Long ago—you may say in 1808—when I was a boy at Peebles, the school-children, as a variety in their boisterous amusements, occasionally bombarded with stones a grievously defaced effigy built into the walls of a ruinous old church in the neighbourhood. With savage significance, the unfortunate piece of sculpture was called Borlum, and as Borlum it had been pelted by several successive generations. From the dearth of historical knowledge at the spot, no one could explain who or what was meant by Borlum; and not till some years afterwards, in the course of reading, did I find out that by Borlum was meant Brigadier Mackintosh of Borlum, who commanded a resolute party of Highlanders in Mar’s rebellion of 1715, and who, by their masterly audacity in marching towards the Border, threw the southern counties of Scotland into a state of indescribable alarm. To Borlum, as he was familiarly termed, was thus assigned the character of a bugbear along the whole course of the Tweed; and long after he had passed away, and when the political events in which he was concerned were forgotten, the original terror of his name survived in the vengefully destructive recreations of school-children. In a vicarious capacity, a harmless piece of sculpture, which had nothing at all to do with Borlum, was doomed to suffer for a popular scare nearly a hundred years previously.

In the history of that miserably managed affair, Mar’s Jacobite rebellion, Mackintosh of Borlum—or more properly younger of Borlum, for his father was still living—stands conspicuously out as a military hero, who threw into the shade many of higher title and pretensions. How with five hundred of his clan, with banners flying, he marched to Inverness, and seized that important post. How he hastened on to the Lowlands, eluded the troops designed to intercept him; crossed the Firth of Forth with a large force in open boats, and captured Leith. How, carrying everything before him, he marched onwards to the Border, in order to join the rebel forces of General Forster in Northumberland—are all facts belonging to history. His sagacity, foresight, intrepidity, and daring courage were worthy of a better cause. Getting into England, and mixed up with half-hearted movements, Borlum is very much lost sight of. The enterprise, owing to Mar’s indiscretion, had been shockingly ill considered. The English Jacobites failed to rise in a body, as they were justified in doing, for the auxiliaries which had been expected from France never made their appearance; and the whole thing collapsed, as is well known, by the humiliating capture of the insurgents by General Carpenter at Preston, in Lancashire. Surrendering at discretion, the whole were conducted as prisoners to London—Borlum among the rest. A dreadful downcome to the proud Highland chief, but not more so than to Lords Derwentwater, Winton, Nithsdale, Kenmure, Carnwath, Widdrington, and other Jacobite noblemen.

It is not altogether agreeable to look back on the dynastic struggles which took place in England in the first half of the eighteenth century; for with some redeeming traits of character, they give a very mean view of human nature. The subject has been suggested to us by the appearance of a work which many will appreciate for its lively account of scenes and circumstances hitherto imbedded in the dry records of history. We mean London in the Jacobite Times, by Dr Doran, F.S.A. (2 vols. Bentley and Son). The writer, it is sorrowful to learn, passed away before the work at which he had long patiently laboured had well been published; and we regret that he has not survived to hear the praises bestowed on his endeavours to produce a picture of past times such as is rarely presented. The way the subject is treated is quite unique. Instead of going into regular historical details, which would be alike tedious and tiresome, the author writes in a sketchy and anecdotic style without pause from beginning to end, and we have before us a drama of unflagging interest, extending over the greater part of a century. We do not think, however, that the book would have been the worse of a few preliminary remarks on the strange circumstances by which the Stuarts forfeited the crown, and placed themselves in the grotesquely unhappy condition of kings retired from business.

The flight of James II. from England, and practically his abdication of authority, December 22, 1688, finished the house of Stuart. When a king runs away from his subjects, and stupidly flings down a magnificent inheritance, he has a bad chance of being called back again, particularly when by a course of exasperating and illegal conduct he has forfeited general esteem. Yet, from the date of that fatal flight there were successive plots by Jacobite adherents to bring back the Stuarts to the throne. Throughout the reign of William III. and of Queen Anne, the plottings were of a comparatively obscure character. On the death of Anne in 1714, and the installation of George I. under a parliamentary Act of Settlement, came the crisis. The rebellion of 1715 broke out, and being quenched at Preston, the fierce dissensions of Jacobites and Whigs arose. Dr Doran commences his narrative with the death of Anne, but scarcely awakes to his subject till the droves of rebels from Preston enter London and are dispersed through the various prisons, the more noble of them being conducted to the Tower.

