Memorandum.—About a year before the Rebellion, as the Earl of Kilmarnock was one day walking in his Garden, he was suddenly alarmed with a fearful Shriek, which, while he was reflecting on with Astonishment, was soon after repeated. On this he went into the House, and inquired of his Lady and all the Servants, but could not discover from whom or whence the Cry proceeded; but missing his Lady's Woman, he was informed that she was gone into an Upper Room to inspect some Linen. Whereupon the Earl and his Lady went up and opened the Door, which was only latched. But no sooner did the Gentlewoman within set eyes on his Lordship's face than she fainted away. When, proper aid being given to her, she was brought to herself, they asked her the meaning of what they had heard and seen. She replied, that while she sat sewing some Linen she had taken up to mend, the Door opened of itself, and a Bloody Head entered the Room, and rolled upon the Floor; that this dreadful Sight had made her cry out, and then the Bloody Head disappeared; that in a few Moments she saw the same frightful Apparition again, on which she repeated her Shrieks; and at the third time she fainted away, but was just recovered when she saw his Lordship coming in, which had made the Impression on her they had been witness of.
This Relation given by the affrighted Gentlewoman was only laughed at and ridiculed as the Effect of Spleen-Vapours, or the Frenzy of a deluded Imagination, and was thought no more of, till one Night, when the Earl of Kilmarnock, sitting round a Bowl by the Winter Fire with my Lord Galloway,—and it is at such a Time that men are most prone to fall-to telling of Ghost Stories,—and their Lordships' conversation turning on Spectres and Apparitions, the vulgar notions of which they were deriding, the terrible tale of the Bloody Head was brought up, and then dismissed as the idle fancy of a Hoity-toity Tirewoman. But after Kilmarnock had engaged in the Rebellion, and Lord Galloway was told of it, he instantly recollected this Story, and said, "I will wager a dozen Magnums of Claret, and my best Silver-laced Justaucorps, that my Lord Kilmarnock will lose his Head."
Nobody took his bet, not daring thus to trifle with the lives of the Quality; but that Scots Lord lost his Head, notwithstanding; and I saw it cut off on Tower Hill in the latter summer of the year '46.
This story of the Bloody Head was common Talk among us Warders at the time,—who were full as superstitious as other Folks, you may be sure. Many such Legends are there, too, current of Persons who were to die Violent Deaths at the hands of the Public Executioner, being forewarned many years before of their Impending Fate. And sometimes hath the Monition come nearer to the Catastrophe, as in the case of K. C. the 1st, who, entering Westminster Hall at that Unnatural Assize presided over by Bradshaw, the Gold Head fell off his Walking-Staff, and rolled on the Pavement of the Hall among the Soldiers; nor, when it was restored to him, could any Efforts of his make it remain on. Also it is said of my Lord Derwentwater, that the last time he went a hunting in the north, before he joined the Old Chevalier of St. George, his whippers-in unearthed a litter of Fox-cubs, every one of which Vermin had been born without Heads. And as well authenticated is it, that when my Lord Balmerino (that suffered on Tower Hill with the Earl of Kilmarnock) was coming back condemned to Death from his Trial before his Peers at Westminster, his Lordship being of a merry, Epicurean temper, and caring no more for Death than a Sailor does for a wet Shirt, stopped the coach at a Fruiterer's at Charing Cross, where he must needs ask Mr. Lieutenant's Attendant to buy him some Honey-Blobbs, which is the Scottish name for ripe Gooseberries.
"And King Geordie maun pay for the bit fruitie; for King James's auld soldier has nae siller of his ain save twa guineas for Jock Headsman," quoth he in his jocular manner, meaning that those about him must pay for the Gooseberries; for indeed this Lord was very poor, and I have heard was, when in town, so much driven as to borrow money from the man who keeps the Tennis-court in James Street, Haymarket.
Well, it so happened that the Season was a backward one; and the Fruiterer sends his duty out to his Lordship, saying that he has no ripe Gooseberries, but that of green ones he has a store, to which that unfortunate Nobleman is heartily welcome.
"I'll e'en try one," says my Lord; and from a Punnet they brought him he picks a Green Gooseberry; when, wonderful to relate, it swells in his hand to the bigness at least of an egg-plum, and turns the colour of Blood. "The de'il's in the Honey-Blobb," cries my Lord in a tiff, and flings it out of window, where it made a great red stain on the pavement.
