This was doubtless the truth, but not the whole truth. Founding apparently on these statements, which are Lord Grange's vindication of himself, the editor of the collection of letters says—"The letters now printed must considerably impair the mystery of the reasons which led to the abduction of Lady Grange. They may be held conclusively to refute the supposition that the affair had any connexion with the political intrigues of the period." On the contrary, we cannot read the confidential portion of the correspondence without feeling that it almost conclusively establishes the fact, that the affair had a "connexion with the political intrigues of the period;" and that the reason why so many people of rank and political influence aided the plot, why the removal was conducted with so much secrecy, and the place of seclusion was so remote and inaccessible, was because Lady Grange was possessed of dangerous secrets, which compromised her husband and his friends. The general tone of the letters, and their many cautious and mysterious, yet unmistakeable references to the proceedings of friends across the water, show that the judge confided to the owner of the old mansion at the foot of Bennochie some things which it would be dangerous for an enemy to know. But we shall cite just one passage, which we consider sufficient of itself to support our position. It is taken from a letter dated 22d March 1731, just ten months before his wife was seized and carried off. There is something very peculiar in the structure of the letter; and, whether in pursuit of some not very appreciable joke, or to waylay the penetration of any hostile party who, might take the liberty of opening the packet on its journey, the writer speaks of himself during the most curious and important part of it, in the third person. Talking of a very difficult and hazardous project in which he is about to be engaged, he thus passes a neat commendation on himself,—"but I am sure he never yet was frightened from what was right in itself, and his duty towards his friends, by his own trouble or danger, and he seems as little frighted now, as ever in his life." He then approaches the subject of his wife's character and intentions, like a man treading on the verge of a frightful pitfall. "I have found that, in such a case, there is no bounds set to such mischief, and it is pushed on though it should go the length of your utter ruin, and of Tyburn itself, or the Grassmarket,"—the one being the place where the gibbet of London, the other where that of Edinburgh stood. From such portentous associations he passes immediately to his wife and her proceedings. To make the passage more distinct, we fill up the names, of which the letter contains only the first and last letters; it will be remarked that he still assumes the third person, and that he himself is the person about to depart for London.
"Then I am told that Lady Grange is going to London. She knows nothing of his going, nor is it suspected here, nor shall be till the day before he goes off, and so she cannot pretend it is to follow him. She will certainly strive to get access to Lady Mary Wortley, Lady Mar's sister, (whom she openly blesses for her opposition to our friends,) and to all where her malice may prompt her to hope she can do hurt to us. You will remember with what lying impudence she threatened Lord Grange, and many of his friends, with accusations of high treason and other capital crimes, and spoke so loud of her accusing directly by a signed information to Lord Justice-Clerk, that it came to his ears, and she was stopped by hearing he said, that, if the mad woman came to him, he would cause his footmen turn her down stairs. What effect her lies may have, where she is not so well known, and with those who, from opposition to what Lord Grange is about, may think their interest to encourage them, one cannot certainly know; but if proper measures be not fallen on against it, the creature may prove troublesome; at any rate, this whole affair will require a great deal of diligence, caution, and address."[24]
He talks of her as mad: and so far as passion and the thirst of vengeance make people mad, she undoubtedly was so. He speaks of her intended accusations as lies—that is, of course, a convenient expression to use towards them. But what is very clearly at the bottom of all the trepidation, and doubt, and difficulty, is, that she might be able, mad and false as she was, to get facts established which called up very ugly associations with Tyburn and the Grassmarket. A minute incident stated in the common histories of the affair, that Lady Grange planned a journey to London for the purpose of taking her accusation to the fountain-head of political power, is confirmed by this extract. It may easily be believed that, among Grange's official colleagues—some of whom had also their own secrets to keep—the lady's frantic accusations met with little encouragement. The Justice-Clerk referred to in the extract, Adam Cockburn of Ormiston, was, like Grange himself, a great professed light of the church, and what sort of interview he would have held with the furious lady, may be inferred from the character given of him by a contemporary,—"He became universally hated in Scotland, where they called him the curse of Scotland; and when ladies were at cards, playing the nine of diamonds, commonly called 'the curse of Scotland,' they called it the Justice-Clerk. He was, indeed, of a hot temper, and violent in all his measures."[25]
In the old narratives of the affair, it is stated that Grange felt his position to be the more dangerous, as some letters had been intercepted tending to inculpate him with the Jacobites on the Continent. It is singular that this should also be pretty satisfactorily proved by the present correspondence. It will be remembered that Grange was a brother of the Earl of Mar, whose prominence in the affairs of 1715 had driven him into exile. A strong attachment to this unfortunate man is, on the whole, the most pleasing feature in the character of the more cautious and more fortunate judge. It was natural that the brothers should keep up a correspondence, and quite as natural that Sir Robert Walpole should be particularly anxious to discover what they said to each other. Grange conducted some negotiations with the government for his brother's pardon and restoration, and we find him defeated in his aim, and receiving some very significant hints about the nature of his correspondence.
