Nay, curse not him; perhaps now he,
Stung with remorse, is blessing thee;
Perhaps at death, for who can tell
But the great Judge of heaven and hell
By some proud foe has struck the blow,
And laid the dear deceiver low,’ &c.
Great doubt has long rested on the history of this piteous ditty; but it is now ascertained to have been a contemporary effusion on the sad love-tale of Anne Bothwell, a sister of the first Lord Holyroodhouse. The only error in the setting down of the song was in calling it Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament, as the heroine had no pretension to a term implying noble rank. Her lover was a youth of uncommon elegance of person, the Honourable Alexander Erskine, brother of the Earl of Mar, of the first Earl of Buchan, and of Lord Cardross. A portrait of him, which belonged to his mother (the countess mentioned a few pages back), and which is now in the possession of James Erskine, Esq. of Cambo, Lady Mar’s descendant, represents him as strikingly handsome, with much vivacity of countenance, dark-blue eyes, a peaked beard, and moustaches. The lovers were cousins. The song is an evidence of the public interest excited by the affair: a fragment of it found its way into an English play of the day, Broom’s comedy of The Northern Lass (1632). This is somewhat different from any of the stanzas in the common versions of the ballad:
‘Peace, wayward bairn. Oh cease thy moan!
Thy far more wayward daddy’s gone,
And never will recallèd be,