While preserving the forms of law, the government did not put off time in the examination and trials of the captured rebels. The pulpits rang with sermons condemnatory of their crimes. Joseph Addison, in his paper the Freeholder, railed upon them with indecent subserviency. There was no want of evidence to convict the leading spirits in the insurrection; but matters were considerably simplified by the voluntarily proffered testimony of the Rev. Robert Patten, who had been formerly a curate at Preston, and acted as chaplain to the rebel forces. Clapped into prison with his associates, Patten pondered on the best means of escaping the gallows; and the longer he thought of it, he became the more firmly convinced that his best plan was to become king’s evidence. His testimony was accepted; and at the cost of being branded throughout all time as a rascal, he daily stood up in court and told every particular requisite to convict the unhappy noblemen and gentlemen with whom he had been associated, and whose bread he had eaten. Very much through the testimony of this wretch, the prisons were gradually cleared by the exit of batches of convicts on hurdles to Tyburn. The Tower was similarly relieved of two of its noble inmates, Derwentwater and Kenmure, who perished on the scaffold; and there would have been more of them, but for the escape of the Earl of Nithsdale disguised in his wife’s clothes, and for the fortunate reprieve of the Lords Widdrington, Nairn, and Carnwath. On the evening of the day on which the Earl of Derwentwater was beheaded (24th February 1716), London was thrown into a state of commotion by the appearance in the sky of an extraordinary Aurora, in which there were fancied resemblances of armies, flaming swords, and fire-breathing dragons—the Jacobites accepting the phenomenon as a token of the indignation of Heaven at the cruel murders on Tower Hill, and prognosticating the rise of the sun of Stuart! On the estates of the Earl of Derwentwater, this famed aurora was called the ‘Earl of Derwentwater’s Lights;’ and it is said that an aurora is still so named in the vicinity of Dilston.

The government of George I. had some difficulty in dealing with the Earl of Wintoun, who contrived to get his trial put off as long as possible, on the plea that he was not yet prepared with his evidence. The truth is, the earl was a somewhat eccentric being. In his youth he had run away from his home at Seton House, went to France, and hired himself to work as a blacksmith. Returning at the death of his father, when everybody had given him up for lost, he assumed the title, George fifth Earl of Wintoun, and was living quietly at Seton when the rebellion broke out. He had no wish to connect himself with it; but stung by some outrageous proceedings of the authorities, he joined the insurrection, and so got himself into trouble. When brought to the bar of the House of Lords, there was some surprise at the oddity of his behaviour. Whether from cunning or affectation, he did not seem to understand why his trial should be hurried on, though in reality he might have complained of the delay. All the earl’s shifts did not greatly serve him. Patten, on being questioned, said that he had seen the Earl of Wintoun on several occasions with a drawn sword in his hand when the Pretender was proclaimed. After this, of course Wintoun was found guilty, and condemned to be beheaded. Not a pleasant drive from Westminster Hall to the Tower, accompanied by the Gentleman Gaoler, ceremoniously carrying an axe with its edge turned towards the condemned earl. One feels a degree of satisfaction in knowing that after all the Earl of Wintoun escaped his doom. Confined to an apartment in the Tower preparatory to the morning of execution, he brought his knowledge as a blacksmith into play by cutting through the iron bars of his window by files supplied by his servant, and dropping to the ground got clear off. He died at Rome in 1749, his title and estates being meanwhile forfeited. The title has been latterly revived in favour of the Earls of Eglintoun. But with the disappearance of the last of the Setons in the direct line, an ancient and honourable family was blotted from the Scottish peerage.

