Before we offer our readers some new light on this renowned mystery, it is necessary that we should give them, in a sentence, the briefest possible outline of the oft-told tale, so far as it has been hitherto known. John Erskine, Lord Grange, a judge of the Court of Session, and a leader of the ultra-religious party in Scotland, was married to the daughter of that Chiesley of Dalry who had shot the Lord President in the High Street of Edinburgh, for giving a decision against him. The marriage was a very unhappy one. The pious leader of a religious party was scandalised in various ways, obliged to live separate from his wife, and subjected to many outrages from her. At length her death was announced, her funeral was duly attended, and the widower preserved the decorous silence of one to whom death has brought relief from what is generally counted a calamity. This occurred in January 1732. The lapse of nearly nine years had almost consigned the remembrance of the unfortunate woman to oblivion, when strange rumours gained circulation, that she who was believed to be dead and buried was living in bondage in the distant island of St Kilda. The account she subsequently gave of her adventures, bore, that one night in her solitary lodging she was seized by some Highlanders, whom she knew to be retainers of Lord Lovat, and conveyed away, gagged and blindfolded, in the arms of a man seated in a sedan chair. It appears that she was kept in various places of confinement, and subjected to much rough usage, in the Low Country. At length she was conveyed north-westward, towards the Highland line. She passed through the grim solitudes of Glencoe, where recent murder must have awakened in the captive horrible associations, on to the western part of Lord Lovat's country, where any deed of tyranny or violence might be committed with safety. Thence she was transferred to the equally safe country of Glengarry, and, after crossing some of the highest mountains in Scotland, was shipped on the wild Loch Hourn, for ever darkened by the shadow of gigantic mountains falling on its narrow waters. She was kept for some time on the small island of Heskir, belonging to Macdonald of Sleat, and was afterwards transferred to the still more inaccessible St Kilda, which has acquired a sort of celebrity from its connexion with her strange history. In 1741, when a communication from the captive had, through devious courses, reached her friends in Edinburgh, an effort was made to release her; but it was baffled by her transference to another place of confinement, where she died in 1745. Little did the old judge imagine, at the time when he had so successfully and so quietly got rid of his domestic curse—when the mock funeral had been performed, the family condolences acted over, and the victim safely conveyed to her distant prison, that on some future day the public, frantic with curiosity, would tear to pieces the covering of his great mystery, and expose every fragment of it to the admiring crowd. It was but a simple matter in the eyes of those who were concerned in it. The woman was troublesome—her husband was a judge, and therefore a powerful man—so he put her out of the way. Nor was he cruel or unscrupulous, according to the morality of the circle in which he lived, in the method he adopted to accomplish his end. He had advisers about him, who would have taken a shorter and a more effectual plan for ridding themselves of a troublesome woman, wife or not, and would have walked forth into the world without being haunted by any dread that rumours of remote captivities might rise up to disturb their peace. Indeed, when we remember the character of the instruments to whom Lord Grange committed the kidnapping and removal of his wife, it is only wonderful that they had patience enough to carry out so long and troublesome an operation; and that they did not, out of regard to themselves and to their employer, put a violent termination to the career of their troublesome charge, and send her at once to where In fact, Lord Grange was what was called in his day "a discreet man." He wished to avoid scandal, and bore a character for religious zeal, which appears to have been on occasion a very serious burden not easily borne. He dreaded scandal and notoriety, and therefore he shrouded his great act of iniquity in the most profound secrecy. Moreover, he kept a conscience—something that, like Rob Roy's honesty, might be called a conscience "after a kind." He said pretty accurately of himself in his Diary—"I have religion enough to spoil my relish and prosecution of this world, and not enough to get me to the next." We may probably believe that, even if he could have performed the deed with perfect secrecy and safety, so far as this world is concerned, he would not have murdered his wife, his conscience recoiling at the dreadful crime—his fear of the world causing him to shrink from exposure. Urged by these two conflicting motives, he adopted the expedient of the secret removal to a desolate and distant spot, believing that he had surrounded the whole project with a deep and impenetrable cloud of mystery. Never was human foresight more signally set at naught. It was this very machinery of intense mystery that, by ministering to one of the cravings of the human imagination, has made the incident one of the most notorious of human events. It is almost satisfactory to know that this dreaded notoriety visited the hoary tyrant, for after he had for nine years enjoyed in secret the success of his plot, and kept his fair fame with the world, we find him, when legal proceedings were commenced against him, bitterly saying that "strange stories were spread all over the town of Edinburgh, and made the talk of coffee-houses and tea-tables, and sent, as I have ground to apprehend, to several other places of Great Britain."20 One may notice, too, in the following discontented mumblings, the bitterness with which he contemplated the divulging of the secret,—it is in a letter to the imprisoned lady's champion, Mr Hope of Rankeillor.
