Chapter 7
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.
Robert Burns, ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’
Like anybody else, my view of castle life was steeped in the books I had read and reread throughout my childhood. The only problem was that the girls in the stories were nearly always passive victims of the baddies. Bluebeard locked Fatima in a tower. All she could do was scan the horizon, hoping to spot the clouds of dust thrown up by horses’ hooves, which would mean her brothers were coming to the rescue. They took their time. Rapunzel was imprisoned in another tower. Letting her hair grow and waiting for help was the extent of her escape plan. The Lady of Shalott would reap a deadly curse if she even so much as glanced out of her tower. Sure enough, her life was ruined when she used the reflection of a mirror to peek at Sir Lancelot singing ‘tirra lirra’ by the river below. The poet Fiona Pitt-Kethley wrote a brilliant précis of that interminable poem:
Saw Knight Pass
In Glass,
Left Room
Full of Gloom,
Stole Boat,
Died Afloat.
As for Snow White, she ran away from her castle after her stepmother tried to kill her. And although she started a new life as a housekeeper in a commune of stunted miners, eventually she was rendered comatose by a poisoned apple. A sharp needle brought the same fate to Sleeping Beauty, who lay in her tower for decades, and both Sleeping and Snow attracted the attentions of princes with necrophiliac leanings. The only punchy heroine of a castle story was Macbeth’s wife Gruoch, but she was heartless, on the make and an accomplice to murder. There was nothing on the nursery bookshelves that said the heroine was feisty, she had a good time, then left the castle and went out into the world and did something epic.
Our first school holiday with Cawdor as our new home was the cause of some trepidation, not least because Emma and I travelled north on the sleeper unaccompanied. No-one had told us that Inverness was at the end of the line, so we spent a sleepless night straining out of the carriage window to check the nameplates of every station we drew into, worried that we would miss our stop. Black-backed gulls wheeled over the platform and Bill the butler was at the barrier waiting to meet us. He put our cases into the back of the Land Rover. ‘Dududududududid you have a gugugugugugood jujujourney up, guggugggugirls?’ he stammered, but we were barely able to respond ‘Yes, thank you, Bill’ before falling fast asleep across the back seat.
Bill woke us gently when we arrived and we staggered into the dining room for breakfast while he took our suitcases to our bedroom. We were sharing a tiny attic in the eaves at the opposite end of the house and on a different floor from our parents. Edith slept quite near to us, but she seemed as traumatized by the move as we were. If we ever looked into her room, she seemed oblivious to our presence, vacuum-packed into her candlewick dressing gown, pink curlers in, teeth out and clutched in one hand, and muttering in Welsh under her breath.
The exciting news was that we could now roam freely through the house. When we first arrived, I expected we would still be bound by our grandfather’s rule of internal exile, and my heart sagged at the thought of that nursery with its subfusc wallpaper. It was not the only aspect of our Scottish life that felt a step behind the times. Every so often it felt as if Pa’s constant harping on about our history was to the almost complete exclusion of any conversation about our future. What’s more, the national newspapers always arrived a day late, and years after everyone else had got three we could still pick up only one television channel. And while our southern school friends went to discos, in the north we had huge, formal reeling parties.
After the insularity of Wales, Cawdor felt like and was a social hub, fishing and shooting parties regularly filling the house from August to February. Whatever the season, Aunt Carey and Uncle Peebles, Uncle James and Aunt Bridget and assorted children were frequent visitors, along with our more distant relations like Great-aunt Helen and Drunkle Uncle. Living nearby was William Gordon Cumming, who was married to Ma’s sister Aunt E. Although Uncle William was Betty’s son, he and Hugh had of course been friends long before they became related by Jack’s marriage to her. The stepbrothers then married a pair of sisters, which made the Gordon Cumming children our double-cousins – or that is what I liked to think. They became our closest friends.
