Such is a brief but correct historical detail of the events which the Author of “Waverley” has confounded and misrepresented, for his own purposes, in the “Legend of Montrose.” We have given at best but a meagre outline of the events, but as they run in their proper series, our narrative will serve to correct the irregularity into which the Great Novelist has thrown them. It may here be observed, that the last event in the Tale is the attempted murder of Lord Menteith, which our Author has placed after the battle of Inverlochy. Now this circumstance, which was of real occurrence, took place on the 6th of September, 1644, a few days after the battle of Tippermuir, whereas the battle of Inverlochy happened on the 1st of February, 1645, five months after. We have made some collections respecting the assassination, and give the result.
John, Lord Kinpont, the Lord Menteith of the “Legend of Montrose,” was the eldest son of William, seventh Earl of Menteith, and first Earl of Airth, who rendered himself remarkable in the reign of Charles I. by saying that he had “the reddest blood in Scotland,” alluding to his descent from Euphemia Ross, then supposed the first wife of Robert II.,—in consequence of which expression he was disgraced and imprisoned by his offended Sovereign. Lord Kinpont married, in 1632, Lady Mary Keith, a daughter of Earl Marishal; consequently he could not be the hero and lover which he is represented to have been in the fiction, and the story of Allan Macaulay’s rivalry, which prompted him to the wicked deed, must be entirely groundless. Kinpont joined Montrose in August, 1644, with recruits to the amount of 400 men, and was present at the battle of Tippermuir, immediately following. A few days thereafter, James Stewart, of Ardvoirlich, basely murdered his Lordship at Colace, in Perthshire. A different colour is given to this circumstance by different narrators. A citizen of Perth, who wrote a manuscript giving an account of some remarkable events in his own time, (quoted in “The Muse’s Threnodie,”) says simply that Stewart committed the murder “because Lord Kinpont had joined Montrose.” But, in Guthrie’s Memoirs, we find, that “Stewart having proposed to his Lordship a plan to assassinate Montrose, of which Lord Kinpont signified his abhorrence, as disgraceful and devilish, the other, without more ado, lest he should discover him, stabbed him to the heart, and immediately fled to the Covenanters, by whom he was pardoned and promoted.[62] The Marquis of Montrose, deeply affected with the loss of so noble a friend, gave orders for conveying his body in an honourable manner to Menteith, where he was interred.” In the “Staggering State of Scots Statesmen,”[63] we find the following passage:—“The Lord Kinpont, being with James Graham in the time of the late troubles, was stabbed with a dirk by one Alexander Stewart, and his lady, daughter of the Earl of Marishal, was distracted in her wits four years after.” Here a remarkable discrepancy is observable. The assassin is termed Alexander, whereas every other authority gives James as his Christian name. Yet this discordance in names is not more worthy of remark than another of the same description, which we are about to point out to the amateurs of the Scotch Novels, as occurring in the Tale before us. In the first edition of this Tale (1819) at the 321st page of the third volume, the Great Unknown, for once, forgets the fictitious appellation Macaulay, and terms the visionary brother Allen Stuart, which, we think, completely serves to identify the above story with the dreadful one in the “Tale.”
Wishart says, that such was the friendship and familiarity of Kinpont with his murderer, that they had slept in the same bed the night previous to the horrid deed, which took place, it appears, in the grey of the morning. It is true that he killed also “the centinel who stood at the entry of the camp, it being so dark that those who pursued him could not see the length of their pikes. Montrose was very much afflicted with the untimely fate of this nobleman, who had been his own special friend, and most faithful and loyal to the King his master, and who, besides his knowledge in polite literature, philosophy, divinity, and law, was eminent for his probity and fortitude.”—Memoirs, p. 84.
PHILIPHAUGH.[64]
elkirk lies on the face of a long range of hills stretching from north to south. The Ettrick water, a pretty little river, runs at their base. A bridge of four arches crosses the stream, and carries the road from the low, flat, and swampy plain of Philiphaugh, up the eminence, in a gracefully winding direction, to the town. A mountain streamlet, called the Shawburn, disembogues itself at the bridge. This in summer is quite dry, but in winter, or during wet weather, descends in torrents, and assists the Ettrick in overflowing the field of Philiphaugh. This celebrated field is now partly inclosed, and bears a few patches of turnips; but the chief produce seems to be rushes, a species of crop which may perhaps yield little comfort to the agriculturist, but which will give a more than proportionable pleasure to the amateur, assuring him that the ground has lost little of its original character, and is much the same now as when it was trod by Montrose.