"Sir Robert told me in wrath that he would have nothing to do with Lord Mar, that he had dealt ill with him, and he should not have his pardon; and he would by no means give me any reason for it, but Lord Townsend did, whom they had stirred up; for he in anger told me Sir Robert had intercepted his letters to me with very odd things in them, injurious to Sir Robert and his friends.... Soon after this, Ilay, with cloudy looks, began to make insinuations of some discoveries against me too, and at length told me that Sir Robert said that he had also intercepted bad letters of mine to Lord Mar, but confessed they were not directed to Lord Mar, and neither subscribed by me nor in my hand of write, but that by the contents they knew them to be mine to Lord Mar. I answered that they might assert what they pleased of letters said to be directed to me, and which they owned I had never seen, but that I must know of letters wrote by myself, and that I ever wrote any such was a damned, villainous, malicious lie; and let Sir Robert or any else be the asserter of it, whoever did assert it, was a liar."[26]
This is a very successful outbreak of virtuous indignation, and does considerable credit to its author, as a pupil of that school of which his dear friend Lord Lovat was the undoubted head.
We cannot help considering that it is a question of some historical interest and importance whether the abduction of Lady Grange was or was not a measure adopted for political reasons, and that the letters before us, by finally deciding the question, throw an important light on the political state of Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century. If we suppose that the lady was carried under circumstances of such profound mystery, and by the agency of some conspicuous and distinguished personages, to the distant island of St Kilda, merely because she was a lunatic who required to be in custody, we only see that many important and sagacious people were taking a very complex and cumbrous method of accomplishing what might have been done with ease; for in those days, few would have troubled themselves about the wretched woman, if her husband had chosen to keep her in any place of confinement, telling the neighbourhood that she was insane. But when we find that the Jacobite party in Scotland were powerful enough to kidnap a person obnoxious to them, and keep her for nine years in a place to which the laws of the realm and the authority of the crown nominally extended, but where their own power was the real operative authority, we have a very formidable notion of the strength and compactness of the Jacobite union during Walpole's apparently powerful ministry.
