The treatment of the lady by the way was, if we can believe her own account, by no means gentle. The leader, although a gentleman (Mr Forster of Corsebonny), disregarded her entreaties to be allowed to stop on account of cramp in her side, and only answered by ordering a servant to renew the bandages over her mouth. She observed that they rode along the Long Way (where Princes Street now stands), past the Castle, and so to the Linlithgow road. After a ride of nearly twenty miles, they stopped at Muiravonside, the house of Mr John Macleod, advocate, where servants appeared waiting to receive the lady—and thus showed that the master of the house had been engaged to aid in her abduction. She was taken upstairs to a comfortable bedroom; but a man being posted in the room as a guard, she could not go to bed nor take any repose. Thus she spent the ensuing day, and when it was night, she was taken out and remounted in the same fashion as before; and the party then rode along through the Torwood, and so to the place called Wester Polmaise, belonging to a gentleman of the name of Stewart, whose steward or factor was one of the cavalcade. Here was an old tower, having one little room on each floor, as is usually the case in such buildings; and into one of these rooms, the window of which was boarded over, the lady was conducted. She continued here for thirteen or fourteen weeks, supplied with a sufficiency of the comforts of life, but never allowed to go into the open air; till at length her health gave way, and the factor began to fear being concerned in her death. By his intercession with Mr Forster, she was then permitted to go into the court, under a guard; but such was the rigour of her keepers that the garden was still denied to her.
THE CASTLE
from Princes Street.
Thus time passed drearily on until the month of August, during all which time the prisoner had no communication with the external world. At length, by an arrangement made between Lord Lovat and Mr Forster, at the house of the latter, near Stirling, Lady Grange was one night forcibly brought out, and mounted again as formerly, and carried off amidst a guard of horsemen. She recognised several of Lovat’s people in this troop, and found Forster once more in command. They passed by Stirling Bridge, and thence onward to the Highlands; but she no longer knew the way they were going. Before daylight they stopped at a house, where she was lodged during the day, and at night the march was resumed. Thus they journeyed for several days into the Highlands, never allowing the unfortunate lady to speak, and taking the most rigid care to prevent any one from becoming aware of her situation. During this time she never had off her clothes: one day she slept in a barn, another in an open enclosure. Regard to delicacy in such a case was impossible. After a fortnight spent at a house on Lord Lovat’s ground (probably in Stratherrick, Inverness-shire), the journey was renewed in the same style as before; only Mr Forster had retired from the party, and the lady found herself entirely in the hands of Frasers.
They now crossed a loch into Glengarry’s land, where they lodged several nights in cow-houses or in the open air, making progress all the time to the westward, where the country becomes extremely wild. At Lochourn, an arm of the sea on the west coast, the unfortunate lady was transferred to a small vessel which was in waiting for her. Bitterly did she weep, and pitifully implore compassion; but the Highlanders understood not her language; and though they had done so, a departure from the orders which had been given them was not to be expected from men of their character. In the vessel, she found that she was in the custody of one Alexander Macdonald, a tenant of one of the Western Islands named Heskir, belonging to Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat; and here we have a curious indication of the spirit in which the Highlanders conducted such transactions. ‘I told him,’ says the lady, ‘that I was stolen at Edinburgh, and brought there by force, and that it was contrary to the laws what they were doing. He answered that he would not keep me, or any other, against their will, except Sir Alexander Macdonald were in the affair.’ While they lay in Lochourn, waiting for a wind, the brother and son of Macdonald of Scothouse came to see but not to relieve her. Other persons visited the sloop, and among these one William Tolmy, a tenant of the chief of Macleod, and who had once been a merchant at Inverness. This was the first person she had seen who expressed any sympathy with her. He undertook to bear information of her retreat to her friend and ‘man of business,’ Mr Hope of Rankeillor, in Edinburgh; but it does not appear that he fulfilled his promise.
Lady Grange remained in Macdonald’s charge at Heskir nearly two years—during the first year without once seeing bread, and with no supply of clothing; obliged, in fact, to live in the same miserable way as the rest of the family; afterwards some little indulgence was shown to her. This island was of desolate aspect, and had no inhabitant besides Macdonald and his wife. The wretchedness of such a situation for a lady who had been all her life accustomed to the refined society of a capital may of course be imagined. Macdonald would never allow her to write to any one; but he went to his landlord, Sir Alexander, to plead for the indulgences she required. On one of these occasions, Sir Alexander expressed his regret at having been concerned in such an affair, and wished he were quit of it. The wonder is how Erskine should have induced all these men to interest themselves in the ‘sequestration’ of his wife. One thing is here remarkable: they were all of them friends of the Stuart family, as was Macleod of Macleod, into whose hands the lady subsequently fell. It therefore becomes probable that Erskine had at least convinced them that her seclusion from the world was necessary in some way for the preservation of political secrets important to them.
