Dr Johnson was a stalwart in one camp; Boswell in the other. "Sir, sir," Johnson said to his friend and biographer, "don't be too severe upon the gentleman; don't accuse him of a want of filial piety! Lady Jane Douglas was not his mother." "Whereupon," Boswell says, "he roused my zeal so much that I took the liberty to tell him that he knew nothing of the cause, which I most seriously do believe was the case." For seven years the suit dragged its weary length through the Courts; the evidence for and against the young man's claim covers ten thousand closely-printed pages; but although Archibald won the Douglas lands, his paternity remains to-day as profound a mystery as when George III. was new to his throne.
Forty years before the curtain rose on this dramatic trial which, Boswell declares, "shook the security of birthright in Scotland to its foundation," the Lady Jean, only daughter of James, second Marquess of Douglas, was one of the fairest maids north of the Tweed—a girl who combined beauty and a singular charm of manner with such abounding vitality and strength of character that she did not require her high rank and royal descent to make her desirable in the eyes of suitors. She was, moreover, the only sister of the head of her family, the Duke of Douglas, who seemed little disposed to provide an heir to his vast estates; and these there seemed more than a fair prospect that she would one day inherit.
It was thus but natural that many a wooer sought Lady Jean's hand; and had she cared for coronets she might have had her pick of them. On the evidence of the man who ultimately became her husband she refused those of the Dukes of Hamilton, Buccleuch and Atholl, the Earls of Hopetoun, Aberdeen and Panrnure, cum multis aliis. However this may be, we know that she had several love romances; and that one at least nearly led to the altar while Jean was still a "wee bit lassie." The favoured suitor was the young Earl of Dalkeith, heir to the Buccleuch Dukedom, a young man who may have been, as Lady Louisa Stuart described him, "of mean understanding and meaner habits," but who was at least devoted to her ladyship, and in many ways a desirable parti. The Duchess of Buccleuch was frankly delighted with the projected marriage of her son with Lady Jean Douglas, "a young lady whom she had heard much commended before she saw her, and who since had lost no ground with her"; and, no doubt, the fair Douglas would have become Dalkeith's Countess had it not been for the treacherous intervention of Her Grace of Queensberry, whose heart was set on the Earl marrying her sister-in-law.
The marriage day had actually been fixed when a letter was placed in Lady Jean's hand, when on her way to the Court—a letter in which the Earl claimed his release as he no longer loved her. That the letter was a clever forgery never occurred to Lady Jean, who was so crushed by it that it is said she fled in disguise to France to hide her shame and her humiliation. Such was the tragic ending to Lady Jean's first romance, which gave her such a distrust of man and such a distaste for matrimony that for thirty years she vowed she would listen to no avowal of love, however tempting.
During the long period, while youth was slipping from her, Lady Jean appears to have lived alone at Drumsheugh House, near Edinburgh, where she made herself highly popular by her affability, admired for her gifts and graces of mind, and courted for her rank and her lavish hospitality—paying occasional visits to her brother, the Duke of Douglas, whose devotion to her was only equalled by the alarm his eccentric behaviour and his mad fits of jealousy and temper inspired in her. That the Duke, who is described as "a person of the most wretched intellect, proud, ignorant, and silly, passionate, spiteful and unforgiving," was scarcely sane is proved by many a story, one alone of which is sufficient to prove that his mind must have been unbalanced. Once when Captain Ker, a distant cousin, was a guest at the castle, he ventured to remonstrate with his host on allowing his servants, especially one called Stockbrigg, to rule over him; whereupon
"the poor Duke," to quote Woodrow, "who for many years had been crazed in his brain, told this familiar, who persuaded him that such an insult could only be wiped out in blood. On which the Duke proceeded to Ker's room and stabbed him as he was sleeping."
It is little wonder that Lady Jean declined to live with a brother who was thus a slave to his own servants and to a temper so insane; but although their lives were led apart, and although, among many other mad delusions, the Duke was convinced that his sister had applied for a warrant to "confine him as a madman and she to sit down on the estate and take possession of it," he was generous enough to make her a liberal allowance, and to promise that, if she married and had children, "they would heir his estate."
Such was the state of affairs at the time this story really opens. Lady Jean had carried her aversion to men and matrimony to middle-age, happy enough in her independence and extravagance; while the Duke, still unwed, remained a prey to his jealousies, his morbid fancies and his insensate rages; and it is at this time that Colonel Stewart, the "villain of the play," makes his appearance on the stage.
Ten years earlier, it is true, John Stewart, of Grandtully, had tried to repair his shattered fortunes by making love to Lady Jean, who, although then a woman of nearly forty, was still handsome enough, as he confessed later, to "captivate my heart at the first sight of her." She was, moreover (and this was much more to the point), a considerable heiress, with the vast Douglas estates as good as assured to her. But to the handsome adventurer Lady Jean turned a deaf ear, as to all her other suitors; and the "Colonel," who had never won any army rank higher than that of a subaltern, had to return ignominiously to the Continent, where for another ten years he picked up a precarious living at the gaming-tables, by borrowing or by any other low expedient that opportunity provided to his scheming brain. The Duke of Douglas, who cordially detested this down-at-heels cousin, called him "one of the worst of men—a papist, a Jacobite, a gamester, a villain"—and his career certainly seems to justify this sweeping and scathing description.
Such was the man who now reappeared to put his fate again to the test—and this time with such success that, to quote his own words,