In his latter years Cardinal York was supported by a pension of four thousand pounds a year from George III.; an act of kindness which was handsomely responded to by the Cardinal giving up to the king the crown diamonds which James II. had carried away with him to France. On the death of the Cardinal, the Countess of Albany became the recipient of an annuity from the king. This she enjoyed till her decease as plain Madame Fabre at Montpelier, in France, in 1824. Such was the sorrowful ending of the broken-down and much-tried widow of Charles Edward Stuart.
We feel that our desultory sketch would be incomplete without some account of Borlum subsequent to his escape to France in 1716. For any such account, however, there are very slender materials in history. To a writer in the Celtic Magazine (Inverness, 1877) we are indebted for some of the following particulars. Borlum remained in France only one or two years, during which his father died, whereupon he became the chief of his house. On what terms, if any, he was allowed to return to his own country there is no statement. At all events, he was again in Scotland in 1719, for in that year he took part in the mad attempt at insurrection by the aid of Spanish soldiers, which was immediately stamped out. That Mackintosh of Borlum should have engaged in so wild an adventure, is an evidence of his Jacobite fervour and indiscretion. He was once more a fugitive, but for a time contrived to elude detection. At length, he was apprehended in the wilds of Caithness, and was conveyed as a state prisoner to Edinburgh Castle.
Few, perhaps, among the gay crowds who throng Princes Street, and cast a glance at the buildings of the castle perched on the summit of rugged cliffs, are aware that in one of these buildings, long used as a state prison, poor Mackintosh of Borlum was confined for the last years of his life. Certainly, a hard fate for the old Jacobite! Cribbed and confined in his airy but miserable den, Borlum did not spend his time uselessly. Before being involved in political troubles he had devoted himself to the improvement and planting of lands. He is said to have planted a row of trees which still ornament the public road near Kingussie. Now that he was locked up, he wrote an Essay on the best means of inclosing and improving lands, which was printed in Edinburgh in 1729. Our authority adds: ‘On the 7th January 1743, after a rough earthly pilgrimage of eighty years, the gallant old soldier passed to his rest, true to the last to the principles which had influenced his whole life. One of his last acts, it is said, was to dedicate one of his teeth to the service of his exiled master, by writing with it on the wall of his room an invocation of God’s blessing on King James!’
How long Borlum was immured in that dismal prison on the castle rock, is not clearly ascertained. The obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine speaks of his having been confined in the castle ‘fifteen years.’ By the authority above quoted, he is said to have been imprisoned ‘for nearly a quarter of a century.’ Truth may lie somewhere between—from twenty to twenty-one years. The Caledonian-Mercury, in noticing his decease at the age of ‘about eighty-five,’ gives him a high character as ‘a complete gentleman, friendly, agreeable, and courteous;’ and for what he had written as regards the improvement of land, he is to be lastingly esteemed as ‘a lover of his country.’ Nowhere is a word said of the cruelty of confining so aged and accomplished a person in the worst species of prison till he was released by death. For the seeming harshness of this prolonged imprisonment, an excuse may perhaps be found in the political apprehensions of the period; but this scarcely lessens our compassion for the sufferings of a man in so many respects estimable. With all his faults, Borlum must be admitted to have possessed that quality of earnestness of purpose which in the ordinary concerns of life is now so feebly demonstrated. It could be wished that some one had done full justice to his biography; for Borlum was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary men of his time.
W. C.
HELENA, LADY HARROGATE.
CHAPTER XIX.—FIRE!
‘There is nothing so hard, nothing so difficult as to get a governess nowadays,’ said the Countess of Wolverhampton, quite unaware that she was but echoing the complaint of many ladies of a lesser degree, to the effect that it is next to impossible to procure pattern cooks, prize housemaids, exemplary seamstresses, or model kitchen-maids, in these degenerate times. ‘I mean a really satisfactory governess of course,’ added the noble mistress of High Tor. Lady Wolverhampton and her two elder daughters were the sole occupants of the smallest of the suite of drawing-rooms, the windows of which were yet open to admit the balmy air of the hot evening. Dinner was but just over, and the flush of the sinking sun was faintly visible on the heathy ridges and pine-groves to the west.
‘It is very tiresome, mamma,’ said sympathetic Lady Maud.