In June 1734 a sloop came to Heskir to take away the lady; it was commanded by a Macleod, and in it she was conveyed to the remotest spot of ground connected with the British Islands—namely, the isle of St Kilda, the property of the chief of Macleod, and remarkable for the simple character of the poor peasantry who occupy it. There cannot, of course, be a doubt that those who had an interest in the seclusion of Lady Grange regarded this as a more eligible place than Heskir, in as far as it was more out of the way, and promised better for her complete and permanent confinement. In some respects it was an advantageous change for the lady: the place was not uninhabited, as Heskir very nearly was; and her domestic accommodation was better. In St Kilda, she was placed in a house or cottage of two small apartments, tolerably well furnished, with a girl to wait upon her, and provided with a sufficiency of good food and clothing. Of educated persons the island contained not one, except for a short time a Highland Presbyterian clergyman, named Roderick Maclennan. There was hardly even a person capable of speaking or understanding the English language within reach. No books, no intelligence from the world in which she had once lived. Only once a year did a steward come to collect the rent paid in kind by the poor people; and by him was the lady regularly furnished with a store of such articles, foreign to the place, as she needed—usually a stone of sugar, a pound of tea, six pecks of wheat, and an anker of spirits.[184] Thus she had no lack of the common necessaries of life; she only wanted society and freedom. In this way she spent seven dreary years in St Kilda. How she contrived to pass her time is not known. We learn, however, some particulars of her history during this period from the testimony of those who had a charge over her. If this is to be believed, she made incessant efforts, though without effect, to bribe the islanders to assist in liberating her. Once a stray vessel sent a boat ashore for water; she no sooner heard of it than she despatched the minister’s wife to apprise the sailors of her situation, and entreat them to rescue her; but Mrs Maclennan did not reach the spot till after they had departed. She was kind to the peasantry, giving them from her own stores, and sometimes had the women to come and dance before her; but her temper and habits were not such as to gain their esteem. Often she drank too much; and whenever any one near her committed the slightest mistake, she would fly into a furious passion, and even resort to violence. Once she was detected in an attempt, during the night, to obtain a pistol from above the steward’s bed, in the room next to her own. On his awaking and seeing her, she ran off to her own bed. One is disposed, of course, to make all possible allowances for a person in her wretched circumstances; yet there can be little doubt, from the evidence before us, that it was a natural and habitual violence of temper which displayed itself during her residence in St Kilda.
Meanwhile it was known in Edinburgh that Lady Grange had been forcibly carried away and placed in seclusion by orders of her husband; but her whereabouts was a mystery to all besides a few who were concerned to keep it secret. During the years which had elapsed since her abduction, Mr Erskine had given up his seat on the bench, and entered into political life as a friend of the Prince of Wales and opponent of Sir Robert Walpole. The world had wondered at the events of his domestic life, and several persons denounced the singular means he had adopted for obtaining domestic peace. But, in the main, he stood as well with society as he had ever done. At length, in the winter of 1740-41, a communication from Lady Grange for the first time reached her friends. It was brought by the minister Maclennan and his wife, who had left the island in discontent, after quarrelling with Macleod’s steward. The idea of a lady by birth and education being immured for a series of years in an outlandish place where only the most illiterate peasantry resided, and this by the command of a husband who could only complain of her irritable temper, struck forcibly upon public feeling, and particularly upon the mind of Lady Grange’s legal agent, Mr Hope of Rankeillor, who had all along felt a keen interest in her fate. Of Mr Hope it may be remarked that he was also a zealous Jacobite; yet, though all the persons engaged in the lady’s abduction were of that party, he hesitated not to take active measures on the contrary side. He immediately applied to the Lord Justice-clerk (supreme criminal judge) for a warrant to search for and liberate Lady Grange. This application was opposed by the friends of Mr Erskine, and eventually it was defeated; yet he was not on that account deterred from hiring a vessel, and sending it with armed men to secure the freedom of the lady—a step which, as it was illegal and dangerous, obviously implied no small risk on his own part. This ship proceeded no farther than the harbour called the Horse-shoe, in Lorn (opposite to the modern town of Oban), where the master quarrelled with and set on shore Mrs Maclennan, his guide. Apparently the voyage was not prosecuted in consequence of intelligence being received that the lady had been removed to another place, where she was kept in more humane circumstances. If so, its object might be considered as in part at least, though indirectly, accomplished.