My parents suddenly had dozens of Highland friends, hardy, humorous people who thought nothing of driving forty miles to eat with one another. After dinner, the women would leave the dining room in advance of the men, who stayed behind to drink sloe gin and smoke cigars – an archaic custom that was meant to spare our blushes from strong talk. The women would go off to retouch their make-up and would then gather around the fire in the drawing room while Bill served tiny cups of coffee on a tray. Emma and I had the duty to offer around mint chocolate wafers and to push the end of a gnarled juniper branch into the hot embers until it smouldered, then to pace about, allowing the sweet-smelling smoke to fumigate the room. With that done, we would position ourselves on wooden toadstools in the inglenooks on either side of the fire, where we could listen and watch, and await the return of the men.
Flickering in the warm glow of the fire, portraits of long-dead family members jostled for space on the walls, like some unwieldy family album. In a full-length painting, John Campbell – hero of the Franco-Welsh encounter – looked windblown and dashing in a red velvet coat with deep fur cuffs, pointing to something unseen. Looking at him from my toadstool with half an ear on the conversation going on around me, I used to imagine he was saying, ‘Sire, I assure you, my horse was tethered to the hitching rail yonder.’ The painting was one of a pair: the other showed his beautiful wife, Caroline Howard, dressed in fashionable Grecian folds cinched under her bust with a pink sash, and trailing a straw sunbonnet. Pryse Campbell, the son of Joyless John and the father of John the French vanquisher, gazed out from his frame grey-wigged, hand on hip, in a kilt and tartan doublet, and swamped by what looked like a pair of tartan parlour curtains draped over one shoulder. His portrait was painted during the period after the Jacobites’ final defeat, when the wearing of any tartan was banned. The English wanted to suppress the Scots’ sense of a separate identity, but their plan proved unworkable. Pryse was not alone in flouting the law; it was a craze: young Scottish dandies saw it as a matter of pride to pose for portraits dressed in their forbidden clothing. Two hundred years later, my grandfather had still preferred to wear tartan, the sartorial rump of more dashing times.
Pryse’s sister Elizabeth was there on the wall as well. Although she was far too beetle-browed to be thought a beauty, her facial characteristics can be traced down the generations. Her likeness to my father, born two hundred years later, was quite uncanny. It could have been him up there in a yellow silk dress standing in a flower-covered bower, even down to the faint five o’clock shadow. Every now and again I would try to persuade Pa to sit for a portrait, for his great-grandchildren’s sake if nothing else, but he ignored me. Now, if ever I want to look upon the face of my dead father I need only go to the portrait of Elizabeth in the drawing room. I find it strangely reassuring, albeit an image of my father as a cross-dresser.
* * *
Hundreds of babies of both sexes were born at Cawdor in the centuries before us, but all the family stories were about the derring-do of hairy blokes – all, that is, except for one. There was one young thane who was utterly different from all the others. So different, he was even a she. She was my absolute favourite ancestor. I thought of her every day because her first name was carved into the ornate stone of the dining-room chimneybreast, behind my mother’s chair. The story enfolded my heart and abducted my imagination. What’s more, this story, unlike Macbeth, was a true one, about a real girl in our own castle. Her life seemed the very pith of romance and gave some indication of the rambunctiousness of the marriage market at that time. She was the reason we bore the name Campbell as
well as Cawdor. Sadly, her name was Muriel, but you can’t have everything.
In 1498, John the 8th Thane died young, leaving an only daughter as the heir to Cawdor. Such was the family’s concern about kidnapping and Muriel’s security that they branded her on the thigh with a red-hot key, for that same irrefutable recognition a farmer enjoys when checking the flank of a prized cow. They had good reason to be scared. With expansionism ever in mind, the powerful Campbells of Argyll gazed upon this peachy prize from their stronghold on the west coast, and in 1499 Archibald Argyll, the 2nd Earl, mustered a posse to kidnap the baby. They crossed the width of Scotland using the Loch Ness corridor, but when they reached Cawdor they found they were out of luck. Muriel was not there; she had been taken to stay over harvest time at Kilravock Castle, the home of her maternal grandparents, the Roses.
The Campbells might have been thwarted, but for an idiot who slipped the village limits and blurted out the baby’s whereabouts. Kilravock was not far. The posse wheeled round, galloped through the stubble fields and splashed across the River Nairn to reach the castle on the far bank. Muriel was with her nursemaid in the grounds when they were attacked. In the frantic struggle the nanny bit off the last joint of the child’s little finger, just to be absolutely certain, on top of the thigh brand, that she too would recognize her miserable charge in the future. Shocked and no doubt choking, the nursemaid staggered off to summon help as the Campbells escaped.