And this the Warder who stood by, and the Messenger who was in the coach itself, told me.
Less need is there to speak of such strange adventures as my Lady Nithisdale's child (that was born soon after her Lord's escape from the Tower, in which, with such a noble valour and self-sacrifice, she aided him) being brought into the World with a broad Axe figured, as though by a Limner, on its Neck; or of the Countess of Cromartie's infant (she likewise Lay-in while the Earl was under sentence) having a thin red line or thread right round its neck. These things are perhaps to be accounted more as Phenomena of nature than as ominous prognostications, and I so dismiss 'em. But it is worth while to note that, for all the good authority we have of Lord Kilmarnock's Waiting-woman being affrighted by the vision of a Bloody Head, the story itself, or at least something germane to it, is as old as the Hills. During my travels in Sweden, I was told of a very strange mischance that had happened to one of their Kings who was named Charles;—but Charles the what, I do confess I know not;—who walking one evening in his garden, saw all at once a Wing of the Palace, that had been shut up and deserted for Twenty years, all blazing with Light from the Windows, as for some great Festival. And his Majesty, half suspecting this might be some Masquerading prank on the part of the Court Ladies, and half afraid that there was mischief in it, drew his Sword, and calling upon a brace of his Gentlemen to follow him, stave in a door and came into a Great Old Hall, that was the principal apartment in the said Wing. And at the upper End, where the ancient Throne of his ancestors was long since gone to Rags and Tatters, and abandoned to Dust and Cobwebs, he saw, sitting on the chair of Estate, and crowned, a little child that was then but a boy—the Duke of Sudermania. And lo! as he gazed upon him a Dreadful Ball, that seemed fashioned in the similitude of his own Head, showed itself under the Throne, rolled down the steps, and so came on to his very Feet, where it stopped, splashing his Boots unto the very ankle with Gore. The tale of the Bloody Boots, as 'tis called, is still quite familiar to every Nurse in Sweden; but I never heard how it ended, or whether King Charles had his Head cut off in the Long-run; but every Swede will swear to the Story; and as for the Boots, I have heard that they are to be seen, with the dark brown stains of the Blood still upon 'em, in a glass case at the House of one Mr. Herdström, who sells Aqua Vitæ over the Milliner's in the Bogbindersgade at Stockholm.
'Twas in the summer of 1747 that I put off my Warder's dress for good and all, the Rebellion being by this time quite Dead and crushed out; but before I laid down my halbert 'twas my duty to assist at the crowning consummation of that disastrous Tragedy. One of the Prime Traitors in the Scottish Risings had been, it is well known, the notorious Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, of Castle Downie, in Scotland, then come to be Eighty years old, and as atrocious an old Villain as ever lived, but so cunning that he cheated the Gallows for three quarters of a century, and died like a Gentleman, by the Axe, at last. He had been mixed up in every plot for the bringing back of King James ever since the Old Chevalier's Father gave up the Ghost at St. Germain's, yet had somehow managed to escape scot-free from Attainder and Confiscation. Even in the '45, when he sent the Clan Fraser to join the Young Chevalier, he tried his best to make his poor Son, the Master of Lovat (a very virtuous and gallant young Gentleman), the scapegoat for his misdeeds, playing Fast and Loose between France and the Jacobites on one side, and the Lord Justice Clerk and the King's Government on the other. But Justice had him on the hip at last, and the old Fox was caught. They brought him to London by Easy Stages, as he was, or pretended to be, mighty Infirm; and while he was resting at an Inn at St. Alban's, Mr. Hogarth the Painter (whom I have seen many a time smoking a pipe and making Caricatures of the Company at the Tavern he used—the Bedford Head, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden: a skilful Draughtsman, this Mr. Hogarth, but very Uppish and Impudent in his Tone; for I remember that he once called me Captain Compound, seeing, as the fellow said, that I was made up of three—Captain Bobadil, Captain Macheath, and Captain Kyd),—this Mr. H. went down to St. Alban's, and took a picture of the old Lord, as he sat in his great chair, counting the strength of the Scottish clans on his fingers. 'Twas afterwards graved on copper, and had a prodigious sale.