Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  There was a third portent, the most pregnant of all, which our returned exile, if he were a man of some education, had a chance of noting. He had heard with pleasure during his absence a rumour of good literature coming from the north. The London critics had spoken well of Mr David Hume’s works in history and philosophy, of Mr Robertson’s excursions in the former domain, of Mr Ferguson’s treatise on civil society, and of the poetry of Mr Beattie of Aberdeen, while visitors had reported the surpassing eloquence of Mr Hugh Blair of the High Kirk of St Giles’. Our traveller, when he had access to these famous men, found that Edinburgh had indeed become a home of brilliant talk and genial company — Edinburgh with her endless taverns where entertainment was cheap, since the Forth at the door gave her oysters, and sound claret was to be had at eighteen shillings a dozen. Around the tavern board or the dinner-table he found the illuminati good Scotsmen, speaking the tongue he fondly remembered, and perpetuating the tales and humours of his youth. But their public performance surprised him, for it was a sedulous aping of London. They strove without much success to acquire an English accent, and Mr Adam Smith was envied because Balliol had trimmed the roughness of his Fife tongue. They cultivated a thing called rhetoric, which was supposed to be a canonical use of language freed from local vulgarities, and in the shabby old college Mr Hugh Blair lectured on that dismal science with much acceptance. In their writings they laboriously assisted each other to correct the solecisms of the northern idiom, and a year or two later, when David Hume lay on his death-bed, it was the jest of a caustic Lord of Session that the philosopher confessed not his sins but his Scotticisms.

  So our restored exile may have regarded the scene with mingled feelings. His countrymen beyond doubt had their heads at last above water, but the land they were making for was not the kindly soil he had known.

  II

  [Scotland in 1771]

  Let us look a little closer at the Scotland of 1771.

  The Union of Parliaments in 1707 had been a blessing beyond doubt, but for a quarter of a century it had been a blessing well disguised. The land and the people were grievously poor, and north of Forth the Highlands had to face the decadence of their ancient social and economic structure, and in the space of a man’s lifetime adjust themselves to the change from a mediæval to a modern world. The failure of Jacobitism flung Scotland back upon herself and forced her to work out her own salvation. But that bitter task did not increase her love for her southern neighbour. She was conscious of being poverty-stricken and backward, a mere northern appanage which England had once seen fit to conciliate, and, the Union accomplished, could now neglect. A friendly visitor like Pennant might find something to patronize and praise, but the common traveller’s tale was only of a bleak land, vile weather, bad inns, bad roads, dirty farms and shabby stone towns. Even Lady Louisa Stuart, with Scots blood in her veins, had little good to say of it; to cross the Border into Cumberland was for her to return to civilization and decency.

  Nor was Scotland’s sense of inferiority likely to be soothed by the attitude of her neighbours. In truth she had given England small cause to love her. The seventeenth century, with its invasion of England by a Scots army, the bartering of their king by that army for arrears of pay, and the attempt to impose the Presbyterian discipline upon all Britain, had left an ugly memory. In the early eighteenth century Scotland had been a storm-centre from which came most of the threats to English peace. Scotsmen in droves had journeyed south, and had won fame and fortune in many callings — at the Bar, in medicine, in commerce, in letters; but their very success increased the unpopularity of their race. There was no one to mediate between the two peoples. The Scotsman Bute was the most hated of politicians, Wedderburn’s conscience was elastic even for a Georgian lawyer, while, in letters, sleek creatures like Mallet and an ill-tempered genius like Smollett only widened the breach. Mansfield might have done something, but the great Chief-Justice had lost every Caledonian trait, including most of his accent. Scotsmen were blamed alike for their rudeness and their servility, their clannishness and their passion to get on in the world, their pence-saving prudence and their high-flying politics. The dislike of Scotland, shown in the venom of Churchill and The North Briton, the gibes of Dr Johnson, and the decorous belittlement of Horace Walpole, was a universal feeling in the south. It was returned in kind, and David Hume was for ever crying out against “the factious barbarians of London.”

