Memoirs of a Highland Lady

by Elizabeth Grant

  My mother was also of ancient birth, the Ironsides having held their small estate near Houghton certainly from the times of our early Norman kings, the cross they wear for arms having been won in the holy wars; the tradition in the family indeed carried back their origin to the Saxon era to which their name belongs, and it may be so, for Saxon remains abound in that part of England.

  My parents met in Glasgow in their dancing days and there formed an attachment which endured to the very close of their long lives through many troubles, many checks, and many changes. But they did not many immediately, my father at the period of their first acquaintance not being exactly his own master. His childhood had been passed strangely without any fixed plan and in various homes under widely differing systems, but with the certain future of wealth and station if he lived. The beautiful plain of Rothiemurchus, with its lakes and rivers and forest and mountain glens, offered in those old days but a few cleared sunny patches fit for tillage. Black cattle was its staple produce—its real wealth, its timber, was unthought of, so that as its sons multiplied the Laird of the period felt some difficulty in maintaining them. The result in the generation to which my Grandfather, Dr William Grant, belonged, was that he with another brother, and a set of half Uncles much about their own age, were all shoved off about the world to scramble through it as they best could with little but their good blood to help them. The fortunes of this set of adventurers were various; some fared well, others worse, but all who survived returned to end their days where they began them, for no change of circumstances can change the heart of a highlander. Faithful to the impressions of his youth wherever he may have wandered, whatever may have befallen him, to his own hills he must return in his old age, if only to lay his bones beneath the heather. At least it was so in my Grandfather’s day, for he died at the Doune,1 still but the Laird’s brother, surrounded by his relations. He had prospered in his struggle for independence, beginning his medical studies at Aberdeen and pursuing them thro’ several of the continental hospitals, remaining some time at Leyden and then fixing in London, where he got into good practice; turned authour so successfully that one of his works, a treatise on fever,2 was translated into both French and German; and then married an heiress of the name of Raper of a very respectable and highly talented family.

  They were for some years childless, 12 I think. Then came my father and ‘years afterwards his only sister, my Aunt Mrs Frere, at whose birth her mother died. Good Mrs Sophy Williams, my father’s attendant, Bonne or nursery Governess, soon removed with both her charges to their Grandfather Raper’s country house at Twyford, near Bishop’s Stortford, where they remained till his death. My Aunt was then adopted by other Raper relations and my father went back to his father, who just at that time was retiring from his profession. In due course he accompanied the Doctor to Rothiemurchus on his father’s death, which happened very suddenly and very shortly; his Uncle Rothy took entire charge of his heir. The summers were passed at Inverdruie,3 the winters at Elgin and a succession of Tutors—queer men enough, by their pupils’ account of them—were engaged to superintend the studies of this wilful boy and a whole host of cousins, who helped to spoil them. This plan not exactly answering, one country school after another was tried, and at last the High School of Edinburgh, where his time wore away till the period of College arrived. He was sent to Glasgow with the intention of being prepared for the Bar; there he met my Mother. She was on a visit to her elder sister, Mrs Leitch, a very beautiful woman, the wife of one of the principal merchants of that eminently mercantile city.

  My Mother’s education had been a very simple matter. She had grown up healthy and happy in her own village among a crowd of brothers and sisters and cousins amounting to a multitude, learning the mere rudiments of knowledge from the village schoolmistress, catching up stray bits of better things from the lessons of her brothers, and enjoying any chance gaiety that now and then wakened up the quiet but very sociable neighbourhood. My Grandfather Ironside was a clergyman, rector of an adjoining parish, curate of his own, and with his little private income might have done more for his children had he not had so many of them, and been besides a man of rather expensively hospitable habits. My Aunt Leitch’s marriage opened the world to the family and my Mother’s engagement to my father was the first result.

