NEW LIGHT ON THE STORY OF LADY GRANGE.
Before we offer our readers some new light on this renowned mystery, it is necessary that we should give them, in a sentence, the briefest possible outline of the oft-told tale, so far as it has been hitherto known. John Erskine, Lord Grange, a judge of the Court of Session, and a leader of the ultra-religious party in Scotland, was married to the daughter of that Chiesley of Dalry who had shot the Lord President in the High Street of Edinburgh, for giving a decision against him. The marriage was a very unhappy one. The pious leader of a religious party was scandalised in various ways, obliged to live separate from his wife, and subjected to many outrages from her. At length her death was announced, her funeral was duly attended, and the widower preserved the decorous silence of one to whom death has brought relief from what is generally counted a calamity.
This occurred in January 1732. The lapse of nearly nine years had almost consigned the remembrance of the unfortunate woman to oblivion, when strange rumours gained circulation, that she who was believed to be dead and buried was living in bondage in the distant island of St Kilda. The account she subsequently gave of her adventures, bore, that one night in her solitary lodging she was seized by some Highlanders, whom she knew to be retainers of Lord Lovat, and conveyed away, gagged and blindfolded, in the arms of a man seated in a sedan chair. It appears that she was kept in various places of confinement, and subjected to much rough usage, in the Low Country. At length she was conveyed north-westward, towards the Highland line. She passed through the grim solitudes of Glencoe, where recent murder must have awakened in the captive horrible associations, on to the western part of Lord Lovat's country, where any deed of tyranny or violence might be committed with safety. Thence she was transferred to the equally safe country of Glengarry, and, after crossing some of the highest mountains in Scotland, was shipped on the wild Loch Hourn, for ever darkened by the shadow of gigantic mountains falling on its narrow waters. She was kept for some time on the small island of Heskir, belonging to Macdonald of Sleat, and was afterwards transferred to the still more inaccessible St Kilda, which has acquired a sort of celebrity from its connexion with her strange history. In 1741, when a communication from the captive had, through devious courses, reached her friends in Edinburgh, an effort was made to release her; but it was baffled by her transference to another place of confinement, where she died in 1745.
Little did the old judge imagine, at the time when he had so successfully and so quietly got rid of his domestic curse—when the mock funeral had been performed, the family condolences acted over, and the victim safely conveyed to her distant prison, that on some future day the public, frantic with curiosity, would tear to pieces the covering of his great mystery, and expose every fragment of it to the admiring crowd. It was but a simple matter in the eyes of those who were concerned in it. The woman was troublesome—her husband was a judge, and therefore a powerful man—so he put her out of the way. Nor was he cruel or unscrupulous, according to the morality of the circle in which he lived, in the method he adopted to accomplish his end. He had advisers about him, who would have taken a shorter and a more effectual plan for ridding themselves of a troublesome woman, wife or not, and would have walked forth into the world without being haunted by any dread that rumours of remote captivities might rise up to disturb their peace. Indeed, when we remember the character of the instruments to whom Lord Grange committed the kidnapping and removal of his wife, it is only wonderful that they had patience enough to carry out so long and troublesome an operation; and that they did not, out of regard to themselves and to their employer, put a violent termination to the career of their troublesome charge, and send her at once to where the weary are at rest. Had this been her fate, the affair of Lady Grange would have been one of secondary interest. Such things were too easily accomplished in those days. The chances would have been greatly against a discovery, and if it took place, equally great against the conviction and punishment of the offenders, unless the lady had a more powerful party at her back than the daughter of Chiesley the murderer would be likely to command. It would have created, so far as it was known, great excitement, and some little horror at the time, but it would have speedily sunk to the level of the ordinary contents of the criminal records, and would never have bequeathed to the ensuing century an object which antiquarians have hunted out as religiously and zealously as if it had involved the fate of Europe.
In fact, Lord Grange was what was called in his day "a discreet man." He wished to avoid scandal, and bore a character for religious zeal, which appears to have been on occasion a very serious burden not easily borne. He dreaded scandal and notoriety, and therefore he shrouded his great act of iniquity in the most profound secrecy. Moreover, he kept a conscience—something that, like Rob Roy's honesty, might be called a conscience "after a kind." He said pretty accurately of himself in his Diary—"I have religion enough to spoil my relish and prosecution of this world, and not enough to get me to the next." We may probably believe that, even if he could have performed the deed with perfect secrecy and safety, so far as this world is concerned, he would not have murdered his wife, his conscience recoiling at the dreadful crime—his fear of the world causing him to shrink from exposure. Urged by these two conflicting motives, he adopted the expedient of the secret removal to a desolate and distant spot, believing that he had surrounded the whole project with a deep and impenetrable cloud of mystery. Never was human foresight more signally set at naught. It was this very machinery of intense mystery that, by ministering to one of the cravings of the human imagination, has made the incident one of the most notorious of human events. It is almost satisfactory to know that this dreaded notoriety visited the hoary tyrant, for after he had for nine years enjoyed in secret the success of his plot, and kept his fair fame with the world, we find him, when legal proceedings were commenced against him, bitterly saying that "strange stories were spread all over the town of Edinburgh, and made the talk of coffee-houses and tea-tables, and sent, as I have ground to apprehend, to several other places of Great Britain."[20] One may notice, too, in the following discontented mumblings, the bitterness with which he contemplated the divulging of the secret,—it is in a letter to the imprisoned lady's champion, Mr Hope of Rankeillor.