  In such a case, disliked abroad and deeply embarrassed at home, Scotland was compelled to look for succour to her own efforts. The victories overseas won under Chatham’s rule, and the recruitment of the Highlands in the British army gave her an interest in the nascent Empire, but in British politics she had no part to play. Her domestic affairs were for the most part beneath the concern of Westminster. Of resident Scotsmen the Fife laird, Oswald of Dunnikier, alone made any considerable show in Parliament. Her system of representation had no popular basis, and was to the last degree fantastic and corrupt, and the members elected under it were in the main dutiful servants of the party in power. The liberalism which has since been so marked a characteristic of the nation flickered only in George Dempster, the member for the Forfar burghs, who had the hardihood on one occasion to act as teller with John Wilkes. British politics had for the time ceased to interest a people, whose mind was bent on more urgent matters.

  [Kirk and State]

  Nor was there any compensating vigour of life in that church, which had once been the chief voice of Scotland. Patronage had been restored in 1712, and the Erastian principle was firmly established. The dominant party, the Moderates, made religion a thing of social decency and private virtues, and their sober, if shallow, creed was undoubtedly a stabilizing factor in a difficult time. But if the extravagance of the earlier Kirk had gone, so too had its power and vision. The High-flyers, the other party, were equally void of inspiration, and disputed chiefly on questions of church government. For a spark of the old fire we must look to the numerous sects, who sustained some of the doctrinal vigour of Calvinism. But sufficient remained of the bequest from the seventeenth century to perpetuate in many quarters spiritual pride and an intolerant formalism. The ministers satirized by Burns in his “Holy Fair” were representative types, but little overdrawn, of the then church in Scotland — a church from which most that was vital in the national life was deeply estranged.

  The two main pre-occupations of the country in and around the year 1771 were to make a better living and to cut a braver figure in the world. In both she was beginning to succeed. Glasgow in the west and Leith in the east had become notable ports, and to the former came more than half of the tobacco imported into Britain. Coal and iron were being mined on a large scale; linen and woollen manufactures were thriving; Scottish agriculture had begun the long upward stride which was soon to make it a model for the globe; new banks had come into being, and the Bank of Scotland had multiplied its capital by six, while its shares were quoted on the London Exchange at 100 per cent. premium. As for fame, Edinburgh had become a hot-bed of talent, the merit of which the south was quick to acknowledge. “I stand at the Cross of Edinburgh,” said an admiring visitor, “and can in a few minutes take fifty men of genius by the hand.” London might sneer at her, but the metropolis was forced to buy the books of her scholars — Hume and Ferguson and Robertson in history, Hume and Reid in philosophy, Adam Smith in political economy, Blair and Lord Kames in æsthetics. These men were no émigrés like Mansfield and Wedderburn, Smollett and Thomson, Allan Ramsay the painter and Adam the architect, but her own domiciled sons who owed nothing to alien patronage, and of them she was inordinately proud. She saw her wealth and repute increasing, and felt that at last she could talk on equal terms with her critics. Scotland had recovered her confidence.

  But in the process she was shutting the door upon her past. There were two strains in her history — the aristocratic and Cavalier; the Covenanting and democratic; and both were so overlaid by novelties that they were in danger of being choke
d and forgotten. The first, having suffered downfall with Jacobitism, survived only as a dim sentiment, the inspiration of songs when the claret went round, a thing of brocades and lace and twilit windows. The second had lost itself in formalism or eccentricity, and its stubborn democratic tradition was half forgotten. There was a danger lest the land, setting out confidently on new paths, might condemn as provincial and antiquated what was the very core and essence of her being. She was in the van of the new enlightenment: was her progress to be that of the rocket which shoots from earth into high places and then falls, or like the slow growth of a tree, deep-rooted by ancient waters?

  In 1771 Scotland stood at the parting of the ways. That she chose rightly was due to two children who were then alive on her soil. One was a boy of twelve, the son of a small farmer in Ayrshire, who was picking up an education on a moorland croft. The other was an infant in an old house in the College Wynd in Edinburgh, who on the 15th of August of that year had been born to a respectable middle-aged lawyer, a certain Mr Walter Scott.

