GRISELL HOME, A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY HEROINE
The Merse has given many a gallant man to the mother-country, oftentimes a fighter, now and again a martyr, but no fairer flower has ever blossomed in that stretch of land that has the North Sea for one of its boundaries, and looks across fertile plains to the long, blue line of Cheviots in the south, than one whose name must ever find a sure place in the hearts of those whom courage and fortitude, sweetness and merry humour, exquisite unselfishness, and gay uncomplainingness in the face of dire emergency are things to be honoured and held dear.
Grisell Home was the eldest of eighteen children, two of whom died in infancy. She was born at Redbraes Castle—now Marchmont—on December 25, 1665. There is a belief that Christmas babies always have an extra large share of the nature of Him who was born on Christmas Day; and truly Grisell Home was one of those who never seemed to know the meaning of Self. Her father, Sir Patrick Home, a man of strong character and large fortune, was known to be a rigid Presbyterian, no friend to the house of Stuart, and he was regarded by the Government of his day as "a factious person." His great friendship with his neighbour, Robert Baillie of Jerviswoode, in no way increased the favour with which either of those good men was regarded in high places. Jerviswoode and Home were "suspects," and being known as close allies, where one was supposed to be plotting, the other was always expected to be at his back.
To be the eldest of so large a brood must have been a sobering thing for any little girl, but Grisell shouldered her responsibilities with a happy heart, and united with that happy, child-like heart the wisdom and discretion of a woman. She was only twelve when she was chosen as messenger from her father to his friend Mr. Baillie, who was then in prison in Edinburgh. Over lonely Soutra Hill (where highway robbery and murder were things not unknown), it was no easy or pleasant ride from Marchmont to the Port of Edinburgh; and here the bleaching skulls of martyred covenanters gave to those who entered the town grim warning of the risks of nonconformity. Doubtless little Grisell had been provided by her parents with a suitable escort, but, even so, her heart must have beat faster as she went up the High Street to where the "Heart of Midlothian" then stood, and asked to see Mr. Robert Baillie, her father's friend. The bright-eyed, slim little maid, with her chestnut hair and exquisite complexion, must have been as unexpected a sight in that gloomy place as a wild rose in a desert. None could suspect her of meddling with affairs of State, or of tampering with the prisoners of his gracious Majesty. Thus Grisell Home was able successfully to carry a letter of advice and information, and to bring back to her father in the Merse tidings of a blameless martyr.
With his father in prison that day was Baillie's son, George, a boy one year older than Grisell. He had been, as were many of the well-born lads of his time, at his studies in Holland, reading law, when his father was put in prison, but hastened home on hearing the news. Boys wore swords, and not Eton jackets, in George Baillie's day. He had, as his daughter afterwards wrote of him, "a rough, manly countenance"; and from that day until the day of her death that face, which she knew first as a boy's, was more beautiful to Grisell Home than any other face on earth. Several times afterwards was Grisell sent as bearer of important letters from her father to him whose son, in days still long to come, was to be her husband, and never once was the douce little messenger suspected.
Not many months later her own father was a prisoner in Dumbarton Castle, and during the fifteen months in which he lay there, Grisell was still the messenger, not only to him, but to his friends in various parts. Her early childhood may have been unharassed, but Grisell Home's girlhood was a careful and anxious one. On the discovery of the Rye House Plot, Baillie of Jerviswoode and Home of Polwarth, innocent men both, were denounced as traitors to their King. Baillie was taken, and after several months of imprisonment in London, so heavily loaded with chains that his health completely broke down, he was brought by sea to Edinburgh in stormy November weather which kept the ship a fortnight on its way. A dying man when he was put in the Tolbooth, he yet had to undergo many exhausting examinations and a farcical trial, with "Bluidy Mackenzie" for chief inquisitor, and on Christmas Eve, 1684, he gallantly and cheerfully met a martyr's death at the Market Cross of Edinburgh.
Sir Patrick Home's denunciation was longer in coming than that of his friend, and not until November 1684 was the warrant for his apprehension issued. He, good man, had no desire for martyrdom; moreover, at that time he already possessed ten children, whose future as orphans was likely to be wretched, and so Sir Patrick sought concealment from the hounds of the law. Foiled in laying hold of him, the law seized his eldest son, Patrick, and cast him into prison. Two days after Jerviswoode's death, the lad petitioned the Privy Council for release. He was but "a poor afflicted young boy," he said, loyal to his principles and with a hatred of plots, and only craved liberty that he might "see to some livelihood for himself" and "be in some condition" to help and serve his disconsolate mother and the rest of his father's ten starving children. Most grudgingly was the boon bestowed, and not until the boy had obtained security for his good behaviour to the extent of two thousand pounds sterling was he allowed to return to the Merse.
Meantime Redbraes Castle was constantly kept under supervision. Scarcely a week passed without a party of redcoats clattering up the drive, interrogating the servants, tramping through all the rooms, hunting round the policies, and doing everything in their power to make things unpleasant for the wife and children of this attainted rebel. To only two people in the house, and to one out of it, was the secret of Sir Patrick Home's hiding-place known. With the help of a faithful friend and retainer, Jamie Winter, the carpenter, Lady Home and her daughter Grisell had one dark night carried bed and bedclothes to the burying-place of the Homes, a vault under Polwarth Church, a mile from Redbraes. A black walnut folding-bed, exactly underneath the pulpit from which the minister of Polwarth preached every Sunday, was the fugitive's resting-place at night, while for a month he saw no more daylight than was able to reach him from a slit at one end of the vault. The ashes of his ancestors were scarcely lively company, but Sir Patrick found "great comfort and constant entertainment" by repeating to himself Buchanan's Latin Version of the Psalms. Each night, too, the prisoner was cheered by a visit from his daughter Grisell. Through an open glen by the Swindon Burn, down what is called The Lady's Walk, Grisell nightly came to the vault with her little store of provisions. She was an imaginative, poetic little maid, and the whisper of the wind in the lime trees that grew on either hand would make her shiver, and yet more loudly would her heart thump when in the darkness she stumbled over the graves in the kirkyard, and remembered all the tales she had ever heard of bogles and of ghosts. That lonely walk in the night must always have been full of terrors, yet Grisell's love for her father was so great that she steadfastly braved them all. One fear only she had—that of the soldiers. The wind moaning through the trees or rustling the long grass, the sound of a rabbit or some other wild thing in the bracken, the sudden bark of a dog,—all these made her sure that some spy had found out her secret, and sent her running as fast as her little legs could carry her to try to save her father from his captors. The first night she went was the worst, for the minister kept dogs, and the manse was near the church, and even her light footfall was sufficient to set every one of them a-barking. But Lady Home sent for the minister next day, and upon the pretence of one of them being mad, persuaded their owner to hang them all. Grisell and her father had the same sunny nature, and both dearly loved a joke, and each amusing little incident of the day was saved up by the former to be told while the prisoner made a meal on the food which she brought with her. Many a hearty laugh they had together in that dark, dismal place, and often Grisell stayed so late that she had to run up the glen, so as to get home before day dawned. The difficulties she encountered in securing food enough for her father without arousing the suspicion of the servants was always a subject for jest, for, more often than not, the only possible means of getting the food was by surreptitiously conveying it, during a meal, from her own plate into her lap. Her amazing appetite was bound to be commented upon, but never did she surprise her brothers and sisters more than on a day when the chief dish at dinner was her father's favourite one—sheep's head. While the younger members of the family were very busy over their broth, Grisell conveyed to her lap the greater part of the head. Her brother Sandy, afterwards Lord Marchmont, dispatched his plateful first, looked up, and gave a shout of amazement.
