Stories of the Border Marches | ||
IN THE DAYS OF THE '15
Close on two hundred years back from the present time there stood far up the South Tyne, beyond Haltwhistle, on the road--then little better than a bridle-track--running over the Cumberland border by Brampton, an inn which in those days was a house of no little importance in that wild and remote country.
If its old walls could speak, what, for instance, might they not have told of Jacobite plottings? Beneath its roof was held many a meeting of the supporters of the King "over the water," James the Eighth; and here, riding up from Dilston, not seldom came the unfortunate Earl of Derwentwater, to take part in the Jacobite deliberations. The young lord and the horse he usually rode were figures familiar and welcome to the country folk around, and at the inn they were as well known as was the landlord himself. It was not long after a secret meeting held here in the earlier half of the year 1715 that the warrants were issued which led to Derwentwater's flight from Dilston, and precipitated the Rising that within a few months rolled so many gallant heads in the dust of the scaffold.
It might perhaps have been better for Lord
A poor affair at the best, this muster in Northumberland; and though the county was seething with excitement, and a few notable men went out with the Earl, his personal following did not exceed seventy in all. Then followed the march which ended so disastrously in pitiful surrender at Preston that fatal November day. However gallant personally, Forster was an incapable soldier, no leader of men, and General Wills had but to spread wide his net to sweep in the bulk of the insurgents--Forster, Derwentwater, Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carwath, Wintoun, and men less exalted in rank by the score and the hundred. The bag was a heavy one, that day of disaster to the Stuart cause; and alas, for many of those who filled it! Alas, too, for the wives and the mothers who sat at home, waiting! Not to
Away up the valley of the Tyne, amongst the wild Northumberland hills, news went with lagging gait, those leisurely days of the eighteenth century; even news of battle or of disaster did not speed as it is the wont of ill news to do: "For evil news rides fast, while good news baits." Tidings, in those good old days, but trickled through from ear to ear, slowly, as water filters through sand. Little news, therefore, of Lord Derwentwater, or of the Rising, was heard in or around Haltwhistle after the insurgent force left Brampton; no man knew for a certainty what fortune, good or bad, had waited on the fortunes of his friends.
Night was closing down on the desolate Border hills on a drear November evening of 1715. Throughout a melancholy day, clinging mist had blurred the outline of even the nearest hills; distance was blotted out. Thin rain fell chillingly and persistently, drip, dripping with monotonous plash from the old inn's thatched eaves; a light wind sobbed fitfully around the building, moaning at every chink and cranny of the ill-fitting window-frames. "A dismal night for any who must travel," thought the stableman of the inn, as he looked east and then west along the darkening road. No moving thing broke the monotony of the depressing outlook, and the groom turned to his work of bedding down for the night the few animals that happened to be in his charge. They were not many; most of those that so frequently of late had stood here were away with their owners, following the fortunes of the Earl of Derwentwater; business was dull at the inn. Well, let the weather be what it liked, at least the groom's work was over for the night, and he might go sit by the cheerful peat fire in the kitchen, and drink a health to the King--the rightful King, God bless him; and it was little harm, thought he, if he drank another to the Earl--whom might the Saints protect.
Even as he turned to go, in the dusk at the door, framed, as it were, in a picture, there appeared a horseman leading a tired horse, the reins loose over his arm. Though seen only in that half light, the
"Ye've ridden hard, sir," said the groom, bustling forward to take the horse.
The stranger said no word, but himself led the tired animal into an empty stall. Yet, as the groom remembered later, of the other horses in the stable, not one raised its head, or whinnied, or took any notice whatever as the new-comer entered.
The stableman turned to lift his lantern, and when, an instant later, he again faced about, he stared to find himself alone; the strange horseman was nowhere to be seen. And the horse in the stall? Him the groom knew well; there was no possibility of mistake; it was the well-known grey on which Lord Derwentwater had ridden away to cast in his lot with Forster.
"Mistress! Mistress!" he cried, hurrying into the house, "has his lordship come in? He's led his grey gelding into the stable the noo, and niver a word wad he say to me or he gaed oot. An' I'm feared a's no weel wi' him; he was lookin' sair fashed, an' kind o' white like."
"His lordship i' the inn? Guide us!" cried the landlady, snatching up a tallow dip and hurrying into the unlit guest-room.
