The Heir of Douglas

by Lillian de la Torre

  At Paris the Scotch rejoiced in the French style, with rockets, squibs, fire-boxes, fire-wheels, and a huge set-piece of a temple all ablaze with emblematic figures and the motto: “Long live Douglas!” Even at Potsdam, Earl Marischal had in Wully the piper to play while his friends dined and in the kitchen some Irish people drank and danced to the pipes like mad.

  While the unthinking chorussed “Douglas forever!” the Hamilton tutors were glumly holding long sederunts, a “Long Parliament.” “And I believe,” remarked Boswell slyly to one of them, “a good many bills have been brought in.”

  He was certainly right. The grand total was £31,-154.–. 75. Andrew Stuart had meticulously calculated it all down to the last farthing, the fencing-master, the muff and the reindeer breeches, the tip at the glass manufactory, horses and chaises and the second-hand berline. At that rate it was a good gamble. Three years of the Douglas rents would have repaid it. Andrew Stuart’s fee was set at £6,000, which was little enough for the best seven years of his life. He would not let the Duchess ask any place for him, and if she had, there were those to block it. But he was not in want. When he arose the day after the fatal decision, he had found on his table a lifetime bond for £400 a year. William Johnstone, now the wealthy Mr. Pulteney, had put it there.

  It is said the Douglas victory cost less, a mere £23,000. At £54,000 the litigation was cheap enough, even when roughly translated into modern terms of about $1,350,000.

  When the victorious heir of Douglas returned to his native country, he was the darling of all hearts. He contributed handsomely to public charities. He received the freedom of the city. He began to apply himself seriously to the business of being a young man of fashion, driving a spanking team of mares to Leith races, sitting to Willison, country-dancing with willing misses at the pleasure-gardens.

  Enthusiastically Boswell welcomed this gilded youth to Edinburgh. He was rewarded with a brief for Douglas, and an invitation to his birthday celebration. It would soon be exactly twenty-one years since Lady Jane bore a boy-child at Paris—or since Colonel John bargained for one.

  On July 7, 1769, there was a merry consultation at Clerihew’s. The old quibbles were being resurrected, but the Douglas lawyers had no doubt that they would be safely disposed of; and indeed they were. In the midst of the merriment came news that struck the company mum with compunction. The little Duke of Hamilton was dead. Still in his teens, beautiful, clever, and beloved, he had slipped out of life wasted by the chest ailment that ran in his family.

  Three days later they were all at Bothwell Castle for Archie’s birthday. There were fireworks, bonfires, a ball, and the tenantry huzzaing on the lawn. At the grand dinner Boswell was master of ceremonies. Two engineers attended with cannon and mortar. Each time they charged the piece, the signal was relayed to Boswell, who then rose up and announced: “Charged, all charged!” Upon this Archie or the Duke of Queensberry would rise and give a toast, Boswell would call: “Fire!” and bang would go the cannon. He himself gave the last toast, an ironical one to the Hamilton address: “May fools become wise and knaves honest!” Bang! went the cannon.

  Thus did the heir of Douglas enter into his inheritance.

  He was to enjoy it for fifty-eight years. He never was granted the honours of the chief of Douglas; he never was made Earl or Duke of Douglas. He sired eight sons, of whom not one perpetuated the name, and four daughters, of whom only one perpetuated his line, now sunk into the family of Home.

  With advancing years he grew duller and prouder. Even enthusiastic Boswell began to think him cold, and void of parts and gratitude. He began to compare dining with Douglas to sitting with whores—it is pleasing for a while, but then comes the thought: “What have I to do here?” There came the day when Boswell was indiscreet, and Douglas got on his high horse and snubbed him at Court, and the unequal friendship was over.

  Archibald Douglas, Lord Douglas of Douglas, lived to be seventy-nine years old. Till the day he died, he never knew for certain whether he was in truth the chief of the house of Douglas, or the son of the glass-polisher of Paris. But he grew up a stolid youth, and he died a stolid old man. There is no reason to think he cared.

