The Heir of Douglas

by Lillian de la Torre

  Then what of the Mignon kidnapping? The Mignon child was carried off on the Thursday before St. Clair. But on Thursday, July 11, no child appeared at Godefroi’s. According to the calendar of the liturgical year, the following Thursday was St. Clair. Andrew Stuart at this point quizzed the glass-workers. They looked into their records, and found that in 1748, to avoid a long week-end, they had celebrated St. Clair late, on July 22. This suited the new scheme of things nicely, making it possible to think that the child had been carried off, after all, on Thursday, July 18, the very day they registered at Michelle’s. This did not explain where the child was hidden on the Thursday night after the Mignons gave him up, and it entailed disregarding the unanimous testimony of all his friends and relations that he was carried off at the age of twelve or fourteen days; but it would have to do.

  On August 19, 1765, almost a year after they had started, Andrew Stuart and Alexander McKonochie signed a minute declaring the proof closed on the continent. They had examined, in France, Germany, and Flanders, almost three hundred persons. Now it was time to go home.

  The Duchess of Douglas set sail first, fraught with strange cargo. At Amiens Horace Walpole crossed her path, and was amused. The English, he remarked to Conway, are generally the most extraordinary persons that we meet with even out of England. “You will not guess what she carries with her—Oh! nothing that will hurt our manufactures; nor what George Grenville himself would seize. One of her servants died at Paris; she had him embalmed, and the body is tied before her chaise:—a droll way of being chief mourner!”

  Their Duchess gone, the Douglas party departed. Andrew Stuart lingered to put his proofs in order.

  Simultaneously he paid up his bills and his obligations. He distributed pineapple rum and Havana snuff to such as patronized him and his cause. Buhot got two hundred louis, a saddle and boots, and the berline. Others received books or a gold-headed cane. Champagne was distributed by the dozen. Andrew Stuart bought it of the friend at Rheims who had first put him on the Sanry track.

  At last, in December, there was nothing more to stay for. Andrew Stuart packed up the souvenirs: Valenciennes ruffles, five snuff-boxes, a tooth-pick case, a magnifying-glass, a laced mantley and hood, and six pairs of silk stockings. For himself there were a muff, a knife, two pair of reindeer breeches, and a riding-coat. On Tuesday, December 17, he donned the breeches, the riding-coat, and the muff, and set out in the dark for Scotland. He had been three and one-half years in exile, and he carried with him in his boxes three and one-half years’ worth of papers to lay before the Court of Session.

  On January 19, 1766, with a chaise and four horses, he gallopped into Edinburgh to deliver the final blow that would dispossess Jacques Louis Mignon from the Douglas birthright.

  PART THREE

  Archie Douglas

  But how at the bar, they averred and defended,

  Till judges were deafened and lawyers’ throats rended;

  Till clerks knew not what they were jotting and scribbling,

  And Lockhart himself lost the thread of his quibbling.

  (The Douglas Garland)

  Chapter XI

  On July 29, 1766, a very young lawyer entered the Parliament Close. The busy scene was an old story to him, but today was a very special day, and he drank it all in with fresh avidity. He pushed his way through the crowd of chairmen and caddies about the Cross. He passed the old gray stones of St. Giles’s and the crazy booths clinging to its flanks. On the walk a winy breeze tickled his nostrils. It came from the thronged house of John Clerihew, vintner.

  Clerihew’s was an important outlying adjunct of the Scotch court. Here more legal business was done over a bottle than was done dry in the Parliament House. It was during a well lubricated consultation at Clerihew’s that the young lawyer was shortly to conclude that the law was “a form of fleecing poor lieges.” It was at Clerihew’s that the Douglas litigants had been taking the oaths of Scotch witnesses. First and last they summoned so many witnesses to Clerihew’s that they had to have summonses printed up, of blank date, for appearance “within the house of John Clearihue vintner.” Andrew Stuart kept a bundle of such blanks among his papers. Clerihew’s bill was an important item when the attorneys presented their accounts, and reminiscences of Clerihew’s often were carried into the court itself. “Gentlemen,” growled the judge on the bench to a couple of elevated lawyers, “ye maun just pack up yer papers and gang hame; the tane o’ ye’s riftin’ punch and the tither’s belchin’ claret; there’ll be nae guid got oot o’ ye the day!”

