Memoirs of a Highland Lady

by Elizabeth Grant

  Another serious grief we had connected with our food. We could refuse nothing that was prepared for us; if we did we not only got nothing else, but the dish declined was put by to appear again at the next meal, and be disposed of in the first instance before we were permitted to help ourselves to what else there was. Jane greatly disliked green vegetables, spinach or cabbage in particular. It was nature speaking, poor nature! so unheeded in those times, for these indigestible plants really disagreed with her, yet she must eat them. I have known a plate of spinach kept for her from dinner one day to supper the next, offered at each meal and refused, and not even a bit of bread substituted all those long hours, till sheer hunger got the better of her dislike and her obstinacy, and she gave herself a night of sickness by swallowing this acid mess. Fancy a young child kept 30 hours without food and then having poison given her. The dungeons of feudal days were in their degree not more iniquitous than these proceedings.

  Of course under this régime the rhubarb bottle became a necessary appendage in the nursery. I had my French beans antipathy, nobody that had seen the half boiled pods swimming in salt and water would have wondered at it, and it was to be overcome in the same way, and followed by the same cure for its effects. In addition to the dose of rhubarb, nauseous enough by itself, our breakfast on medicine mornings was water gruel—I can see it now, unstrained, thick, black, seasoned with salt and made with water only—how unlike the delicious mess prepared by Margaret Fyfe16 on which I have half lived for so long. This frightful bowl gave me an obstinate fit in Jane’s style, from which I suffered in the same manner; breakfast, dinner, and supper passed, and the cold gruel remained untouched for the very look sickened me. Faint from hunger I lay down in the evening upon the floor of the closet where I had passed the summer’s day, and I sobbed out that I wished to die, I was so miserable. One of the housemaids on her tour of window shutting, a Hertfordshire girl named Sally Witham, whom I remember with gratitude to this hour, unturned the key which kept me prisoner, and threw beside me some red streaked apples. I have liked apples ever since. Good humoured, light hearted, rosy cheeked Sally Witham! She told me all the servants were scandalised at the ‘barbariousness of master’ and that if she could find that nasty gruel, it should not plague her sweet young lady no more, she’d answer for it. I was not slow to give the hint, and certainly on being called to bed, whither I went without a kiss or a goodnight or even appearing downstairs, fresh gruel, better made it seemed to me, warm at any rate, and a slice of bread, were thankfully received after the miserable day of dark closet fasting. Dotheboys hall is not so unnatural.

  Even poor little Mary did not escape the Spartan rules of my father’s discipline; for her little baby errours she had to bear her punishment. She used to be set upon the bottom step of the stair at ‘naughty times,’ and not be allowed to move from thence till permission was given her. One night my father forgot her, so, I suppose, had every one else, for on ringing for wine and water at mid night, the footman who brought it up found the poor little thing lying there asleep. She had sat there since dinner. We used to comfort one another in our troubles when we could manage it, for interference with punishment was not allowed, and many a goody the good children stole and carried to be given with kisses and hugs to the poor desolate culprit, who all the time honestly believed him or herself to be disgracefully guilty.