"Mother!" he cried, "will ye look at Grisell! while we have been eating our broth, she has eaten up the whole sheep's heid!"
"Sandy must have an extra share of the next sheep's heid," said the laughing father when he heard the tale.
During the month that Sir Patrick Home lay hid in the vault, it was not only by collecting food for him by day, and by taking it to him by night, that his young daughter gave proof of her devotion. In a room of which Grisell kept the key, on the ground floor at Redbraes Castle, she and Jamie Winter worked in the small hours, making a hiding-place for the fugitive. Underneath a bed which drew out they lifted up the boards, and with their hands, scraped and burrowed in the earth to make a hole large enough for a man to lie in. To prevent making a noise they used no tools, and as they dug out the earth it was packed in a sheet, put on Jamie's back, and carried, Grisell helping, out at the window into the garden. Not a nail was left upon her fingers when the task was completed, and a sorely unslept little maid she must have looked at the end of a month's foraging by day and hard work by night, with that nerve-tearing walk as a beginning to her nightly labours. The hole being ready, Jamie Winter conveyed to it a large deep wooden box which he had made at home, with air-holes in the lid, and furnished with mattress and bedding, and this was fitted into the place made for it. It was then Grisell's duty to examine it daily, and to keep the air-holes clean picked, and when it had for some weeks stood trial of no water coming into it from its being sunk so low in the ground, Sir Patrick one night came home. For a couple of weeks only was Redbraes his sanctuary, for, on Christmas Day, upon Grisell lifting the boards as usual to see that all was well with the lair that her father was to retire to in case of a sudden surprise, the mattress bounced to the top, the box being full of water. The poor child nearly fainted from horror, but Sir Patrick remained quite calm.
"Obviously," he said to his wife and daughter, "we must tempt Providence no longer. It is now fit and necessary for me to go off and leave you." Later in the day, news brought by the carrier confirmed him in his resolution. Baillie of Jerviswoode had been hanged in Edinburgh on the previous day, and his head now adorned a spike on the Nether Bow. The death of his best friend was a great shock to Sir Patrick, perhaps an even greater one to Lady Home, and to little Grisell, for could not their imagination readily paint a picture of their dear "traitor" hanging where his friend had hung. No time was to be lost, and Grisell at once began work on her father's wardrobe, and in the coming days and nights, with anxious fingers, made such alterations in his clothing as seemed necessary for a disguise.
Meantime a friend and neighbour of Sir Patrick's, John Home of Halyburton, had "jaloused" that his namesake was not hidden so far afield as some imagined, and when, one cold January afternoon, he heard the clatter of hoofs on the high-road and saw the red coats of the dragoons, he had a stab at his heart at the thought of another good son of the Merse going to martyrdom.
"Where do you ride to-day?" he asked, when the party came up.
"To take Polwarth at Redbraes," they said.
"Is it so?" said Home. "Then I'll go with you myself and be your guide. But come your ways into the house and rest you a little, till I get ready for the road."
Nothing loth, the troopers followed him, and were still contentedly testing the quality of the contents of his big case-bottles when a groom galloped off to Redbraes. Halyburton's message to Lady Home of Polwarth was a brief one, for when she opened his envelope there was nothing there to read—only a little feather fluttered out, giving as plainly the advice to instant flight as pages of words might have done.
There was nothing for it but to take another into their secret. John Allen, the grieve, was sent for, and fainted dead away when he heard that his master was in the house instead of being in safety in foreign lands, and that the dragoons were even then on his tracks. He, too, had visions of a figure dangling from a gibbet, and of a head on the Nether Bow—and small blame to him, worthy man.
It was then the darkening, and Allen's instructions were at once to tell his fellow-servants that he had received orders to sell three horses at Morpeth Fair, and to be off on the road without further delay.
Sir Patrick took farewell of his wife and of Grisell, climbed out of a window, met the grieve near the stables, and was off in the darkness, with as little noise as might be. It was a sorrowful parting, but when, not long after he was gone, the dragoons rode up to Redbraes, Lady Home and her daughter were glad indeed that he was away.
Somewhat regretting their prolonged enjoyment of the hospitality of Home of Halyburton, the search-party thoroughly ransacked every hole and corner of Redbraes Castle. Inside they could find no trace nor pick up one crumb of information, but from an outside servant they heard of John Allen's departure, Morpeth way, with three horses.
"Horses, indeed! for Morpeth Fair?" the dragoon officer hooted at the thought. "Boot and saddle, lads!" he called to his men; "we'll run the traitorous fox to earth long before he gets to Berwick!" At a canter they were off down the drive, the contents of Halyburton's case-bottles still warming their hearts and giving extra zest to their enterprise. It was a dark night, and they were thick black woods that they rode between, but they had not ridden very many miles when they were able to make out, some way in front of them, the outlines of two horses.
"We've got him, lads!" cried the officer; "run him down at last. Worry, worry, worry!"
But instead of the horses in front breaking into a gallop at the sound of pursuit, they were pulled up short by the roadside, and instead of there being two riders there was only one, leading an unsaddled horse. More exasperating than all to the ardour of the hunters was the fact that in place of the thin, clever face of Sir Patrick Home being the one to confront them, the round, scared face of a Berwickshire peasant stared at them in dismay. In vain did the officer question, bully, cross-examine. John Allen was unshakeable. He was gaun tae Morpeth Fair tae sell the horse. Na, he didnae ken where the maister was. Sure's daith he didnae ken. Aye, he left Redbraes mebbes twa hour sin', in the darkening. No amount of hectoring, no quantity of loudly—shouted oaths could move the grieve from his tale. "A wuss a did ken whaur he is," he said, "but a dinnae ken." Finally he had to be given up as hopeless, and the dragoons rode back, a little shamefacedly and cursing their luck. John Allen, his honest face still full of scared amazement, rode slowly on. Every now and again he would check his horse, look round and listen, mutter to himself bewilderedly, shake his head, and go on once more. The clatter of the dragoons had not long died away when, coming towards him from the other direction, he heard the regular beat of a horse's hoofs. It was no strange horse, he soon realised, nor was the rider a stranger. The gay smile that his face so often wore irradiated Home of Polwarth's when he heard his servant's greeting.
"Eh, losh me, Polwarth!" he said, "a never had sic a gliff in a' ma days! Here a' em, thinking aye that ye was riding no far ahint us, and when a hears a gallopin' an' turns roond, ye've santed, an' here's a pack o' thae bluidy dragoons that wad blast ye black in the face an' speir the inside oot o' a wheelbarra. Man, where were ye? It's naething short o' a meericle?"
Nor was it much short of a miracle, as Sir Patrick acknowledged. He had followed Allen at first as the grieve had thought, but his mind was full of the parting he had just gone through and of the misty future before him, and when his thoughts came back with a jerk to the actualities of the present, he heard the rush of a winter river and found that he was close by the side of the Tweed. It was some time before he could exactly find his bearings, but he did so at last, and, after some reconnoitring, found a place that could be safely forded. Once across the river, he rode quickly back towards Redbraes, hoping that by good fortune he might yet meet with Allen, and so neatly escaped the soldiers who pursued him. The high-road after this was no longer deemed safe, and the rest of his ride to London was done on bye-ways and across the moors. In two days honest John returned to Redbraes and brought to the sad hearts of Lady Home and Grisell the joyful news that Sir Patrick had not fallen into the hands of the dragoons, as they had greatly feared, but was now safely on his way to England. As a travelling surgeon, calling himself Dr. Wallace, Sir Patrick Home worked his way south, bleeding patients when need be, prescribing homely remedies when called upon to do so. None ever penetrated his disguise, and he was able to cross from London to France and journey, on foot from France to Holland with complete success.
