Lady Grisell Baillie has been called ‘the bravest of all Scotch heroines.’ Her career lasted from 1665 to 1746. In that life of fourscore years and one she wrote one famous song, ‘Were my Heart licht I wad dee,’ and rendered a million good services to her fellow-creatures. One of the eighteen children of Sir Patrick Home, afterwards Earl of Marchmont, she learned the trick of serving her kindred so early and so well that she could not give it up when she was a fine old lady. Till her eighty-first year she rose the earliest of her family, and managed the most difficult of their affairs. When her father was in hiding from the scaffold, and Grisell was eighteen, she walked alone every night, over a dark road, and through an ill-reputed churchyard, to carry food to the fugitive, who was concealed in the family vault. Sir Patrick is described as lying on a mattress wrapped in a Kilmarnock cloak, among the mouldering bones of his ancestors, with nothing to help to spend the time but repeating some of Buchanan’s Latin psalms. Grisell had to be cautious, for there were hostile soldiers in her father’s house ever on the watch. One night, when she was providing the rations for her parent, she contrived to take a sheep’s head from the table. She was nearly betrayed to the soldiers by the remark of a sister, who, suddenly missing the head, gave loud expressions to her wonder at Grisell having so quickly eaten the whole of it. When in exile in Holland, before the Great Revolution, Sir Patrick wrote home as to how the young people should be brought up. He enjoined dancing every day. ‘Lost estates,’ he said, ‘can be recovered again, but health once lost by a habit of melancholy can never be recovered.’ After Grisell married young Baillie of Jerviswood, ‘he never went abroad but she went to the window to look after him (so she did that very day he fell ill, the last time he was abroad), never taking her eyes from him so long as he was in sight.’ Grisell ranks among Scottish songstresses. Some of her tuneful sisters are worthy of notice.
The world does not know much of Alison Rutherford of Fairnalee, but she is familiar to us under her married name of Mrs. Cockburn, authoress of one of the versions of ‘Flowers of the Forest.’ Her period was a long one, within the limits of the last century, 1712-1794. One of the biographers of this Queen of Edinburgh describes the Scotswomen of the early part of that century as highly cultivated. ‘The daughters of the country houses were educated by their fathers’ chaplains and their brothers’ tutors’ (the Dominie Sampsons of the House), ‘when they had brothers, as well as by their mothers’ waiting-women; and when the family happened to be of more than ordinary intelligence, or to be decidedly of a studious turn, the daughters were fairly well-read and well-informed women. Not only were Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Prior, and Addison on many bookshelves in lairds’ and ladies’ closets, but, though the women of the nobility and gentry had not a classical education, they frequently learnt French and Italian, and were very conversant with the former. This was not so much because of the obsolete national alliances which have scattered French words broadcast over the field of the Scottish language, as because of the influence of the vieille cour of the great Louis on manners, and the effects of its beaux esprits on literature, which were felt as far as Scotland. The number of soldiers of fortune belonging to the upper classes who served campaigns abroad and came home with foreign polish increased the influence. Corneille, Racine, and Molière, La Fontaine and La Bruyère were as much the fashion in the Scotch rank that pretended to fashion when Alison Rutherford was young, as they were in English high society when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mrs. Delany grew up.’ The above must be taken with some reserve. Scottish governesses of the period were, for the most part, ill-educated, and they were as much servants as teachers. When Jean Adam, the reputed author of ‘There’s nae Luck about the House’ (she was born in 1710), went as governess into the family of a clergyman, Mr. Turner of Greenock, she had to live on pease-brose, nettle-kail, and barley-meal scones. She knitted the minister’s stockings, helped to make the clothes of his wife, his girls, and his boys, worked at the spinning-wheel, nursed the baby, and tended the sick. In the manse of Crawfurdsdyke this governess wore a woollen petticoat and a short gown of striped linen within the house. Her Indian cotton gown and her bon grâce, or straw hat, were for gala trips to Glasgow. The education of Mrs. Cockburn, as we will call her, was defective in spelling, at all events. In one of her notes she complains of the ‘rheumatiz.’ In another she uses the word ‘unparaleled,’ sees the mistake, can’t correct it, and then gaily writes in a postscript, ‘cannot spell unparaleled.’ She was a beauty throughout life—supremely beautiful in her youth. She says prettily of herself: ‘I was a prude when young, and remarkably grave. It was owing to a consciousness that I could not pass unobserved, and a fear of giving offence or incurring censure. I loved dancing extremely, because I danced well.’ She loved it to the end of her days, and would dance with men whose grandfathers had been her partners in days of yore. Mrs. Cockburn also preferred men’s society to that of women. A company without a clever man in it was to her worse than no company at all. The sterling stuff that was in her is to be seen in what she curiously says of the early years of her marriage with young Cockburn, son of the Lord Justice Clerk: ‘I was married, properly speaking, to a man of seventy-five, my father-in-law. I lived with him four years, and as the ambition had seized me to make him fond of me, knowing also that nothing could please his son so much, I bestowed all my time and trouble to gain his approbation.’ Of her husband she wrote, three-and-thirty years after she had become a widow: ‘I was twenty years united to a lover and a friend.’ Perhaps it was the happiness of her own married life that gave her a decided partiality for making matches. ‘She was the confidante,’ her biographers remark, ‘of all lovesick hearts.’ When speaking of a widow ‘being consoled by one who had been longer in that state,’ Mrs. Cockburn contemptuously asked, ‘What’s a woman to a woman?’ That any woman should prefer a single to a married life was a fact she could not account for. ‘The girls are all set agog,’ she writes, ‘in seeking the ideal man, and will have none of God’s corrupted creatures.... Even as a good housewife I would choose my lord and master should have many faults, because there’s so much glory in mending them. One is prouder of darning an old table-cloth than of sewing a new one.’ The sentiment is happier than the simile. To the next sentiment universal mankind would say a loud Amen: ‘It’s a pity woman does not mend with age as wine does.’ There was a rough side to female Scottish character in those days. Among the friends of Mrs. Cockburn, when she was queen of Edinburgh society, was a Miss Suff Johnstone. She is thus sketched in ‘The Songstresses of Scotland,’ of whom Miss Suff was not one: ‘Miss Suff, before women’s rights were mooted, took the law into her own hand, and wore a man’s greatcoat, hat, and square-buckled shoes, practising, with the habiliments, a man’s habit of striding, spitting, and swearing. She shod a horse better than a smith, had a private forge in her bedroom, played on a fiddle, and sang a man’s song in a man’s bass voice.’ Gentle Anne Scott’s foot happening to tread upon the space appropriated by the Amazon, Anne was punished by a rough kick on the shins, and the fierce challenge, ‘What are ye wab-wabstering there for?’ The innocent offender was overwhelmed, and the rest of the party electrified. A contemporary of Mrs. Cockburn, Miss Jean Elliot, whose life ran between the limits of 1727 and 1805, and who was also the author of a version of the song, ‘Flowers of the Forest,’ had a very indifferent opinion of the Scotswomen of her time. ‘The misses,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘are, I am afraid, the most rotten part of the society. Envy and jealousy of their rivals have, I fear, a possession in their minds, especially the old part of the young ladies, who grow perfect beldames in that small society.’ At that period, the lady leaders of fashion of the faster sort frequented the Edinburgh oyster-cellars, exercised the license of men, and had such promising pupils as Miss Suff Johnstone. In an indirect way we owe to this last lady the song of ‘Auld Robin Gray.’ She was in the habit of singing words far from choice to the old tune. Lady Anne Barnard (while she was the yet unmarried daughter of the Earl of Balcarres) took the tune, and supplied it with the words which tell the well-known tale of virtuous distress. The author was forty years of age when she married Mr. Barnard, son of the Bishop of Limerick. She is almost as celebrated for this one song as the Baroness Nairne (by birth an Oliphant of Gask) was for the ‘Laird o’ Cockpen,’ ‘Caller Herrin,’ and a dozen of Jacobite and other songs, in some of which there are indications of great humour, in others of great pathos. In one verse of ‘Caller Herrin,’ she sketches a picture, as George Cruikshank used to do, with two or three strokes:—
When the creel o’ herrin’ passes
Ladies, clad in silk and laces,
Gather in their braw pelisses,
Cast their heads and screw their faces.
In the last century there was a Scottish home discipline, compared with which that of school must have appeared amiable. Take the Lanarkshire home of Joanna Baillie, who passed away just twenty years ago at the venerable age of ninety. She and the other children of the family had parents whose hearts were full of affection, which their principles would not permit them to show. The father never kissed his children. Joanna, hungering for a caress, once clasped her mother’s knee, and was gently chided. ‘But,’ Joanna used to say, ‘I know she liked it.’ It is curious to mark the contrast of Joanna Baillie, who could hardly read at eleven, running wild by the banks of the Clyde or on the braes of Calder, and of Joanna Baillie writing songs and plays in the house of her brother, the physician, in Windmill Street, Haymarket—the site of the house now occupied by the Argyll Dancing-rooms. Byron’s daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, had a wonderful knowledge of mathematics, but she cared nothing for her father’s nor any other person’s poetry. Joanna Baillie had not a poet for her sire, but the numbers came. Therewith she acquired the paternal affection for Euclid, and was great in the demonstration of problems. In her unrestrained Scottish girlhood she knew as little of fear as Nelson ever did. She was not only supreme in all girlish sports, but she rushed into audacious deeds that boys stopped short at. She ran unbonneted and high-kilted, along the parapets of bridges and the tops of walls as deftly as Mazurier or Gouffe over theatrical representations of them. She once induced her brother to mount a horse on which she was seated. The steed, waxing angry, bolted, and flung the brother, whose arm was broken. Her equestrianism was the admiration of the countryside. ‘Look at Miss Jack!’ cried a farmer, who saw her pass, riding at the head of a party on a country excursion. ‘Look at Miss Jack! she sits her horse as if it was a bit of herself.’ Not the least singular thing connected with this Scottish lady is that when, after a long residence in London she returned to Scotland, her Scottish accent was stronger than ever. Her Scottish songs, original or adapted, will probably live longer than her ‘Plays of the Passions,’ with all their unquestionable merits.
We may here put readers on their guard against concluding that even a very Scottish song must necessarily be by a Scottish author. Mrs. John Hunter, who wrote ‘My Mother bids me,’ and a version of ‘Flowers of the Forest,’ was a Yorkshirewoman. Mrs. Grant, famous for ‘Roy’s Wife,’ was Irish. Mrs. Ogilvy, who has given so many samples of Highland minstrelsy, was born in India. Miss Blamire wrote ‘An ye shall walk in Silk Attire,’ but she was a Cumberland lass; and Mrs. Hamilton, of ‘My ain Fireside,’ was, like Mrs. Grant, of Carron, an Irish lady. They are all held to be virtually Scottish by men who deny that Wallace was a Welshman and that Robert Bruce was a native of Yorkshire.