  Possibly some other writer at some time or other may be led to sum up the whole evidence …

  (HORACE BLEACKLEY TO Notes & Queries)

  Chapter XIII

  with which is incorporated

  AN ESSAY ON SOLVING ANCIENT MYSTERIES

  The Douglas Cause is one of the world’s great unsolved mysteries. Neither Douglas nor Hamilton was able to drive conviction home. Andrew Stuart set out to prove that Lady Jane Douglas generalled a kidnapping plot which made Jacques Louis Mignon the heir of Douglas. He failed. He himself had to admit that he had all the proofs in the world of her pregnancy. Hamilton and Douglas witnesses alike paid tribute to her character, and the British peers were unable to believe that she could have lent herself to a coldblooded conspiracy of kidnapping and imposture.

  Furthermore, Andrew Stuart proved too much. One kidnapping, one imposture, might go down; but two, at a distance of sixteen months, were impossible to swallow. If it was a plot, it had failed before it was completed. Before the second kidnapping, the Duke had taken every penny away from his sister, and the half-finished plot had already ended in utter disaster. Why would any plotter double trouble, risk, and expense, without the remotest hope of gain, after the plot had failed?

  The Douglas defenders had no choice. They had to maintain that the heir of Douglas was Lady Jane’s son, and everybody concerned was innocent of everything. There were great gaps in the defence. They never explained why no trace was found of the house or the witnesses of the birth. They never explained why Colonel John shuffled, and lied, and forged, and evaded a confrontation of his accusers. They never explained why Sholto lay neglected for sixteen months, nor why Archie had “all the probable appearance of a swarthy French peasant.” But for Lady Jane’s high character and maternal fondness, her boy would have been put out of the Douglas succession.

  The Douglas and Hamilton parties spent seven years investigating; they amassed more than two thousand pages of evidence and based upon them more than two thousand pages of argument; they talked for weeks on end; and they left the thing at last in doubt.

  An unsolved case, no matter how long past, need not remain in doubt forever. All that is needed is a sufficiency of evidence, and one simple rule of thumb.

  If there is not enough evidence, the necessary clues may be gone past recovering. The vanishment of the Great Seal of England from Chancellor Thurlow’s writing-desk looked uncommonly like an inside job; but it will never be solved, because whatever evidence was offered about it in Bow Street has vanished too.

  If there is enough evidence, hidden therein unnoticed may be the clue that leads to the truth.

  About many cases the truth is known. No one doubts that Burke and Hare were guilty, or Calas innocent. Those cases were solved at the time.

  The great cases that continue to fascinate are the unsolved cases. They remain unsolved because the truth has never been suspected. If it had, proof would have been forthcoming. The truth was not guessed at. Instead, angry partisans took up extreme positions on one side or the other, obscuring with their controversies the true shape of the affair.

  There is a rule for solving such cases. If in spite of evidence a mystery remains unsolved, then the truth has never been suspected, and neither side is right. The solution lies somewhere down the middle.

  This will be known as de la Torre’s Law.

  The Gowrie Conspiracy was neither a conspiracy against James VI nor a conspiracy against the Ruthvens. Given that perception, William Roughead in his brilliant study showed what it really was.

  The Popish Plot was neither a Popish nor a Protestant plot. John Dickson Carr’s great book shows conclusively who did kill Sir Edmund Godfrey, and why.

  Elizabeth Canning was neither a wicked conspirator nor a wronged innocent. What she was lies down the middle.


  There is a method for solving ancient mysteries by de la Torre’s Law. The author of Elizabeth Is Missing and The Heir of Douglas learned it from the author of The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey. If the truth lies down the middle, it is useless to belabor the old solutions. They were wrong. The best way to arrive at the right solution is the scientific way, the way of the tested hypothesis. The right guess will prove itself by the evidence.

  Furthermore, the right guess will frequently prove itself by using bits of the evidence which before were utterly inexplicable. John Dickson Carr demonstrated the meaning of Godfrey’s strange bruises when he put his finger on a hitherto little suspected murderer. When Roughead understood what happened between James VI and the Ruthvens at Perth, he understood what brought him there. The new view of Elizabeth Canning makes sense of the hitherto senseless details of the grate in the chimney and the mince pie in the pocket.