Years afterwards, when Sir Patrick was Earl of Marchmont, Chancellor of Scotland, and President of the Privy Council, it was his lot to have to try for his life a certain Captain Burd. And during the trial there came back to him like a flash the old days when, in company with another wayfarer, he tramped the long French roads, unwinding themselves like white ribbons before him, between the avenues of stiff, tall, silvery poplars on to the flat, windmill-dotted Dutch country, with the brown-sailed boats that seemed to sail along the fields. And here, in Captain Burd, he recognised the companion of those often weary, often hungry days, when pockets were empty, fortunes at dead-low tide, and Scotland and wife and children very far away. In public the Chancellor treated his old friend with severity, but arranged with his son, Sir Andrew Home, then a young lawyer, to see Captain Burd alone. Timidly and nervously, with downcast eyes, the poor man repeated the tale to which the Chancellor had already listened. In silence he heard it again, and then: "Do you not know me?" he asked, smiling.
"God's wounds! Dr. Wallace!" cried Captain Burd, and fell with tears of joy on the neck of the Chancellor, who was readily and gladly able to prove the innocence of his old companion.
No sooner had Sir Patrick Home left Scotland than his estates were forfeited and given to Lord Seaforth, and although Lady Home went by sea to London, and there for a long time did all possible to obtain from Government an adequate allowance for the support of her family of ten, £150 a year was all that she was able to secure. Of course Grisell was her companion there, and her companion also when she sailed to Holland to join Sir Patrick. Of the ten, a little girl, Julian by name, had to be left behind with friends as she was too ill to travel, and when Grisell had safely handed over her mother and brothers and sisters to her father's care, she returned to Scotland alone, to act as escort to the little sister, "to negotiate business, and to try if she could pick up any money of some that was owing to her father." The brave and capable little woman of business, having managed affairs to her satisfaction, secured, for the passage, a nurse for the sister, who was still a weakly invalid. Moreover, the voyage to Holland, being in those days more than just the affair of a night, a cabin-bed—the only one in the ship, apparently—was engaged for Julian, and a good store of provisions laid in. But when the ship had sailed, Grisell found that the cabin-bed had been separately engaged and paid for by four other ladies, and at once these four began a violent dispute as to which should have it. "Let them be doing," said a gentleman, who had to share the cabin with the rest, "you will see how it will end."
So the disappointed little maid had to arrange a bed on the floor as best she could for herself and her sister, with a bag of books that she was taking to her father for pillow, while two ladies shared the bed and the others lay down where they could find room. Any place where they could lie flat must have been welcome, for a storm was brewing, and as a cradle the North Sea usually leaves a good deal to be desired. As they all lay, in fairly sickening discomfort, in the cabin, lit only by an evil-smelling oil-lamp that swayed back and forwards with each roll, the heavy step of the captain was heard coming down the companion way. Grisell had expected honesty from her fellow-travellers, and her store of provisions was laid out in what she had considered a convenient place. It did not take the captain long to devour every scrap of what had been meant to last the girls and their maid for days. His gluttonous meal over, he tramped up to the bed.
"Turn out! turn out!" he said to the women who lay there, and having undressed himself lay down to snore in that five time's paid for sleeping-place. It must have been somewhat of a comfort—if, indeed, comfort was to be found in anything that night—that the captain did not long enjoy his slumbers. A fierce gale began to blow, and during the furious storm that never abated for many an hour to come, the captain had to remain, drenched to the skin, on deck, working and directing with all his might, in order to save his ship. They never saw him again until they landed at the Brill. That night the two girls set out on foot to tramp the weary miles to Rotterdam, a gentleman refugee from Scotland, who had come over in the same boat, acting as their escort. The stormy weather of the North Sea had followed them to land. It was a cold, wet, dirty night, and Julian Home, still frail from illness, soon lost her shoes in the mud. There was but one solution to the difficulty. The gentleman shouldered their baggage along with his own; Grisell shouldered her sister, and carried her all the rest of those weary miles. At Rotterdam they found Sir Patrick Home and his eldest son awaiting them, to take them on to their new home in Utrecht, and wet and cold and tiredness were all forgotten at the sight of those dear faces, and Grisell "felt nothing but happiness and contentment."
For three years and a half they lived in Utrecht, and once again during that time Grisell voyaged to Scotland to see to her father's business affairs. It is difficult to discover what, during the rest of that time, she did not do for her parents and family. There were many Scottish refugees then in Holland, and the Homes kept open house, and spent nearly a fourth part of their income on a mansion sufficiently commodious to allow of their hospitalities. This made it impossible for them to keep any servant save a little girl who washed the dishes, and consequently Grisell acted as cook, housekeeper, housemaid, washerwoman, laundress, dressmaker, and tailoress. Twice a week she sat up at night to do the family accounts. Daily she rose before six, went to the market and to the mill to see their own corn ground, and—in the words of her daughter, who proudly tells the tale—"dressed the linen, cleaned the house, made ready the dinner, mended the children's stockings and other clothes, made what she could for them, and in short did everything." She was very musical and loved playing and singing, but when, for a small sum, a harpsichord was bought, it was her younger sister, Christian, who was the performer, and by it "diverted" her parents, and the girls had many a joke over their different occupations. Yet even with all her other work she found time to take an occasional lesson in French and Dutch from her father along with the younger ones, and even wrote a book of songs—many of them half written, broken off in the middle of a sentence as a pot boiled over or an iron grew hot enough to use. Some of them are dear to us still. Do we ever think of all the hardships that were nobly endured by a Scottish girl two hundred years ago when we quote the words of her exquisite song?—
"Were na my heart licht, I wad dee."
Of all her brothers and sisters, her eldest brother, Patrick, was her closest friend, and, when he became one of the Prince of Orange's Guards, Grisell had extra labours, for the Guards wore little point-lace cravats and cuffs, and many a night she sat up to have these in such perfect order that no dandy officer in the service could compete with the young Scottish soldier. An added happiness to those happy, busy days came to Grisell through her brother's fellow-guardsman and greatest friend, for George Baillie, the lad she first met in the Tolbooth, gave his heart to her that day within the gloomy prison walls, and they were lovers still when, after forty-eight years of married life, death came to part them.
With the accession of the Prince of Orange the merry, light-hearted days in Holland came to an end. There was probably no poorer Scottish family to be found in all Holland. There was certainly no happier one. When they came home they were prosperous once again, and honours were showered upon Sir Patrick Home. Grisell was asked to become a maid of honour to the Princess but she preferred to go back to the quiet country life at Redbraes. Already, during their least prosperous days, Grisell's beauty and charm had made at least two Berwickshire gentlemen "of fortune and character" beg for her hand, and it was to her parents' regret that she refused them both, because her heart was already in the keeping of a penniless guardsman in the Dutch service. Only poverty kept them apart, and when King William gave back to George Baillie his lands, there was no other obstacle in the way, and they were married forthwith. They were man and wife for forty-eight years, "in all of which time," writes their daughter, "I have often heard my mother declare that they never had the shadow of a quarrel, or misunderstanding, or dryness betwixt them—not for a moment"; and that, "to the last of his life, she felt the same ardent and tender love and affection for him, and the same desire to please him in the smallest trifle that she had at their first acquaintance." To the day his last illness began, her husband never went out without her going to the window to watch him till he was out of sight of those kind, bright, beautiful eyes, through which shone as beautiful a soul as any that ever made the earth a better and a happier place for having been in it.
Grisell Home was Lady Grisell Baillie when, in 1703, her mother died.
"Where is Grisell," she asked, almost with her latest breath. And when Lady Grisell came and held her hand the old lady said, "My dear Grisell, blessed be you above all, for a helpful child you have been to me."