The correspondence of Lord Grange admits its reader to a species of confidential intercourse with him, which can scarcely be called agreeable. It exhibits one of the most disgusting of all the moral diseases—the rankling of the arrow of disappointment in the heart of a defeated political schemer. It is not the man of brave and bold designs baffled, or the utopian enthusiast disappointed of the fulfilment of his golden dreams, or the adherent of one absorbing political idea looking at it lying broken to pieces at his feet: in all of these there is a dash of noble and disinterested sentiment, and the politician defeated in his conflict with the world has still the consolation of an honest if mistaken heart, into which he can retire without the sting of self-reproach. But all Grange's disappointments were connected with paltry schemes of personal aggrandisement. Fawn and flatter as he might, Sir Robert Walpole, and his Scottish coadjutor Ilay, knew him and distrusted him, and, when he came to court them, gave him but fair words, and sometimes not even that. With Sir Robert he carried on an unequal war. Believing that he could scourge the minister in parliament, while he was a judge of the Court of Session, he resolved to obtain a seat, and thereupon the all-powerful minister at once checkmated him, by carrying an act to prohibit judges of the Court of Session from holding seats in the House of Commons—it was a less invidious proceeding than the dismissal of his lordship from the bench would have been, and it had the appearance of being dictated by a desire for the public good. Grange preferred the senate to the bench, and resigned his judgeship, but he never achieved political eminence. In the mean time he acquired Dr Johnson's desideratum of an honest hatred towards his enemy, and indeed hatred appears to have been the only honest ingredient in his character. He expressed it so well towards Walpole, that we must quote his confidential opinion of that mighty statesman:—
"An insolent and rapacious minister, who has kept us under the expense of war in time of peace, yet hindered us to fight to vindicate our trade, so grossly violated by Spanish robberies, and when we could have put a stop to it, and corrected them without drawing upon us the arms of any other nation, maintained his hollow and expensive peace by ridiculous contradictory treaties, trying us to take part in all the quarrels of Europe, and sometimes to be on both sides, and at the same time allowing confederacies to go on so powerful, and which we are not of, that now when a war is breaking out we know not where to turn us; laying plots to devour the land by new swarms of officers of the revenue, to put the merchants' stocks in the possession of these vermin, and trade under their power, &c., as by that most damned excise scheme; openly protecting the frauds and villains that plunder the stocks and ruin multitudes, and must sink the kingdom; plundering the revenue, and using all his art, and power, and bribes to stop all inquiry into, or the least amendment of these things, either by parliament or otherwise; openly ridiculing all virtue and uprightness; enhancing all power to himself and his brother, and suffering almost none else to do or know anything; barefaced and avowed bribing of members of parliament and others, and boasting of it; heaping up immense wealth to himself and his most abject profligate creatures of both sexes, while the public treasure and trade of the nation is ruined; suffering and encouraging these locusts to get large bribes, and giving considerable employment at their recommendation, while men of merit and service, and of the best families and interest, are neglected or abused, employing insignificant brutes or the greatest rogues, and favouring almost none but such; maltreating and insulting all whom his rascals and jades complain of. But the list is too long to go through with here."[27]
Grange thought at one time that he had great claims on Walpole, and Lord Ilay; and he seems to have very diligently performed one class of duties which politicians sometimes think sufficient to establish a claim for reward—he had been an indefatigable petitioner for ministerial favours. We have heard somewhere of a story of a political economist, who during a long walk is pestered by an Irish beggar, who asks his honour just to give him a sixpence, "for the love of God." The economist turns round to argue the matter: "I deny," says he, "that I would be showing my love to the Deity by giving an idle rascal like you money; if you can state any service you have ever done to me worth the sixpence, you shall have it."—"Why, then," says the mendicant thus appealed to, "haven't I been keeping your honour in discourse this half hour?" Such seems to have been the character of Grange's claim on the ministry—he kept them in unceasing "discourse" as a petitioner. Not that he did not profess some claims of another kind. "During all this time," he says, "I ran their errands and fought their battles in Scotland." Nor did he fail sometimes to allude to his services as a religious professor, so ill-requited, that he taunts Ilay with having "already effectually interposed for Tom (now Baron) Kennedy, who had been Queen's advocate, and obnoxious to all the Presbyterian party, which I was not." And how was he rewarded for all this running errands, fighting battles, and being religious enough not to be obnoxious? "Ilay showed me no countenance, and Argyle shunned to see me.... He [Ilay] never speaks nor writes to me of any business, but to shame me (as you have seen) about my own: and, these three or four years past, has visibly to all the world drawn off by degrees from all familiarity with me, and has dropped me even from his conversation about trifles or mirth. I could give you many strong instances of this." Here is an incident told with a pathos sufficient to move a whole antechamber to tears:—