  II

  [The Border]

  The Border, where Scotland touched the soil of her ancient adversary, had always cherished in its extremest form the national idiom in mind and manners. It had been the cockpit where most of the lesser battles of her independence had been fought; for generations it had been emptied from vessel to vessel; its sons had been the keepers of the gate and had spoken effectively therein with their enemies. The result was the survival of the fittest, a people conscious of a stalwart ancestry and a long tradition of adventure and self-reliance. In the Middle Ages the king’s law had had but a feeble hold upon all the country from Berwick in the east to Dumfries in the west, and from the Cheviots northward to the Moorfoots. There the hand had to keep the head, and the spear was not left to rust in the thatch. The life bred a hardy and vigilant race, good friends and pestilent foes, tenacious of their honour and their scanty belongings. “They delight in their own,” wrote Bartholomew the Englishman in the thirteenth century, “and they love not peace.” But the traveller chronicled other qualities. They were a mirthful and humorous folk, as “light of heart” as they were “fierce on their enemies.” They were skilled musicians, too, and, said Bishop Lesley in the sixteenth century, “lovers of eloquence and poetry.”

  The Borderer differed in certain ways from the rest of his countrymen. He lived in an enclave of his own, for, though on the main track of marching armies, he was a little remote from the centres of national life. His eyes did not turn north to the capital, but south to the English frontier, where danger lay, and around him to his urgent local concerns. He lived under a clan system, different from that of the Highlands, but hardly less compelling. This absorption in special interests kept the Borderer, gentle and simple, from sharing largely in those national movements which had their origin in the Scottish midlands and the eastern littoral. The wars of religion, for example, affected him little. The Border bred few noted Covenant enthusiasts, as it sent few men to Montrose’s standard. It was damp tinder for the fires of either reaction or revolution.

  Yet the centuries of guerrilla fighting had produced something more than hardihood and independence. The Border was the home of harpers and violers, and from it came some of the loveliest of northern airs, and most of the greatest ballads in any literature. It had always had a tradition of a rude minstrelsy, for during the peace of the winter season, at the Yule and Hogmanay revels, at the burgh fairs, at sheep clippings and “kirns” and at the shieling doors in the long summer twilights, wandering minstrels would sing of old days, of the fairies in the greenwood and the kelpies in the loch, and of some deed of prowess the rumour of which had drifted across the hills. Out of this tradition, perhaps some time in the sixteenth century, the great ballads were made by singers whose names have been lost — maybe the dead poets chronicled in Dunbar’s “Lament of the Makars.” The innominate balladists left behind them poetry which often reached the highest levels of art, and which at the same time woke an immediate response in those for whom it was composed. So the Borderer, however scanty his learning, fell heir to a body of great literature, passed by word of mouth from father to son — a literature bare as the grey bent of his hills, rarely mirthful, telling mostly of tragic loves and tragic hates, but inculcating, as fiercely as the Sagas, the noble austerities of courage and duty.

  [Rural Life]

  At the beginning of the seventeenth century the old life of the Border came to an end, since the Governments of both nations combined to coerce its turbulence. As with the Highlands after 1745, there followed a decline of population, since the livelihood of many had gone. In Liddesdale the single clan of Elliot numbered some 1500 souls in the sixteenth century, while in the eighteenth that figure represented the total population of the valley. Since the riding days were over, and most of the hill land was poor and uncultivable, the glens became sheep-walks, and one shepherd could serve a wide area. Till the mid-eighteenth century the Border was as poor as the rest of Scotland. But it shared in the revival of Scottish agriculture, and by the year 1771 there had been a vast deal of draining done in the valley bottoms; stone dykes seamed the uplands; the more progressive lairds were planting not only in their demesnes but far up the hillsides, so that many slopes were feathered with young firs; a better system had taken the place of the old shiftless Scots tillage; the prices were good for both sheep and cattle, and rural life was everywhere thriving. It was different with the little towns. They had never been of great importance except when they nestled beneath the shadow of an abbey or a castle, but under many difficulties they had striven for centuries to preserve their close burghal life. Once they had been smuggling centres, but after 1707 this activity ceased. Their more enterprising sons flocked into north England. Jedburgh, which had had 6000 citizens before the Union, had now scarcely 2000, and Adam Smith speaking apparently of the burghs, told a correspondent that “the Scotch on the Borders were to this day in extreme poverty.”