Lady Grisell Baillie lived through the '15 and the '45, and those who suffered in the first of those years had the kindest of friends and helpers in her large-minded husband and in herself. She was eighty at the time of the '45, but during that year and during the next, when her death took place, she helped by every means in her power those who had suffered from fighting for a cause that was dear to their hearts. She always remembered what she herself had gone through. "Full of years, and of good works," as her somewhat pompous epitaph has it, Lady Grisell Baillie died in December 1746, and was buried at Mellerstain on the day upon which she should have celebrated her eighty-second birthday. And surely the angels who, on that first Christmas Eve, long, long ago, sang of "Peace on earth—goodwill towards men," must have been very near when she, who was a Christmas baby, and whose whole long life had been one of love and of peace, of goodwill and of charity to others, was laid in the earth as the snowflakes fell, on Christmas Day, one hundred and sixty-eight years ago.
KINMONT WILLIE
A venerable and highly respected Scottish professor of literature was once asked what was his ruling passion—his heart's desire? If the secrets of his soul could be laid bare, what, above all, would be found to be his predominant wish? The question was an indiscreet one, but he was tolerant. He tightly compressed his gentle mouth, and firmly readjusted his gold-rimmed glasses.
"I wish" said he, "to be a corsair."
It would have been interesting to know how many of a following he would have had from sedate academic circles had he been given his heart's desire and had sailed down the Clyde with the raw head and bloody bones showing on the black flag that flew at his mast-head. How many of us are there with whom law-abiding habits, decorous respectability, form but a thin covering of ice over unplumbed depths of lawless desire? Not long since, when a wretched criminal case in which the disappearance of a pearl necklace was involved, was agitating every Scottish club and tea-table, a charming old Scottish lady, whose career from childhood up has been one of unblemished virtue, was heard to bemoan the manner of commission of the crime. "She did it very stupidly. Now, if I had been doing it I should"—And her astounded auditors listened to an able exposition of the way in which she would successfully have eluded justice. Is it the story of the villain who is successfully tracked to his doom that attracts us most? or that of the great Raffles and his kind whose villainies almost invariably escape detection, and who burgles with a light and easy touch and the grace and humour of a Claude Duval? Let us be honest with ourselves. How many of us really wish to be corsairs? Which of us would not have been a reiver in the old reiving days? Have we not noticed in ourselves and other Borderers an undeniable complacency, a boastful pride in a mask of apology that would not deceive an infant, when we say, "Oh yes; certainly a good many of my ancestors were hanged for lifting cattle." And, however "indifferent honest" we ourselves may be, which of us does not lay aside even that most futile mask and boast unashamedly when we can claim descent from one of those princes among reivers—Wat o' Harden, Johnnie Armstrong, or Kinmont Willie?
William Armstrong, better known as Kinmont Willie, lived in the palmiest days of the Border reivers. The times of purely Scottish and purely English kings were drawing to a close, and with one monarch to rule over Britain the raider could no longer plead that he was a patriot who fought for king and country when he made an incursion over the Cheviots, burned a few barns and dwelling-houses, lifted some "kye and oxen," horses, and goats, and what household gear and minted money he could lay hands on, slew a man or two, and joyously returned home.
But with Elizabeth still on the English throne, and with Queen Mary, and afterwards her son, reigning in Scotland, the dance could go merrily on, and when we look at those days in retrospect it seems to us that the last bars of the music, the last turns in the dance, went more rapidly than any that had gone before.
In Kinmont Willie's lifetime the Wardens of the Marches had but little leisure. It was necessary for them to be fighting men with a good head for figures, for on the days of truce when the Wardens of the Scottish and English Marches met to redd up accounts, not only had they to work out knotty arithmetical problems with regard to the value of every sort of live stock, of buildings, of "insight," and the payment of such bills, but they had to have expert knowledge in fair exchange of a Scottish for an English life, an English for a Scotch. Little wonder if their patience sometimes ran short, as did that of a Howard of Naworth upon one famous occasion. He was deeply engrossed in studies that had no bearing upon Border affairs when an officer came to announce the capture of some Scottish moss-troopers, and to ask for the Warden's commands with regard to them. The interruption was untimely, and Lord Howard was exasperated. "Hang them, in the devil's name!" he said angrily, and went on with his studies. A little later he felt he could better give his mind to the consideration of the case, and sent for his officer. "Touching the prisoners," said he, "what have you done with them?"
Proud of being one of those who did not let the grass grow beneath their feet, the officer beamingly responded: "Everyone o' them's hangit, my lord!"
It was a March day in 1596, when a Wardens' meeting took place at Dayholm, near Kershopefoot. The snow was still lying in the hollows of the Cheviots, the trees were bare, the Liddel and the Esk swollen by thaws and winter rains; but weather was a thing that came but little into the reckoning of the men of the Marches unless some foray was afoot. They got through the business more or less satisfactorily, and proceeded to ride home before the day of truce should be ended. From sunrise on the one day until sunset on the next, so the Border law ordained, all Scots and Englishmen who were present at the Wardens' meeting should be free of scathe. Now the Warden of Liddesdale at that time was Sir Walter Scott of Branxholme, laird of Buccleuch. He was one of the greatest men of his century; a "fyrebrande," according to Queen Elizabeth, and a fierce enemy according to those who incurred his enmity; but, according to all others, a man of perfect courage, stainless loyalty and honour, charming wit, and great culture. He never spared an enemy nor turned his back on a friend, and he was a born winner of hearts and leader of men. Amongst his retainers was Kinmont Willie, and as Willie rode from the Wardens' meeting, along the banks of the Liddel, in company with only three or four men, a body of two hundred English horsemen, commanded by Salkeld, Warden of the Eastern March, marked him from across the water. Truce or no truce, the chance seemed to them one that was too good to lose. Speedily some of them pushed on ahead, and an ambush was laid for Kinmont Willie. He and his friends were naturally totally unprepared for such a dastardly attack, but it took them but little time to gather their wits, and Willie gave them a good run for their money. For nearly four miles they chased him, but ran him down at length. After some hard giving and taking, he had to acknowledge his defeat, and, pinioned like a common malefactor—arms tied behind him, legs bound under his horse's belly—they rode with him into Carlisle town.
The news of the treacherous taking of his follower was not long in reaching Buccleuch, who at once raised an angry protest. Scrope, the English Warden, received this with an evasive and obviously trumped-up counter-charge of Kinmont Will having first broken truce. Moreover, he said, he was a notorious enemy to law and order, and must bear the penalty of his misdeeds. This was more than the bold Buccleuch could stomach.
"He has ta'en the table wi' his hand,
He garr'd the red wine spring on hie—
'Now Christ's curse on my head,' he said,
'But avenged of Lord Scrope I'll be!
O, is my basnet a widow's curch?
Or my lance a wand o' the willow-tree?
Or my arm a ladye's lilye hand,
That an English lord should lightly me?'"
No time was lost in making an appeal to King James, which resulted in an application to the English Government. But while the English authorities quibbled, paltered, and delayed—with a little evasion, a little extra red-tapism, a little judicious procrastination—the days of Kinmont Willie were being numbered by his captors. The triumph of putting an end to the daring deeds of so bold a Scottish reiver when they had him safely in chains in Carlisle Castle, was one that they were not likely lightly to forego. It would be indeed a merry crowd of English Borderers that flocked to Haribee Hill on the day that Will of Kinmont dangled from the gallows.
Buccleuch saw that he had no time to lose. He himself must strike at once, and strike with all his might.