  De la Torre’s Law is a good law for wider application. In any affair at all where partisanship runs high, the wise man looks for the truth down the middle. It makes for peace in the home, in the market-place, and in the world, and what law can offer more?

  What was Lady Jane Douglas—the kidnapper or the mother of Archie Douglas?

  By de la Torre’s Law, she must be something between the two.

  It was impossible for the Douglas litigants to arrive at this hypothesis. It was as much as the Douglas patrimony was worth for the defenders to dream such a thought. They had to do their best with everything they had, from the proved pregnancy to the highly dubious Menager-Delamarre-Garnier story.

  Andrew Stuart obfuscated himself. He formed the Hamilton hypothesis in December 1762, before all the evidence was in, and never budged from it. Though he had all the proofs in the world of her pregnancy, and next to none of her complicity, he never altered his view of Lady Jane.

  In August 1763, a new hypothesis, down the middle, came his way.

  It was nothing less than the confession, by the plotter, of the nature of the plot.

  The Douglas and Hamilton partisans, out of partisanship, heard about this confession and ignored it. Because of partisanship, or because of the rules of the detective-story parlor-game, which decree that the guilty cannot be believed, subsequent investigators have likewise ignored it.

  They ought not to have ignored it. It lies down the middle, and explains what the Douglas and Hamilton factions could not explain.

  “My wife,” said the soldierly foreigner to Madame Guynette, “has lain in of twins, and they are dead. She will be so afflicted should she find it out, that there is reason to fear for her life if we do not present her with living children, and make her think they are hers, until she is quite recovered. Or if two cannot be found, one would keep her happy, and I will tell her the other is too feeble to be brought to her.”

  If Andrew Stuart had taken the gentleman’s word, as everybody did who heard it, he could have won the suit for Hamilton. All the compelling contrary evidence, centering about Lady Jane, would have been explained away. Her pregnancy, her high character, her maternal fondness for her boys, would have gone for nothing, once it was perceived that she was not the instigator of the fraud, but its first victim.

  The questions on both sides would have been answered. The second kidnapping took place after the Duke had taken away every penny, because neither kidnapping was for the Duke’s benefit. They never found the house of the birth because it was sedulously concealed; the people there would prove that the heir of Douglas had been born, and died. Sir John shuffled and lied and avoided confrontation, because he was guilty. Sholto lay neglected for sixteen months because there was not any Sholto, and Colonel John committed forgery to prove to his wife that there was. Archie looked like a swarthy French peasant because he was one.

  In the Douglas Cause character speaks strongly, and only this solution accepts all its testimony. It is impossible to believe that Andrew Stuart with his rigid rectitude went to work to fake a case. If proof were needed, it appears in the correspondence about the needy Mignons. It is equally impossible to believe that Lady Jane Douglas, with her sensitive and loving heart, her family pride and high principles, could have stolen other women’s children to perpetrate a vulgar fraud.

  On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to believe that resourceful, unprincipled Colonel John would lift a child, or do anything else he thought useful, upon the impulse of the moment. Stupid, loyal Mrs. Hewit would help him. It is easy to see how, without reflection, without foresight, from hand to mouth, from day to day, the two inept conspirators built up the Douglas mystification out of sheer love for Lady Jane, and so, half by accident, put a cuckoo in the Douglas nest.

  In spite of them, Lady Jane instilled into the hearts of all that knew her a strong belief that Archie was the right heir of Douglas because, although he was not, she thought he was. That was the strength of the Douglas Cause.

  Lady Jane Douglas, a Duke’s sister, marries beneath her.

  Everyone recognizes this fact, including the man she honours with her hand. At first it is a kind of morganatic alliance, to be discreetly managed, and not to be published.

  At Aix in February 1748, Lady Jane is four months pregnant, but like many another woman carrying a menopause baby, she does not know it. She lays the symptoms to a cold, or bile on the stomach. She goes on concealing her marriage.