  This is the dark side of the picture. We had very happy hours as well. Despotically as we were ruled in some respects, we were left much to our own devices in other ways. We disposed of our own time very much according to our own fancies, subject to certain rules. We were always to appear at the breakfast table of our father and mother some time between ten and twelve o’clock; the last of the three regular ringings of my father’s dressing room bell was our signal for leaving our plays. We ran off to brush our hair, wash our hands, and seize our books, with which provided we repaired to the breakfast room, where our duties were to go on messages, in winter to make the toast, in summer to amuse ourselves quietly till called upon to stir. Breakfast over, we said our few lessons and read in turns to my Mother, who had certainly very little patience with dunce, poor William. I was supposed to have practised the pianoforte early. If we were wanted again during the day we were sent for, though very frequently we passed the whole morning in the drawing room, where we employed ourselves as we liked, provided we made no noise. The prettily wound cotton balls had already superceded the skeins, so that we were saved that piece of business. In the hot summer days Aunt Mary sometimes read to us fairy tales, or bits from the Elegant extracts,17 latterly Pope’s Homer, which with her explanations we enjoyed extremely, all but the shield of Achilles, the long description of which I feared was never to end. When my father was away my Mother dined with us early, and in the evenings we took long drives in the open landau and four. When he was at home, and the late dinner proceeded in full form, and what a tedious ceremony it was, we all appeared at the dessert in full dress like the footmen, or rather at the second course for it was part of our education to be disciplined spartan fashion. We sat in a row—we four, little Mary and all, on four chairs placed against the wall—trained to perfect quiet. We were to see and to smell, and to taste nothing. We were to hear and not to speak, but on the dessert appearing we were released, called forward to receive a little wine, a little fruit, and a biscuit, and then to have our game at romps. The riot generally forced our nervous Mother to retire, and then quite at ease, in right good earnest began the fun.

  Sometimes my father was an ogre groping about for little children, whom he caught and tickled nearly into fits. Sometimes he was a sleeping giant whom we besieged in his Castle of chairs, could hardly waken, and yet dreaded to hear snore. Whatever the play was it was always charming, redeemed all troubles. We looked forward to this happy hour as to a glimpse of heaven. Milk, spinach, cabbage, fat, rhubarb, and gruel were all forgotten, and the whippings too; he was no longer the severe master, he was the best of play fellows. We dreaded hearing of his absence, as all our joy went with him. We hailed his return as our chief blessing. He soon found out that no punishment had such effect upon any of us as exclusion from the romping hour. Once or twice it was my fate to remain upon my chair in that row against the wall, while the romp went on around me, to be told to remain there as unworthy of my share in the fun. I don’t think I ever needed a third lesson, although the faults had not been very heinous; the most flagrant was my having provided myself with a private store of apples, gathered only from underneath the trees, but it had been done slily, it was said, that is without assistance, and the hoard had been consigned to, they said again concealed in, one of the queer little triangular corner cupboards scattered up and down the turret stairs. I had never meant to regale in secret, the store was for all, it was to furnish out our play banquets up in the haunted attick, but publick opinion was against me and I was misjudged. It was probably as well to make a clearance of such unwholesome fruit—Aunt Lissy would have said so at once without attributing any improper motives to a thoughtless act, but Aunt Lissy was gone and nobody else thought it worth while to study character, to educate on a plan, to make a proper business of their proper duty. She was a greater loss to us than we were at all aware of.

  1. The age of Neil Gow (1727–1807) has been called ‘the golden age of Scottish fiddling’.

  2. Jane, daughter of Sir William Maxwell of Monreith, Bart., (1749–1812) married the fourth Duke of Gordon; for The Scots Peerage she was ‘the beautiful, witty, eccentric and daring Duchess of Gordon, the heroine of innumerable anecdotes’.

  3. Mrs Thrale (1741-1821), later Hester Lynch Piozzi, was celebrated for her literary friendship with Dr Samuel Johnson (the D.N.B. comments ‘she cast off her daughters as decidedly as she did Dr Johnson’.)

  4. In her Companion (1803), ‘sketching in some detail the social condition of the northern peasantry’, she wrote: ‘I had the pleasure of spending a fortnight at that most enchanting place in 1801 … the proprietor and his lady have g
reat taste!’

  5. Killie callum: the Gille Caluim (two pence) is a traditional sword dance. Chantreuse: the Seann Triubhas (old trews) ‘according to a popular tradition was the only dance that the Gaels would condescend to perform in the dress imposed by the Disclothing Act’ after the ’45. See John MacInnes, Companion to Gaelic Scotland, edited by Derick S. Thomson (Oxford, 1983).

  6. Thomas Hope: Costume of the Ancients.

  7. Correspondence between Frances, Countess of Hertford and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret, between 1738 and 1741 (London, 1805).

  8. (1689–1762): Adversary of Pope and Walpole, and an indefatigable writer (‘Letters from the East’) whose collected works were published in five volumes in 1803.