  Passing that inviting fragrance, the young lawyer crossed the Close, making for the Parliament House on the south side. In the old gray stone building, turreted and balustraded, the Scotch Parliament had sat till the Union, and the Scotch judges still held their court there. Over the high ornamental door stood figures in stone, representing Justice and Mercy. They made the young lawyer laugh. The wits were saying that Justice and Mercy stood outside the door of the law court because they could not get in.

  The young lawyer passed in, and stood in the handsome Parliament Hall of Scotland. Under his feet was the chequered hardwood floor, over his head sprang the arches of the groined vault ceiling, open and coming together in a forest of points. Around him surged lawyers and litigants and tradesmen in a babble of talk and laughter. As in Westminster Hall, the tradesmen with their booths took up half the wall space. At one end sat the Lord Ordinary, one of the judges assigned in his turn to sit as a court of first resort in civil cases. About him clustered the citizens and lawyers involved. Everywhere else strolled the idle men of the law in unbounded merriment and witty sallies.

  “What, Mr. Burnet!” cries a Hamilton adherent to the Douglas lawyer. “I hear you have been feasting the judges on the Duchess of Douglas’s venison. A pretty use to make of it, man—’tis flat bribery and corruption!”

  Burnet grins. The haunch had proved too rank to stomach.

  “I confess much corruption—but no bribery.”

  The advocates laugh. The young advocate laughs too, and is proud to be one of this merry company.

  But there is no lingering in the Outer House today. The lawyers are pressing into the robing room to make ready. Over his suit of legal black the swarthy, sharp-nosed young advocate dons the gown too. It is the first time.

  “Gentlemen,” he says whimsically, “I am prest into service here; but I have observed that a prest man, either by sea or land, after a little time does just as well as a volunteer.”

  Young Boswell’s father the judge, having played the role of the press-gang, regards the volatile young fellow with an eye more indulgent than usual. “Jamie,” he remarks, “is takin’ a tout on a new horn.”

  The eager young advocate in his first year at the bar is to win cases from Scotland’s best lawyers, and save a sheepstealer from the noose against the eloquence of his betters and the weight of the evidence, before he gets tired of the new sensation. Now, with many another lawyer, he presses eagerly forward and enters the Inner House.

  In the Inner House sat the fifteen judges of Scotland together, acting as a court of appeal. It was a low square den of a place, not above forty feet wide. Behind the bench, at the Lord President’s back, yawned a huge fire-place, all massive, and never cleaned. To right and left, worked in gold thread on a black velvet ground, hung two samplers, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. Over all brooded a dark-brown air of antiquity. On the benches at the bar sat the advocates and Writers to the Signet. Above the bar was the crowded spectators’ gallery, hanging so low that the speaker was in danger of hitting it as he flourished his arms.

  The full bench of judges in their purple and red were listening to the speaker with close attention. The great Douglas Cause was in its fifth week of pleadings, and the pleader was at his climax. He was Alexander Lockhart, Dean of the Scottish bar (later Lord Covington), famed leader of desperate causes. Lockhart was winding up the proof for Hamilton. He was haranguing the court with great rapidity and veh
emence, and as little respect for persons as usual. It was Lockhart whose overbearing rudeness had driven young Wedderburn to the English bar. It was Lockhart upon whose industry and forensic ingenuity the Hamilton faction pinned their hopes.

  “The heir of Douglas,” cried Lockhart, “is no Douglas, but the glass-worker’s boy!”

  Ranged at the bar to back Lockhart sat others of Edinburgh’s legal elite. Here was sober-sided, reliable Nairne. Here was genial Andrew Crosbie, Scott’s “Counsellor Pleydell,” official Assassin to the Poker Club, an organization which existed to keep things “stirred up.” Here was starchy Sir Adam Ferguson, hand in glove with Andrew Stuart. Dr. Johnson from his conversation perceived Sir Adam to be a vile Whig. Gay young Boswell perceived him to be a prodigious dull fellow.

