In his youth, engaging in a foray on the lands of Sir Gideon Murray of Elibank, and being taken prisoner, Murray offers him choice between being hanged, or marrying the plainest of his daughters. The contract of marriage, written on the parchment of a drum, is still in possession of the family of Harden.[11]
This is Lockhart’s reading of the circumstances, and I give his own statement of them in the note below. But his assumption of the extreme plainness of the young lady, and of the absolute worldly-mindedness of the mother, are both examples of the modern manner of reading traditions, out of which some amusement may be gathered by looking only at them on the grotesque side, and interpreting that grotesqueness ungenerously. There may, indeed, be farther ground than Lockhart has thought it worth while to state for his colour of the facts; but all that can be justly gathered from those he has told is that, Sir Gideon having determined the death of his troublesome neighbour, Lady Murray interfered to save his life; and could not more forcibly touch her husband’s purpose than by reminding him that hostility might be better ended in alliance than in death.
The sincere and careful affection which Sir William of Harden afterwards shows to all his children by the Maid of Elibank, and his naming one of them after her father, induce me still farther to trust in the fairer reading of the tradition. I should, indeed, have been disposed to attach some weight, on the side of the vulgar story, to the curiously religious tendencies in Sir William’s children, which seem to point to some condition of feeling in the mother, arising out of despised life. Women are made nobly religious by the possession of extreme beauty, and morbidly so by distressed consciousness of the want of it; but there is no reason for insisting on this probability, since both the Christian and surname of Sir Gideon Murray point to his connection with the party in Scotland which was at this time made strong in battle by religious faith, and melancholy in peace by religious passion.
III. Walter Scott, first Laird of Raeburn; third son of Sir William and this enforced bride of Elibank. They had four sons altogether; the eldest, William, becomes the second Sir William of Harden; their father settled the lands of Raeburn upon Walter; and of Highchester on his second son, Gideon, named, after the rough father-in-law, of Elibank.
Now about this time (1657), George Fox comes into Scotland; boasting that “as he first set his feet upon Scottish ground he felt the seed of grace to sparkle about him like innumerable sparks of fire.” And he forthwith succeeds in making Quakers of Gideon, Walter, and Walter’s wife. This is too much for Sir William of Harden, the eldest brother, who not only remains a staunch Jacobite, but obtains order from the Privy Council of Scotland to imprison his brother and brother’s wife; that they may hold no further converse with Quakers, and also to “separate and take away their children, being two sons and a daughter, from their family and education, and to breed them in some convenient place.” Which is accordingly done; and poor Walter, who had found pleasantly conversible Quakers in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, is sent to Jedburgh, with strict orders to the Jedburgh magistrates to keep Quakers out of his way. The children are sent to an orthodox school by Sir William; and of the daughter I find nothing further; but the two sons both became good scholars, and were so effectually cured of Quakerism, that the elder (I don’t find his Christian name), just as he came of age, was killed in a duel with Pringle of Crichton, fought with swords in a field near Selkirk—ever since called, from the Raeburn’s death, “the Raeburn meadow-spot;”—and the younger, Walter, who then became “Tutor of Raeburn,” i.e., guardian to his infant nephew, intrigued in the cause of the exiled Stewarts till he had lost all he had in the world—ran a narrow risk of being hanged—was saved by the interference of Anne, Duchess of Buccleugh—founded a Jacobite club in Edinburgh, in which the conversation is said to have been maintained in Latin—and wore his beard unclipped to his dying day, vowing no razor should pass on it until the return of the Stewarts, whence he held his Border name of “Beardie.”
It is only when we remember how often this history must have dwelt on Sir Walter’s mind that we can understand the tender subtlety of design with which he has completed, even in the weary time of his declining life, the almost eventless story of ‘Redgauntlet,’ and given, as we shall presently see, in connection with it, the most complete, though disguised, portion of his own biography.
IV. Beardie. I find no details of Beardie’s life given by Scott, but he was living at Leasudden when his landlord, Scott of Harden,[12] living at Mertoun House, addressed to him the lines given in the note to the introduction to the sixth canto of ‘Marmion,’ in which Scott himself partly adopts the verses, writing from Mertoun House to Richard Heber.
“For course of blood, our proverbs dream,
Is warmer than the mountain stream.
And thus my Christmas still I hold