  9. Published in 1796, this was an early work on education by Maria Edgeworth, the well-known novelist she was to meet in Ireland in the 1840s.

  10. See 1, pp 175–6.

  11. See p. 141.

  12. Charles Dibdin (1745-1814): ‘English composer, dramatist, novelist, actor, singer and entertainer’ (Groves).

  13. Bedford was her youngest son-in-law.

  14. Yellow cotton trousers.

  15. Wild plum, larger than the sloe.

  16. She was the Scots servant who had accompanied the Smith family to France, and was to follow them to Ireland.

  17. Improving literature written by Vicesimus Knox (1752-1821).

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1806–1807

  THE summer of 1807 was the last we spent at Twyford. Annie Grant was a few weeks with us, and Bessy Maling and James Griffith and Aunt Mary—not all at the same time, there would not have been room for them. Harriet Grant, too, came for a long visit. She was grown up and had left school. The one she and her sister had first gone to at Kensington did not turn out good, so Harriet had been placed with a very ladylike Mrs Pope in Bloomsbury Square, who took only a certain number of pupils; and Anne, who was very delicate, had been sent to the sea under the care of Mrs Peter Grant, a Cousin, the Widow of one of the five ne’er do weel sons of my great Uncle Sandy. By the bye we wore mourning for the first time this very summer for Uncle Leitch, such mourning as suited my mother’s economy. Our coloured frocks were put away and in the afternoons our white frocks were decorated with black crape sashes, the long tails of which did charmingly for playing at horses. There were black ribbons on our bonnets too, and round William’s straw hat.

  Just before leaving town we had seen our dear Aunt Lissy’s little boy, poor John Frere, a fine plain, healthy baby, when as a secret I was told to expect a little brother or sister shortly at home, for whose arrival many preparations were making. Jane hemmed some new soft towels for it—very badly—and I made all the little cambrick shins so neatly, that I was allowed to begin a sampler as a reward, and to go to Bishop’s Stortford to buy the canvas and the coloured worsteds necessary.

  There was less disturbance in the nursery this summer. Whether we were better children, or Millar more occupied working for the expected baby, or that private instructions had been given her to forbear such very strict inforcement of her rales, I know not, but we were all in better humour certainly. For one thing, we had more to do. Harriet Grant undertook the lessons, and under her they were not quite child’s play; besides this, a Mr Morris came over from Epping, I think, where he was organist, to give me a musick lesson twice a week. My Mother gave him a good luncheon always, and he in return let William have a scamper on his poor little tired pony, for he was goodnatured to every body but me.

  On our first introduction I seated myself in full confidence before Pleyel’s Concertante, 1 and rattled it off in my own peculiar style, looking for the usual amount of praise as a matter of course. Old Mr Morris gravely put on his spectacles, and after surveying the musick, the instrument, and me, he soberly asked me who had been my teacher. He said no more, but the tone was quite enough. I knew as well as if I had been his pupil for a twelvemonth that no sleight of finger practices would pass under his severe eye. We turned back to Clementi’s first book of instructions, and beginning with the scales again I may say I then began to learn the pianoforte, with more trouble to both of us than if I had never touched its keys before. I felt thoroughly ashamed of myself, I don’t know why, except that old Mr Morris had laid peculiar stress on what he called honest playing, so true it is that truth should be carried out in all things. ‘Play by yourself,’ he said, ‘as if I were beside you, leave no difficulty behind, get every passage smooth.’ As1 distrusted myself and my old bad habits, I got Harriet to watch the practisings, and for the single hour a day allowed for this purpose really made good progress, delighting my father on his return with many neatly given passages from his favourite Corelli2

  He had been in the north, of course: Parliament had been dissolved, and he had set up for Morayshire. His opponent was Colonel Francis Grant, the second son of his Chief, who had all the Tory interest and a deal of clannish help besides; feudal feeling being still strong in the highlands, although personally there was no doubt as to the popularity of the two Candidates. My father ran up to within two votes of his Cousin; all the consolation he had for setting the country in a flame, losing his time, and wasting his money, and dividing irremediably the House of Grant against itself. Years before, he had canvassed Inverness,3 Sir James giving all his interest to the East India Director, Charles Grant, who to secure his seat promised my father unlimited Indian appointments if he would give in. This was the secret of my father’s Indian patronage, through which he provided ultimately for so many poor Cadets. How much each of such appointments cost him unluckily he never calculated. He was very little cast down by his ill success, having probably arranged the road to ruin and knew where next to fling his gold.