  As I have mentioned, the marriage was deferred awhile, and before it took place both the Bride’s father and the bridegroom’s Uncle died. My Grandfather Ironside had been so long helplessly paralytick, that his death was really a release from a very pitiable existence. My Uncle Rothy died suddenly in the full vigour of a green old age. He was found in his study, leaning back in his chair, a corpse, with his large Bible open before him. This event much altered my father’s position, it enabled him to marry when he liked, and it would have released him from his legal studies had he been inclined to give them up; but besides that he thought a knowledge of law necessary to the usefulness of a country gentleman, he really liked the profession; and the French revolution, in the startling shake it had given to the aristocracy of all Europe while it was annihilating its own, had made it a fashion for all men to provide themselves with some means of earning a future livelihood, should the torrent of democracy reach to other lands. He therefore, during the year of mourning requisite on both sides, took a lodging in Edinburgh, where he gave a succession of bachelour entertainments, got through his Law trials, and then, to make sure of the fidelity of his attachment, went over to Ireland with an Irish College friend, and made a gay tour thro’ Cork, Limerick, Wicklow etc. before appearing at Houghton. My Mother expected him, but she had not thought herself justified in formally announcing this; she had therefore to meet some frowns for having rejected noble and wealthy suitors, for the sake of him who was considered to have been trifling with her, and whom she must have loved for himself alone—for mind and manner only—as neither he nor she had any idea of the extent of his inheritance, and in person he was not handsome.

  On their marriage my parents settled in Edinburgh, which was to be their home and where my father had purchased one of the only three houses then finished in Charlotte Square. Here he was to pursue his profession, spending the summer vacations either on the beautiful highland property, or in travels which were sometimes to extend to the south of England, a pretty estate in Hertfordshire having fallen to him just at this time by the death of an Uncle Raper.

  The house at Thorley Hall was so small as to be inconvenient, but its furniture was valuable. A fine library, some good pictures, portfolios of prints, and all sorts of philosophical instruments formed part of it, all of which were removed to the Doune. The land was worth about £1200 a year. The rents of Rothiemurchus were small, not more than £800, but the timber was beginning to be marketable; 3, or 4,000 a year could easily have been cut out of that extensive forest for ever and hardly have been missed the while.4 My Grandfather Grant had left his son £10,000 in ready money and my Aunt Frere inherited her mother’s fortune, so that life began with these happy young people well. To assist in the spending of what was then a fine income, there were numberless relations on both sides to bring gay spirits, a good deal of talent, a good deal of beauty, with healthy appetites to the hospitable board where they were so welcome. Bachelour friends, too, were not wanting and as at that time gentlemen seldom re-appeared in the drawing-room after dinner, they made, as the wine merchant thought, excellent use of their freedom from ladies’ society.

  My memory, however, does not go back to these scenes, it is very indistinct as to all that happened before I was four years old. I remember nothing of Edinburgh but a certain waggon full of black sacks which represented coals, and which I vainly attempted to pull or push up some steps in the garden, and which I think was taken from me for crying, so that its possession must have been very near my baby heart when the impression was so vivid on it. I have a dreamy recollection of at about this time beating a boy in a red jacket who was playing with me and of shutting up another in some cupboard, while I went
about with his drum which he had refused me. My victims were my regular companions, the children of the houses on each side of us. The red jacket was the present Sir George Sinclair, agricultural Sir John’s eldest son,5 and the drum boy was poor little Johnny Redfearn, who died at five years of age, to the abiding grief of his parents. He was the last survivor of their once well-filled nursery. But beyond this, I have no remembrance of Charlotte Square, which, considering that I was but three years and a half old when we left it for ever, is not surprising.

  Of the highlands, that dear home of all our young hearts, I have more perfect glimmerings. My father and mother had spent there the summer following my birth, and I fancy the winter also, and the next summer, at the end of which in September my brother William was born. I had been named Elizabeth after my two Grandmothers and two Aunts, one of each side, Mrs Leitch and Mrs Frere. William Patrick was called after both Grandfathers and my great Uncle Rothy whom my father had immediately succeeded. He was christened by the presbyterian parson and nursed by my mother, so that perhaps that nursing winter was the one they all spent at the Doune, with my two Aunts, Mrs Frere and Mrs Bourne, then Lissy Grant and Mary Ironside, for company.

