The aisle of the old church of Slains contains the graves of Countess Mary and her husband, with an epitaph in Latin, of which the following is a translation: "Beneath this tombstone there are buried neither gold nor silver, nor treasures of any kind, but the bodies of the most chaste wedded pair, Mary, countess of Erroll, and Alexander Hay of Dalgaty, who lived peaceably and lovingly in matrimony for twenty-seven years. They wished to be buried here beside each other, and pray that this stone may not be moved nor their remains disturbed, but that these be allowed to rest in the Lord until He shall call them to the happy resurrection of that life which they expect from the mercy of God and the merits of the Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ."
The central figure, however, in the history of the Hays of Erroll, and that which no one who bears the name of Hay can think of without a thrill of pride, is the Lord Kilmarnock who fell, in 1746, a victim to the last unsuccessful but heroic rising in favor of the Stuarts. I have heard it whispered as an instance of "second sight" that some years before he had any reason to anticipate such a death he was once startled by the ghostly opening of a door in the apartment where he was sitting alone, and by the apparition, horribly distinct and realistic, of a bloody head rolling slowly toward him across the room; till it rested at his feet. The glassy eyes were upturned to his, and the bonny locks were clotted with blood: it was as if it had just rolled from under the axe of the executioner; and the features, plainly discerned, were his own!
His part in the rising of 1745 belongs to history, but his personal demeanor concerns my narrative more closely. All the contemporary accounts are loud in praise of his beauty and elegance of person, his refinement of manner, his variety of accomplishments; and Scott, in his Tales of a Grandfather, relates a curious circumstance concerning his fine presence at the moment of his execution. A lady of fashion who had never seen him before, and who was herself, I believe, the wife of one who had much to do with Lord Kilmarnock's death-warrant, seeing him pass on his way to the block, formed a most violent attachment for his person, "which in a less serious affair would have, been little less than a ludicrous frenzy."
The grace and dignity of his appearance, together with the resignation and mildness of his address, melted all the spectators to tears as they gathered round the fatal Tower prison to witness his death: the chaplain who attended him says his behavior was so humble and resigned that even the executioner burst into tears, and was obliged to use strong cordials to support him in his terrible duty. Lord Kilmarnock himself was deeply impressed by the sight of the block draped in funereal black, the plain coffin placed just beside it, the sawdust that was so disposed as speedily to suck up the bloody traces of the execution, and the sea of faces surrounding the open enclosure kept for this his last earthly ordeal. It was certainly not from fear that he recoiled, but his proud, sensitive, melancholy nature was thrilled through every nerve by this dread publicity, and we cannot wonder that, leaning heavily on the arm of a trusty friend, he should have whispered, almost with his last breath, the simple words, "Home, this is dreadful!"
One who was the lineal descendant of this earl of Kilmarnock, and whose only brother long bore the same blood-stained and laurel-wreathed title, has often told me of the strange link that bridged the chasm of four generations from 1746 to 1829, and bound her recollections to those of a living witness of the scene. She was so young as not to have any distinct impression of other events that happened at the same time, but this lived in her mind because of the importance and solemnity with which her own parents had purposely invested it in her eyes. One day, at Brighton, this little great-great-grand-daughter of the Lord Kilmarnock of 1745 was brought down from the nursery to see an old, more than octogenarian, soldier who had distinguished himself in recent wars, and reached the rank of general. This tottering old man, more than fourscore years of age, took the wee maiden of hardly four upon his knee, and told her in simple words the story she was never to forget—how he had been a tiny boy running to school on the day of the execution of the "rebel lords," and how, seeing a vast, eager crowd all setting toward the Tower quarter, he was tempted to play truant, and flinging his satchel of books over his shoulder, had pushed his way as far as the great state prison. Then of his frantic efforts to secure a point of vantage whence to see the great death-pageant—of his childish admiration for the handsome, manly form of Lord Kilmarnock, of his enthusiasm when Lord Balmerino, the other victim, had cried in a loud voice, "Long live the king!" and of the fascination he could not resist which led his eyes from the shining axe and the draped block to the auburn locks of the prisoner, and soon after to his bleeding head laid low in the sawdust around the coffin. All this the old veteran told thrillingly, the shadow of a boy's awed recollection mingling with his Scottish exultation as a compatriot of the victim, and even with a touch of humor as he recalled the domestic scolding which marked the truant's return.
