THE EARL OF WESTMORELAND

Elliot’s most romantic clients were the Earl of Westmoreland and Miss Child, who eloped in 1782. The father of the young lady was the famous London banker, whose great fortune, and the prospect of marrying it, dazzled the Earl quite as much as the beauty of his daughter and heiress. She fell in love with the noble suitor, whose proposal did not, however, commend itself to the banker. “Your blood, my lord, is good,” said he, “but money is better”; and he refused his consent. But the disappointed suitor was not disheartened, and the lovers eloped in a four-horse chaise; his canny lordship having arranged beforehand for relays of horses all the way: prudently, at the strategic point of Shap, hiring every horse to be found there. Mr. Child, enraged, lost no time in following. Using every effort that money could procure, he at last came up with the fugitives changing at High Hesket; and, leaping from his chaise, drew a pistol and shot one of the leaders of their conveyance. At the same moment, one of the Earl’s servants ran behind Mr. Child’s carriage and cut the leather braces suspending the body. The Earl and his love proceeded with three horses, with the father pursuing. Not for long, however, for presently the body fell over, and pursuit became a laggard and hopeless rearguard. One hundred guineas was the fee paid to the fortunate Elliot by the Earl. Mr. Child died within a year of the affair, it is supposed from disappointment and anger at his daughter’s disobedience. Rowlandson has, in his caricature, “Filial Affection,” drawn a more or less close commentary upon this incident. The banker took excellent care that neither of them should have his money, which he devised to any issue of the marriage. Lady Westmoreland died in 1793, leaving six children, and the Earl married again, at which one is instinctively revolted.

The elder daughter of Lord and Lady Westmoreland, Lady Sophia Fane, inherited the fortune, and married the Earl of Jersey; and their daughter, the Lady Adela Corisande Maud Villiers, followed the example set by her grandparents; eloping in 1845, at the age of seventeen, with the youthful Captain Ibbetson, of the 11th Hussars. It was a November night when the ardent pair flitted from the lady’s home at Middleton Park, Bicester. They did not patronise Elliot, but went to Gretna Hall. They reached Mr. Linton’s establishment on the 6th, and were duly married, as the surviving register shows. Lady Adela died fifteen years later, but Captain Ibbetson survived until 1898.

Jack Ainslie, of the “Bush,” Carlisle, was a sworn enemy to parents and guardians. He was perpetually signing his name as a witness to marriages, and was in fact quite a consulting counsel to love-lorn squires and damsels. To have him, in his yellow jacket, on the near wheeler was worth as many points to them as it was for attorneys to retain a leading K.C. When pushed hard, Jack knew of cunning bye-lanes and woods to hide the pursued couples in, and had occupation-roads across farms, and all that sort of geography, at his fingers’ tips.

On one occasion he altogether surpassed his previous doings. He had driven a runaway couple to Longtown, and as he thought they were taking it rather too easily, strongly advised them to cross the Border and get married before they dined. They were weary and would not be advised, and so he took his horses back to Carlisle and thought them “just poor silly things.”

He had not long returned before the girl’s mother and a Bow Street officer dashed up to the “Bush” in a post-chaise. There was not a second to lose, and so Jack, saying not a word to any one, jumped on a horse and galloped to Longtown. He had barely time to see the dawdlers huddled into a post-chaise, and to take his seat and clear the “lang toun” when the pursuers loomed in sight. The pursuit was so hot that the only way was to turn sharp down a lane. From it they saw the enemy fly past towards Gretna and so on to Annan, where they found themselves at fault and gave up the pursuit. The coast being thus cleared, Jack would stand no more nonsense, but saw his couple duly married and witnessed before he went back to Carlisle. The signatures of that marriage were always looked at with a certain sad interest, for the bridegroom was killed the next year, at Waterloo. This was Jack’s “leading case.” He was long remembered as a “civil old fellow, perhaps five feet seven if he was stretched out, and with such nice crooked legs.”

One of the most remarkable of these runaway weddings was that of the old and widowed ex-Lord Chancellor, Erskine, to Sarah Buck, his housekeeper, an elderly widow with a numerous family of children, who accompanied them.

“In the year 1818,” says Elliot, “as near as I can remember, Lord Chief Justice Erskine came to Gretna in a chaise and four horses, dressed in woman’s clothes, accompanied by an elderly lady and four children. When I first saw them, I took the elderly lady for the mother of the children, and the learned Lord for the grandmother. He asked me many questions relative to Gretna marriages, all of which I answered him as I would a female, until by chance I espied a button of his waistcoat through the opening of a neckerchief which he wore over his breast. After he found that I had discovered his sex, he smiled but made no remark. He afterwards changed his dress, and I married him to the female whom he had brought with him. I asked him why he had come in female attire; he answered that he had his own reasons for it. He gave me twenty pounds, and again resumed his female dress. Twelve months after, at the instigation of his sons by a former wife, he wished to divorce her by Scots law, but found, upon trial, that he could not.”

Erskine was not the first great lawyer, by very many, to exhibit a practical uncertainty as to the law, however certain he might theoretically be. He made no further attempt to upset the legality of the marriage, and in December 1821 a son, christened Hampden Erskine, was born to this odd couple. Erskine died, in his seventy-third year, in 1823.

Among the more famous clients of the canny marriage-mongers of Gretna were the heroic Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald, and Miss Katharine Barnes, in 1812. On their heels came Viscount Deerhurst, son of the Earl of Coventry, whose fee to the “priest” was £100. Very late in Gretna’s history came the marriage of Lord Drumlanrig, heir to the sixth Marquis of Queensberry, and Miss Caroline Clayton, in 1840. The lady’s father, General Clayton, had objected to the marriage, on account of her youth, for she was only nineteen at the time; and the couple decided to hie over the Border on the first opportunity. This soon offered, and, discarding the time-honoured post-chaise, they rode horseback all the way, reaching their haven on May 25th. This gallant cavalier became seventh Marquis of Queensberry, and was accidentally shot in 1858, at Kinmont, when out rabbiting. The Marchioness long survived him, and died so recently as February 1904.

The circumstances of the elopement of Lady Rose Somerset, daughter of the seventh Duke of Beaufort, in 1846, with Captain Francis Lovell, show that the old hazards were passing. They took railway tickets, and so, without foam-flecked horses or anxious post-boys, came to Gretna.

But by far the most romantic incident in those annals of “over the Border” elopements was the marriage of Miss Penelope Smyth on May 7th, 1836, at Gretna Hall to Charles Ferdinand Bourbon, Prince of the two Sicilies and Capua, brother and heir-presumptive to Ferdinand the Second, King of Naples. The whole affair reads like the vapourings of some extravagant novelist of the old Family Reader type. Miss Smyth was a beautiful Exeter girl, and additionally attractive to an impecunious Prince in the fact of possessing a fortune of £20,000. The circumstances of her being in Italy do not appear, but she seems to have been married to the Prince at Lucca, and again at Rome. They fled from Italy to avoid the fury of the King of Naples, who denied the legality of the union, and claimed that no marriage could be contracted by a Prince of the Blood Royal without the consent of the reigning sovereign. The Prince appears to have relied upon the affection of his sister, the Queen Regent of Spain, to smooth matters over, but was rebuffed at Madrid, the Queen refusing to receive either him or his bride. They then left for Paris, and afterwards for England, after a third ceremony had been performed, and flew to this inevitable refuge, the Border. Then, coming to London, they applied for a license at Doctor’s Commons.

Of the virtuous intentions of this anxious and much-married couple there can be no possible doubt whatever, and the part of “villain of the piece” is taken by the bold bad “Bomba,” the notorious King of Naples, who acted to perfection the character of tyrannical brother. He instructed the Sicilian Ambassador to protest against the license being issued, and it was accordingly refused. The dauntless couple were then married in the ordinary way, by banns, at St. George’s, Hanover Square.

The virtuous lived happily ever after, and the wicked met with the retribution that, by all the canons of dramatic art, was to be expected, for the kingdom of Naples was abolished in 1861, and with it went King Bomba and all questions of succession.

The contributor to Household Words in 1852, found John Linton dead, and the glory of Gretna Hall already departed; but Mrs. Linton was there, and he seems to have been provided with a not unpalatable dinner, while some few good cigars remained. But it was not for dinner or for cigars he came. He wanted some juicy facts for his article. He got some, but they were not so very juicy. Everything, you see, spoke of the Past, and he was reduced to being shown the “registers,” which the widow Lang very jealously displayed to him. They were wrapped in an old silk handkerchief, and when they were untied and he would have handled them, the suspicious old dame gently repulsed his hand, and turned over the leaves herself for his inspection.

Everywhere in the house, vanished visitors had scrawled their names, despite the notice, “Please not to write on the walls, windows, or shutters,” pasted on the looking-glass of the dining-room. Scrawled on a window-pane was the frank confession, perhaps made in disillusioned after years, “John Anderson made a fool of himself in Gretna, 1831”; and in a greasy visitors’ book he found the usual ribald remarks. With the prevailing air of desolation heavy upon everything, he asked how long it was since the last marriage had been celebrated there, expecting a reply in terms of years; but the landlady turned to the maid who was laying the cloth, and said, “Was it Tuesday or Monday last, that couple came?” The maid said it was “Monday.”

Oh! what a surprise.

Gretna Green itself is a small place, and to-day a dull one, too. The Hall, situated in its private grounds, is just a country mansion. No longer do the officers from Carlisle garrison “come once a week to be married,” as the lady there pleasantly suggested to me; and no one will accost the stranger and hint that it is a fine day for a wedding. Eheu! fugaces.