  Of the nature of rural Border society at this time we have ample evidence. A village had its assorted craftsmen, which made it independent of the towns, its wauk-mill and its corn-mill, its schoolmaster and its minister. The bonnet-laird farmed his own land; on the great estates there were tenants cultivating large acreages, and the lairds, since they were themselves prosperous, were as a rule good masters. The Border yeoman was a great lover of sport, an inheritance from his active forbears, and came nearer to the English type of hunting farmer than to the ordinary Scots tacksman. In the upland glens the shepherds made a community by themselves — a strong and responsible race, men of the “lang stride and the clear eye,” accustomed to take many risks in their calling, for the most part literate and for the most part pious, but living close to tradition and the elder world of faery. The youth of Leyden and Hogg gives a picture of their lives. If superstition was always at their elbow, the spirit of critical independence was also there. They were under no blind bondage either to creed or custom. The householder would stop his reading of the Bible at family prayers with the remark: “If it hadna been the Lord’s will, that verse had been better left out.” They lived in a semi-patriarchal society, where the laird was king, but they dealt with him as free men. He was greater and richer than they, but of the same blood, for a Scott or a Kerr, whose hirsel lay at the back of beyond, could count far-away kin with Buccleuch or Lothian. The clan system still survived in a wholesome and universal pride of race. Most Borderers rightly held themselves to be gently born.

  The greater Border houses were a late growth. In the distant days of Scottish history, when the political game was played by Comyns and Bruces, Douglases and Stewarts, Lindsays and Hamiltons, there is little mention of Kerr or Scott. The Border chiefs till the Union of the Crowns were only heads of turbulent septs who come into the national story in the tail of some great Warden of the Marches. But at the beginning of the seventeenth century these chiefs were ennobled, and Buccleuch and Roxburgh and Lothian took their place as landed magnates.

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nbsp; By 1771 the Scotts of Buccleuch had become one of the most powerful families in Britain. Coming originally from upper Tweeddale and Lanarkshire, we find them settled on Teviot and Ettrick at the end of the thirteenth century. They had the byname of the “rough clan,” they were formidable reivers and at times effective March Wardens, and they maintained always a stubborn patriotism not too common among Scots grandees. The Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, who rescued Kinmont Willie of the ballad from Carlisle castle, became Lord Scott of Buccleuch in 1606, and his only son was the first earl. The daughter of the second earl, Anne, Countess of Buccleuch in her own right, and the heiress of vast lands in Lothian and on the Border, married James, Duke of Monmouth, and, after his execution, was permitted to retain his English estates. Henceforth the “rough clan” ranked among the major nobility of the land. They were as fortunate as the Hapsburgs in their marriages, which brought them estates from the ducal houses of Argyll and Montagu, and ultimately both the estates and titles of the dukedom of Queensberry.

  [The Family of Buccleuch]

  From the family of Buccleuch there was an early offshoot, called first of Sinton and then of Harden, whose tower still stands in a dark nook of Borthwick water. The Scotts of Harden were scarcely less noted in the Border wars than the parent house, and they produced such figures of ballad and folk story as Auld Wat of Harden, who in 1567 married Mary Scott, the “Flower of Yarrow,” and his son William, who espoused the daughter of Sir Gideon Murray of Elibank, the “Muckle Mou’d Meg,” of a tale which is probably apocryphal. The third son of this William of Harden became laird of Raeburn, and his wife was a MacDougal of Makerstoun, of a family which has some claim to be the oldest in Scotland. This Walter Scott was a Whig and a Quaker, but his sons walked in other paths, for his eldest fell in a duel, and the second, Walter, was known on Teviotside as Beardie, from the great beard which he allowed to grow in token of his regret for the banished Stuarts. Beardie, after narrowly escaping the gallows on account of his politics, married a kinswoman of the Campbells of Blythswood, and in his old age had some repute for learning. His second son took to sheep-farming, and leased the farm of Sandy Knowe from the Scotts of Harden, after staking all his fortune on the purchase of a hunter, which he fortunately sold for double the price he gave. He prospered, and made a great name on the Border as a judge of stock. His wife was a Haliburton of Newmains, who brought to the family the right of burial in Dryburgh Abbey. The sheep-farmer’s eldest son, Walter, forsook the family pursuits and, first of his race, settled in a town and adopted a learned profession, for he became a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, the highest stage in Scotland of the solicitor’s calling. His wife was Anne Rutherford, the eldest daughter of the professor of medicine in the University, and with her came into the blood two other ancient strains. For the Rutherfords had been longer settled on the Border than the Scotts, and her mother was a Swinton of that ilk, one of the most sounding names in early Scottish history, and a descendant of Ben Jonson’s friend, the poet Earl of Stirling.