"Any of the smallest discretion will see what a worthy part he acts towards me and mine, and many others, and even towards the person pretended to be cared for, who, in such an occasion, begins by spreading through Great Britain strange stories, unexamined and unvouched, and not so much as communicated to us concerned; and next, when offered satisfaction, yet proceeds to fix such on public records, and to force others to bring on record sad and proved truths, which he himself knows and formerly has acknowledged to be truths, and that ought for ever to be sunk. This cannot be construed to be anything but an endeavour to fix, as far as in him lies, a lasting blot on persons and families. The first was defamation, and the next would be the same, under a cover of a pretended legal shape, but in itself more atrocious. One cannot doubt that this is a serious thing to many more than me, and cannot but be laid to heart."[21]
The text from which we are at present discoursing, is a bundle of confidential letters from Lord Grange, printed in the Miscellany of the Spalding Club, and not the least valuable and curious of the many contributions made by that useful and spirited institution, to the elucidation of Scottish history and manners. At the foot of the high conical hill of Bennochie, in a small group of forest trees, there nestles one of those quaint small turreted mansions of old French architecture so frequently to be seen in the north of Scotland. The owner of this mansion was an Erskine; he was related to Erskine of Grange, and it so happened that this relative was the person in whose ear he poured his secret sorrows, as a disappointed and morbid politician. Such confidential outpourings are not the most interesting of communications, even when one has the fortune to be so far connected with the wailer as to be the chosen vessel into which he pours the anguish of his heart. Some of these letters are portentous—they are absolute pamphlets—in their spirit as yellow and mildewed with discontent, as their outward aspect may have been by the cold damp air of Bennochie, when they were discovered in the worm-eaten chest. It requires a little zeal to peruse the whole series; but, unless we are greatly deceived, we think we can present our readers with a few plums picked out of the mass, which they may find not unacceptable. And here, by the way, let us observe, how great a service is done by those who ransack the repositories of our old Scottish houses, and make their contents accessible to the public. We are convinced that in dusty garrets, in vaults, in musty libraries, and crazy old oak-chests, there is still an almost inexhaustible wealth of curious lore of this description. The correspondence of the old Scottish families is generally far more interesting than that of English houses of the same rank. Since the civil wars of the seventeenth century, England may be said to have been internally undisturbed, and no private papers contain matters of state, save those of the great families whose ancestors have been high in office. But in Scotland, the various outbreaks, and the unceasing Jacobite intrigues, made almost all the country gentlemen statesmen—made too many of them state offenders. The Essex squire, be he ever so rich, was still but the lord of a certain quantity of timber and oxen, grass and turnips. The Highland laird, be he ever so poor, was a leader of men—a person who had more or less the power of keeping the country in a state of war or danger—a sort of petty king reigning over his own people. Hence, while the letters of the last century one might pick up in a comfortable old English mansion, would relate to swing-gates and turnpike roads, game preserves and tithes, those found hidden behind the wainscoat of a gaunt old cheerless Scottish fortalice, would relate to risings at home, or landings from abroad—to the number of broadswords and targets still kept in defiance of the Arms Act—to communications received through French Jesuits, or secret missions "across the water."[22]
We believe that the passages from these documents, on which we are now to comment, in the first place exhibit to us pretty plainly the motive of Lord Grange for the deportation of his wife; and, in the second place, prove that he entertained designs of a similar character against another female with whom he was nearly connected.
When Lady Grange's strange history was first communicated to the public, it was believed that the cause of her abduction was not merely her violent temper, but her possession of certain secrets which would enable her to compromise the safety of her husband and his friends, by proving their connexion with the Jacobite intrigues of the period. The view more lately taken of the mystery, has been that she was merely a mad woman, and that her abduction, with all its laborious mystery, was only an attempt to accommodate the judge with a resource in which Scotland was then deficient—a lunatic asylum for insane relatives. Though, as we shall presently see, his confidential communications give other and darker revelations, this was the light in which Lord Grange wished the matter to be viewed, after his plot had been discovered; and in his controversial letter to Mr Hope, already referred to, he gives an account of her frantic outbreaks, which certainly affords a picture of one likely to have been a most distressing partner in life to a grave judge, having a few secrets to conceal which required him to be peculiarly circumspect in his walk; and holding a high, but a rather precarious position, in the opinion of the religious world. After stating that she had agreed to a separation, he continues—
"Then it was hoped that I and the children (who she used to curse bitterly when they went dutifully to wait on her) would be in quiet; but she often attacked my house, and from the streets, and among the footmen and chairmen of visitors, cried and raged against me and mine, and watched for me in the streets, and chased me from place to place in the most indecent and shameless manner, and threatened to attack me on the bench, which, dreading she would do every time I went to it, made my duty there very heavy on me, lest that honourable Court of Session should be disturbed and affronted on my occasion. And not content with these, and odd and very bad contrivances about the poor children, she waited on a Sunday's afternoon that my sister, Lady Jane Paterson, with my second daughter, came out of the Tron Church, and on the street, among all the people, fell upon her with violent scolding and curses, and followed her so down Merlin's Wynd, till Lady Jane and the child near the bottom of it got shelter from her and being exposed to the multitude in a friend's house. You also know, and may well remember, that before you and the rest advised the separation, and till she went from my house, she would not keep herself in that part of it (the best apartment) which was assigned her, but abused all in the family, and when none were adverting, broke into the room of ane old gentlewoman, recommended to me for housekeeper, and carried off and destroyed her accompts, &c., and committed outrages, so that at length I was forced to have a watch in my house, and especially in the night time, as if it had been in the frontier of an enemy's country, or to be spoiled by robbers."[23]