The night of April 13, 1596, was dark and stormy. All the Border burns and rivers were in spate; the winds blew shrewd and chill through the glens of Liddesdale, and sleet drifted down in the teeth of the gale. The trees that grew so thick round Woodhouselee bent and cracked, and sent extra drenching showers of rain down on the steel jacks of a band of horsemen who carefully picked their way underneath them, on to the south. Buccleuch was leader, and with him rode some forty picked men of his friends and kinsmen, to meet some hundred and fifty or so of other chosen men. Scotts, Elliots, Armstrongs, and Grahams were there, and although Buccleuch had requested that only younger sons were to risk their lives in the forlorn hope that night, Auld Wat o' Harden and many another landowner rode with their chief. "Valiant men, they would not bide," says Scott of Satchells, whose own father was one of the number. Kinmont Willie's own tower of Morton, on the water of Sark, about ten miles north of Carlisle, was their rallying point. Buccleuch had arranged every detail most carefully at a horse-race held at Langholm a few days before, and one of the Grahams, an Englishman whose countrymen were not yet aware that the Graham clan had allied themselves to that of the Scotts, had conveyed his ring to Kinmont Willie to show him that he was not forgotten by his feudal lord. One and all, the reivers were well armed, "with spur on heel, and splent on spauld," and with them they carried scaling ladders, picks, axes, and iron crowbars. The Esk and Eden were in furious flood, but no force of nature or of man could stay the reivers' horses that night.
"We go to catch a rank reiver
Has broken faith wi' the bauld Buccleuch."
That was the burden of their thoughts, and although they well knew that ere the dawning each one of them might be claiming the hospitality of six feet of English sod, their hearts were light. To them a message that the fray was up was like the sound of the huntsman's horn in the ears of a thoroughbred hunter.
"'Where are ye gaun, ye mason lads,
Wi' a' your ladders, lang and hie?'
'We gang to berry a corbie's nest,
That wons not far frae Woodhouselee.'"
No light matter was it to harry that corbie's nest. Carlisle Castle was a strong castle, strongly garrisoned, and to make a raid on an English town was a bold attempt indeed. But fear was a thing unknown to the Border reivers, and the flower of them rode with Buccleuch that night—close on his horse's heels Wat o' Harden, Walter Scott of Goldielands, and Kinmont's own four stalwart sons—Jock, Francie, Geordie, and Sandy. As the dark night hours wore on, sleet and wind were reinforced by a thunderstorm.
"And when we left the Staneshaw-bank,
The wind began full loud to blaw,
But 'twas wind and weet, and fire and sleet,
When we came beneath the castle wa'."
When the besiegers reached the castle they found some of the watch asleep, and the rest sheltering indoors from the storm. The outside of the castle was left to take care of itself. It was dismaying to find the scaling ladders too short to be of any use, but a small postern gate was speedily and quietly undermined. Drifting sleet, growling thunder, and the wails of the wind drowned all sounds of the assault, and soon there was no further need for concealment, for the lower court of the castle was theirs. The guard started up, to find sword-blades at their throats; two of them were left dead, and the rest were speedily overpowered. Buccleuch, the fifth man in, gave the command to proclaim aloud their triumph:
"'Now sound out trumpets!' quoth Buccleuch;
'Let's waken Lord Scroope right merrilie!'
Then loud the Warden's trumpet blew—
'O wha daur meddle wi' me?'"
While Buccleuch himself kept watch at the postern, two dozen stout moss-troopers now rushed to the castle gaol, a hundred yards from the postern gate, forced the door of Kinmont Willie's prison, and found him there chained to the wall, and carried him out, fetters and all, on the back of "the starkest man in Teviotdale."
"Stand to it!" cried Buccleuch—so says the traitor, a man from the
English side, who afterwards acted as informer to the English
Warden—"for I have vowed to God and my Prince that I would fetch out of
England, Kinmont, dead or alive."
Shouts of victory in strident Scottish voices, the crash of picks on shattered doors and ruined mason-work, and that arrogant, insolent, oft-repeated blast from the trumpet of him whom Scrope described in his report to the Privy Council as "the capten of this proud attempt," were not reassuring sounds to the Warden of the English Marches, his deputy, and his garrison. Five hundred Scots at least—so did Scrope swear to himself and others—were certainly there, and there was no gainsaying the adage that "Discretion is the better part of valour." So, in the words of the historian, he and the others "did keip thamselffis close."
But no sooner had the rescue party reached the banks of the Eden than the bells of Carlisle clanged forth a wild alarm. Red-tongued flames from the beacon on the great tower did their best, in spite of storm and sleet, to warn all honest English folk that a huge army of Scots was on the war-path, and that the gallows on Haribee Hill had been insulted by the abduction of its lawful prey.
"We scarce had won the Staneshaw-bank,
When a' the Carlisle bells were rung,
And a thousand men on horse and foot,
Cam' wi' the keen Lord Scroope along.
Buccleuch has turn'd to Eden Water,
Even where it flow'd frae brim to brim,
And he has plunged in wi' a' his band,
And safely swam them through the stream.
He turned them on the other side,
And at Lord Scroope his glove flung he—
'If ye like na' my visit in merry England,
In fair Scotland come visit me!'
All sore astonished stood Lord Scroope,
He stood as still as rock of stane;
He scarcely dare to trew his eyes,
When through the water they had gane.
'He is either himsel' a devil frae hell,
Or else his mother a witch maun be;
I wadna' have ridden that wan water
For a' the gowd in Christentie.'"
At a place called "Dick's Tree," not far from Longtown, there still stands the "smiddy" where lived the blacksmith who had the honour of knocking off Kinmont Willie's fetters. Sir Walter Scott has handed on the story of the smith's daughter who, as a little child, was roused at daybreak by a "sair clatter" of horses, and shouts for her father, followed, as the smith slept soundly, by a lance being thrust through the window. Looking out in the dim grey of the morning, the child saw "more gentlemen than she had ever seen before in one place, all on horseback, in armour, and dripping wet—and that Kinmont Willie, who sat woman-fashion behind one of them, was the biggest carle she ever saw—and there was much merriment in the party."
Furious was the hive of wasps that Buccleuch brought about his head by thus insultingly casting a stone into the English bike. The wrath of Queen Elizabeth was unappeasable. Scrope found it sounded better to multiply the number of the raiders by five, but Scottish tongues were not slow to tell the affronting truth, and the Englishmen of Carlisle had the extra bitterness of being butts for the none too subtle jests of every Scot on the Border. The success of so daring a venture made the Scottish reivers arrogant. Between June 19 and July 24 of that year, the spoils of the western Marches were a thousand and sixty-one cattle and ninety-eight horses, and some thirty steadings and other buildings, mostly in Gilsland, were burned. The angry English made reprisals. It was in one of them that the Scots who were taken were leashed "like doggis," and for this degradation Buccleuch and Ker of Cessford made the English pay most handsomely. Together those "twoo fyrebrandes of the Border" led an incursion into Tynedale, where, in broad daylight, they burned three hundred steadings and dwelling-houses, many stables, barns, and other outhouses, slew with the sword fourteen of those who had been in the Scottish raid, and brought back a handsome booty.
