Legends of the Black Watch; or, Forty-second Highlanders

by James Grant

At the head of this rabble, on the evening of the 14th of July, Oswald appeared with other leaders before the walls of the terrible Bastille; and bearing in his hand a white flag of truce, summoned the governor, the Marquis de Launay, "to surrender in the name of the sovereign people;" but that noble proudly and recklessly despised this motley rout of armed citizens, and opened a fire upon them. The cannon taken from the Hotel des Invalides soon effected a breach, and a private of the French Guards, with John Oswald, the ci-devant lieutenant of the Black Watch, were the two first men who entered the place. The poor garrison were all slaughtered or taken prisoners; among the latter were De Launay, his master-gunner, and two veteran soldiers, who were dragged to the Place de la Grêve and ignominiously beheaded.

The terrible Bastille, for centuries the scene of so many horrors, and the receptacle of broken hearts, was demolished, sacked, and ruined! The most active in that demolition was the author of "Euphrosyne," and the "Cry of Nature"—the wild enthusiast, John Oswald. Intent on releasing the suffering captives who were believed to be immured there, he hurried, sword in hand, from tower to tower, from cell to cell, and vault to vault; through staircases and corridors, dark, damp, and horrible, where for ages the bloated spider had spun her web, and the swollen rat squattered in the damp and slime that distilled from the massive walls to make a hideous puddle on the floors of clay, amid which the bones of many a hapless wretch, forgotten and nameless now, lay steeping with their rusted chains.

In one of these, the darkest, lowest, and most pestilential—for it was subject to the tides of the Seine, where the oozing water dropped from the vaulted roof, where the cold slimy reptiles crawled, and where the massive walls were wet with dripping slime—he found a human being, almost an idiot, chained to a block of stone. He was old; his hair and beard were white as the thistle-down: he seemed a living corpse; his aspect was terrible, for existence seemed a miracle, a curse in such a place; and on being brought to upper earth and air by these blood-steeped men of the people, he became senseless and swooned.

Three other prisoners were found, and then, to its lowest vaults, the infamous Bastille was levelled—even to its base, and its records of tyranny, torture, suffering, human crime, and inhuman horror perished with it.

"The only State prisoners, where so many were supposed to have entered," says the Edinburgh Magazine for that year, "the only prisoners that were forthcoming in the general delivery amounted to four! Major White and Lord Mazarine were two out of that number. The first gentleman, a native of Scotland, was in durance for the space of twenty-eight years; he had never in that time been heard of by his friends, nor in the least expected thus to be enthralled. When restored to liberty, he appeared to have lost his mental powers, and even the vernacular sounds of his own language. The Duke of Dorset has taken him under his direct protection; this is unasked, and therefore the more honourable."

So this miserable wreck, aged, pale, and wan, worn almost to a skeleton, nearly nude, with his limbs fretted by iron fetters, and all but fatuous; insane, and with scarcely a memory of his native tongue or past existence; in whose eyes the light of life and intelligence seemed dead, and who had forgotten the days when he could weep or feel, was our long-lost comrade, the soldier of Ticonderoga?

Inspired by just indignation, and determined to unravel this terrible mystery, the Duke of Dorset took him in a fiacre to the hotel of the Comte de Montmorin, the only minister then in Paris, to demand the reason of this outrage upon the laws of war, of peace, and of common humanity; but the official of the unfortunate Louis could only shrug his shoulders, make the usual grimaces and apologies, and plead, that as the records of the Bastille had perished in the sack of that prison, it was totally beyond his power to explain the affair; for not a scrap of paper remained to show how or why this brave officer of the Black Watch, who had been wounded and taken prisoner in action in 1758, should have been found in that dreadful place thirty-one years after. The Duke of Dorset perceived, with surprise, that while speaking the Comte de Montmorin was ghastly pale, and that his eyes were filled with terror. It would have made a fine subject for a painter, but a finer still for a novelist—the delineation of this interview, as it took place in the drawing-room of the Hotel de Montmorin on the morning after the demolition of the Bastille.

The unfortunate victim of a government which had long made that infamous prison an engine of tyranny, was introduced by our proud and determined ambassador, who spoke for him in no measured tones; for alas! the poor major could scarcely put three words together, and for some hours seemed to have forgotten the sound of his own voice.

In the stately and now elderly French lady seated on the gilt fauteuil, between her shrieking and pitying daughters, clad in her high stays, hooped petticoat, and figured satin, with an esclavage round her neck, and her white hair powdered and towered up into a mountain of curls, flowers, and feathers, à la Marquise de Pompadour, it was impossible for Adam White to recognise the once beautiful and black-eyed Lucy of his youth—the simple Scottish girl of the quiet old manse on Tweedside, for whom his sorrowing heart had yearned with agony, in the long and dreary days of captivity, and in the longer watches of the silent night, until love and youth and blessed hope all passed away together.

It was as difficult for her to trace in that wan, aged, and resuscitated man, the handsome young officer who had left her side to fight Britain's battles under Amherst and the hero of Quebec. She was now a white-haired matron, and he a wild-eyed, haggard old man—old by premature years, for eight-and-twenty in the Bastille had crushed him by a load of unavailing care and sorrow. How many seasons had passed over that dark and vaulted solitude during which his pained and weary eyes had never met a friendly smile, or his ear welcomed a kindly greeting.