Derwentwater had not attained the age of twenty-seven at the time of his death. We may believe that the character given of him by the renegade Patten was not overcharged: “The sweetness of his temper and disposition, in which he had few equals, had so secured him the affection of all his tenants, neighbors, and dependants that multitudes would have lived and died with him. The truth is, he was a man formed by nature to be generally beloved, for he was of so universal a beneficence that he seemed to live for others. As he lived among his own people, there he spent his estate, and continually did offices of kindness and good neighborhood to everybody, as opportunity offered. He kept a house of generous hospitality and noble entertainment, which few in that country do, and none come up to. He was very charitable to poor and distressed families on all occasions, whether known to him or not, and whether Papist or Protestant. His fate will be sensibly felt by a great many who had no kindness for the cause he died in.”

The king’s letter, which, in the ballad, summons Derwentwater to London (to answer for his head, D 3), suggests the Secretary of State’s warrant of arrest, which his lordship, unhappily for himself, evaded. But very probably the ballad-maker supposed Derwentwater to have gone home after his less than six weeks in arms. As he is setting forth to obey the mandate, his wife calls to him from child-bed to make his will. This business does not delay him long: one third of his estate is to be his wife’s, and the rest to go to his children. (He had a son not two years old at the date of his execution, and a daughter who must have been born, at the earliest, not much before the rising. His very large estates first passed to the crown, and were afterwards bestowed on Greenwich hospital.) Bad omens attend his departure. As he mounts his horse, his ring drops from his finger, or breaks, and his nose begins to bleed, B 5, D 6, E 8, F 9, H 7, I 10; presently his horse stumbles, A 8, E 9, F 10, I 11; it begins to rain, H 8. When he comes to London, to Westminster Hall, B 6, F 11, to Whitehall, D 7, rides up Westminster Street, in sight of the White Hall, I 12, the lords and knights, the lords and ladies, a mob, H 9, call him “traitor.” How can that be, he answers, with surprise or indignation, except for keeping five hundred men (five thousand, seven thousand, eight score), to fight for King Jamie? A 10, D 8, E 11, F 12, H 10, I 13. A man with an ax claims his life, which he ungrudgingly resigns, B 8, D 9, 10, E 12, 13, F 13, 14, H 11, 12, I 14, 15, directing that a good sum of money which he has in his pockets shall be given to the poor, A 12, D 11, E 14, F 15, I 17.

In A 2, D 12, Derwentwater seems to be taken for a Scot.

Ellis, Brand’s Antiquities, 1813, II, 261, note, remarks that he had heard in Northumberland that when the Earl of Derwentwater was beheaded, the stream (the Divelswater) that runs past his seat at Dilston Hall flowed with blood.[[87]]

The Northern Lights (perhaps the red-colored ones) were peculiarly vivid on the night of February 16, 1716, and were long called Lord Derwentwater’s Lights in the north of England, where, it is said, many of the people know (or knew) them by no other name. It was even a popular belief that the aurora borealis was first seen on that night: Notes and Queries, Third Series, IX, 154, 268; Gibson, Dilston Hall, p. 111.

The omen of nose-bleed occurs in the ballad of ‘The Mother’s Malison,’ No 216, C; both nose-bleed and horse-stumbling, as omens, in Webster’s Dutchess of Malfi, Act II, Scene 2, Dyce, 1859, p. 70, cited, with other cases, in Ellis’s ed. of Brand’s Antiquities, II, 497.

‘Brig. Macintosh’s Farewell to the Highlands,’ or ‘Macintosh was a Soldier Brave,’ is one half a Derwentwater ballad: see Harland’s Ballads and Songs of Lancashire, 1865, p. 75, Ritson’s Northumberland Garland, p. 85, Hogg’s Jacobite Relics, II, 102, etc.

A

Motherwell’s MS., p. 331, July 19, 1825, “from the recitation of Agnes Lile, Kilbarchan, a woman verging on fifty;” learned from her father, who died fourteen years before, at the age of eighty.