King Jamie was in a most uncomfortable position. Queen Elizabeth demanded Buccleuch's punishment, and he argued. She nagged, and he wriggled. Finally, after continual angry remonstrances from the insulted English monarch, he had to give in, and Buccleuch and Ker had both, at different periods, to suffer imprisonment for the sin, in the virgin Queen's eyes, of the rescue of Kinmont Willie, and of its bloody consequences. We realise what was the reputation of Buccleuch and of his followers when we see into what a state of panic the mere prospect of having the Border chieftain as prisoner at Berwick-on-Tweed threw Sir John Carey, the governor. To Lord Hunsdon he wrote: "I entreat your Lordship that I may not become the jailor of so dangerous a prisoner or, at least, that I may know whether I shall keep him like a prisoner or no? for there is not a worse or more dangerous place in England to keep him than this; it is so near his friends, and, besides, so many in this town willing to pleasure him, and his escape may be so easily made; and once out of this town he is past recovery. Wherefore I humbly beseech your honor, let him be removed from hence to a more secure place, for I protest to the Almightie God, before I will take the charge to kepe him here, I will desire to be put in prison myself, and to have a keeper of me. For what care soever be had of him here, he shall want no furtherance whatsoever wit of man can devise, if he himself list to make an escape. So I pray your Lordship, even for God's sake and for the love of a brother, to relieve me from this danger." But there was no attempt at a rescue of Buccleuch. He did not desire it. Not as a criminal, but as a state prisoner he gave himself up to the English governor, and, having given his parole, he kept it, like the gentleman of stainless honour that he was.
Two years after his imprisonment at Berwick-on-Tweed, Buccleuch, on his way with two hundred followers to serve with Prince Maurice of Nassau in the Low Countries—a raid from which many a Borderer never returned—was sufficiently received into favour to be permitted to go to London and kiss the hand of her most gracious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. The remembrance of Kinmont Willie still rankled in that most unforgiving of royal breasts.
"How dared you," she imperiously demanded, "undertake an enterprise so desperate and presumptuous?"
"Dared?" answered Buccleuch; "what is it that a man dares not do?"
Elizabeth turned impetuously to a lord-in-waiting. "With ten thousand such men," she said, "our brother of Scotland might shake the firmest throne in Europe."
That Kinmont Willie avenged himself not once, but many times, on those who had treacherously trapped him and done their best to make him meat for the greedy English gibbet, is not a matter of surmise, but one of history. His ride into Carlisle on that bleak March day, and the long days and dreary nights he spent in chains in the English gaol, were little likely to engender a gentle and forgiving spirit in the breast of one of the most fiery of the "minions of the moon." When, in 1600, he raided Scrope's tenants, they were given good cause to regret the happenings in which Scrope had taken so prominent a part.
We have no record of the end of Kinmont Willie, and can but hope, for his sake, that he died the death he would have died—a good horse under him almost to the end, a good sword in his hand, open sky above him, and round him the caller breeze that has blown across the Border hills. In a lonely little graveyard in the Debatable Land, close to the Water of Sark, and near the March dyke between the two countries, his body is said to rest. Does there never come a night, when the moon is hidden behind a dark scud of clouds, and the old reiver, growing restless in his grave, finds somewhere the shade of a horse that, in its day, could gallop with the best, and rides again across the Border, to meet once more his "auld enemies" of England, and, to the joyous accompaniment of the lowing of cattle and the jingle of spurs, returns to his lodging as the first cock crows, and grey morning breaks?
"O, they rade in the rain, in the days that are gane,
In the rain and the wind and the lave;
They shoutit in the ha' and they routit on the hill,
But they're a' quaitit noo in the grave."
IN THE DAYS OF THE '15
Close on two hundred years back from the present time there stood far up the South Tyne, beyond Haltwhistle, on the road—then little better than a bridle-track—running over the Cumberland border by Brampton, an inn which in those days was a house of no little importance in that wild and remote country.
If its old walls could speak, what, for instance, might they not have told of Jacobite plottings? Beneath its roof was held many a meeting of the supporters of the King "over the water," James the Eighth; and here, riding up from Dilston, not seldom came the unfortunate Earl of Derwentwater, to take part in the Jacobite deliberations. The young lord and the horse he usually rode were figures familiar and welcome to the country folk around, and at the inn they were as well known as was the landlord himself. It was not long after a secret meeting held here in the earlier half of the year 1715 that the warrants were issued which led to Derwentwater's flight from Dilston, and precipitated the Rising that within a few months rolled so many gallant heads in the dust of the scaffold.
It might perhaps have been better for Lord Derwentwater had he been less beloved in Northumberland, and had his devoted admirers been unable to send him notice of the coming of the warrant for his arrest. He might not then have had opportunity to commit himself so deeply; and there might have been a romantic and pathetic figure the less in the doleful history of that unhappy period. As it was, he had time to get clear away, and was able to lie securely hid, partly in farmhouses, partly near Shaftoe Crags, till the news reached him that Forster had raised the standard of rebellion. On 6th October 1715, at the head of a little company of gentlemen and armed servants, he joined Forster at Greenrig.
A poor affair at the best, this muster in Northumberland; and though the county was seething with excitement, and a few notable men went out with the Earl, his personal following did not exceed seventy in all. Then followed the march which ended so disastrously in pitiful surrender at Preston that fatal November day. However gallant personally, Forster was an incapable soldier, no leader of men, and General Wills had but to spread wide his net to sweep in the bulk of the insurgents—Forster, Derwentwater, Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carwath, Wintoun, and men less exalted in rank by the score and the hundred. The bag was a heavy one, that day of disaster to the Stuart cause; and alas, for many of those who filled it! Alas, too, for the wives and the mothers who sat at home, waiting! Not to everyone was given the opportunity to dare all for husband or son; to few came such chance as was seized by the Countess of Nithsdale, who so contrived that her husband escaped from the Tower disguised in woman's clothing. It was boldly schemed, and success followed her attempt. Others could but pray to God and petition the King. She not only prayed, but acted. Would that there might have been one so to act for Derwentwater! More happy had it been, perhaps, for his Countess had she never uttered the taunt that ended his hesitation to join in the Rebellion: "It is not fitting that the Earl of Derwentwater should continue to hide his head in hovels from the light of day, when the gentry are up in arms for their lawful sovereign." They say that her spirit mourns yet within the tower of Dilston.
Away up the valley of the Tyne, amongst the wild Northumberland hills, news went with lagging gait, those leisurely days of the eighteenth century; even news of battle or of disaster did not speed as it is the wont of ill news to do: "For evil news rides fast, while good news baits." Tidings, in those good old days, but trickled through from ear to ear, slowly, as water filters through sand. Little news, therefore, of Lord Derwentwater, or of the Rising, was heard in or around Haltwhistle after the insurgent force left Brampton; no man knew for a certainty what fortune, good or bad, had waited on the fortunes of his friends.
Night was closing down on the desolate Border hills on a drear November evening of 1715. Throughout a melancholy day, clinging mist had blurred the outline of even the nearest hills; distance was blotted out. Thin rain fell chillingly and persistently, drip, dripping with monotonous plash from the old inn's thatched eaves; a light wind sobbed fitfully around the building, moaning at every chink and cranny of the ill-fitting window-frames. "A dismal night for any who must travel," thought the stableman of the inn, as he looked east and then west along the darkening road. No moving thing broke the monotony of the depressing outlook, and the groom turned to his work of bedding down for the night the few animals that happened to be in his charge. They were not many; most of those that so frequently of late had stood here were away with their owners, following the fortunes of the Earl of Derwentwater; business was dull at the inn. Well, let the weather be what it liked, at least the groom's work was over for the night, and he might go sit by the cheerful peat fire in the kitchen, and drink a health to the King—the rightful King, God bless him; and it was little harm, thought he, if he drank another to the Earl—whom might the Saints protect.
Even as he turned to go, in the dusk at the door, framed, as it were, in a picture, there appeared a horseman leading a tired horse, the reins loose over his arm. Though seen only in that half light, the outline of man and beast were familiar to the stableman. Both seemed far spent; the horse held low its head, and sweat stood caked and thick on neck and heaving flanks, and dripped off inside down by the hocks.
"Ye've ridden hard, sir," said the groom, bustling forward to take the horse.
The stranger said no word, but himself led the tired animal into an empty stall. Yet, as the groom remembered later, of the other horses in the stable, not one raised its head, or whinnied, or took any notice whatever as the new-comer entered.
