The Heir of Douglas

by Lillian de la Torre

  The Douglas lawyers would have given much to expunge the defender’s father from the case altogether. They did their best. He had gone before the court in December, 1762, and emitted a most inconvenient mass of contradictions and confusions. The La Marr details alone were a terrible nuisance to the Douglas argument. Equally embarrassing, the old man had confirmed the birth-date by the receipt of a credit from Rheims. Now among the papers appeared a voucher for the Rheims money, collected on July 26.

  Against the admission of such inconvenient testimony the Douglas lawyers fought stubbornly. When the Court of Session insisted upon admitting it, they appealed to the House of Lords. Then they thought it over. They looked mighty silly trying to quash their own chief witness. Sheepishly they withdrew the appeal.

  At the same time, it was among the Steuart correspondence that the Douglas lawyers found their strongest weapon. Colonel John had treasured his lady’s every word, every loving, gay, courageous little note she wrote to him in prison, when there was no money and not enough to eat and nothing to cling to but their love for one another, and the “little men,” and trust in God. How could one read those notes, said the Douglas faction, and still believe that such a Lady Jane was guilty of a crime which blackened the Colonel, wronged the children, and flouted Providence? Among the proofs they published more than 150 of the notes.

  While the Memorials were being constructed, both sides kept a sharp eye on ailing Mrs. Hewit. On September 22, 1766, she died. Scarcely was the breath out of the old body, when Islay Campbell’s clerk was in the house, slapping an attachment on her effects, ostensibly for debt. The Hamilton lawyers found an answer to that. Armed with a writ, ostensibly concerning quite another affair, they appeared and searched her things. They found a prize. Years before, in the Duke’s lifetime, Mrs. Hewit, like Colonel John, had taken to scribbling. She had scribbled, and never sent, a letter designed to “vindeceat my dr Angelles pious memry to the confeution of thos desinen velenes who is adeshesly attempted to blast her character.”

  “I do sollemnly decler & am ready to swear that I received they two lovely babs out of the bed as they came to the woreld from L. Jane, the landlady Madam Michall and her daughter present,” wrote Mrs. Hewit.

  The designing villains who were audaciously attempting to blast Lady Jane’s character were far from being thrown into confusion when they read this screed. They thought it the final proof of the conspiracy their opponents had all been involved in, lying in concert about Michelle’s being the place of the birth. They added the letter to the evidence before the court.

  On January 24, 1767, the Memorials for Hamilton and Douglas were handed in to the Court of Session. The Lords hefted the heavy quartos, more than sixteen hundred pages between them, and hastily decided to give themselves time to read them. They set June 23 for the hearing.

  James Boswell in his turn hefted the Hamilton Memorial.

  “We shall know after this,” he quipped, “what a Scotch Brief means”—meaning a contradiction in terms, like “French leave.”

  Solemn Sir Adam’s Memorial tickled young Boswell’s funny-bone. The older lawyer had brought mathematics to his aid in a long calculation of chances, and decided they were 11,533,394,545,595,999 to 1 in favour of the pursuers. This feat of arithmetic young Boswell celebrated in a comic song.

  Alas, my poor brethren, poor sons of the laws,

  [sang the irreverent youth in the person of Sir Adam],

  You’re all knock’d o’ the head by the Hamilton cause;

  No more can you live by your noisy vocation,

  The plan now is silent and slow calculation.

  Derry down down …

  You may e’en make a bonfire of

  Bankton and Stair,

  [law-books

  And betake you to Sherwin, to Cocker,

  and Mair;

  [arithmetic texts

  The Roman Twelve Tables exploded shall be,

  The table of Multiplication for me.

  All the rules are of use, and I value them all,

  Tho’ little to us on Division would fall:

  On each single rule a whole life must be spent,

  But give us Reduction and we are content.

  O’er Europe we’ve hunted, and got to our aid

  Philosophers gratis, and lawyers when paid;

  And if light-headed ladies have said I’m not gay,

  They now sure must own that I figure away!