The text from which we are at present discoursing, is a bundle of confidential letters from Lord Grange, printed in the Miscellany of the Spalding Club, and not the least valuable and curious of the many contributions made by that useful and spirited institution, to the elucidation of Scottish history and manners. At the foot of the high conical hill of Bennochie, in a small group of forest trees, there nestles one of those quaint small turreted mansions of old We believe that the passages from these documents, on which we are now to comment, in the first place exhibit to us pretty plainly the motive of Lord Grange for the deportation of his wife; and, in the second place, prove that he entertained designs of a similar character against another female with whom he was nearly connected. When Lady Grange's strange history was first communicated to the public, it was believed that the cause of her abduction was not merely her violent temper, but her possession of certain secrets which would enable her to compromise the safety of her husband and his friends, by proving
This was doubtless the truth, but not the whole truth. Founding apparently on these statements, which are Lord Grange's vindication of himself, the editor of the collection of letters says—"The letters now printed must considerably impair the mystery of the reasons which led to the abduction of Lady Grange. They may be held conclusively to refute the supposition that the affair had any connexion with the political intrigues of the period." On the contrary, we cannot read the confidential portion of the correspondence without feeling that it almost conclusively establishes the fact, that the affair had a "connexion with the political intrigues of the period;" and that the reason why so many people of rank and political influence aided the plot, why the removal was conducted with so much secrecy, and the place of seclusion was so remote and inaccessible, was because Lady Grange was possessed of dangerous secrets, which compromised her husband and his friends. The general tone of the letters, and their many cautious and mysterious, yet unmistakeable references to the proceedings of friends across the water, show that the judge confided to the owner of the old mansion at the foot of Bennochie some things which it would be dangerous for an enemy to know. But we shall cite just one passage, which we consider sufficient of itself to support our position. It is taken from a letter dated 22d March 1731, just ten months before his wife was seized and carried off. There is something very peculiar in the structure of the letter; and, whether in pursuit of some not very appreciable joke, or to waylay the penetration of any hostile party who, might take the liberty of opening the "Then I am told that Lady Grange is going to London. She knows nothing of his going, nor is it suspected here, nor shall be till the day before he goes off, and so she cannot pretend it is to follow him. She will certainly strive to get access to Lady Mary Wortley, Lady Mar's sister, (whom she openly blesses for her opposition to our friends,) and to all where her malice may prompt her to hope she can do hurt to us. You will remember with what lying impudence she threatened Lord Grange, and many of his friends, with accusations of high treason and other capital crimes, and spoke so loud of her accusing directly by a signed information to Lord Justice-Clerk, that it came to his ears, and she was stopped by hearing he said, that, if the mad woman came to him, he would cause his footmen turn her down stairs. What effect her lies may have, where she is not so well known, and with those who, from opposition to what Lord Grange is about, may think their interest to encourage them, one cannot certainly know; but if proper measures be not fallen on against it, the creature may prove troublesome; at any rate, this whole affair will require a great deal of diligence, caution, and address."24 He talks of her as mad: and so far as passion and the thirst of vengeance make people mad, she undoubtedly was so. He speaks of her intended accusations as lies—that is, of course, a convenient expression to use towards them. But what is very clearly at the bottom of all the trepidation, and doubt, and difficulty, is, that she might be able, mad and false as she was, to get facts established which called up very ugly associations with Tyburn and the Grassmarket. A minute incident stated in the common histories of the affair, that Lady Grange planned a journey to London for the purpose of taking her accusation to the fountain-head of political power, is confirmed by this extract. It may easily be believed that, among Grange's official colleagues—some of whom had also their own secrets to keep—the lady's frantic accusations met with little encouragement. The Justice-Clerk referred to in the extract, Adam Cockburn of Ormiston, was, like Grange himself, a great professed light of the church, and what sort of interview he would have held with the furious lady, may be inferred from the character given of him by a contemporary,—"He became universally hated in Scotland, where they called him the curse of Scotland; and when ladies were at cards, playing the nine of diamonds, commonly called 'the curse of Scotland,' they called it the Justice-Clerk. He was, indeed, of a hot temper, and violent in all his measures."25 In the old narratives of the affair, it is stated that Grange felt his position to be the more dangerous, as some letters had been intercepted tending to inculpate him with the Jacobites on the Continent. It is singular that this should also be pretty satisfactorily proved by the present "Sir Robert told me in wrath that