The stableman turned to lift his lantern, and when, an instant later, he again faced about, he stared to find himself alone; the strange horseman was nowhere to be seen. And the horse in the stall? Him the groom knew well; there was no possibility of mistake; it was the well-known grey on which Lord Derwentwater had ridden away to cast in his lot with Forster.
"Mistress! Mistress!" he cried, hurrying into the house, "has his lordship come in? He's led his grey gelding into the stable the noo, and niver a word wad he say to me or he gaed oot. An' I'm feared a's no weel wi' him; he was lookin' sair fashed, an' kind o' white like."
"His lordship i' the inn? Guide us!" cried the landlady, snatching up a tallow dip and hurrying into the unlit guest-room.
"Ye hae gotten back, my lord? And is a' weel wi' your lordship? And—e-eh! what ails—?" she gasped, as a tall figure, seated in the great oak chair by the smouldering fire, turned on her a face wan and drawn, disfigured by bloody streaks across the cheek. Slowly, like a man in pain, or one wearied to the extreme of exhaustion, the seated figure rose, stood for a moment gazing at her, and then, ere the landlady could collect her scattered wits, it had vanished. Vanished, too, was the grey horse that the groom had seen brought into the stable; and, what was more, the bedding in the stall where the animal had stood was entirely undisturbed, and showed no trace of any beast having been there.
It was long that night ere anybody slept within the walls of the old inn, and broken was their sleep. None doubted but that the Earl was killed, or if not killed, at least soon to die; and the news of Preston, when it came, was to those faithful friends no news, only confirmation of their fears. None, after that, dared hope; they knew that he must die. And the 24th of February 1716 saw a countryside plunged in grief, for that day fell on the scaffold the head of one whom everybody loved, who was every man's friend, who never turned empty away those who went to him seeking help.
Blood-red were the northern lights that flashed and shimmered so wildly in the heavens that night, red as the blood that had soaked into the sawdust of a scaffold; never before in the memory of living man had aurora gleamed with hue so startling. But the sorrow in the hearts of his people passed not away like the fading of the northern lights. His memory lives still in Northumberland; still, when they see the gleam and flicker of the aurora, folk there call it "Lord Derwentwater's Light"; and even yet it is a tradition that dwellers by the stream which flows past Dilston were wont to tell how, on that fatal day, its waters ran red like blood.
When "a' was done that man could do, and a' was done in vain," there remained but to convey his headless body, if it might be, to the spot where his forebears lie at rest.
"Albeit that here in London Town,
It is my fate to die,
O, carry me to Northumberland,
In my fathers' grave to lie."
The Earl's body had been buried at St. Giles-in-the-Fields, and of those who went to recover it and to bring it home, there was one famous in Northumberland story, Frank Stokoe of Chesterwood. A remarkable man was Stokoe, of enormous personal strength and of great height—in stature a veritable child of Anak—a man without fear, brave to recklessness, a good friend and a terrible enemy. Added to all this, he was an extraordinarily expert swordsman. He was a man, too, of much influence and acknowledged authority in the county—a useful man to have on the side of the King—one to whom the people listened, and to whom often an appeal for help was made in ticklish affairs.
There was, for instance, that affair of the feud between Lowes of Willimoteswick Castle and Leehall of Leehall, which kept a great part of Tynedale in hot water for so many years. Leehall appears to have been physically the better man; at any rate, on more than one occasion Lowes seems to have escaped from the clutches of his enemy solely by the superior speed of the horse he rode, or possibly he was a light, and his enemy a heavy, weight, which would make all the difference in a rousing gallop across deep ground or heathery hill. In any case, as a general rule, Lowes was more often the hunted than the hunter. Yet, to the followers of Lowes—there must always be two sides to a story—it was he, and not Leehall, who was the finer man, for, of an encounter between the pair near Bellingham, when Lowes' horse was killed by a sword-thrust directed at the rider's thigh, the old ballad says:
"Oh, had Leehall but been a man
As he was never ne-an,
He wad have stabbed the rider
And letten the horse alean."
But perhaps the animosity here shown to Leehall comes more from one who was a lover of horses—as who in Northumberland is not?—than from a partisan of Lowes. However, the feud ran on, year in, year out, as is the custom of such things, and no doubt it might have been bequeathed from father to son, like a property under entail, had it not been for the intervention of Frank Stokoe. Lowes and Leehall, it seems, had met by chance near Sewing Shields, with the usual result. Only, upon this occasion, the former was possibly not on the back of an animal the superior in speed and stamina of the horse on which Leehall was mounted. At least, Lowes was captured.
But, having got him, his enemy did not proceed to cut him into gobbets, or even to "wipe the floor" with him. Something lingering and long was more to his taste; he would make Lowes "eat dirt." With every mark, therefore, of ignominy and contempt, he dragged his fallen foe home to Leehall, and there chained him near to the kitchen fire-place, leaving just such length of chain loose as would enable the prisoner to sit with the servants at meals. The position can scarcely have been altogether a pleasing one to the servants, to say nothing of the prisoner. Doubtless the former, or some of them, may have found a certain joy in baiting, and in further humiliating, a helpless man, their master's beaten enemy. Yet that pleasure, one would think, could scarcely atone for the constant presence among them of an uninvited guest—a guest, too, who had not much choice in the matter of personal cleanliness. However, trifles of that nature did not greatly embarrass folk in days innocent of sanitary science. As for Lowes, it must have been difficult so to act consistent with the maintenance of any shred of dignity, or of conciliatory cheerfulness. If, for example, the cook should happen of a morning to have got out of bed "wrong foot first," how often must the attentions of that domestic have taken the form of a pot or a pan, or other domestic utensil, flung at his head. Here, no soft answer would be likely to turn away wrath. On the spur of the moment, when a pot, or an iron spit, has caught one on elbow or shins, it might not be altogether easy to think promptly of the repartee likely to be the most conciliating. And he could not "make himself scarce." The situation was embarrassing.
Now, the law, in those breezy times, took small cognisance of such little freaks as this; the law, indeed, was pretty powerless up among those wild hills. It wanted some force stronger, or, at all events, some force less magnificently deliberate, than that of the law.
Frank Stokoe was that force. To him went the friends of Lowes; and next morning saw the peel tower of Leehall besieged. Frank demanded the surrender of Lowes, uninjured. Leehall retorted that he might take him—if he could. But Leehall had reckoned without his retainers; they dared not fight against Frank Stokoe. So they said. But was it not, in reality, a sort of incipient Strike? Did they, perhaps, being wearied of the somewhat tame sport of baiting him, think the opportunity a fitting one to get rid of their uninvited guest for good and all? In any case, before an hour had passed, Leehall found it convenient to hand Lowes over to Stokoe, who safely deposited him by his own fireside at Willimoteswick, and the feud was pursued no further.
Whether or not Leehall was content to have thus played second fiddle, one does not know. Perhaps it was his men who, a year or two later, paid a nocturnal visit to Stokoe's peel tower. Frank was roused from sleep one winter night by his daughter, who told her father that some one was attempting to force the outer door. Stokoe stole quietly downstairs, to find that some one outside was busy with the point of a knife trying gently to prise back the great oaken bolt which barred his door. A very little more, a few minutes longer of work, and the beam would have been slid back, the door would have been quietly opened, and the throats of all the occupants of the house might have been cut. Whispering to his daughter to stand behind the door, and softly to push back the bolt each time the attempt was made to prise it open, Frank snatched down, and loaded with slugs, his old musket. Then very quietly he let himself down through the trap-door into the cow-house, which in all, or nearly all, old peel towers formed the lower story of the building. Cautiously unclosing the door of the cow-house, which opened on the outer air close to the flight of stone steps leading up to the main door of the tower, he stepped out. There, plainly to be seen at top of the stair, were several men, busily employed in trying to gain an entrance.