  Two months later, the figure change has convinced her that she is pregnant. Strangers don’t notice, for compared with other women slim Lady Jane never looks very bulky; but nobody doubts it who remembers her extreme natural thinness. The unsuitable marriage has to be announced. She puts a good face on it: “My Lord, he is a very Titus.”

  In a strange country, short of cash in the face of rising prices, her Titus casts wildly about for expedients, and chooses a crazy one. It makes no sense to go kiting off to Paris; but who ever said Colonel John had any sense? He adores his wife, and he is panicky about her.

  At Paris they put up at the Hôtel de Chalons until they find a quieter lodging. They do not run a bill. They pay in ready money out of the cloak-bag, the same as they do later at Michelle’s.

  The Godefrois pay no attention to them. When later on they want to remember them, they point to somebody else’s blank account. On first impression, neither Andrew Stuart nor Alexander Murray trusted Godefroi; and now that we know from Andrew Stuart’s papers that Godefroi was a Hamilton agent, neither need we.

  From the Hôtel de Chalons, on July 8, the Steuart party move to another lodging. They may have to wait, as Godefroi remembers, a day or two for a debugging; but if they do, it is an unsuccessful one. In that buggy house Lady Jane is brought to bed.

  Everyone at Michelle’s hears later that this event took place at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Probably it did. It would be natural for Colonel John to turn to his Jacobite friends at Prince Charlie’s Court. Hence the Mignon inquiries are fruitless in the faubourg Saint-Germain, a very different locality. Hence later inquiries are equally fruitless. The scattering of the Scotch colony six months after the birth obliterates all trace of the landlady, whatever her real name is.

  The real name of the accoucheur is undoubtedly Pier La Marr. The name does not rest upon the Colonel’s word, but transpires from the letters. The transaction in the Tuileries is exactly like that penniless opportunist. La Marr is never found. If brother-in-law Murray locates him, he burkes him. He can testify too much.

  Lady Jane, we now know from modern genetic studies, is seven times as likely to bear twins as the next woman, because her husband comes of a twinning family; and she is more likely to bear twins at fifty than when younger. (See Reginald Ruggles Gates: Human Genetics [1946], pp. 925, 930, and passim.)

  She is more likely to lose them at fifty, too, and lose them she does. If the true Sholto had lived three days, he would have been in the parish books.

  Colonel John fears to tell her that her babies are dead. He knows her emotional intensity, and fears grief will kill her. It is not entirely a fanciful fear,
for it is grief in the end that shortens her days. He sees that he will have to put a child in her arms, and that very day, July 10 (as all the Mignon witnesses agree), he sets out to find one.

  He finds Jacques Louis Mignon. The baby’s eyes are the right colour, the slaty undecided colour of the first few days after birth. He can see that the parents are brown-eyed, and he may know that the baby’s eyes will turn brown; but it does not matter, because he does not intend to keep the child so long. As a mere matter of precaution against premature discovery he gives the parents the slip, mounts a waiting second coach, and carries the baby to Lady Jane at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

  Within ten days he has realized that he never can bring himself to take the child away from Lady Jane. He resolves to keep him, persuading himself that it will be doing the glass-worker’s brat a favour. Now he must get away from the household at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. They know too much, and they may let it out. He seizes on the bugs as an excuse to move.

  Archie stays at nurse while they move to the Hôtel d’Anjou. When he arrives there, he has already been days away from his real mother, to get so very hungry; and his first nurse has had time to make up her new skirt.

  Now that Colonel John has decided to keep the child, letters are written announcing the birth. They write them on Sunday July 21 (as Mrs. Hewit tells Isabel Walker) and post them on Monday July 22. They date them July 22. This casts light on that batch of letters dated July 10, which contain no mention of the birth, having probably been begun on July 9 and finished before post time on the morning of July 10. It is ridiculous to think that with a record before them of those letters, they would deliberately pick July 10 for the date of a fictitious birth, when they could as easily pick any other day. It is equally absurd to think that Colonel John lied deliberately about the date of the Rheims credit. Why should he?