The Heir of Douglas

by Lillian de la Torre

  Biggest question-mark of all was the Lord President, Robert Dundas. Young Boswell admired his boldness, dispatch, penetration, and fire. His animal spirits made the court seem alive, like ringing the glasses at a drinking-bout, or striking a shuttlecock with a sounding battledore. Nevertheless the young lawyer was rather intimidated by him, as by a large dog in a bleachfield: “He is chained and does not bite you. But he barks wowf wowf, and makes you start; your nerves are hurt by him.”

  Dundas had held the balance between Douglas and Hamilton with scrupulous fairness for fifty-five months. Now he broke his silence. In his dictatorial, passionate, wowf-wowf style he came out for Hamilton.

  After him, the rest of the court would deliver their opinions in order of seniority. It would be a long process; each judge was prepared to deliver a speech commensurate to the importance of the cause. Archie Douglas’s suspense was not over.

  To balance Dundas, old Lord Strichen spoke for Douglas. The heat was wilting the men in velvet. At this point they adjourned.

  The heat almost cost Archie Douglas a supporter. It laid low his guardian Kames, and the day was only saved by a famous lady then far away—Mrs. Montague, Queen of the Bluestockings. For this learned dame Lord Kames entertained a sentimental regard, and only the thought of her, he averred, got him up the next day, though indisposed, to speak for Douglas. He spoke rather poorly, Boswell thought, like a man who had expected it to go without talk—cela va sans dire—or like a man who had intended to stay in bed.

  The same day, Lord Auchinleck had his say, wheezing out a few words for Douglas in a voice enrheumed by the fetid court-room vapours; and Lord Coalston followed to make it four to one for the heir of Douglas.

  Archie’s lead was cut down next day, when little Lord Barjarg blew hot and cold and came out for Hamilton. There was gossip later that in dubiety he had prepared two speeches, one for each side, and plumped for Hamilton at the last minute. The same day saw two other votes for Hamilton, and one of them was cast by a Douglas guardian.

  The decision stood tied at four to four.

  The next day matters went faster. Pitfour and Garden-stone did their bit for Douglas, Stonefield and Kennet for Hamilton. Then came the turn of Lord Hailes. In his student days at Utrecht, he had been one of Lady Jane Douglas’s young men; but now he saw her differently. Ruefully he reflected that if his speech were to have a motto, it ought to be a line from the Æneid: “Unwillingly, O Queen, I left thy shore.” He spoke ably against her.

  At six against seven for Hamilton, the court adjourned over the week-end, and everybody went home debating the matter. The final sederunt to come would be decisive.

  On Tuesday the ruin of Douglas was sealed. Thomas Miller gave lip-service to Queensberry’s cousin Douglas, his vote to Hamilton, and a side-swipe in passing to James Boswell in the matter of the sheepstealer. Burnet’s able speech and his vote for Douglas could not save matters.

  By eight voices to seven, Archie Douglas was adjudged to be Jacques Louis Mignon, son to the glass-worker; and Lord Douglas Hamilton was heir of Douglas.

  The blood of Douglas will protect itself;

  But we shall need both friends and favor, boy,

  To wrest thy lands and lordship from the gripe

  Of Randolph and his kinsmen …

  (HOME’S Douglas)

  Chapter XII

  “Dear Toutie,” wrote the eleven-year-old Hamilton Duke to his “wife,” “I was too hasty in calling the President a fool: he has knocked up the Duchess of Douglas; he has declared himself for us—for us—mark that now, for us. Is not that curious? and this moment we have heard the cause is won.”

  Others were calling the President a fool. The mob was far from pleased with the Douglas decision. They jostled Dundas in the Parliament Square. Their chosen leader, Bowed Joseph, the creeshy cobbler of the Cowgate, took it on himself to stop him in his sedan chair and deliver an official rebuke.

  Anonymous letters threatened him:

  We shall burn your Lodgin in Town and then Arnston Lodgins shall go in flames and then yourself we shall make a Captain Portus of you in the Gras market as an exampel to all false judges … and if you want to know the writhe

  they call him Timothy hove Justice

  Douglas and Hamilton, the Crown and the city, combined to set twelve hundred pounds on the writer’s head. Boswell heard that the writer was a poor ragged foolish printer’s-boy, and had made his escape. Dundas really had little reason to fear the sign-post from which the unruly Edinburgh mob had not so long ago suspended unpopular Captain Porteous.

  Archie Douglas, at nineteen just turned out of a princely inheritance, was far less upset than the printer’s boy.

  Our cause is indeed lost here [he wrote to Jock], but there is another court, where justice and impartiality must prevail. The final decision here is not so great a stroke upon us as I believe upon most of our friends. Every person’s character here is pretty well known, as well as their motives for their behaviour, but time and a little patience shows every thing and every man in their proper light. My affection for you and your family will not be the least diminished by the late decree.

  It was always known that the loser would appeal. The Douglas lawyers could “reclaim,” calling for a review by the Court of Session; or they could appeal to the British House of Peers. They let the time elapse without reclaiming, and the judgement was “extracted”; that is to say, recorded. Upon this Andrew Stuart on behalf of the winner gave a feast for the court clerks and the friends and well-wishers of the pursuers. It cost the Duke of Hamilton £34. 10. 0. Aeneas Macdonald at Paris followed suit, regaling the understrappers with vin couleur de rose at the Duke’s expense.

  Aeneas Macdonald was still posted in the rear-guard on behalf of Hamilton, and he reported regularly. Andrew Stuart kept a sheaf of his reports. They informed him that Douglas adherents were still very busy all over Paris looking for Madame Le Brun and intriguing for their cause. Sometimes McKonochie appeared in town and conferred with Carnegie of Boysack. It was the business of Macdonald and other Hamilton agents to keep a sharp eye out. “Buhot, and Godefroi and D’Anjou and I are upon the watch,” Macdonald would report, or again: “Godefroi never misses to come to me when he has anything new.”

  There was bad news about the family of star witnesses, the Mignons: “Young Mignon that was a journeyman in the wine trade has given us some trouble, for he is a très mauvais sujet, and was taken up some days ago as a pickpocket, and was very near being sent to the galleys,” wrote Macdonald.

  In more polished periods M. D’Anjou told the same story. He added that the elder Mignons had been after him for a couple of louis. He feared that in their distresses they might be induced to sell out to Douglas, and besought Andrew Stuart’s permission to give them a trifle to go on with. Andrew Stuart set his lips, and replied: “I am very disturbed over their misery and misfortunes, but it is absolutely impossible for us to give them any assistance, with money or otherwise. Our enemies are just looking for one pretext to induce belief that these poor people have received money or promises from us before their depositions.”

  Andrew Stuart certainly had no system of bribery set up. If he had, the Mignons would have been taken care of without parley. One wonders what Godefroi hoped to gain from his pro-Hamilton activities.

  Bad-hat young Mignon was sentenced to flogging and branding and three years in the galleys. He escaped this fate by appealing the sentence and dying in prison before the appeal came on. The Douglas faction never found it out.

  Meanwhile in England Parliament rose without hearing the Douglas Cause. The Union Duke of Queensberry had by this time taken his young cousin Archie under his wing, and it fell to him to break the bad news. The old statesman much admired the philosophic and noble way in which the young fellow, not yet twenty, took this disappointment. Characteristically, he was perfectly easy under it.

  Heavy-set, quiet, and grave, the young heir of Douglas was beginning to cut a figure in the great world of Lo
ndon, making friends for his cause and winning popular approval for himself by the correctness of his bearing. Even David Hume, a violent Hamiltonian, had to admit that Archie bore so good a character that it was impossible to feel any enmity toward him.

  So once more Archie Douglas, Andrew Stuart, the Duchesses, and the men of law settled down to a waiting game. While they waited presses rolled and tongues wagged. Pamphleteers had their say. The cause made clatter in every drawing-room and coffee-house in London. James Boswell, the self-appointed Douglas champion, was still in the thick of it.

  Boswell’s happiest stroke for Douglas, and perhaps the decisive one, was the edition which he published of The Letters of Lady Jane Douglas. From the 189 letters and excerpts printed in the Douglas Proof he selected, cut, and rearranged the choicest. With his usual impudence he drew his mottoes from two pro-Hamilton judges, as if they endorsed my Lady, and added a “character” judiciously selected from the words of the Hamilton advocate Lockhart, as if he admired her. He added a few valentines addressed to friends and fellow citizens, in the shape of complimentary foot-notes. Nor did he omit a valentine for James Boswell, in the form of a puff for Dorando, a passing reference which made it seem at first glance as if Lady Jane had written one of her eloquent letters in consequence of reading that affecting work.

  None of these editorial exertions was needed. The letters spoke for themselves. They did more for Lady Jane’s boy than all the law-papers put together.

  In usefulness this one publication outdid everything else Boswell did for Douglas—his Dorando, his inventions and puffs in the newspapers, and even his lawyerly exposition of The Essence of the Douglas Cause.

  All these exertions made the zealous youth ever increasingly welcome at Bothwell Castle when the Duchess was in residence there. When he announced his coming arrival, and demanded a warm, orthodox room—sounding rather as if he had once been fobbed off with the box-room—the Duchess gave him a merry reply. “You will be welcome,” said she, “to the warmest bed in the house—my own.” Saucy young Boswell professed to think this not very orthodox.

  Under such condescending treatment from a Duchess, his zeal grew. He was not satisfied with publication. He talked. In the spring of 1768 he went to London, and talked Douglas to anybody who would listen. Queensberry listened, and McKonochie. Dr. Johnson at Oxford listened, and said what Boswell wanted to hear about the principle of filiation. The Chief Justice of the King’s Bench listened.

  The Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, along with the Lord Chancellor, was the key to the situation. “If the Law Lords disagree,” explained one of the peers, “there is no saying how it will go; because the peers, however imperfectly prepared to judge, will follow the judge they most respect. But if they unite, the case will be determined by their opinion; it being the practice in the House to support the Law Lords in all judicial cases.”

  The Lord Chancellor was Charles Pratt, Lord Camden, fat of face, warm, sullen, and a uniform Whig. Camden was keeping his own counsel, and Boswell could not get at him. The Chief Justice was that William Murray who in the ’50 got Lady Jane her pension. He now sat on the bench as Lord Mansfield. On May 20, 1768, young Boswell called upon Mansfield, and instructed him about the Douglas Cause.

  “I have not,” said Mansfield, “read a word of the cause.”

  “I dare say not, my Lord,” said Boswell sceptically.

  “I have not, upon my honour,” said Mansfield, as one gentleman to another. “I have their great quartos lying here upon my table, but I have been so much employed with other things that I have not had time to open them.”

  “Pray, my Lord,” struck in a flunkey, “shall I bid the chariot wait?”

  Boswell rose.

  “Sit still, Mr. Boswell,” said the complaisant Mansfield.

  The gratified youth thought he would do all the good he could.

  “What made the judges on the Hamilton side so obnoxious was their maintaining that there was no law in the cause. Now, your Lordship sees that, although gentlemen without doors are not lawyers, they are still judges of that great principle of law—filiation—on which we all depend; and every man is alarmed at the danger of that principle being taken away. When a man is called, Sir, you must stand trial for your birthright, he replies, Very well. I put myself upon my country. I rest upon my filiation. Then he is told, No, Sir, there is no law. You must bring proofs; and then it will be judged whose proofs are strongest. My Lord, when you thus deny a man the great privilege of filiation, you are taking the very pavement from under his feet.”

  “You are so,” said Mansfield.

  Boswell went away feeling in admirable humour. He was naïvely surprised, two days later at my Lord’s levee, to find, when he brought it up, that he had exhausted the subject. Still, he had done his cause yeoman service.

  On November 13 the new Parliament met, and set January 16, 1769, for the Douglas day in court. As the day drew near, excitement in high life mounted. There was much canvassing for votes, much guessing of opinions, much betting at White’s and Almack’s. The Duchess of Douglas had hired the most magnificent lodging in London, and she and Archie were showing the red face and the swarthy one all over Mayfair.

  Betty Gunning was now a Duchess with three tails—Hamilton, Brandon, and Argyll. With her two beautiful boys she was at the Argyll town house in the Oxford Road. The boys, as became their years, stayed home; but the beautiful Duchess was a favourite at Court, and she was very busy making interest in the great world.

