Memoirs of a Highland Lady

by Elizabeth Grant

  But now a great change was to come over the family. The English Bar had never answered, and was now to be given up. It remained to be seen how parliamentary business would answer, for my father was elected member for the thoroughly rotten borough of Great Grimsby,24 at an expense he and the electors, and his Agent little Sandy Grant, were not one of them fully able to acknowledge. To meet some of the difficulties thus produced, economical measures were to be resorted to, which in a couple of years would set every thing to rights. Thorley Hall had been sold some time before to Lord Ellenborough, and Kinloss bought with part of the purchase money. The house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was to go now and all the furniture not wanted to make the Doune more comfortable, for, to our delight, it was there we were to spend these two years of retirement. My father was to run up to town for the session at a very trifling expense. We were a little disturbed by the news that Annie was not to go north with us. My mother hoped that before the winter she would settle herself in some house of business, but in the meanwhile she was to pay a visit to a Mrs Drury, a rich widow, the sister of Mr William Hunter, who had been married to one of the Malings, and who had taken a very great fancy to our dear Annie. Next came worse tidings. We were to have a Governess. And very great pains our poor Mother took to choose one. I could not count the numbers she saw, the notes she wrote, the references she visited. At last she fixed upon a little bundle of a woman recommended by Lady Glenbervie. The father had been sub-ranger of Bushy Park; the daughter, said to have been well educated and left unprovided for at his death, had been all winter in London taking lessons from various masters with a view to teaching in private families. It all seemed satisfactory; a high salary bribed Miss Elphick to engage for one year to go to so remote a country, and she came every other day to sit with us from the time she gave her consent to the bargain, that she might learn our ways and we get accustomed to her. My father also engaged a little french girl, a protégée of Mr Beekvelt, and about Jane’s age, to go north as our Schoolroom companion. She went by sea with most of the servants and the luggage, and had a very tearful parting from good M. Beekvelt, whom we also were very sorry to leave. He was up a bit in the world since we had first known him. The dingy house in Rathbone Place was exchanged for a pretty sunny house and garden at Padding- ton; two of his daughters were well married, the other two in good situations as governesses; he, just the same as in less prosperous days. We were also in great grief when we said farewell in Brunswick Square. All the pretty presents waiting for us there could not pacify either Jane or me. To me my aunt Lissy was inexpressibly dear, and the little cousins, of whom there were then four, John, Lissy, George and Anne, were great pets with us. It required to have Rothiemurchus in prospect.

  1. A ribbon on the forehead binding the hair, the snood was a symbol of maidenhood.

  2. Oliver Goldsmith’s and William Robertson’s reputations have survived; Charles Rollin was the French author of a well-known History of Rome.

  3. Six volumes of her Tales of Fashionable Life were in the Grant library.

  4. John Nattes (1765–1822) produced his Scotia Depicta in 1804 but his reputation fell after his expulsion from the Old Society of Painters in Watercolours (which he had helped to found) for exhibiting work shown not to be his own.

  5. George 111, approaching his 75th year, had been blind for eight years, suffered probably from porphyria and had a severe relapse in July 1811. John Brooke’s George III describes him as becoming senile and living in a world of his own.

  6. The Duke of Sussex, sixth son of George iii, married Lady Augusta Murray in Rome, contravening the Royal Marriage Act of 1772; he was aged 20, on his first Grand Tour, and she was ten years older.

  7. Thomas Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald (1775–1860); this was shortly after the quarrel with his Commander-in-Chief Lord Gambier as a result of which he campaigned for three years (1809–12) against abuses in the Navy; he is credited later with helping to found the navies of Chile, Brazil and Greece; see Ian Grimble, The Sea Wolf, 1978.

  8. Admiral Henry Raper (1767–1845); the ‘old’ Bellerophon was the predecessor of the ship that took Napoleon to St Helena.

  9. He retired from the Navy in 1825 aged 26; his scientific interests led to the standard navigational text book of its day.

  10. William Pitt Amherst was the British envoy sent to the Emperor Ken K’ing in 1815; he was ready to bow the statutory nine times but not to prostrate himself, or ‘Kotow’.