In the charter-room at Slains Castle, where the records, genealogies, private journals, official deeds, etc. of the family are kept, one might find ample material for curious investigation of our forefathers' way of living. Among other papers is a kind of inventory headed, "My Ladies Petition anent the Plenissing within Logg and Slanis." The list of things wanted for Slains speaks chiefly of brass pots, pewter pans and oil barrels, but, the "plenissing" of Logg (another residence of the Errolls), "quhilk my Ladie desyris as eftir followis, quhilk extendis skantlie (scantily) to the half," contains an ample list of curtains of purple velvet, green serge, green-and-red drugget and other stuffs hardly translatable to the modern understanding, and shows that in those days women were not more backward than now in plaguing their liege lords about upholstery and millinery. But the most amusing and natural touch of all is in the endorsement, hardly gallant, but very conjugal, made by the fair petitioner's husband: "To my Ladyes gredie (greedy) and vnressonable (unreasonable) desyris it is answerit...." Here follows a distinct admission that the furniture of both houses, put together, is too little to furnish the half of each of them, and therefore nothing can be spared from Logie to "pleniss" Slains.
The family coat-of-arms commemorates to this day the poetical genealogy of the Hays. Its supporters are two tall, naked peasants bearing plough-yokes on their shoulders: the crest is a falcon, while the motto is also significant—"Serva jugum." Scottish tradition tells us that in 980, when the Danes had shamefully routed the Scots at Loncarty, a little village near Perth, and were pursuing the fugitives, an old man and his two stalwart sons, who were ploughing in a field close by, were seized with indignation, and, shouldering their plough-yokes, placed themselves resolutely in a narrow defile through which their countrymen must pass to evade a second slaughter by the victors. As the Scots came on the three patriots opposed their passage, crying shame upon them for cowards and no men, and exhorting them thus: "Why! would ye rather be certainly killed by the heathen Danes than die in arms for your own land?" Ashamed, and yet encouraged, the fugitives rallied, and with the three dauntless peasants at their head fell upon their astonished pursuers, and fought with such desperation that they turned defeat into victory. Kenneth III., the Scottish king, instantly sent for the saviors of his army, gave them a large share of the enemy's spoils, and made them march in triumph into Perth with their bloody plough-yokes on their shoulders. More than that, he ennobled them, and gave them a fair tract of land, to be measured, according to the fashion of that day, by the flight of a falcon. From the name of this land the Hays came to be called; lords of Erroll, and it is said that the Hawk Stone at St. Madoes, Perthshire, which stands upon what is known to have been the ancient boundary of the possessions of the Hays, is the identical stone from which the lucky falcon started. It was left standing as a special memorial of the defeat of the Danes at Loncarty. Another stone famous in the Hay annals, and conspicuously placed in front of the entrance to Slains Castle, is said to be the same on which the peasant general rested after his toilsome leadership in the battle.
Our walks over the bleak moors on one side, with the heather in bloom and the blackberries in low—lying purple clusters fringing the granite rocks, were sometimes rendered more interesting, though more dangerous, by the sudden falling of a thick white mist. Slowly it would come at first, gathering little filmy clouds together as it were, and hovering over the gray sea in curling tufts, and then, growing strong and dense, would swoop down irresistibly, till what was clear five minutes before was impenetrably walled off, and one seemed to stand alone in a silent world of ghosts. Or again, our walks would take us on the other side, over the Sands of Forvie, a desolate tract where nothing grows save the coarse grass called bent by the Scotch, and where the wearied eye rests on nothing but mounds of shifting sand, drearily shaped into the semblance of graves by the keen winds that blow from over the German Ocean.
This miniature desert, tradition says, was an Eden four hundred years ago, but a wicked guardian robbed the helpless orphan heiresses of it by fraud and violence, and the maidens threw a spell or weird upon it in these terms: