From the Woolsack Lord Camden calls by name the first Douglas pleader. James Montgomery bows, mounts the low rostrum, and begins to speak.
Counting long week-ends, it took the House of Peers five weeks to hear the Douglas Cause. Montgomery pleaded the cause of Archie for thirteen hours, and was much admired. Three Hamilton lawyers replied, Dunning with his Devonshire accent, pursy Yorke, and electric Alexander Wedderburn.
The day that Wedderburn ascended the rostrum, as from a play-house hundreds were turned away. A packed gallery listened to the clarion voice. Boswell, who was jealous of Wedderburn, disliked the metallic clang of that voice, which made the speaker appear a machine, a man of brass. But others admired him. By turns sarcastic, forcible, polished, and conciliating, he combined in himself the great physical and intellectual requisites for swaying that gentleman-like mob of peers. His eye was full of fire, and the grace and energy of his compact frame made him seem six feet tall. It was said that for a great debate he took enormous pains, confecting in writing some fine sentences, and even practising before a looking-glass his starts of surprise at ironical cheers and his looks of complacency at the sympathy of his hearers.
His performance was enthusiastically applauded, and the Duchess of Hamilton and Argyll was much enlivened to hear his praises ringing. A dissenting opinion came from Boswell’s boon companion, Andrew Erskine:
In my opinion it was as dull and as unentertaining a narrative as ever I had the mortification of listening to, he tried to be ironical and to raise a laugh, but he failed egregiously, for there was not a smile on the countenance of one of his auditors, this pleased me, and made me smile though from a very different reason from what Mr. Counsellor Wedderburn in the pride of his parts would have imagined.
The climax of the contest came when the Douglas rebuttal was opened by Sir Fletcher Norton, “Sir Bull-face Double-fee.” The Douglas big gun was a bawling bully with a reputation as a bold and able pleader, remarkable alike for the clearness of his arguments and the inaccuracy of his statements. Again the house was mobbed. Even Archie Douglas was there. He came in with the Duke of Queensberry, and listened to Sir Fletcher with all possible sedateness and composure. It was the Douglas turn to be enlivened by their pleader’s praises.
On Monday, February 27, the pleadings were over and the debate began. Archie was not there. The Duchess of Queensberry carried him down to Kew to divert his anxiety.
Everybody else was there who could crowd in. Jammed in like sardines, creating and suffering from intense animal heat, they were to stand or lean without refreshment, except a roll or an orange they might have in their pockets, until, ten hours later, the cause was decided.
The Duke of Newcastle opened the debate, coming out for Douglas in a twelve-minute speech to which nobody listened. Then Lord Sandwich arose, and everybody listened. Clerks planted by Andrew Stuart took surreptitious notes.
Sandwich, at fifty, was notorious. As a leading spirit of the blasphemous “Monks” of Medmenham, he was an atheist, a Satanist, and a voluptuary. He kept, it was said, a favourite ape, which he would dress in canonicals, and call upon to say grace at his table. In person he resembled his ape, being ugly and shambling and rather like a man who has been half hanged and cut down by mistake. “Nay, say no more, your Grace,” said an angry clergyman when the ape had finished, “I had not known your Grace had so near a relative in Holy Orders.”
Sandwich as an administrator gave us the Sandwich Islands, and as an indefatigable gamester he invented that portable meal, the sandwich. He was shrewd, cynical, reckless, and witty; and like every shrewd cynic a convinced Hamiltonian. He now arose and scandalized the Bishops.
Better-turned orations, hand-polished, were put into print. Sandwich’s scandalous remarks were lost in horrified silence until they turned up recently among Andrew Stuart’s papers.
The Bishops blushed when the unabashed nobleman sailed into the topic of midwifery: “My Lords,” he boasted, “I have had some practice in my lifetime among the female sex, and I believe I know at least as much of midwifery as my Lord Advocate Montgomery, yet in the whole course of my practice no such case has ever come under my cognizance as that cited by his Lordship, of a woman of eighty years of age that bore a child. Perhaps in the Northern climates, where I suppose that learned gentleman has chiefly practised, women may last longer …”
Sandwich was adept in the lore of roguery. He borrowed a word from underworld cant, and for the first time put an English name to the crime in dispute: “It is what I call kidnapping, if you have it in plain English,” said he. He called a Newgate roll of impostors, including his unfortunate cousin Captain Hervey, who was in fact no impostor but the veritable husband of the bigamous Duchess of Kingston. Another cousin figured to his disadvantage in a fantastic imaginary instance:
“I will beg leave to cite a case in my own family; I will mention to your Lordships the Peerage that gives me the great advantage of addressing your Lordships on this occasion. The person that succeeds to my children is Mr. Wortley Montague. He has lived at Grand Cairo and Jerusalem and God knows where, he is all over the world. I know Mr. Wortley very well. He is a man of gallantry. He has a particular affection for matrimonial women, for in many places there has generally been a Mrs. Wortley, I dare say every one of them very fairly married. Well, my Lords, now we may suppose if my branch of the family should be extinct, and a son of Mr. Wortley born at Aleppo comes to your Lordships’ bar and claims the Peerage, the Turks will cry, O Lord, here is the habit and repute, there is nothing upon earth so clear, he must be Earl of Sandwich! A great many people lived with Mr. Wortley, and a great many women knew Mr. Wortley. Will your Lordships admit him upon that claim? Will your Lordships upon the evidence of the father—upon his death-bed declaration—will your Lordships upon Mr. Wortley’s marriage—he is infinitely better than Sir John—will your Lordships admit this pretender?”
He paid his respects to Sir John: “There has been so much cooking of evidence, that I am surprised the gentlemen could not find a better receipt for a witness. It was a new receipt—a man of a bad memory which he supplies with a lively imagination.”
He had his fun with Isabel Walker and her evidence about Lady Jane’s getting into bed with a stool. He was specially equipped to do so, because he had, as the British plenipotentiary at Aix, moved into the house and probably into the bed in question: “The beds are made there so high that you are obliged to make use of a stool or a box to get into bed. When I travelled in that country I did the same, and yet, my Lords, I should have been monstrously surprised if people had brought that in evidence that I was with child …”
The scandalous old atheist closed with an oblique fleer at the “death-bed declarations” he had heard so much about: “My Lords, I hope my declaration is not a death-bed declaration, but I hope it will be as solemn as that of Lady Jane and Sir John Steuart; and I do declare if I was going into eternity, I should go with the full conviction of the truth of what I say, when I declare that I believe the Douglas claimant is not the son of Lady Jane Douglas.”
Now came the moment the crowd was waiting for, when the Law Lords would speak. Camden was dreading it. He had prepared a sheaf of notes, contrary to his custom, and he feared to fluster himself by using them, or to stumble by not using them. When he arose, he held them rolled in his hand. With perfect fluency, harmony, and recollection, he launched into his oration, brandishing his roll of papers like a truncheon, and never once faltering.
He came out for Douglas. The court rippled with the sensation.
He also came out in a bitter denunciation against Andrew Stuart: “I really do not know who this Andrew Stuart is. I observe an anxiety of the counsel at the bar to vindicate him, forgetting their clients’ cause for two hours together. I don’t know what sacredness there is about this gentleman. This I know very well, that whenever a cause requires it, Mr. Andrew Stuart must be content to hear such observations as the evidence in the cause makes necessary.”
It
was too much for Andrew Stuart. Seeing himself pilloried, and his cause tottering, he rose, white to the eyes, and stalked from the house.
Camden finished with a side-swipe at atheistic Lord Sandwich: “I shall not follow the noble Lord who spoke last through the various descriptions he has given us of midwifery. His observations may be just, but they cannot affect the character of Lady Jane Douglas, or the cause of the appellant, her son. The question before us is short: Is the appellant the son of Lady Jane Douglas or not? If there be any Lords within these walls who do not believe in a future state, these may go to death with the declaration that they believe he is not. For my part I am for sustaining the positive proof, which I find weakened by nothing brought against it; and in that mind I lay my hand upon my breast, and declare that in my soul and conscience I believe the appellant to be her son!”
Camden sat down, the roll of papers still unopened in his hand. Lord Bedford arose. He made a few sensible remarks for Hamilton amid general inattention. The big moment was still to come.
At two minutes after six, in the wavering yellow light of the candles, Lord Mansfield stood up. Like Wedderburn, he had exchanged his Scotch accent for a feigned voice with a metallic ring; but he was so handsome, so forceful in his periods, so elegant in his diction, that the galleries heard him with rapture. He sailed into the Hamilton proceedings with all guns blazing.
“I never saw in any cause so much anger, so much disingenuity, so cruel a stand, so much dexterity and so much art to break truth, to wrest and torture evidence, to colour facts, to throw dust in the eyes, to foul the head, to mislead the heart and judgement. I never saw such a scene of rank and gross perjury!”
Back in the hall, helpless to answer, while his cause fell in ruins, Andrew Stuart had himself better in hand; but he flamed with anger. The day came when, in a series of letters as mordant as those of Junius, he took his revenge; now he could only listen with bitter resentment.
Mansfield shrugged off Sir John’s evidence without a qualm—“The ornamental part has been added from his too lively imagination.” Then he turned to a more congenial subject, Sir John’s lovely lady. He began to recall her “more than ordinary cross fate.”
The heat of the house was oppressive, and Mansfield’s emotional pressure kept rising. Suddenly his senses reeled, and he fainted away. It was an effective bit of by-play. The Chancellor himself in his robes dashed out at the side door, and came back with wine. Lord Mansfield took two restorative potations. Even the groundlings, who had no wine, were nearly as much recruited by the inrush of fresh air when the door was opened.
Back on his feet, Mansfield played out his big emotional scene. He called her before them, the thin-faced woman who came three times in silence, absolutely literally starving without a morsel of bread, to the man who remembered her as a famous toast. He adverted to her letters:
“Here we read Lady Jane’s heart. Confederates in guilt do not impose upon each other, two highwaymen when they divide the watches do not tell each other that they found them in the street.… Lady Jane’s reputation is unsullied and great. How is it possible to credit the witnesses, some of them of a sacred character, when they speak of Lady Jane’s virtues, provided we can believe her to have been a woman of such abandoned principles as to make a mock of religion, a jest of the Sacrament, a scoff of the most sacred oaths, and rush with a lie in her mouth, and perjury in her right hand, into the presence of the Judge of all, Who at once sees the whole heart of man, and from Whose all-discerning eye no secrecy can screen, before Whom neither craft nor artifice can avail, nor yet the ingenuity and wit of lawyers can lessen or exculpate; on all which accounts I am for finding the appellant to be the son of Lady Jane Douglas!”
The putting of the question, which followed, was the merest formality. Every peer put his hand upon his breast, and declared upon his honour that Archibald Douglas was the son of Lady Jane, and the right heir of Douglas.
Archie Douglas came back from Kew as cool as a syllabub, and received the news with great composure. The Duchess burst into tears. It fell to the steady boy, not yet twenty-one, to comfort her. The rumor of this scene threw a poetical young lady into ecstasies.
How did our Hero hear the joyful News?
My feeble Pen, assist me, gentle Muse!
Composure still upon each Look appears,
Joy uncomplete, his Nurse was drown d in Tears:
No time is lost to ease her Load of Grief,
His gen’rous Heart now swells to give Relief.
’Twas great, ’twas good! to free from such Distress!
Such tender acts a virtuous Soul express.
Approval of the victorious heir was general. He went to Court, and behaved to perfection. Kitty of Queensberry gave a great ball in his honour, and he graced it with sedate decorum. He escorted the two Duchesses to the play-house to see George-Anne Bellamy in the Albion Queens. When the groundlings saw him in the box between the two Duchesses, they burst into an ovation. Archie sat unmoved, but Duchess Peggy was still a little light-headed. She dipped so many curtsies that dry Duchess Kitty had to lean across the immobile Archie and pluck her by the sleeve-ruffle. “Sit down, Peg!” Miss Bellamy, in the wings, laughed so hard at this that she missed her cue.
On March 2 a horseman clattered up the Edinburgh High Street as night was falling, reined in at the Cross, and threw his hat in the air, shouting: “Douglas for ever!” It was Islay Campbell, who had ridden hell-for-leather from London to outstrip the mail and be first with the glorious news. His shout brought the men of Edinburgh on the run, and touched off a three-day celebration of riotous proportions.
The unruly Edinburgh mob broke loose. They decreed a general illumination in honour of Douglas; no window was safe unless there was a candle against the pane. They broke Hamiltonian windows without waiting. To the cry of “Porteous him!” they showered stones against the Lord President’s new house in Adam Square. “Aye,” said a wag, listening to the rattle and crash, “these honest fellows in their turn are giving their casting votes.” Another contingent scoured down to Holyrood and tried to break into the Hamilton apartments; but the soldiers chased them off.
Still another riotous detachment paused before Auchinleck’s house. Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, had voted for Douglas; but the old grandee was too stiffnecked to illuminate under compulsion. When the mobleader saw the darkened windows, he gave the order to fire, and himself led the attack in a shower of missiles and shattered glass.
The mob-leader was James Boswell.
For this Roman impartiality the mad young lawyer gained an unenviable notoriety. “You have been rioting, you Dog you,” wrote Dempster to Boswell, “and have broke thy honest Father’s windows, as the story here tells. No body suspects that you have thereby broke his heart.”
Old Boswell was further pained and incensed when he heard, at the Sessions House the next day, that his son had been in the van of the dangerous crowd that tried to force the doors of their friend Lord Hailes. With tears in his eyes he entreated the Lord President to commit the unruly young man to the Tolbooth.
James Boswell was actually taken up and quizzed before the Sheriff.
“Pray,” said that worthy, “relate your proceedings in your own way.”
“After I had communicated the glorious news,” replied the impudent youth, “to my father, who received it very coolly, I went to the Cross to see what was going on. There I overheard a group of fellows forming their plan of operation. One of them asked what sort of man the Sheriff was, and whether he was not to be dreaded. No, no, answered another, he is a puppy of the President’s making.”
On hearing this exordium, the Sheriff went off, leaving the culprit to himself. The incident was closed.
The rejoicings were still in full swing. The mob surrounded the Sessions House and hissed the Hamiltonian judges. “A ridiculous enough accident happened to me,” wrote Hailes to Charles Yorke. “You know the judges sit by rotation three and three in the Outer House. I was peaceabl
y hearing a cause, when the alarm came, ‘they are attempting to pull the President out of his chair.’ In a moment everybody but a few lawyers and clerks left the Outer House; I had no idea at the time of any chair but the chair in Court. I went to Lord Pitfour who was near me, and said, ‘They are pulling the president out of his chair, we must go and share fates with him!’ He followed me into the Inner House, there there was nothing but bare walls, this confirmed me in the opinion that Civil Justice was annihilated. I called for a macer that I too might go out in form; I found immediately that the court had not been assembled, and that the confusion had been about the President’s chair in the street. The President assured me that he heard the cry ‘pull him down’ and I can assert that he was more enraged than terrified.”
The creeshy mob-leader, Bowed Joseph, rose to the occasion with a popular jape. He organized a procession of asses labelled with the names of the Hamiltonian Lords, from a big one led by a woman in front, down to a runt jackass bringing up the rear and labelled “Lord Barjarg.”
Even the preachers had their jape, preaching from double-meaning texts, which was a popular form of ecclesiastical wit. Reverend Hugh Blair had the effrontery to preach before the entire fifteen judges from the text, “What fruit had ye then in those things whereof we are now ashamed?” (Romans 6:21)
As the news ran from town to town, it kindled up, like lightning, bonfires and illuminations. Bells were set ringing, guns banged and cannon thundered, there were processions and dinner parties, balls for the quality, dancing in the streets, feasting in the gaols. Free liquor flowed down thousands of gullets, DRINK DOUGLAS HEALTH AND WELCOME, said a sign over a hogshead of strong ale before a Glasgow inn. The mob obliged, while gentlemen in the tavern drank Douglas’s health in wine on the balcony, and dedicated their glasses by flinging them down to shatter among the crowd. The landlord of the Saracen’s Head burned twenty carts of coals, and offered to pay the bill if the near-by cottages should add themselves to the conflagration. On the Isle of Raasay the gentlemen set fire to a mountain, and on Skye they ignited a great cauldron of whiskey, cinnamon, and sugar before the kerns were allowed to drink it up.
The Heir of Douglas Page 19