Mackintosh of Borlum—called by mistake Borland by Dr Doran—was confined along with General Forster and a host of others in Newgate. Borlum and Forster are stated to have often quarrelled regarding the military conduct of the insurrection, their angry debates often furnishing amusement in the corridors, court-yard, and common room in the prison, to which visitors were admitted without hinderance, as to a tavern, for the more eating and drinking there were the better it was for Mr Pitt, the governor. Pitt, himself, was never disinclined to lend his assistance in eating a dinner, or in finishing a bowl of punch. So countenanced, the revelries in Newgate were boundless. Dr Doran affords a glimpse of this state of things. Visitors and sympathisers supplied the prisoners with money. ‘While it was difficult to change a guinea almost at any house in the street, nothing was more easy than to have silver for gold in any quantity, and gold for silver, in the prison; those of the fair sex, from persons of the first rank to tradesmen’s wives and daughters, making a sacrifice of their husbands’ and parents’ rings and other precious movables for the use of the prisoners. The aid was so reckless, that forty shillings for a dish of early peas and beans, and thirty shillings for a dish of fish, with the best French wine, was an ordinary regale!’

Forster was to be tried on the 18th April, but a week previously the town was startled with the intelligence that he had broken bounds; he was off. ‘His escape,’ says Doran, ‘was well planned and happily executed. His sharp servant found means to obtain an impression of Pitt’s master-key, from which another key was made and conveyed to Forster, without difficulty. Pitt loved wine, and Forster seems to have had a cellar full of it. He often invited the governor to get drunk on its contents. One night, Pitt got more drunk than usual, finished the wine, and roared for more. Forster bade his servant to fetch up another bottle. This was the critical moment. The fellow was long, and Forster declared he would go and see what the rascal was at. On going, he locked the unconscious Pitt in the room; and the way being prepared by his servant, and turnkeys, as it would seem, subdued by the “oil of palms,” master and servant walked into the street, where friends awaited them. Pitt sounded the alarm, but everything had been well calculated. A smack lay at Holly Haven, on the Thames, which had often been employed by the Jacobites in running between England and France.’ By this means, Forster effected his escape, and ‘the joy of the Jacobites was incontrollable.’ The government shut up Pitt in one of his own dungeons, and offered a thousand pounds for the recovery of ‘General Forster;’ but pursuit was useless. The general was safe in France.

Borlum, who knew that his trial would speedily take place, meditated on plans for emulating the success of Forster. Strange to say, notwithstanding a knowledge of the irregularities that were carried on in Newgate, the public authorities made no change in the administration of affairs. Wine flowed, punch was sent round, and the prisoners suffered scarcely any stint in their indulgences. Things were indeed rather worse than better—all which was favourable to a plan concocted by Borlum and his fellow-captives. ‘The prisoners,’ says Dr Doran, ‘might cool themselves after their drink, by walking and talking, singing and planning, in the court-yard, till within an hour of midnight. Evil came of it. On the night of the 4th [May] the feast being over, nearly five dozen of the prisoners were walking about the press-yard. Suddenly, the whole body of them made an ugly rush at the keeper with the keys. He was knocked down, the doors were opened, and the prisoners swept forth to freedom. All, however, did not succeed in gaining liberty. As the attempt was being made, soldiers and turnkeys were alarmed. The fugitives were then driven in different directions. Brigadier Mackintosh, his son, and seven others overcame all opposition. They reached the street, and they were so well befriended, or were so lucky, as to disappear at once, and to evade all pursuit. They fled in various directions.’ Some others less fortunate were secured, ‘and were not only heavily ironed and thrust into loathsome holes, but treated with exceptional brutality.’ What a picture of a metropolitan prison in the reign of George I.!

The escape of Borlum from Newgate with certain other convicts produced an immense sensation. For decency’s sake, if for nothing else, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen came down to the prison, and solemnly gathered some evidence on the subject. The least thing in the way of amends was to offer a reward for the capture of ‘William Mackintosh, commonly called Brigadier Mackintosh.’ Placards were profusely posted up describing the appearance of Borlum. ‘A tall, raw-boned man, about sixty years of age, fair complexioned, beetle-browed, gray-eyed, speaks broad Scotch.’ The reward for capturing him was two hundred pounds, to which sum, however, were added a thousand pounds by the government. Every effort failed to secure the old Highland chief. He and his son succeeded in getting on board a vessel in the Thames, by which they reached the coast of France, and there for the present we must leave him.

These furtive escapes did not slacken operations at Tyburn, to which doomed men from Newgate were carried in half-dozens, as if for a public entertainment. We can hardly in the present day realise the brutality of these exhibitions, to which, however, ladies of quality regularly adjourned to see the show. Hanging formed a holiday amusement of the fashionable society of London. Such was the disregard of humane feeling that officers of the law were not ashamed to practise cruel deceptions on convicts at the very scaffold. Dr Doran describes a case of this kind. It was that of a person named David Lindsay, convicted of traitorous visits to France, who was sentenced to die, and carted to Tyburn in spite of an amnesty. ‘When his neck was in the noose, the sheriff tested David’s courage, by telling him he might yet save his life on condition of revealing the names of alleged traitors. David, however sorely tempted, declined to save his neck on such terms. Thereupon, the sheriff ordered the cart to drive on; but even this move towards leaving Lindsay suspended did not shake his stout spirit. All this time the sheriff had a reprieve for the unnecessarily tortured fellow in his pocket. Before the cart was fairly from under Lindsay’s feet, it was stopped, or he would have been murdered.’ Taken back alive to Newgate, a very unusual spectacle, Lindsay, after being nearly starved in a loathsome dungeon, was sent into perpetual banishment; ultimately he died of hunger and exposure in Holland.

As the hanging of some thousands of rebels would have shocked ordinary decency, vast numbers were condemned to be banished, as an act of grace, to the Plantations, or were ‘made over as presents to trading courtiers,’ who might pardon them for ‘a consideration.’ Think of lords and ladies at court being presented with groups of convicts on whom money could be made by selling pardons! The fact throws a new light on this period of English history. As regards transportation, Dr Doran gives some not uninteresting and little known particulars concerning Rob Roy. Twelve years after the rebellion of 1715, Rob was taken to London in connection with the Disarmament Act, and sentenced with many others to be transported to Barbadoes. Handcuffed to Lord Ogilvie, he was marched from Newgate through the streets of London to a barge at Blackfriars, and thence to Gravesend. ‘This,’ says Dr Doran, ‘is an incident which has escaped the notice of Walter Scott and of all Rob’s biographers.’ Before quitting England, the barge-load of convicts were pardoned and allowed to return home.

Matters had considerably calmed down, when the country was startled with the rebellion which broke out in 1745, headed by the young Chevalier, Charles Edward, grandson of James II. It was a daring and romantic adventure, but as badly conceived and supported as that of thirty years previously. No promised auxiliaries were supplied from France; and that the attempt to upset a powerful and settled government by a handful of adventurous Highlanders and the adherents of a few discontented noblemen and gentry should have ended disastrously, as it finally did on the field of Culloden, is not at all surprising. This fresh outbreak in the reign of George II. affords new material for the graphic pen of Dr Doran; and to his second volume we must refer for many painful though curious details concerning the treatment of the unfortunate prisoners. The manners of the more fashionable classes in the metropolis do not seem to have improved. We are told that ‘people of fashion went to the Tower to see the prisoners as persons of lower quality went there to see the lions. Within the Tower, the spectator was lucky who saw Murray [of Broughton], Charles Ratcliffe, Lord Traquair, Lord Cromarty and his son, and the Lord Provost, at their respective windows. Lady Townshend, who had fallen in love with Lord Kilmarnock, at the first sight of “his falling shoulders,” when he appeared to plead at the bar of the Lords, was to be seen under his window at the Tower.’ The Lord Provost, here alluded to, was Archibald Stewart, who, known to be of Jacobite proclivities, was charged with culpable neglect of duty, in having allowed a party of Highlanders to rush in and take possession of Edinburgh. Stewart was tried and acquitted. Lord Cromarty’s life was spared; but Lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino, and Lovat perished by beheading on Tower Hill. Lovat had expressed a passionate desire to be buried with his head in his own country in Scotland. The wish was gratified. His head was sewed on again by the undertaker before the body was despatched northwards! Lord Traquair was liberated.

The case of Charles Ratcliffe was peculiar. He was a younger brother of Lord Derwentwater who was executed in 1716, and he had himself only evaded the same fate at that time by being one of the prisoners who escaped from Newgate and took refuge in France. Assuming the title of Earl of Derwentwater, he was made prisoner in 1745, on board a French vessel on its way to Scotland with supplies for Prince Charles. The sentence of death which had been passed on him thirty years before was now raked up. He was condemned to be executed; and giving him the benefit of his assumed title of nobility, he was beheaded on Tower Hill, his manly courage and proud bearing not deserting him at the last dreadful scene.

Like Patten, in the former rebellion, Murray of Broughton, who had acted as secretary to Charles Edward, was saved by basely turning king’s evidence, and sending many better men than himself to the scaffold. He retreated into private life under a deserved load of infamy. Years afterwards, as we learn from Lockhart, Murray, several times in disguise, visited Mr Scott, father of Sir Walter, for the sake of professional advice. On one of these occasions, Mrs Scott, from curiosity, intruded with the offer of a cup of tea, which Murray accepted. When he withdrew, Mr Scott lifted the window-sash, and threw the empty cup into the street. The lady exclaimed for her china, but was silenced by the remark: ‘I may admit into my house, on a piece of business, persons wholly unworthy to be treated as guests by my wife. Neither lip of me nor of mine comes after Mr Murray of Broughton.’ As a memento of this curious incident, Sir Walter made prize of the saucer, which he preserved.

The executions of the untitled prisoners were conducted in a wholesale manner on Kennington Common, to which crowds flocked to see the hideous show. Drawers attended to supply wine to the culprits while the ropes were put round their necks, for the Jacobites drank treasonous toasts till the last. At one of these tragic ceremonials, ‘Captain Wood, after the halter was loosely hung for him round his neck, called for wine, which was supplied with alacrity by the prison drawers. When it was served round, the captain drank to the health of the rightful king, James III.’ The slight delay so caused was lucky for another culprit, Captain Lindsay, who was coming up with a second batch. ‘While the wine was being drunk, Lindsay was “haltering,” as the reporters called it. He was nice about the look of the rope, but just as he was courteously invited to get in and be hanged, a reprieve came for him, which saved his life.’ At this period, London could not be deemed a pleasant place of residence for any one with delicate feelings. The entrances to the town were lined with decaying bodies hanging in chains. At length the sights became so offensive as to cause public remonstrance.

Dr Doran winds up his dramatic narrative with some graceful remarks on the altered state of feeling towards the Jacobites in the reign of George III. By the decease of Charles Edward in 1788, after having sunk to the character of a sot, the Jacobite fanaticism was considerably abated, and only lingered as an expiring sentiment till the death of Charles’s brother, Henry, Cardinal York, 1807, when the house of Stuart was extinct.

It is pleasant to know that the royal family always spoke with sympathy of the Stuarts. Charles Edward, as is well known, was unhappy in his marriage with Louise, Countess of Albany, daughter of Count von Stolberg. She left him for a convent in 1780, and subsequently to his death became the wife of the Italian poet, Vittorio Alfieri. By a strange turn in the wheel of fortune, she sought an asylum in England, on the outbreak of the French Revolution, and was well received at the court in St James’s Palace, the king and queen vying to do her honour. She went to see the king in the House of Lords with the crown on his head, when proroguing parliament, 1791. Hannah More speaks of seeing the Countess of Albany on that occasion seated among ladies ‘just at the foot of the throne which she might once have expected to have mounted.’ Finding London dull, with ‘crowds but no society,’ and that the climate of England did not suit her, she returned to the continent.

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.