  On the Douglas side were marshalled an even more glittering and high-priced array of talent. Mumbling Rae and witty Burnet had had their say. James Montgomery, Lord Advocate for Scotland, would have his day in court when Lockhart finished. Young Murray had displayed his ornate eloquence, which his friend Boswell thought wasted in the Scotch court: “It is lost upon the judges. It is like playing fine Italian allegros to a parcel of strong plowmen dancing in a barn, who will call out, Poh, play Grieg’s Pipes!” “I plead to please myself,” said young Murray.

  After him had spoken the Lord President’s brother, brilliant young Henry Dundas, of whose meteoric rise Boswell was very jealous. Then there was Robert Macqueen (later Lord Braxfield, model for Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston). The very name of this formidable jurist was enough to make malefactors and junior pleaders start. With his powerful frame, piercing eyes under rough brows, and dark lowering look, he was like a menacing blacksmith. He affected a thick Scotch accent and a low growling voice, in which with dramatic vividness he presented, in abrupt questions and answers, pleadings short, strong, and conclusive.

  In court, but not to plead, sat the first writing-lawyer of the Scotch bar, Islay Campbell (later Lord Succoth), from whose pen had come many Douglas law-papers. His mind was deep, artful, and ingenious; his pleadings were dry, minute, and ineffective. He was a small, impassive man, with a low, dull voice, and even when heaving internally with strong passion, he pleaded with no more fire than a knot of wood. He listened to Alexander Lockhart with unmoved face.

  In Holland, law-student Boswell had not even asked Andrew Stuart about the Douglas Cause. At home, he was catching the infection of a great enthusiasm for this romantic affair. He had flirted with the Duchess, and breakfasted young Archie in London, and now he became their passionate adherent. Much he wished that he might be retained upon the Douglas side. He wished it so much that people actually began to believe it. His brother, half-mad half-pay Lieutenant John, heard it less than two weeks later, and the Scots Magazine, too rashly repeating the rumor, had to retract it.

  The Douglas Cause could engross the young lawyer’s attention, not only as financially the biggest law-suit ever seen in Scotland, not only as a romantic story as good as a novel, but also as an epitome of civil proceedings under Scotch law. Scotch law was nothing like English law; if it had been, there would have been no point in going to Utrecht to study. It was based upon Roman law. Jury trial, either civil or criminal, was as yet unknown. Small decisions and small rulings were made by the Lord Ordinary, sitting in the Outer House. Every decision of his could be appealed to the Court of Session, in which all fifteen judges sat at once.

  It was not the custom to summon witnesses for examination and cross-examination before the court. The judges might choose to question a witness, but they seldom did. Shorthand reporting was unknown in the Scotch courts, so taking down viva-voce testimony was a long and trying process. The litigants brought their evidence in the form of affidavits. The affidavits in the Douglas Cause were before the court in print in two thick quarto volumes of more than a thousand pages each, formidable weapons physically as well as intellectually. The copy owned by Robert Macqueen, now in the possession of the author, looks rather as if that doughty champion had used it to batter his opponents about the head.

  Like the proofs, the pleadings before the fifteen-man court were mostly turned out in writing and presented in print, the only easy method of duplicating then known. “You know,” wrote Boswell, “one half of the business before the Court of Session is carried on by writing. In the first instance a cause is pleaded before the Lord Ordinary, that is to say one of the fifteen Judges who sits in his turn for a week in the Outer House. But no sooner does he give judgement than we give him in Representations and Answers and Replies and Duplies and Triplies, and he will sometimes order Memorials to give him a full view of the cause. Then we reclaim to the Inner House by Petition, and there again we give in variety of printed papers, from which the Lords determine the cause. For it is only in causes of great consequence that the Court orders a hearing in presence. This method of procedure is admirable, for it gives the Judges a complete state of every question, and by binding up the Session Papers a man may lay up a treasure of law reasoning and a collection of extraordinary facts.”

