C. When the gentlemen are in their saddles, ready to ride away, Lady Frendraught, on her bare knees, begs them to remain, and promises them a firlot of red gold if they will. When everybody has gone to bed, the doors are locked and the windows shut. The reek begins to rise and the joists to crack; Lord John betakes himself to the window, and finds the stanchions too strong to break. He goes back and wakens Rothiemay, and proposes to him to praise the Lord in the fifty-third psalm,[[27]] for there is treason about them. He calls to Lady Frendraught, walking on the green, for mercy; she replies that the keys are in the well, and the doors were locked yesterday. He reproaches her for burning her own flesh. George Chalmers (who really escaped, though lodged in the third story) is described as leaping the ditches and coming, from without, to Rothiemay’s help, and Colin Irving (the Colin Ivat of Spalding, who was burnt) as doing the same in behalf of Lord John, to whom he calls to jump into his arms. Lord John is burning, and there is little more left of him than his spirit; but he throws down a purse of gold for the poor and his rings for his wife. Lady Rothiemay comes in the morning to cry vengeance on Frendraught, who has betrayed the gay Gordons, killed her lord, and burnt her son.[[28]]
D. “‘There are some intermediate particulars,’ Mr Boyd says, ‘respecting the lady’s lodging her victims in a turret or flanker which did not communicate with the castle.’ ‘This,’ adds he, ‘I only have from tradition, as I never heard any other stanzas besides the foregoing.’ The author of the original, we may perceive, either through ignorance or design, had deviated from the fact in supposing Lady Frennet’s husband to have been slain by Lord John’s father.” Ritson, p. 36.@
It may be noted that three of the most tragical of the Scottish historical ballads are associated with the name of Gordon: the Burning of Towie, as we might call ‘Captain Car,’ No 178, through Adam Gordon, uncle of the first marquis of Huntly; the Burning of Donibristle, known as ‘The Bonny Earl of Murray,’ No 181, of which the responsibility is put upon the marquis (then earl) himself; and the Burning of Frendraught, in which his son perished.
A
a. Motherwell’s Minstrelsy, p. 161, from a MS. of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. b. Maidment’s North Countrie Garland, p. 4; “long preserved by tradition in Aberdeenshire, and procured from an intelligent individual resident in that part of Scotland.”
1
The eighteenth of October,
A dismal tale to hear
How good Lord John and Rothiemay