he would have nothing to do with Lord Mar, that he had dealt ill with him, and he should not have his pardon; and he would by no means give me any reason for it, but Lord Townsend did, whom they had stirred up; for he in anger told me Sir Robert had intercepted his letters to me with very odd things in them, injurious to Sir Robert and his friends.... Soon after this, Ilay, with cloudy looks, began to make insinuations of some discoveries against me too, and at length told me that Sir Robert said that he had also intercepted bad letters of mine to Lord Mar, but confessed they were not directed to Lord Mar, and neither subscribed by me nor in my hand of write, but that by the contents they knew them to be mine to Lord Mar. I answered that they might assert what they pleased of letters said to be directed to me, and which they owned I had never seen, but that I must know of letters wrote by myself, and that I ever wrote any such was a damned, villainous, malicious lie; and let Sir Robert or any else be the asserter of it, whoever did assert it, was a liar."26 This is a very successful outbreak of virtuous indignation, and does considerable credit to its author, as a pupil of that school of which his dear friend Lord Lovat was the undoubted head. We cannot help considering that it is a question of some historical interest and importance whether the abduction of Lady Grange was or was not a measure adopted for political reasons, and that the letters before us, by finally deciding the question, throw an important light on the political state of Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century. If we suppose that the lady was carried under circumstances of such profound mystery, and by the agency of some conspicuous and distinguished personages, to the distant island of St Kilda, merely because she was a lunatic who required to be in custody, we only see that many important and sagacious people were taking a very complex and cumbrous method of accomplishing what might have been done with ease; for in those days, few would have troubled themselves about the wretched woman, if her husband had chosen to keep her in any place of confinement, telling the neighbourhood that she was insane. But when we find that the Jacobite party in Scotland were powerful enough to kidnap a person obnoxious to them, and keep her for nine years in a place to which the laws of the realm and the authority of the crown nominally extended, but where their own power was the real operative authority, we have a very formidable notion of the strength and compactness of the Jacobite union during Walpole's apparently powerful ministry. The correspondence of Lord Grange admits its reader to a species of confidential intercourse with him, which can scarcely be called agreeable. It exhibits one of the most disgusting of all the moral diseases—the rankling of the arrow of disappointment in the heart of a defeated political schemer. It is not the man of brave and bold designs baffled, or the utopian enthusiast disappointed of the fulfilment of his golden dreams, or the adherent of one absorbing political idea looking at it lying broken to pieces at his feet: in all of these there is a dash of noble and disinterested sentiment, and the politician defeated in his conflict with the world has still the consolation of an honest if mistaken heart, into which he can retire without the sting of self-reproach. But all Grange's
Grange thought at one time that he had great claims on Walpole, and Lord Ilay; and he seems to have very diligently performed one class of duties which politicians sometimes think sufficient to establish a claim for reward—he had been an indefatigable petitioner for ministerial favours. We have heard somewhere of a story of a political economist, who during a long walk is pestered by an Irish beggar, who asks his honour just to give him a sixpence, "for the love of God." The economist turns round to argue the matter: "I deny," says he, "that I would be showing my love to the Deity by giving an idle rascal like you money; if you can state any service you have ever done to me worth the sixpence, you shall have it."—"Why, then," says the mendicant thus appealed to, "haven't I been keeping your honour in discourse this half hour?" Such seems to have been the character of Grange's claim on the ministry—he kept them in unceasing "discourse" as a petitioner. Not that he did not profess some claims of another kind. "During all this time," he says, "I ran their errands and fought their battles in Scotland." Nor did he fail sometimes to allude to his services as a religious professor, so ill-requited, that he taunts Ilay with having "already effectually interposed for
In the sequel he exclaims, "Can such usage be bore, even by the spirit of a poor mouse!"—deeming probably that its endurance by a rat was quite out of the question. It is singular enough to find from these revelations of Lord Grange's character and habits, that while he was plotting the abduction of one mad woman, he was busily engaged in attempting the release of another. Yes, as a first step, he was intending to release her; but there are a few hints, slight in themselves, but wonderfully suggestive when they are associated with his wife's history, showing us that his ultimate intention was to make a second victim. In this scheme he was defeated by a spirit less crafty but more audacious than his own—by no less renowned a person than Lady Mary Wortley Montague, whose name has already been mentioned as "openly blessed" by Lady Grange for her "opposition to our friends," meaning the Jacobites. We have among the papers the history of the baffled attempt—at least one side of the