  The Douglas and Hamilton lawyers had been peppering the court with law-papers for almost four years. Certain milestones in the case were behind them. The Hamilton lawyers had fired the opening gun of the reduction suit on December 7, 1762. The judges had declined to take the rents away from Archie and sequester them while litigation was pending. They were unwilling to put him at such a disadvantage against the Hamilton coffers. So Archie had his twelve thousand odd a year to pay his lawyers. At first he paid them triple, for there were three suits to defend, against the Duke of Hamilton, against Lord Douglas Hamilton, and against the Earl of Selkirk. Embarked on a policy of obstruction, the Douglas lawyers refused to let the three be conjoined into one. They were conjoined, nevertheless, on July 23, 1763, and the spate of law-papers was that much reduced. On July 27 the Lords decided that Hamilton had a case, and permitted them to take evidence; but within two weeks the French suit had brought things to a standstill.

  It took Andrew Stuart an entire year to get the matter of the French suit adjusted, and another year to wind up the proof-taking in France. It took another half year to get the proofs printed, even printing simultaneously at different printing-houses in Edinburgh and Paris; and when they were done, the court wanted them explained, and both sides spent four months more drawing up brief statements of their cases, which were finally handed in on June 15, 1766.

  On July 1 the pleadings began. They took more time than any spoken arguments the Lords had ever before sat through. On August 1 they ended without a judgement. The Lords of Session were still lost in the forest of evidence. They wanted a guide. They ordered Memorials drawn up to explain the explanations. Sir Adam Ferguson and Islay Campbell settled down to work.

  Concurrently, from session to session, an unremitting running fight was taking place over the Hamilton attempts to lay hands on written evidence. It was like a guessing game. The law was that if you could guess what your opponent held, and describe it, you could get it to look at. They would guess, for instance, at a green notebook with the name of Mignon in it—in such a book that name was jotted by the stranger gentleman who took the child. They drew blank. They drew blank with the name of Blainville, too, though Colonel John had certainly taken it down for future reference. With other guesses and bits of information they did better.

  The Douglas faction fought desperately to keep another notebook out of it. They were forced to silly subterfuges. “The defender was pleased to argue,” remarked a Hamilton lawyer contemptuously, “that in this memorandum book there might be things unfit for inspection, as for instance, that Lady Jane and Sir John might thence appear to have had a treasonable correspondence with the Pretender. But this, with submission, seems rather too ludicrous in a cause wherein forgery is charged. The pursuers have no concern in the political opinions of those persons, their opinions are no secret, every one knows how Sir John became a Colonel, & when Lady Jane became a convert.”

  When young
Boswell first put on the gown, the pursuers had just wrung this disputed document from the unwilling hands of the defenders. There was no treason in it, and not much else. On a page by itself Lady Jane had recorded: “Archibald and Sholto were born on the 10 July 1748. Archibald was weaned on the 22 April 1749.” Otherwise there were only a few jottings of expenses and journeys, letters sent and received. It was in this notebook that the Duchess of Douglas found the itinerary she followed in France. In it also Lady Jane had jotted that Mr. Steuart on the 10th of July had written six letters.

  There were many Steuart letters lying around in old trunks and charter-chests, tossed into a corner or “impignorate” for debt; some had turned up in a blacking-box with the brushes and bear’s grease. Sifting through them, the lawyers recovered four letters of the six. They were dated July 10, sure enough. They contained no word of my Lady Jane being in labour, and some of them were datelined Rheims.

  Colonel John from his grave was still confusing his son’s cause. The Douglas defenders took the Almanac Royal and showed that the letters would have gone by the early-morning post; and they took the Colonel’s records and showed that he had a trick of dating by the post day and not by the day of writing. They pointed out that he had chosen Rheims as his permanent address. When they got all through, the Colonel still looked shifty.

  Another of the Colonel’s records turned up among Mr. Loch’s papers. The man of business was summoned to hand in a scrap of paper on which the old man had jotted the details of the birth. Name for name and spelling for spelling they matched Mr. Loch’s jotting on the back of Lady Jane’s will. The note explained “Sanbourg St. Germain,” too. When Colonel John wrote “Faubourg,” in his cramped hand it looked like “Sanbourg.” It still does. Andrew Stuart kept the note among his papers. He was convinced that no matter what Lady Jane told Mr. Loch, the Writer had copied the details from Colonel John’s jotting.