  11. Black funereal lace, produced at Mechelin, or Malines, near Brussels.

  12. His principles were more elastic than this suggests; at the end of the family tour to Holland, he successfully smuggled china back to Scotland; see ii, pp. 145-6.

  13. Brother of John Kemble and Mrs Siddons, whose grand-daughter married E.G.’S brother William.

  14. A dance from Le Devin du Village by Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1752.

  15. According to authorities like Flammarion, the 1811 comet was one of the most famous of modern times; it was used as a propitious omen by Napoleon before his invasion of Russia.

  16. Samuel Vince (1744-1821), son of a bricklayer, was Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge (1796–1821).

  17. The Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords decided in 1811 (after ten years ‘deliberation) that the fifth Earl of Berkeley’s marriage was not proved; the title therefore went to his brother, Colonel William Berkeley, and not to his son ’Lord Dursley’.

  18. Crochallan: gaelic Crodh Chailean (Colin’s Cattle).

  19. James, eighth Earl of Lauderdale: known as ‘Citizen Maitland’ on account of his sympathies with the French Revolution.

  20. This was her last performance (29 June, 1812); the play ended when she left the stage at the end of Act v scene i.

  21. He was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons on 11 May, 1812 by the deranged bankrupt, John Belling-ham.

  22. It was over a month before the Prince Regent and the customary political processes produced Lord Liver-pool’s government, ample time for the Irish poet and satirist Tom Moore to comment.

  23. Twilled or corded dress funeral cloth made of silk or worsted.

  24. ‘Few boroughs in England were more corrupt than Great Grimsby’ (J. Holladay Philbin, Parliamentary Representation, 1832, England and Wales).

  CHAPTER TEN

  1812

  EARLY in July of the year 1812 my Mother set out with her children for the Doune, bidding a final adieu, though she knew it not, to England. I cannot quite remember whether my father travelled with us or not. Yes, he must—for he read Childe Harold to us; it had just come out, and made its way by its own intrinsick merit, for popular prejudice set strong against its authour. To sit on rocks,’ etc.,1 arrested the attention even of me, for I was not given to poetry generally; then, as now, it required ’thoughts that rouse, and words that burn’ to affect me with aught but weariness; but when, after a second reading of this passage, my father closed the pamphlet for a moment, saying ‘This is poetry!’ I felt he was quite right, and resolved to ‘look the whole poem over’ some day more at leisure. We had also with us Walter Scott’s three first poems, great favourites with us, The Seven Champions of Christendom, Goldsmith’s History of England, and his Animated Nature, and in French, Adèle et Théodore.2 This was our travelling library, all tumbled into a brown holland bag kept under the front seat of the barouche. At the inns where we had long rests, our own horses doing but few stages in the day, we amused ourselves in spouting from these volumes, Jane and I, acting Macbeth, singing Operas of our own invention, and playing backgammon when we met with tables, a style of thing so repugnant to the School ideas of propriety befitting the reign of the new governess, that she got wonderfully grave with her unfortunate pupils. We had picked her up as we left town, and thinking more of ourselves than of her felt quite disposed to quarrel with any one who wept so bitterly at leaving London and her own friends, when she was going to the highlands amongst ours. She was a little fat dumpling of a w
oman, with fine eyes, and a sweet toned voice in speaking, strangely dressed in a fashion peculiar to the middle classes in England in that day, when the modes were not studied all through society as they are now, nor indeed attainable by moderate persons, as the expense of a careful toilette was quite beyond the means of poorer people. Her provision for the long journey was a paper of cakes, and a large thick pocket handkerchief, which was very soon wetted through; not an auspicious beginning where two such monkeys as Jane and I were concerned. Mary and Johnny ate the cakes and were satisfied.

  The play thus opened seldom flagged nor did it want for shifting scenes enough. Poor Miss Elphick, she had troubled times. Her first grand stand was against the backgammon—shaking dice boxes in a publick inn! We were very polite but we would not give in, assuring her we always were accustomed to shake dice boxes where we liked out of lesson hours. Next she entreated to be spared Macbeth’s dagger! Hamlet’s soliloquys! Hecate’s fury! So masculine to be strutting about in those attitudes and ranting in such loud tones, etc. etc. We were really amazed. Our occupation gone! the labour of months to be despised after all the applause we had been earning by it! What were we to do? Sit silent with our hands before us? not we indeed! We stood amazed! We pitied her! and left her! thinking that my Mother had made a most unfortunate choice of a governess, and perhaps we were not wrong.