history, and, when shaken free of the dust of Grange's prolix grumblings, it is infinitely amusing. The intended victim in this instance was Lady Mar, Lady Mary's sister, the wife of Grange's brother. Lady Mar was insane, and in some shape or other committed to the guardianship of her sister. There were some pecuniary matters depending on the question of her detention or release, so vaguely hinted at that it is not easy to discover their nature. It would appear that Lady Mar was allowed by the favour of the court, and probably through the interest of her relatives, a jointure of £500 a-year over the estates which were forfeited from her husband. Lord Mar was then living in poverty abroad; and Lord Grange was inclined to think that this sum would be better administered by himself and his friends than by Lady Mary. Looking at the £500 from his own side, he of course saw Lady Mary on the other, and judged that her motives were as parallel to his own as the one jaw of a shark is to the other—so he says, "Lady Mar, they say, is quite well; and so as in common justice she can no longer be detained as a lunatic; but she is obstinately averse to appearing in chancery, that It was believed that if Lady Mar were released from Lady Mary Wortley Montague's influence, means might be taken for so arranging matters that her husband should participate in her jointure. There was another matter, however, in which Grange himself had a more particular prospect of pecuniary advantage. Lady Mar appears to have had a beneficiary interest in a lease of a house in Whitehall, forming part of the royal demesne. An arrangement seems to have been made by which, during her incapacity from insanity, her own term was conveyed to her brother-in-law, Lord Grange, while he at the same time obtained a reversion of the lease in his own favour. He had, it appears, sold his whole interest in the property—both the lease he had obtained from Lady Mar's guardians and his own reversionary interest. He was now, therefore, in endeavouring to procure the release of Lady Mar, on the ground of her restoration to sanity, about to enable her to revoke the transference that had been made to him of her own share in the lease. In his own words, "On Lady Mar's being at freedom, the assignment of her lease to Lord Grange becomes void, and so does the sale he has made of it; and in that sale the lease to Lady Mar was valued at £800 sterling, which will be lost by the avoidance of it." Such is the danger; and now, in a very brief continuation of the quotation, let us observe the way in which it was to be met, for, considering who was the writer, it is really well worthy of observation. "Were Lady Mar in her freedom, in right hands, she would ratify the bargain, but if in her sister's, probably she will not." Such was the plot; she was to be restored to her freedom that she might be put "in right hands,"—in hands in which there was no chance of her refusing what might be demanded. But there was a lion in the way, or rather a lioness, as we shall see. Lord Grange's anticipations of Lady Wortley Montague's operations is not the least remarkable of his revelations. It is "the power within the guilty breast" working as in Eugene Aram's dream. What Lady Mary suspected it were difficult to say, but he who ventured to predict her suspicions spoke from his own guilty conscience—spoke as the kidnapper and secret imprisoner. We pray attention to the remarkable expressions with which the following quotation closes:—
Such are Lord Grange's "imaginary conversations" of Lady Mary Wortley—like many others, a more accurate reflection of the thoughts habitually dwelling in the writer's own mind, The interchange of compliments between the parties, when they came to actual conflict, is extremely instructive. "She concluded with rage," says the judge, "that we were both rascals, with many other ridiculous things." But perhaps more people will think her ladyship's penetration was not more ridiculously at fault on this than on other occasions. Horace Walpole left an unfavourable testimony to her treatment of her sister, when he alluded to "the unfortunate Lady Mar, whom she treated so hardly when out of her senses." Pope caught up the same charge in the insinuation— "Who starves a sister, or denies a debt." Lord Grange, for his own part, has the merit, when characterising his opponent, of a coincidence with the illustrious poet—at least in the bestowal of an epithet. Every one remembers Pope's— "Avidien and his wife, no matter which; For him you call a dog, and her a ——." It is satisfactory to find, on the most palpable evidence, that Lord Grange had sufficient poetical genius to supply this rhyme, though whether his poetic powers went any farther, we are unable, and perhaps no one will ever be able, to determine. We must quote, unmutilated, one of Grange's conflicts with Avidien's wife. Though the scene be roughly described, it has an interest, from the unscrupulous vehemence of the principal actors, and the eminence of the little group, who cluster round it like a circle of casual passengers round the centre of disturbance, where the wife and the brother-bacchanalian compete, on the pavement, for the possession of some jovial reveller, whose half-clouded mind remains vibrating between the quiet comforts of home and the fierce joys of the tavern. There is something affecting in the vacillating miseries of the poor invalid—we wonder how much of the cruel contest can be true; for, that it is all true, it is impossible to believe—yet Lady Mary could be violent, and she could be hard, when she was attacked or baffled; and she had a rough and unscrupulous nature to combat with, in the historian of their warfare.