"Ye hae gotten back, my lord? And is a' weel wi' your lordship? And--e-eh! what ails--?" she gasped, as a tall figure, seated in the great oak chair by the smouldering fire, turned on her a face wan and drawn, disfigured by bloody streaks across the cheek. Slowly, like a man in pain, or one wearied to the extreme of exhaustion, the seated figure rose, stood for a moment gazing at her, and then, ere the landlady could collect her scattered wits, it had vanished. Vanished, too, was the grey horse that the groom had seen brought into the stable; and, what was more, the bedding in the stall where the animal had stood was entirely undisturbed, and showed no trace of any beast having been there.
It was long that night ere anybody slept within the walls of the old inn, and broken was their sleep. None doubted but that the Earl was killed, or if not killed, at least soon to die; and the news of Preston, when it came, was to those faithful friends no news, only confirmation of their fears. None, after that, dared hope; they knew that he must die. And the 24th of February 1716 saw a countryside plunged in grief, for that day fell on the scaffold the head of one whom everybody loved, who was every man's friend, who never turned empty away those who went to him seeking help.
Blood-red were the northern lights that flashed and shimmered so wildly in the heavens that night, red as the blood that had soaked into the sawdust of
When "a' was done that man could do, and a' was done in vain," there remained but to convey his headless body, if it might be, to the spot where his forebears lie at rest.
It is my fate to die,
O, carry me to Northumberland,
In my fathers' grave to lie."
The Earl's body had been buried at St. Giles-in-the-Fields, and of those who went to recover it and to bring it home, there was one famous in Northumberland story, Frank Stokoe of Chesterwood. A remarkable man was Stokoe, of enormous personal strength and of great height--in stature a veritable child of Anak--a man without fear, brave to recklessness, a good friend and a terrible enemy. Added to all this, he was an extraordinarily expert swordsman. He was a man, too, of much influence and
There was, for instance, that affair of the feud between Lowes of Willimoteswick Castle and Leehall of Leehall, which kept a great part of Tynedale in hot water for so many years. Leehall appears to have been physically the better man; at any rate, on more than one occasion Lowes seems to have escaped from the clutches of his enemy solely by the superior speed of the horse he rode, or possibly he was a light, and his enemy a heavy, weight, which would make all the difference in a rousing gallop across deep ground or heathery hill. In any case, as a general rule, Lowes was more often the hunted than the hunter. Yet, to the followers of Lowes--there must always be two sides to a story--it was he, and not Leehall, who was the finer man, for, of an encounter between the pair near Bellingham, when Lowes' horse was killed by a sword-thrust directed at the rider's thigh, the old ballad says:
As he was never ne-an,
He wad have stabbed the rider
And letten the horse alean."
But perhaps the animosity here shown to Leehall comes more from one who was a lover of horses--as
But, having got him, his enemy did not proceed to cut him into gobbets, or even to "wipe the floor" with him. Something lingering and long was more to his taste; he would make Lowes "eat dirt." With every mark, therefore, of ignominy and contempt, he dragged his fallen foe home to Leehall, and there chained him near to the kitchen fire-place, leaving just such length of chain loose as would enable the prisoner to sit with the servants at meals. The position can scarcely have been altogether a pleasing one to the servants, to say nothing of the prisoner. Doubtless the former, or some of them, may have found a certain joy in baiting, and in further humiliating, a helpless man, their master's beaten enemy. Yet that pleasure, one would think, could scarcely atone for the constant presence among them of an uninvited guest--a guest, too, who had not much
Now, the law, in those breezy times, took small cognisance of such little freaks as this; the law, indeed, was pretty powerless up among those wild hills. It wanted some force stronger, or, at all events, some force less magnificently deliberate, than that of the law.
Frank Stokoe was that force. To him went the friends of Lowes; and next morning saw the peel tower of Leehall besieged. Frank demanded the surrender of Lowes, uninjured. Leehall retorted that he might take him--if he could. But Leehall had reckoned without his retainers; they dared not fight
Whether or not Leehall was content to have thus played second fiddle, one does not know. Perhaps it was his men who, a year or two later, paid a nocturnal visit to Stokoe's peel tower. Frank was roused from sleep one winter night by his daughter, who told her father that some one was attempting to force the outer door. Stokoe stole quietly downstairs, to find that some one outside was busy with the point of a knife trying gently to prise back the great oaken bolt which barred his door. A very little more, a few minutes longer of work, and the beam would have been slid back, the door would have been quietly opened, and the throats of all the occupants of the house might have been cut. Whispering to his daughter to stand behind the door, and softly to push back the bolt each time the attempt was made to prise it open, Frank snatched down, and loaded with slugs, his old musket. Then very quietly he let himself down through the trap-door into the cow-house, which in all, or nearly all, old peel
"Ye bluidy scoundrels," roared Stokoe, "I'll knock a hole in some o' ye that the stars will shine through."
