a family named Lauder. The fugitive told her tale, and the Lauders gave her a permanent home. After a while, the eldest son fell in love with and married her. Happiness seemed secured to her at last, but it did not continue long. Her husband fell into adversity, and the honest fellow died under the crushing pressure of it. What the daughter of Lady Strathmore suffered it would be too painful only to conjecture. In 1821 she was found living in a miserable cottage near Stirling, and her influential neighbours took up her case. They represented it to the families of Dundonald and Strathmore, to whom the appeal was not made in vain. They contributed to furnish her with an annuity of 100l. a year. It was thankfully received, and it proved all-sufficient for the wants of the granddaughter of two earls.
Returning to days before the Reformation, it seems to have been then a sort of practical joke on the part of leaders of military bands to quarter their officers and men in convents, which were also places where young ladies of quality were educated and lodged. There were generally means available to get rid of this unmanly intrusion. Similar circumstances, with similar results, occurred in Scotland after the Reformation. The first notice of a regular professional governess in Scotland occurs under the date of 1685. In a petition to the Privy Council this lady, Isabel Cumming, describes herself as a widow and stranger, who has been invited to Edinburgh (in which place she considered that the centre of the virtue of the whole kingdom was to be found!) to instruct young gentlewomen in all sorts of needlework, playing, singing, and several other excellent pieces of work, becoming ladies of honour. She had not only succeeded, but, she says, she was continually improving herself for the advantage of young ladies of quality. This exemplary Isabel petitioned to be made exempt from the affliction of having soldiers quartered upon her; otherwise, what would become of all her young ladies? Their heads would be turned from study, and their hearts would be beating to nought but military airs. The Lords of the Council, who had young kinswomen, perhaps, among the pupils, prudently and promptly granted Mrs. Cumming’s request.
These young ladies, grown into wives, often sorely troubled their lords by going to conventicle instead of to church, as the Act of Charles II., the religious head of that church, ordered them to do, under severe penalty, which, of course, the husband had to pay. The wife of Balcanqui of that ilk so often offended in this way, that her lord at last grew tired of paying her fines. He protested to the king’s council that he conformed himself, but that his wife stoutly refused. He was therefore, desirous, he said, to deliver her up to the council, to be disposed of at their pleasure. The considerate council declared that men like Balcanqui were not to be ruined by the mad and wilful opinions of fanatical wives; and they agreed to remit the fine, if he would send them the lady.
On the other hand, there was at least one lady who was willing, not only to give up her lord for conventicle-haunting, but to see him hanged as a Nonconformist. Her name has not lived in history, but Wodrow records the fact. She was a graceless virago. She mocked him in family prayer, cursed him when he went to conventicle, and flung stools at him when he returned. She had him up to the court at Glasgow, and entreated my lords ‘to hang him.’ They refused, on the ground that hanging could be nothing compared with having to live with her. This fearful sort of woman constantly comes to the front in Scottish annals. Indeed, the question as to woman’s rights was settled in Scotland before it was thought of in England. Take, for example, the ladies who mobbed the Chancellor Stair and Archbishop Sharpe, in Charles’s reign. They cried out that the Gospel was starving in Scotland through rampant prelacy. One of the ladies struck the prelate on the back of the neck as he passed into the Parliament House, crying out, at the same time, that that (his neck) should pay for it ere all was done! The prelate’s life was said to have been in danger. The whole scene, with the beautiful furies pelting the archbishop with epithets of ‘Judas’ and ‘Traitor,’ and hinting at murder, is almost inconceivable now. We should have something like it if the Mrs. Fitzhighflyers were to mob the Dean of Westminster in his own cloisters, and try to hang him from one of his own gargoyles.
If a minister took a wife from women of the temper indicated above, he must have soon felt that the same temper would always regulate home affairs. Very fearful bodies were some of those ministers’ wives. James Fraser, of Ross-shire, who wrote a work on Sanctification during the first half of the last century, had about the worst of them. She kept him tightly up to the collar, worked him hard, and starved him outright. She gloried in her tyranny. It might be said of her, as some say of Bismark, human anguish was a sensual delight. The good man’s neighbours put food in his way when he was permitted to walk abroad, or they treated him hospitably in their houses, where he dared tarry, however, very briefly. In winter, his Fury allowed him neither light nor fire in his study. He worked in it by day and meditated in it by night, when not at a scanty meal. At a ministers’ festival meeting ‘Our Wives’ was one of the toasts. Fraser, on being sportively asked if he would drink it, exclaimed, ‘Aye, heartily! Mine brings me to my knees in prayer a dozen times daily, which is more than any of you can say of yours!’ On the day of Fraser’s death, several ministers, on a formal visit of condolence, waited on her, and found her gaily busy among the poultry which she reared and sold. ‘Oh aye, he’s gane!’ said the widow. ‘Ye can gang in, if ye will, and look at the body!’ and she scattered corn the while, crying, ‘Chick! chick! chick!’ The sentiment of Mrs. Fraser towards her husband was very like that of the Scotswoman in the old song:—