  My father turned the remainder of his time in the highlands to farming account, for he was exceedingly interested in agricultural improvements, particularly anxious to open the eyes of the Hertfordshire people, who at that time pursued the most miserable of the old fashioned English systems. The first year we went to Twyford he had established a Scotch grieve there; he built a proper set of offices, introduced rotation crops, deep ploughing, weeding, hay made in three days, corn cut with a scythe, and housed as cut, cattle stall fed; and I remember above all such a field of turnips as all, far and near, came to look and wonder at—turnips in drills, and two feet apart in the rows, each turnip the size of a man’s head. It was the first such field ever seen in those parts, and so much admired by two footed animals that very little of it was left for the four footed. All the lanes in the neighbourhood were strewed with the green tops cut off by the fortunate depredators. The Scotch farming made the Hertfordshire bumpkins stare, but it produced no imitators during the short period it was tried by us. The speculation did not enrich the speculator, We ate our own mutton, poultry, and vegetables in town, as well as in the country, the market cart coming to Lincoln’s Inn Fields weekly with all supplies. We had a cow, too in the London stables, changed as required. But Mr Reid got to drink too much gin, Mrs Reid lay in bed in the mornings and saw company in the evenings. The laundry maids also entertained a large acquaintance with the dairy produce in our absence for they united the two conditions; so that though we lived in luxury we paid well for it, made no friends, and were cheated by our servants, for besides the liberal way in which they helped themselves they neglected their master’s business.

  My father had gone to the Trysts after losing Moray, and bought a large drove of fine young black cattle, for no small penny. These were sent South under the care of two highland drovers. The fine field of turnips during the winter and the rich grass of the Hertfordshire meadows being expected to feed such beef for the London market as, to say the truth, the English people of that day had very little notion of. There was above an hundred head. They were put to rest in the small paddock between the orchard and the river bordered on the shrubbery side by the yew hedge. Poor beasts! I forget how many survived; it was heart breaking to see them all next day dropping one after the other, lying ab
out the field dying from the effects of the poison. Reid might not have known the ill qualities of a shrub very little seen in Scotland but my father or my Mother could hardly have been so ignorant—it was just the usual want of thought that characterised all our proceedings.

  This unfortunate business disgusted my father with his English improvements; at least after this summer we never saw Twyford again. He sold Thorley Hall to Lord Ellenborough for £30,000, I have heard, £10,000 of which bought Kinloss near Forres, the remainder helping off the accounts of the Morayshire canvass.

  Had we known when we left for Lincoln’s Inn Fields in November that we were never to run wild in those happy gardens again, we should have grieved bitterly, for life was very bright to us in the summers there. Green and flowery, and sweet scented, sunny, dry and comfortable; all home pleasures were perfect. It was easy to run in and out, it was warm and cheerful everywhere, and the farm labours, the fruit harvest, the nutting, all close round us, coming in a rotation of enjoyment, with sunshine pervading the atmosphere, left a glow over the remembrance of our childhood there that lives still through every recollection of Twyford. To our parents it could not have been so rose coloured. The few neighbours of their own degree within visiting distance were extremely uninteresting, primitive families, rich, self important, ignorant of the world, which indeed they despised, for they were illiberally limited in all the few ideas they had. We kept up no after acquaintance with any but one house, the Archer Houblons, originally Dutch, who had come over as Merchants in the reign of the third William, and had been some way connected with the Rapers, and were not considered altogether on an equality with the older and stupider County families.