  The song made a great hit. Young Boswell sang it in the very Parliament House, while the amused lawyers made a circle around him. He showed it to Hume, and to Ferguson himself. He gave the Lord President’s wife a copy. He dined at the table of one of the other judges, and allowed himself to be coaxed to sing it over the wine. With his tuneful voice and his turn for mimicry, young Boswell was a popular entertainer, and nobody took him ill.

  Andrew Stuart could not sing, but he could write. He took his pen, and wrote a reply:

  “To the Author of the Poem on the Hamilton Cause”

  How can the young Barrister vainly so Dread

  The loss of a fee or a knock o’ the head

  Double Pay from the Douglas by calcul most snug

  Both as Poet and Counsel you’ll now have a tug

  Skill in numbers & law you have sure beyond measure

  Since thus by Reduction you double your treasure

  By Rules such as these whilst your fortunes advances

  None so fit to make Laws for Paoli’s finances

  Vain your dread of Division, all Rules it excells

  Where Law takes the Oyster gives Clients the Shells

  Why rail at Reduction Wise Counsel agree

  To Reduce any Form but that of the Fee.

  Your Light headed Ladys The youthfull or young

  Wish you fam’d in the Law tho’ your Lyre lay unstrung

  At Bar or at Toilette at Ball or at Play

  If you don’t act a Part you cant figure away

  Old & Young and Philosophers gratis are charm’d

  With that Knight at whose Merit methinks you’re alarmed

  He with Candor & grace hits the truely Sublime

  His Prose towrs above while We crawl but in Rhime

  Of Truth Love & Beauty Good Minds feel the Power

  Some boast greater charms in Jove’s golden shower

  Both Numbers and Beauty your Ballad refuses

  Let us then bid adieu to the Corsican Muses.

  Boswell in his turn took to his native Doric for another gay ballad, which still lies among his papers:

  Gif ye a dainty Mailing want

  [holding

  And idle-seat prefer to working

  Ablins ye’ll get it by a Plea

  [perhaps

  That far aff owr the seas is lurking.

  Gang ye your ways to Paris town

  Blaw in the lug o’ lown and Sorner

  [ear of rogue & beggar

  And I’se be Caition ye’se bring hame

  [I’ll be caution

  An enlevement frae ilka corner.

  French proofs! howt man gae hawd your tongue

  For, to sic proofs nae Judge e’er lippens.

  [trusts

  Gowpins o’ gowd your cause has cost,

  [handfuls of gold

  And after aw it’s no worth tippence.

  Tho’ your Memorial’s braw and lang

  And tho’ your Sequel like a Curple

  [crupper

  Would keep it sicker steeve and tight,

  [firm stout

  ’Twill faw before the men in purple.

  Your Procureurs do by their art

  Cast glamer in the e’en o’ dunces;

  [a spell

  But conscience Callands the Fifteen

  [lads

  Are owr auld-farind for the Munsies.

  [too reverend to be made guys

  Since ye a worthy Lady’s name

  Wi’ muckle foul abuse hae pelted,

  By Jinks I’d turn
up aw your tails

  And hae you aw fu’ soundly belted.

  With this view the man in the Edinburgh street was heartily in accord. Archie Douglas was in town with his public-school manners and his splendid raiment and his thousands a year, buying good opinions with all three. Twenty guineas for the Charity Work-house and ten guineas for the poor of the Canongate was small change to him. The town was seething with pro-Douglas sentiment. It found vent at the play-house, where the managers thought good to produce that touching drama of a long-lost heir, Home’s Douglas.

  “To be the son of Douglas,” declaimed that noble youth, downstage center, “is to me inheritance enough …”

  The pit went wild.

  Over tea tables feeling ran equally high. Families divided for Hamilton or Douglas, drawing-rooms rang with altercation. The ladies doted on the youthful heir. The mob followed him about. Young Boswell thoroughly enjoyed the furore and contributed to it, tooting on the Douglas horn to some purpose.

  In between comic songs he took to inventing interesting items for the newspapers, keeping them incessantly warm with various writings all tending to touch the heart and rouse the parental and sympathetic feelings, as he put it to himself. His readers never guessed, as their hearts beat faster over Douglas, that the items were flat lies. Nobody would have known, if the wicked young fabricator had not kept a file of The London Chronicle in which, with justified pride, he plainly labelled every one of his inventions.