"Ye bluidy scoundrels," roared Stokoe, "I'll knock a hole in some o' ye that the stars will shine through."
And with that he let drive at the nearest, the charge, at so close a range, literally "knocking a hole" in him. Like a startled covey of partridges the remaining robbers fled, not only without attempting reprisals, but without even waiting to use the steps as an aid to escape; they simply flew through the air to mother earth and made tracks towards safety, anywhere, out of the reach of Frank Stokoe's vengeance; which perhaps was the wisest thing they could have done, for Stokoe was the kind of man who in a case such as this would willingly have knocked a hole in each one of them. In those days people were not very squeamish, and Stokoe seems to have gone quietly back to bed without greatly troubling himself about the slain robber; but the man's friends must have stolen back during the night, for in a copse near by, in a shallow grave hastily scooped out of the frozen earth, the dead body was found next day.
It is almost needless to say that Frank Stokoe was of those who would be certain to concern themselves in an enterprise such as the Rising of 1715. His sympathies were entirely with the Stuart, and against the Hanoverian King. Moreover, though he owned his peel tower and the land surrounding it, he was yet, as regards other land, a tenant of the Earl of Derwentwater, as well as being a devoted admirer of that nobleman. Naturally, therefore, when the Earl took the field, Stokoe followed him; and had all been of his frame of mind, there had been no ignominious surrender at Preston. Whilst fighting was to be done, no man fought so hard, or with such thorough enjoyment, as Stokoe. "Surrender" was a part of the great game that he did not understand; he was not of the stuff that deals in "regrettable incidents." At Preston that day, when all was done, there stood King George's men on either side, as well as in his front; in his rear a high stone wall, even to a man less heavily handicapped than he by weight, an obstacle almost insurmountable. But his horse was good—Stokoe's horses had to be good—and it knew its master. Never hitherto had the pair refused any jump, and they were not like to begin now. With a rush and a scramble, and the clatter of four good feet against the stone coping, they were over; over and away, galloping hard for the North Countrie, the free wind whistling past their ears as they sped, Stokoe throwing up his arm and giving a mocking cheer as each ineffective volley of musketry from the troops spluttered behind him; and the great roan horse snatched at his bit, and snorted with excitement.
Yes, that part of it was worth living for, and the blood danced in the veins of horse and man while the chase lasted. But what of it when once more the hills of Northumberland were regained, when the great moors that lay grim and frowning under the dark November skies were again beneath his horse's feet? It was a different matter then, for the hue and cry was out, and the earths all stopped against this gallant fox. Chesterwood was closed to him, no friend dared openly give him shelter.
"He had fled, had got clear away to France," was the story they gave out. But Frank Stokoe all the time lay snug and safe in hiding, not so very far from his own peel tower. And he was one of those who, disguised—perhaps in his case not very effectually—ventured to London, intent on bringing back the body of their chief, that it might lie at rest in the grave where sleep the fathers of that noble race.
There, in London, Frank narrowly escaped being taken. As it chanced, at that time an Italian bravo was earning for himself an unsavoury notoriety by going about boastfully challenging all England to stand up before him to prove who was the better man. He would mark his man, pick a quarrel with him, and the result was always the same. The Italian's trick of fence was deadly, his wrist a wrist of steel. None yet had been able to stand long before him; not one had got inside his guard.
As he walked once near Leicester Field in the dusk of an evening, Stokoe's great figure caught the eye of this little Italian, in whose mind suddenly arose the irresistible longing to bring this huge bulk toppling to earth. That would be something not unworth boasting about—that he, a sort of eighteenth-century David, should slay this modern Goliath.
No one had ever been able to complain that it was difficult to pick a quarrel with Frank Stokoe. Not that he was quarrelsome—far otherwise; but never was he known to shrink from any combat that was pressed on him, and on this occasion the venomous little foreigner found him most ready to oblige. It wanted but a slight jostle, an Italian oath hissed out, a few words in broken English to the effect that big men were proverbially clumsy, and that bigness and courage were not always to be found united. Stokoe knew very well who his assailant was, knew his reputation, and the slender chance the ordinary swordsman might expect to have against this foreigner's devilish skill, but his weapon was unsheathed almost before the Italian had ceased to curse. Cautiously keeping a check on his habitual impetuosity, calling to his aid every ounce of the skill he possessed, and content meanwhile if he could evade the vicious thrusts of his enemy, Stokoe for a time kept the fiery little man well at bay. Irritated at length by the giant's coolness, and by finding him, perhaps, not quite so easy a conquest as he had anticipated, unable to draw him on to expose himself by attacking, the Italian for a moment lost patience. None other in England had given him so much trouble. It was time this farce ended; he would spit the giant now. Once, twice, thrice—it was with the utmost difficulty that Stokoe saved himself from being run through the body, and once the sword of his enemy went through his clothes, grazing his ribs, and sending a warm stream trickling down his side. Then, suddenly, again the Italian lunged. This time it surely had been all over with Stokoe. But the foot of the hectoring little foreigner slipped, or he stumbled owing to some slight inequality of the ground. For a single instant the man was overbalanced and off his guard, and before he could recover, Frank Stokoe's sword passed through his body, sending out of this world one who whilst in it had wrought much evil.
"Well done, Stokoe! Old Northumberland for ever!" cried a voice from amongst the considerable crowd of spectators who had run up before the fight had been in progress many seconds. "Well done, Stokoe!"
Here was danger greater even than that from which he had but now escaped. He was recognised! And for him to be recognised in London probably meant instant arrest, and an almost certain end on the gallows. He was too deeply involved in the late Rebellion; King George's Government would show him as little mercy as they had showed to his chief.
Stokoe glanced round uneasily as he wiped his sword, but it was not possible to say which in the group of spectators was the man who had given that compromising cry; it might be one of several who, to Stokoe's extreme discomposure, seemed to look at him rather intently. Time to be out of this, thought he; the farther he was from London the more freely he would breathe just at present, and the less chance was there of that breathing being permanently stopped. Policemen had not been invented in those days, and there was not much chance of his being arrested for duelling, for what was then called "the watch" was singularly inefficient, and seldom to be found when wanted. Nevertheless, it was now no easy matter for Stokoe to shake off the little "tail" of admirers who insisted on following him; it was not every day that they had the chance of seeing a man killed in fair fight, and they were loth to lose sight of the man who had done it—a hero in their eyes. However, by dint of plunging down one narrow street and up some other unsavoury alley, and repeating the manoeuvre at intervals, blinding his trail as far as possible, he at length shook off the last persevering remnant of his admirers, and, without being tracked or shadowed, gained the shelter of the house where he lodged. A few days saw him and his friends safely out of London, bearing with them the body of the Earl of Derwentwater, which was later buried at Dilston.
Frank Stokoe's position was an unfortunate one from now on. He was a proscribed man; his property had been seized, and those now in possession threatened if he put in an appearance, or made any attempt to regain the property, that they would give him up to Government. Times consequently became hard for poor Stokoe; his affairs went from bad to worse, and though his name was included in the general pardon which Government issued some time later, he never got back his land nor any of his possessions. Part of the land passed with the Derwentwater Estate to Greenwich Hospital, part, including the peel tower, where he and his ancestors had lived for generations, remained in the clutches of those who had seized it. Old age came upon Frank and found him poverty-stricken; want came, "as an armed man," and found him too weak to resist. The spirit was there, but no longer the strength that should have helped the spirit. He sank and died, leaving behind him no shred of worldly gear.