Some miles further on, they stripped off Muriel’s cloak and wrapped it around a wheatsheaf. The majority of the posse kicked on with the tiny girl, while a small band stayed behind to hinder the Cawdors in their pursuit. They laid the decoy in the shadows of a hazel grove beside the track and then encircled it, swords drawn. When the Cawdor horsemen caught up there was a vicious skirmish. Seven Campbells were killed, but by the time the Cawdors realized they had been duped and the bundle was not Muriel it was too late. The kidnappers were well on their way to the Argyll lands in the west, and once they reached the west coast she would be beyond rescue. Muriel was held until 1510, when, aged twelve and legally ‘of age’, she was married off to Archibald’s younger son Sir John Campbell and officially united with Scotland’s answer to the Corleones.
Every time we sat at the dining-room table, my eyes would flick over her carved name in the same way they would over a grandparents’ wedding photograph. I would look at my baby sister Laura and think, ‘That’s how big Muriel was when she was kidnapped.’ Then at Emma and think, ‘And that’s how big she was when she got married.’ And then across to my father and think, ‘And there have been sixteen thanes between her and him.’
With Muriel’s ‘arranged’ marriage, the tendrils of the Argyll Campbells’ power extended into the north-east. The good news is that by all accounts her union was a happy one. She and John had grown up together, and given her experience of family love prior to the kidnapping and her scarred leg and slightly less than the full complement of fingertips, perhaps Muriel was thankful she was no longer in the Cawdors’ care. Muriel and John settled in the clan heartland and did not return to Cawdor until 1523, after John murdered Lachlan Maclean of Duart, the husband of his sister Elizabeth. It was said that she could not give Maclean an heir, so, bored and estranged, he spurned a conventional separation in favour of dragging Elizabeth to the Firth of Lorne, where he chained her naked to a rock that got covered by every rising tide. Maclean then hurried to Archibald, his Argyll father-in-law, and sorrowfully but prematurely reported his young wife’s death. Unfortunately for Maclean, a group of passing fishermen heard Elizabeth’s cries as the seawater rose around her waist. They freed her and she fled to the sanctuary of her Campbell brothers. In a fit of fraternal indignation, John tracked Lachlan to Edinburgh and ‘dirked him in his bed’. As the killing avenged a clear case of attempted murder, a judge gave John a pardon. Despite this official exoneration, neither Edinburgh nor the county of Argyll was safe for him any longer. He had to be forever on his guard against Maclean relatives exacting their revenge on his revenge. Suddenly, the very remoteness of Cawdor, on the far side of the Grampian Mountains, was attractive.
The Campbell party arrived at Cawdor to a hostile reception. Muriel’s four Rose uncles had held sway there ever since she had been kidnapped and they had long stopped counting on her return. They did not welcome any shift in the status quo and saw the move as a greasy Campbell expropriation of Cawdor land. They dismissed Muriel as an impostor, but a quick flash of thigh and abridged finger proved otherwise. Muriel emphatically claimed her inheritance as 9th Thane and evicted them. Her furious uncles called an emergency council. They resolved to resist her with maximum force and wrest back the castle for themselves.
In those days, the castle worked on a five-layered defence system; if one failed, the defenders fell back to the next. First was the curtain wall. Second was the drawbridge. Third was a hefty portcullis. For many years there was no conventional front door. The main access to the house was via portable wooden steps to the first floor of the keep, and this was the fourth defence. It can’t have made bringing occasional tables into the house easy. As soon as the uncles’ horde arrived, Muriel’s party retreated inside the castle, hauled up the ladder behind them, and left the raiders milling in the courtyard below. If the invaders remained within the castle walls, the counter-attack would swing into action. Behind the battlements at the top of the tower was a cookhouse, the fifth defence. Here, come rain or shine, industrial quantities of waste could be heated up in cauldrons and the contents tipped down the ‘murder hole’ onto the enemy beneath. Knowing this, the invaders fell back and set about besieging the castle.