The hill on which Selkirk stands is studded round with neat gentlemen’s seats, and forms a striking contrast with those on the opposite side of Philiphaugh, which are uniformly dark, bleak, and unproductive. Sheltered by one of these, and situated directly south from Selkirk, there stands, in the ravine formed by the Shawburn, a little cottage thatched in the Scottish fashion, with the usual accompaniments of a kail-yard, a midden[65] before the door, and a jaw-hole. The inhabitants of this humble tenement, if, like us, you be driven in by stress of weather, will be very obliging in telling all they know about Philiphaugh, and how Montrose galloped “up the burn and away over Minchmoor,” in his retreat before Lesly’s victorious army. They will likewise tell an indistinct story about a division of Lesly’s troops, which, led by a countryman, came down this way in order to cut off his retreat. This evidently alludes to the circumstance of Lesly despatching a body of his horse across the river to attack Montrose’s right wing in the rear, upon which the unfortunate general, finding himself hemmed in on all sides, cut his way through his foes, and abandoned the field.[66] In corroboration of what we suppose, the inhabitant of the cottage points out several tumuli or mounds[67] on a little peninsula formed by a sweep of the stream, where the conflict had been greatest. He also speaks of having now and then dug up in his potato-field the remains of human bones.
This cicerone of Philiphaugh is a very singular-looking man, and well merits the little attention which you may feel disposed to pay him. He is what is called a country weaver—that is, a person who converts into cloth the thread and yarn spun by the industrious female peasantry of his neighbourhood. It is not perhaps generally known—at least among our southern neighbours—that the common people of Scotland in general manufacture their own clothes, and that from the first carding of the wool to the induing of the garment. The assistance of the weaver and the dyer is indeed required; but every other department of the business they are themselves fit to undertake,[68] and sometimes the aid of the dyer is entirely dispensed with, when the cloth, bearing the natural colour of the wool, is termed hodden-grey, an expression to which Burns has given a more than ordinary interest. The weaver is usually a person of no little importance in a rural district; for his talents are in universal request. The specimen of the craft now before us was unusually poor, and, not being free of the Selkirk incorporation, was, like the Paria of the Indian tale, obliged to fly from the customary haunts of his brethren, and seek an asylum in this solitary place. According to his own account of his affairs, he “daikers on here in a very sma’ way,” but when he can get customer-wark, has no occasion to complain. Customer-wark is the species of employment which we have described, and he says that he can make eighteen-pence a day by it, which seems to him to constitute a superlative degree of prosperity. We visited his loom, which we found half embedded in the damp earth in a low-roofed part of the cottage, and separated from the domestic establishment by two large wooden beds. Here he seemed engaged upon a piece of woollen cloth at least half an inch thick, the surface of which appeared fully as rough and unequal as the map of Selkirkshire in our good friend Mr. John Thomson’s Scottish Atlas. One peculiarity in his method of working is worthy of remark. Instead of impelling the shuttle in the improved modern manner, by means of a simple piece of mechanism, he sent it through the web by his hands, throwing it from the right and receiving it into the left, and vice versa, while the hand immediately unemployed with the shuttle, was employed for the instant in drawing the lay in upon the thread. This old fashion, which formerly prevailed in every species of weaving, is now disused by all the Glasgow manufacturers and others who work upon fine materials, and is only kept up in remote parts by the coarse country weavers. We entered into a discussion of the various merits and demerits of different sorts of work; and found that Glasgow was blessed with no share of the goodwill of our friend the weaver. Jaconets, blunks, ginghams, and cambrics were alternately brought up, and each successively declared stale, flat, and unprofitable, in comparison with the coarse stuff upon which he was now employed. Customer-wark was superior to every other work; and customer-wark was, indeed, the very god of his divinity. Customer-wark seemed to give a sort of character to his conversation, for the phrase was generally introduced three or four times into, and formed the termination of, every sentence. When he paused for breath, he recommenced with “customer-wark;” and this ludicrous technical accented every cadence. The world was to the weaver all a desert, wherein only one resting-place existed—customer-wark!
The poor weaver’s workshop is a miserable-looking place, and so damp that the walls have a yellow tinge, which also affects the three-paned window, through which the light finds its way with difficulty. The family pig is disposed in the same place,—an unusual mark of squalor and poverty. The weaver tells that his loom now occupies the precise spot on which the tent of Montrose formerly stood; but this can scarcely be correct, as, by all accounts, the general resided, with all his horse, in the town of Selkirk.