  “Bets to the amount of 100,000 pounds,” he invented, “are depending on the Douglas Cause.” Public demand, he added shortly after, was leading to plans for holding the trial at Holyrood Palace, with scaffolding seats to be sold, at a half guinea apiece, for the benefit of the Royal Infirmary. This interesting fiction was followed shortly after by a grave-faced essay on the crime of which Lady Jane had been accused, supposing of children or “Partus suppositio.” Young Boswell by a combination of pastiche and plagiary made this pro-Douglas item seem to have come from the pen of Adam Smith the economist, who was in fact a strong Hamiltonian.

  His happiest bit of fiction was a little continued story about the merry shorthand men who, said Boswell, set out for Edinburgh to report the Douglas trial. There were five of them, and he gave each an interesting pedigree. One was a distant relation of the Speaker of the House of Commons. One was own sister’s grand-nephew to Father Garnet the Jesuit, of Gunpowder-plot fame. One was a boon companion of the late Duke Hamilton, who, having spent his fortune raking, meant to recoup it by shorthand. One, Selwyn by name, had a great look of George Selwyn the famous wit; “but we cannot venture to affirm that it is he.… Mr. Burridge is the most extraordinary personage among them; he wears a brown coat and a cut wig, and looks as grave as a parish clerk; yet, over his bottle, he has the most droll and ludicrous sallies; and when he turns that cut wig of his, you would laugh for a whole evening. In the year 1745, he was employed as a spy by the government, and by letting himself down a chimney at Derby, and keeping himself concealed, he with the help of a dark lanthorn, wrote down many secrets of the rebel chiefs. In one place, where none but ladies were admitted, he went in properly dressed, and with a fountain-pen, in the shape of a fan, he took down with white ink, on the bottom of a French song, the whole conversation, without so much as being perceived by those about him.”

  It would be useless, Boswell told the newspapers, to try to exclude these disguise artists from court. Nevertheless, they did not appear. The last that was heard from them, via Mr. James Boswell, was that with mobs at their heels and messages from idle ladies every hour of the four and twenty, they had fled the town, disguised like English riders, and were off on a jaunt to Inverary.

  The affair of the shorthand writers was not the only bit of fiction that inventive young Boswell coined out of the Douglas affair. He made it the theme of his first and only novel. This affecting work took shape during the vacation, at Auchinleck. There in the spacious library with its two great fireplaces, young Boswell dictated his novel to Brown the clerk. Brown as he wrote was often struck with admiration, and with unaffected enthusiasm cried out: “Excellent!” Boswell felt inspirited with a great vigour of genius, and considered his novel an elegant mark of attachment to Douglas.

  The title of the work was Dorando. Its theme was the attempts of the family of “Arvidoso” to oust from his birthright the Prince Dorando, a youth who “by his sentiments, his manners, and his air, could not but be acknowledged as of superior rank.” Arvidoso’s tool is “Don Pedro Stivalbo,” a cavalier of principle and true Spanish generosity, who nevertheless is misled by the duplicity of French priests and advocates “who with many bows, shrugs, and compliments, pretended they had made astonishing discoveries.” Arvidoso is balked, but not until the case is heard by “the grandees of Spain,” on which occasion they are harangued by their leader in the unmistakable vein of the Great Pitt himself. Young Boswell’s flair for mimicry spared nobody.

  Nowhere in the book did the name of Douglas appear. Nevertheless, it was a risky thing to publish in Scotland while the suit was pending. Foulis printed it at Glasgow; but he put an English publisher’s name on the title page. The work came out on June 15, and went briskly. Boswell helped it along by puffing, an art which he instinctively understood. He plied the papers with paragraphs. “At a time when all ranks are agitated with expectation,” he reported loftily, “‘Dorando’ comes like old Nestor, to calm the violence, and to diffuse good temper and complacency of disposition.” He expected Dorando to influence the court, and had the impudence to say so in a rattling set of verses:

  … For all your sense,

  And all your pence

  Spent in a foreign land-o

  Will make but sport

  To the grave Court,

  When they have read Dorando …

  “If the hand of M. Rousseau guided by my Lord Marischal of Scotland is not here,” exclaimed the London Chronicle reviewer with unbounded enthusiasm, “Dorando is at least the production of no ordinary genius.” So was the review. The reviewer was Mr. James Boswell.

