We must not forget to mention that Rory Spears and Captain MacErchar were called on soon afterwards to repeat their dancing exhibition which had met with so much applause; and this was on occasion of the wedding of Squire Mortimer Sang and the lovely Katherine Spears. Many a happy hour had Squire Roderick afterwards, in teaching his grandson the mysteries of wood and river craft, whilst the youth’s father, the gallant Sir Mortimer, was gathering wreaths of laurel in foreign lands, whither he travelled as a valiant knight.
One of the last acts of King Robert was to bestow a small estate in the valley of the Dee upon the veteran MacErchar. Thither he retired to spend a comfortable and respectable old age, and, having married, became the head of a powerful family.
It has always been a very common belief in Scotland that, when a wicked man becomes unexpectedly good, the circumstance is a forewarning of his approaching death. It was so with the Wolfe of Badenoch, for he lived not above two or three [[627]]years after the reformation that was so surprisingly worked in him. The Franciscan, who still continued with the Earl as his confessor, gained a great ascendancy over his ferocious mind; and his endeavours to subdue it to reason had also the good effect of enabling him the better to command his own proud spirit, which he every day brought more and more under subjection. The happy effects of this appeared after the demise of him to whom he had been so strangely linked; for, despising that Church advancement which was now within his grasp, he retired into the Franciscan Convent at Haddington, where he subjected himself to the penance of writing the Chronicle from which these volumes have been composed; and those who have suffered the tedium of reading the produce of it, may perhaps be judges of the severity of this self-inflicted punishment. That the Wolfe of Badenoch had not failed to make good use of the remnant of his life, in wiping off old scores with the Church by making it large donations, we may well guess, from the following epitaph, which may yet be read in well-raised, black-letter characters sculptured around the edge of the sarcophagus in which his body was deposited in the Cathedral of Dunkeld; but where now, alas! there remains not as much of the dust of Alister-more-mac-an-righ as might serve to make clay sufficient for the base purpose to which the fancy of our immortal dramatic Bard has made his moralizing Prince of Denmark trace a yet mightier Alexander, and an Imperial Cæsar,
To stop a hole to keep the wind away.
The Epitaph is:—
Hic Jacet
Dominus Alexander Seneschallus
Comes de Buchan et Dominus de Badenoch,
Bonæ Memoriæ,
Qui Obiit xx Die Mensis Februarii,
Anno Domini MCCCXCIV.[2]
THE END.
[1] The reader, on consulting the second reference of our text, will find that Douglas has run into much confusion in regard to the Halyburtons. The Sir John Halyburton who married the co-heiress of Dirleton, he kills at the battle of Nisbet in 1355. Now, by consulting the first reference, p. 223, it will be found that Sir Patrick Hepborne, younger of Hailes, who married the other sister, was killed at the battle of Nisbet in 1402, at which time Sir Patrick Hepborne, sen., was alive. This we know to be true, and perfectly according to history; but to suppose that Sir Patrick Hepborne’s brother-in-law could have been killed in 1355 is a glaring absurdity. The inconsistency is easily explained, however, for there were several Sir John Halyburtons, and two battles of Nisbet. There was a Sir John Halyburton killed at the battle of Nisbet in 1355, and there was a Sir John Halyburton taken at the battle of Nisbet in 1402. On this last occasion Sir Patrick Hepborne commanded. It is therefore quite natural that his brother-in-law should have had a share in this expedition.—Vid. Fordun, II., p. 433. [↑]
[2] This monument is still in tolerable preservation, though it suffered mutilation by a party of Cameronians about the time of the Revolution. [↑]