After some days, an intrepid Campbell broke cover, sallied forth and killed two of the uncles on the drawbridge. The deadlock was broken, and negotiations began. Muriel acknowledged her uncles’ long trusteeship and granted the two survivors various tracts of her land in return for a yearly rent. The payment she levied was a single rose bloom from each of them, every summer, lest they forget who the rightful owner was. This elegant arrangement was sustained until their deaths, and thereafter the lands reverted to Muriel. Once matters were settled, John and Muriel started a family and their descendants have been defined as ‘Cawdor’ Campbells ever since.
Muriel lived to the age of seventy-five. Back then, a natural death at such an advanced age was as remarkable as her youthful trials – although her story was not such an unusual one for the Highlands. Quite aside from her two uncles killed at the siege of Cawdor and the stabbing of Lachlan Maclean, another brother-in-law of Muriel’s fell to his death down the sheer cliffs below Edinburgh Castle while trying to escape from jail. Janet Douglas, Muriel’s beautiful sister-in-law, was burned at the stake on trumped-up charges of witchcraft for daring to spurn a powerful suitor. And in 1571, in an incident that had echoes of Macduff’s fate in Macbeth, Muriel’s niece, Margaret Forbes, was burned to death along with her children and twenty-six of her household in an arson attack on Corgarff Castle. Corgarff was burned down a further three times over the next two hundred years. Muriel’s eldest son predeceased her, so she handed the inheritance to her grandson, yet another John. He was murdered sixteen years later, shot at close range in a plot by ‘Black’ Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy, who was jealous of the influence Sir John had over the young Argyll laird Archibald ‘the Grim’.
When I was trying to understand the strange things my father did, I wondered if he ever worried about how he would have acquitted himself in such situations from our family history. Would he have chased after the Campbell posse stealing the baby Muriel? Would he have stood up against the French soldiers like John? Would he have gone off to sea at sixteen to enlist in a war, like his father had? Would his grandchildren one day tell stories about his honourable deeds? After my father died, it slowly became clear that his idea of paternal tenderness would just about run to biting off the top joints of our little fingers.
Chapter 8
Today I saw a crow, and yesterday I had a distant view of
a rabbit.
The Revd Sydney Smith
For any child with a thirst for blood, growing up at Cawdor was like a little corner of heaven. Pa’s first ever writing effort when he was a little boy was an essay lovingly preserved by Wilma. It read: ‘If you want to know how to catch a rabbit, You’d better follow me. The End.’
His love of trees began when he first started creeping around the Big Wood with his shotgun. When he took us down the same paths, he would point out sessile oak, min fir and northern hemlock, and show us where the trees were scarred by lightning strikes and where squirrel drays were hidden high up in the topmost branches. When Hugh was a boy, the keepers would drag a ladder to the moat, clamber up it and lure him out of bed by tapping on the window with a Zippo lighter. Cap on head, flask in pocket, fingerless mittens, fag in mouth, he would join them to stump across frozen plough hunting hoodies (hooded crows) and pigeon. Pa was in his element when shooting, and one of the first things he did after Grandpa died was to order matching jackets and plus-fours for John Stewart and all the other keepers so that they were conspicuous as ‘Cawdor men’ in their tweed uniforms, with the new Thane as their general and birds as the enemy.
Pa encouraged the boys whole- and the girls halfheartedly to shoot. There were child-size shotguns to hunt vermin (not edible) and game (allegedly edible). With each new species potted, there came the crude rite of getting smeared in its blood. Sometimes, when John Stewart, the head keeper, took Colin flighting for duck I would go along to keep him company. We would take up our positions among the juniper bushes at the edge of a little pond as the sun sank and wait for the skeans to come in. ‘Don’t shoot until the bushes are black!’ John would whisper before heading off to the far side of the pond with his spaniel. I liked going with Colin, because often he didn’t fire and you could watch the whizzing silhouettes of the ducks as they dropped acrobatically out of the sky with an occasional quack, and hear the soft noise of the air wiffling from their wings.
A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle Page 12