  She heard much encouraging talk. Lord Shelburne had determined not to vote. “I conceived such a prejudice,” said he, “upon the sight of the claimant’s form and figure, that I could not allow myself to vote in this cause. If ever I saw a Frenchman, he is one.”

  Lord Hertford, who had been Ambassador at Paris during the Hamilton investigations, intended to pursue the same course, but he did not say why. Another visitor to Paris, Horace Walpole, thought that Archie had all the probable appearance of a swarthy French peasant. He took malicious pleasure in setting the ladies at odds about him.

  The Duchess with three tails even harangued their Majesties, who were diplomatically mum. When she cornered Lord Northington in the Drawing-room, however, she got a rough reply.

  “Madam,” said the old reprobate, “you’re so pretty that I’d do any wickedness with you, but not for you; and besides, the House of Lords is too public a place.”

  In December, the Cases prepared by Hamilton and Douglas were distributed. The Hamilton Case was written by Andrew Stuart. His first draft, still among his papers, shows how in revising he both shortened it and softened its sharpness. Counsellor Yorke helped with the revisions. He signed it along with Wedderburn, Dunning, Ferguson, and Lockhart.

  In exchange for his Case, Andrew Stuart received a copy of the Douglas Case, quite a different kind of writing. It was longer than the Hamilton Case, and much more rough-and-tumble. It was signed by James Montgomery and an English lawyer, Fletcher Norton, “Sir Bull-face Double-fee.” As Andrew Stuart read it, he began to simmer. He found himself figuring as the villain of the piece, blackened and lampooned on every other page as a burker of evidence and a suborner of perjury. He ignored the formal signatures, and directed his anger at the man who had really written it—Edward Thurlow. Tradition has it that this black-browed, brimstone-tongued young attorney was in the habit of resorting to Nando’s to drink punch, flirt with the landlady’s daughter, and talk loud about the law. McKonochie, listening, was so pleased with what he heard about the Douglas cause that the young lawyer was retained. As insensitive as Andrew Stuart was sensitive, he waded into the fray wielding gimlet and file, razor and chisel, and drew blood from a dozen scratches.

  Rigid with anger, Andrew Stuart sent him a challenge.

  They met on Saturday, January 14, on the frozen turf of Hyde Park. Andrew Stuart came to the ground with his brother as his second. A Member of Parliament seconded Thurlow. A malicious story went round that the second had much difficulty
in haling his principal to the field of honour. He was certainly kept waiting while the robust Thurlow, on his way to the field, stopped in at a tavern near Hyde Park Corner to eat, like the proverbial condemned man, an enormous breakfast. But when he came face to face with Andrew Stuart, he advanced and stood up to him, it seemed to his adversary, like an elephant.

  They had bottom in those days. A pistol in each hand, at ten paces they blazed away. When the smoke cleared, the antagonists were still standing. Motet’s pupil drew his sword. But the seconds judged honor was satisfied, and parted the combatants. No harm had been done. They left the ground, as they had come, in icy silence; but Thurlow carried off a heightened respect for the Hamilton manager, and as soon as the cause was over he apologized for his insulting words, and affirmed roundly: “I think him a man of honour.”

  On Monday the peers met. They had no time for Archie Douglas, being entangled with that subversive devil John Wilkes; but they set Archie’s day as Thursday, January 19.

  On Thursday the Scotch and English lawyers rigged themselves out in gown, wig, and band, and paced solemnly into the Lords’ meeting-chamber to open the case of Archibald Douglas against those who would question his birthright. All in a line they advanced, bowing thrice to the assembled peers, once at the door, again in their advance, and again at the bar. There they made themselves at home, throwing their bags of papers upon the long table that backed the solid barrier, spreading notes upon it, taking straight chairs to await their turns.

  At the other end is the dais with the throne. Along each side of the plain high chamber sit the Lords on backless benches. Above their heads the narrow spectators’ galleries are reared on posts. Now that the Lords and the lawyers are in, the curious are admitted to jam the balconies and crowd into the chamber itself, crushed together at the dais end, where they will stand without relief while the proceedings last. It is a distinguished and high-born mob. David Hume never misses a day, and noble ladies are everywhere.