  We entered Scotland by the Kelso road. We passed the field of Flodden; neither of us remembered why it should be celebrated. ‘Miss Elphick will tell us, I am sure,’ said I, pert unfeeling child that I was. I had taken her measure, and knew full well she knew less of Flodden field than I did. ‘Decidedly not,’ said my father, ‘take the trouble to hunt out all the necessary information yourself, you will be less likely again to forget it; I shall expect the whole history a week after we reach home.’ Whether suspecting the truth, he had come to the rescue of the governess, or that he was merely carrying out his general plan of making us do all our own work ourselves, I did not stay to think. My head had begun to arrange its ideas. The flowers o’ the forest and Marmion3 were running through it. ‘Ah, Papa,’ said I, ‘I needn’t hunt, it’s all here now, the phantom, the English lady, the spiked girdle and all; I’m right, ain’t I?’ and I looked archly over at our governess, who, poor woman, seemed in the moon altogether. The family conversation was an unknown language to her. ‘What could have made Mama choose her?’ said Jane to me.

  We went to see Melrose, dined at Jedburgh, passed Cowdenknows, Tweedside, Ettrick schawes, Gala Water, starting up and down in the carriage in extasies, flinging ourselves half out at the sides each time these familiar names excited us. In vain Miss Elphick pulled our frocks. I am sure she feared she had undertaken the charge of lunaticks, particularly when I burst forth in song at either Tweedside or Yarrow braes. It was not the scenery, there is much finer, it was the ‘classick ground’ of all the border country.

  A number of french prisoners, officers, were on their parole at Jedburgh. Lord Buchan, whom we met there, took us to see a painting in progress by one of them; some battle field, all the principal figures, portraits, from memory, minutely executed and well grouped and pencilled I believe, but so vivid in colouring that the glare offended my eye, all unpractised as it was. The picture was already sold, and part paid for, and another ordered, which we were all so glad of, the handsome young painter having interested us. The ingenuity of these french prisoners of all ranks was amazing, really only to be equalled by their industry. Those of them unskilled in higher arts earned for themselves most comfortable additions to their allowance by turning bits of wood, and bones, straw, almost any thing in fact, into neat toys of many sorts, eagerly bought up by all who met with them. At Ramsgate we had provided ourselves with work boxes, work baskets and various other nicknacks, all made at the prisoners’ dépots in the neighbourhood. We felt quite friendly therefore to all of the same son we found at Jedburgh.

  We rested a few days in Edinburgh and then journeyed leisurely by the highland road home, still crossing the Queensferry in a miserable sailing boat, and the Tay at Inver for the last time in the large flat boat. When next we passed our boundary river the handsome bridge was built over it at Dunkeld, the little inn at Inver was done up, a fine hotel where the civilest of Landlords reigned, close to the bridge, received all travellers; and Neil Gow was dead, the last of our bards—no one again will ever play Scotch musick as he did. His sons in the quick measures were perhaps his equals, they gave force and spirit and fine expression to Strathspeys and reels, but they never gave the slow, the tender airs with the real feeling of their beauty that their father had.4 Nor can any one hope to revive a style passing away. A few true fingers linger amongst us, but this generation will see the last of them. Our children will not be as national as their parents—reflections made like some puns, à loisir, for at the time we last ferried over the Tay I was only on the look out for all the well remembered features of the scenery. We baited the horses at Moulinearn, not the pretty country inn of the rural village which peeps out on the Tummel from its skreen of fine wooding now, but a dreary, desolate, solitary stone house, dirt without and smoke within, and little to be had in it but whiskey. The road to Blair then passed over the summit of the hills, overlooking the river, the valley in which nestled Fascally, and allowing of a peep at Loch Rannoch in the far distance; then on through Killiecrankie, beautiful then as now, more beautiful! for no Perth traders had built villas on its sheltered banks, nor Glasgow merchant perched a Castle on the rock. Hardly a cabin broke the solitude in those days, to interrupt the awe we always felt on passing the stone set up where Dundee fell, ‘Bonny Dundee,’ whom we Highlanders love still in spite of Walter Scott.5 Miss Elphick, poor soul, was undoubtedly as innocent of any acquaintance with him as she had been with James the 4th, but there had been something in my father’s manner on the Flodden field day which prevented any future display of my ill breeding. I therefore contented myself with a verse of the song, and a little conversation with my mother, who was a perfect chronological table of every event in modern history.