  The old Jacobite nobleman was amused. “I have seen in the English newspaper,” he wrote from Potsdam, “that Mr. Rousseau with my directions and assistance has writ a Romance, Dorando I think it is called, they tell me that it has given offence, and that it is a history of the Douglas’s unlucky law suit, I wish you would sent it me by one of the oyster boats coming to Hamburg.”

  Boswell sent him a presentation copy, a fine large-paper quarto fairly inscribed: “To the Right Honourable The Earl Marischal of Scotland from His Lordship’s faithful servant James Boswell.” He was careful not to employ his usual inscription: “from the Authour.”

  In this he was wise, for the pamphlet had indeed given offence. Everybody was reading it; in two weeks it had to be put to the press again. The newspapers were busy publishing excerpts. Boswell’s puffs began to incorporate dark hints about the danger of persecution. The day after the new edition was announced, the Lords of Session pounced. They did not pounce on the author; they were not eager to gaol the son of one of their number. They gaoled the newspaper publishers.

  With unbounded impudence, Mr. James Boswell, advocate, undertook the defence of one of them, and handed in on his behalf a Memorial breathing utter innocence. After a couple of postponements, the affair fizzled out with a genteel reprimand to Mr. Boswell’s client. By that time nobody at all was interested in the matter, from Boswell at the bar to the Lord President on the bench. The Douglas Cause had finally been decided.

  On July 7, after five years and 173 Memorials, Answers, Replies, Duplies, and Triplies, the cause came up for judgement. All engines had been set to work. Archie Douglas and his Duchess had been very busy engaging the affections of high and low alike. What the Duchess’s informal charm could not effect was attained by Archie’s impeccable public-school good breeding. Andrew Stuart watched uneasily, and begged the beautiful Hamilton Duchess to come to Edinburgh in her turn. She came, with her little Duke of eleven and h
is small brother of nine, and moved in at Holyrood House. But the temper of the mob was uncertain; she thought best to stay away from the court.

  Everybody else was packed into the Inner House on that hot July day. Ladies of quality crowded the balcony. Archie Douglas, nineteen years old, bore himself among them with proud reserve. The red-faced Duchess sat by him. Andrew Stuart among the Writers was white with strain. On the advocates’ bench James Boswell prepared to take notes.

  Excitement was intense as the fifteen judges filed into their places. From towering Lord Kames, who had once thought of a career in the King of Prussia’s tall regiment, to child-size little Lordie Barjarg, they made a brave showing. Robed in purple cloth and red velvet, they swung into their places, dimming with their magnificence the black-robed lawyers at the bar. The lawyers’ day in court was over. The pleadings were done, the proofs marshalled. Today they were here for judgement.

  Young Boswell must have scanned the fifteen faces and wished he could read behind them. What were Archie’s chances?

  Some opinions were known. Boswell of Auchinleck was convinced for Douglas; his son had read the Douglas proofs with him. Jaunty ancient Pitfour could be counted on. The Hamiltons had tried to get him out of the way as Archie Douglas’s step-uncle-in-law, the old man having married the Colonel’s third wife’s sister; but they had failed. Coalston, Kames, and Eliock had been nominated as Douglas tutors. Coalston’s son the Writer was Archie’s man of business. Coalston’s son-in-law, scholarly David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, now sat on the bench with him; but he was not so certain. Lord Gardenstone was a certainty; in France he had been known as Francis Garden, friend to pigs and Douglas. Equally certain was James Burnet, Lord Monboddo. The Duchess of Hamilton had pulled every string to keep him from becoming a judge, but a judge he had become nevertheless.

  Thomas Miller, Lord Justice Clerk, was a big question-mark. He was the puppet of Archie’s cousin the Duke of Queensberry. The Boswell connection thought him a mere Body sprung from nothing, and deplored the Duke’s helping him to crawl into office.