  It was when I was weaned there had come a tall randy kind of woman from Forres, a Meg Merrilies,6 to take care of me; our much-loved Betty Glass in those days, Betty Campbell afterwards when she married the grieve. She had William from his birth and to test the strength of the young heir, she gave him, before she washed him, a spoonful of gin in highland fashion, which medicine he survived to my great sorrow; for spoiled as I had been, the darling of so many, I so much disliked the arrival of this brother near the throne, that I very early tried to make away with him. One day that I had been left alone in his room before his dressing time I seized his clothes, which had been all stitched together and laid upon the bed ready to put on him and carrying the bundle to the fire tried to throw it on the flaming peats, saying with all the spite of a baby not a year and a half old could give way to, ‘Dere! Burn! nassy sing!’ which exclamation brought in an Aunt, horrourstruck. But all this is hearsay. Of my own impressions I have a clear recollection of some West Indian seeds, pretty, red, shiny and with black spots on them, sweet-smelling beans and a variety of small shells, all of which were kept in a lower drawer of a japanned dressing table in my Mother’s room, for the purpose, it appeared to me, of my playing with them.

  I recollect also the bookcases in my father’s study, a set of steps by which he used to reach the upper shelves and up which I used to climb in terrour not of a fall, but of being set in the corner as a punishment—a fox-tail for dusting dirty volumes and a dark place in the wall where the peats were kept, so that I think while my Mother was taken up with her baby boy I must have been the companion of my father. I also remember building materials lying about, an old woman with a wooden leg warning me from some mischief, and a lady in a blue gown assisting me to play at see saw, she and I sitting on the ends of a plank laid across a trestle, and a clapping of hands around answering my laughter. I have also a painful remembrance of a very tearful parting from our dear Betty, who declined accompanying us when we left the Doune.

  All these clearer visions of the past must relate to a summer spent in the highlands after the birth of my sister Jane, which event took place in Edinburgh in the month of June of the year 1800. I don’t imagine we ever returned to Charlotte Square afterwards.

  My Mother nursed Jane herself, and Betty, unassisted, took charge of us all three. Our nursery at the Doune was the room at the head of the backstairs my Mother afterwards took for her own. It had two windows looking towards Inverdruie, a fire on the hearth, two wooden cribs made by Donald Maclean, a cot cradle, a press bed for Betty into which we all of us scrambled every morning, a creepie apiece for William and I, and a low table of suitable height on which our porridge was set in the mornings. I hated mine and Betty used to strew brown sugar over it to make it more palatable. She washed us well, dressed us after a fashion, set us to look at pictures while she tidied the room and then set off out of doors, where she kept us all day. We were a great deal in the fields with John Campbell the grieve and we talked to every body we met, and Betty sang to us and told us fairy tales, and made rush crowns for us, and kept us as happy as I wish all children were. I don’t feel that I remember all these details accurately, there is just an idea of some of them fixed by after allusions.

  In the winter of 1802, after a season of all blank, I wake up in a gloomy house in London in Bury Place. There were no Aunts, no Betty, a cross nurse, Mrs Day, who took us to walk somewhere where there was gravel, and nothing and nobody to play with; the few objects round us new and disagreeable. William and Jane were kept in great order by Mrs Day. William she bullied. Jane she was fond of; every body was fond of Jane, she was always so good. Me she did not like, I was so selfwilled. I therefore gave her very little of my society, but spent most of my time with Mrs Lynch, my Mother’s maid, an Englishwoman who had been with us some time, engaged in London soon after my Mother’s marriage when they first visited Thorley Hall. Mrs Lynch taught me to sew, for I was always very fond of my needle and my scissors too. I shaped and cut out and stitched up my doll’s clothes from very early days. I used to read to her too, she was so good natured! I fancy my Aunts had taught me to read, though I do not remember this or them up to this date.

  My books had very gaudy paper backs, red and green and all manner of colours, with dashes of gold dabbed on, in size vigesimo quartos,7 paper coarse, printing thick, and the contents enchanting! Puss in boots, Riquet with the tuft, Blue Beard, Cinderella, the geni and the fisherman; and in a plain marble cover on finer paper, full of prints, a small history of Rome, where one print so shocked me—Tullia in her car riding over the body of her father—that I never would open that classic page again.