  The old inn at Blair was high up on the hill, overlooking the park, the wall of which was just opposite the windows. We used to watch through the trunks of the trees for the antlered heads of the herds of deer, and walk to a point from whence we could see the Castle far down below, beside the river, a large, plain, very ugly building now, that very likely looked grander before its battlements were levelled by order of the government after the rebellion.6 Here we were accustomed to a particularly good pudding, a regular soufflé that would have been no discredit to a first rate French cook, only that he would have been amazed at the quantity of whiskey poured over it. The German brandy puddings must be of the same genus, improved, perhaps, by the burning, except to the taste of the highlander. The ‘Athole lad’ who waited on us was very awkward, red haired, freckled, in a faded, nearly thread bare tartan jacket. My father and mother had a bedroom, Johnny and the maid a closet, but we had three and our governess slept in the parlour, two in a bed, and the beds were in the wall shut in by panels, and very musty was the smell of them. So poor Miss Elphick cried, which we extremely resented as a reflexion upon the habits of our country. Next day was worse, a few miles of beauty, and then the dreary moor to Dalnacardoch, another lone house with very miserable steading about it, and a stone walled sheep fold near the road; and then the high hill pass to Dalwhinnie very nearly as desolate. Nothing can exceed the dreariness of Drumochter—all heather, bog, granite, and the stony beds of winter torrents, unrelieved by one single beauty of scenery, if we except a treeless lake with a shooting box beside it, and three or four fields near the little burn close to which stands the good inn of Dalwhinnie. We felt so near home there that we liked the lonely place, and were almost sorry we were to push on to sleep at Pitmain, the last stage on our long journey. We never see such inns now; no carpets on the floors, no cushions on the chairs, no curtains to the windows. Of course polished tables, or even clean ones, were unknown. All the accessorie
s of the dinner were wretched, but the dinner itself, I remember, was excellent; hotch potch salmon, fine mutton, grouse, scanty vegetables, bad bread, but good wine. A mile on from Pitmain were the indications of a village—the present town of Kingussie, then a few very untidy looking slated stonehouses each side of a road, the bare heather on each side of the Spey, the bare mountains on each side of the heather, a few white walled houses here and there, a good many black turf huts, frightful without, though warm and comfortable within. A little farther on rose Belleville, a great hospital looking place protruding from young plantations, and staring down on the rugged meadow land now so fine a farm. The birch woods began to show a little after this, but deserted the banks about that frightful Kincraig where began the long moor over which we were glad to look across the Spey to Invereschie, from whence all that, the Rothiemurchus side of the river was a succession of lovely scenery. On we went over the weary moor of Alvie to the Loch of the same name with its kirk and manse, so singularly built on a long promontory, running far out into the water; Tor Alvie on the right, Craigellachie before us, and our own most beautiful ‘plain of the fir trees’ opening out as we advanced, the house of the Doune appealing for a moment as we passed on by Lynwilg. We had as usual to go on to the big boat at Inverdruie, feasting our eyes all the way on the fine range of the Cairngorm, the pass of the Lairig Ghru between Cairngorm and Braeriach, the hill of Kincairn standing forward to the north to enclose the forest which spread all along by the banks of the Spey, the foreground relieved by hillocks clothed with birch, fields, streams, and the smoke from the numerous cottages. Our beloved Ord Ban rose right in front with its bald head and birch covered sides, and we could point out our favourite spots to one another as we passed along, some coming into sight as others receded, till the clamour of our young voices, at first amusing, had to be hushed. We were so happy. We were at last come home; London was given up, and in our dearly loved Rothiemurchus we now fully believed we were to live and die.