We have no more of this affair until the lapse of several months, when the judge, at the very moment of apparent victory, is routed by his watchful antagonist. He had obtained possession of Lady Mar—she was on her way to Scotland, "in right hands," but had not crossed the border. This was in 1733, a few months after Lady Grange had been safely conveyed to the grim solitudes of Hesker. Surely some bird of the air had whispered the matter to Lady Mary; for her measures were prompt and stern, and they draw from the baffled plotter many hard expressions and insinuations. "But on the road, she [Lady Mar] was seized by Lord Chief-Justice's warrant, procured on false affidavit of her sister Lady The people with whom his London connexion brought the judge in contact, display a gathering of dazzling names in the firmament of fashion and wit. Bolingbroke, Windham, and "the courtly Talbot" are casually mentioned. Grange says in passing, "I am acquainted with Chesterfield." He has something to say of "sweet Lepel," the "wife of that Lord Hervey who last winter wrote the pamphlet against Mr Pulteney, and on Mr Pulteney's answer, fought with him and was wounded." Arbuthnot, and the prince of classical collectors, Richard Mead, mix with the ordinary actors of the scene. Young Murray, not then a crown lawyer—but sufficiently distinguished for wit, eloquence, and fashionable celebrity, to have called forth the next to immortal compliments of Pope—must have been one of the brilliant circle; and in the early period of his intercourse with his brother's sister-in-law, accident would be strangely against him, if he did not sometimes meet in the ordinary circle the pale distorted youth, with noble intellectual features and an eye of fire, whose war of wit and rancour with "furious Sappho" left the world uncertain whether to laugh with their fierce wit, or lament the melancholy picture of perverted genius, exhibited by a hatred so paltry yet so unquenchable. In his autobiographical revelations, the economical old judge leaves some traces of his consciousness that his journeys from Merlyn's Wynd to Whitehall were a decided transition from the humble to the great world. He thus describes one of these journeys, in the letter already cited, in which he gratified his humour by talking of himself in the third person.
Strange indeed were the social extremes between which this journey lay. At the one end we see the brilliant assemblages of the most brilliant age of English fashion. The rays of the wax-lights glitter back from stars and sword-hilts, diamond buttons and spangles. Velvet coats, huge laced waistcoats, abundant hoops, spread forth their luxurious wealth—the air is rich and thick with perfumed powder—the highest in rank, and wealth, and influence are there, so are the first in genius and learning. Reverse the picture, and take the northern end of the journey. In an old dark stone house, at the end of a dismal alley, Lovat's ragged banditti throttle a shrieking woman—a guilty cavalcade passes hurriedly at night across the dark heath—next opens a dreary dungeon in a deserted feudal fortalice—a boat tosses on the bosom of the restless Atlantic—and the victim is consigned to the dreary rock, where year follows year, bringing no change with it but increasing age. The contrast is startling. Yet, when we read Lady Grange's diary and Lady Mary Wortley's letters together, they leave one doubtful whether most to shudder at the savage lawlessness of one end of the island, or the artificial vices that were growing out of a putrid civilisation in the other. |