  It is here in Bury Place that the first distinct notion of the appearance of my parents presents itself. I see my father in his study at a table writing; a little sallow brisk man without any remarkable feature, his hair all drawn back over his head, powdered and tyed in a queue with a great bow of black ribbon. He has on drab coloured stocking pantaloons and little boots up to the knee, from the two pointed front of which dangles a tassel. The last Duke of Gloucester wore the very dittos, stocking pantaloons and all, when we saw him in the year’ 32 at Cheltenham. Strange, as this figure now rises before my mental eye, it is one which always produces recollections of happiness, for my father’s voice was the herald of joy to us children. He was the King of all our romping plays, had always something agreeable to say, and even when too much occupied to attend to us, would refuse our petitioning faces with a kindness and an air of truthful regret so sympathetick that he gave us nearly as much pleasure as if he could have assented. There was a charm in his manner I have never known any one of any age or station capable of resisting under any circumstances, and which my dear sister Mary inherited. My Mother, though accounted such a handsome person, impresses my memory much less agreeably. A very small mouth, dark hair curling all over her head in a bush down close to her eyes, white shapeless gowns, apparently bundled up near the chin without any waist visible, her form extended on the sofa, a book in her hands, and a resident nervous headache which precluded her from enduring noise, is the early recollection that remains with me concerning her. She had probably been ill in Bury Place, which had contributed to make our residence there so melancholy.

  The reason of our removal from Edinburgh to London was my father’s having determined on giving up the Scotch for the English bar. Why, with his large fortune, and plenty to do both on his Highland and his Hertfordshire properties, he should have followed any profession but that of managing them, nobody could very well tell. But as his wish was to be a great lawyer, some of his dear friends, in whose way he stood in Edinburgh, easily persuaded him that his abilities were too superiour to be frittered away in a mere provincial town, and that Westminster Hall was the only sphere for such talents—the road to St. Stephens! the fit a
rena for display! No thought of their country’s good in those days, the general interest was of little account compared with the individual’s fame for speaking!—very little being done in Pitt and Fox days. I have often thought my poor Mother’s headaches had something to do with all these mistakes of her young, much loved husband. She had certainly, as far as I remember, very little of his company, only just during dinner, and for the little while he sat to drink his wine afterwards. William and I always came to them at that time, and when my Mother went up to the Drawing room to make the tea we two went on further to bed. Though so young, we were always sent upstairs by ourselves to our nursery at the top of the house in the dark; that is, we had no candle, but a glimmering light fell in rays on the windings of the crooked stairs from a lamp on some landing above. On the small gallery on the second floor, which we had to pass on our ascent to our atticks, there stood a big hair trunk into which I had often seen Mrs Lynch dive for various necessaries required in her needle works. Poor William, who was kept in the nursery by Mrs Day, and who during his periodical descents and ascents seldom looked beyond his own two little feet, which he had some difficulty in placing and pulling up and down after him while she was tugging him along by whichever unfortunate arm she had hold of, had never noticed in the sunlight this object, which appearing large and dark in the gloomy evenings, and feeling rough to the touch, he took for a wild beast, the wolf, in fact, which had eaten up Red Riding Hood. He began at first to shrink and then to shudder and then to stop, till soon I could not get him past the trunk at all. Our delay being noticed by Mrs Day, that enlightened person, on being informed of the cause, took upon herself to put an end to all such nonsense in a very summary manner. She shook me out of the way, and well thumped poor William. The next night the terrours of the journey and his probable warm reception at the end of it so worked upon the poor child’s mind that he became quite nervous long before bedtime, and this sort of agony encreased so much in the course of a day or two that my father noticed it. My Mother noticed nothing but as we kept our disgraceful secret faithfully our misery continued a little longer, till my father, certain there was something wrong, followed us as hand in hand we very slowly withdrew. He found William stifling his sobs and trembling in every limb some steps below the fatal landing, and I, with my arm round him, kissing him and trying to encourage him to proceed. My father called for lights and without a word of anger or mockery shewed his boy the true nature of this object of dread. He was led gently to it, to look at it, feel it, sit on it, see it opened, not only then, but in the morning; and though we had still to go to bed by ourselves, the drawing room door was henceforward left open till our little steps were heard no more.