And with that he let drive at the nearest, the charge, at so close a range, literally "knocking a hole" in him. Like a startled covey of partridges the remaining robbers fled, not only without attempting reprisals, but without even waiting to use the steps as an aid to escape; they simply flew through the air to mother earth and made tracks towards safety, anywhere, out of the reach of Frank Stokoe's vengeance; which perhaps was the wisest thing they could have done, for Stokoe was the kind of man who in a case such as this would willingly have knocked a hole in each one of them. In those days people were not very squeamish, and Stokoe seems to have gone quietly back to bed without greatly troubling himself about the slain robber; but the man's friends must have stolen back during the night, for in a copse near by, in a shallow grave hastily scooped out of the frozen earth, the dead body was found next day.
It is almost needless to say that Frank Stokoe was of those who would be certain to concern themselves in an enterprise such as the Rising of 1715. His sympathies were entirely with the Stuart, and against the Hanoverian King. Moreover, though he owned his peel tower and the land surrounding it, he was yet, as regards other land, a tenant of the Earl of Derwentwater, as well as being a devoted admirer of that nobleman. Naturally, therefore, when the Earl took the field, Stokoe followed him; and had all been of his frame of mind, there had been no ignominious surrender at Preston. Whilst fighting was to be done, no man fought so hard, or with such thorough enjoyment, as Stokoe. "Surrender" was a part of the great game that he did not understand; he was not of the stuff that deals in "regrettable incidents." At Preston that day, when all was done, there stood King George's men on either side, as well as in his front; in his rear a high stone wall, even to a man less heavily handicapped than he by weight, an obstacle almost insurmountable. But his horse was good--Stokoe's horses had to be good--and it knew its master. Never hitherto had the pair refused any jump, and they were not like to begin now. With a rush and a scramble, and the clatter of four good feet against the stone coping, they were over; over and away, galloping hard for the North Countrie, the free wind whistling past their ears as they sped, Stokoe throwing up his arm and giving a
Yes, that part of it was worth living for, and the blood danced in the veins of horse and man while the chase lasted. But what of it when once more the hills of Northumberland were regained, when the great moors that lay grim and frowning under the dark November skies were again beneath his horse's feet? It was a different matter then, for the hue and cry was out, and the earths all stopped against this gallant fox. Chesterwood was closed to him, no friend dared openly give him shelter.
"He had fled, had got clear away to France," was the story they gave out. But Frank Stokoe all the time lay snug and safe in hiding, not so very far from his own peel tower. And he was one of those who, disguised--perhaps in his case not very effectually--ventured to London, intent on bringing back the body of their chief, that it might lie at rest in the grave where sleep the fathers of that noble race.
There, in London, Frank narrowly escaped being taken. As it chanced, at that time an Italian bravo was earning for himself an unsavoury notoriety by going about boastfully challenging all England to stand up before him to prove who was the better man. He would mark his man, pick a quarrel with him, and the result was always the same. The
As he walked once near Leicester Field in the dusk of an evening, Stokoe's great figure caught the eye of this little Italian, in whose mind suddenly arose the irresistible longing to bring this huge bulk toppling to earth. That would be something not unworth boasting about--that he, a sort of eighteenth-century David, should slay this modern Goliath.
No one had ever been able to complain that it was difficult to pick a quarrel with Frank Stokoe. Not that he was quarrelsome--far otherwise; but never was he known to shrink from any combat that was pressed on him, and on this occasion the venomous little foreigner found him most ready to oblige. It wanted but a slight jostle, an Italian oath hissed out, a few words in broken English to the effect that big men were proverbially clumsy, and that bigness and courage were not always to be found united. Stokoe knew very well who his assailant was, knew his reputation, and the slender chance the ordinary swordsman might expect to have against this foreigner's devilish skill, but his weapon was unsheathed almost before the Italian had ceased to curse. Cautiously keeping a check on his habitual impetuosity, calling to his aid every ounce of the skill he possessed, and content meanwhile if he could evade the vicious thrusts of his enemy, Stokoe for a
"Well done, Stokoe! Old Northumberland for ever!" cried a voice from amongst the considerable crowd of spectators who had run up before the fight had been in progress many seconds. "Well done, Stokoe!"
Here was danger greater even than that from which he had but now escaped. He was recognised! And for him to be recognised in London probably
Stokoe glanced round uneasily as he wiped his sword, but it was not possible to say which in the group of spectators was the man who had given that compromising cry; it might be one of several who, to Stokoe's extreme discomposure, seemed to look at him rather intently. Time to be out of this, thought he; the farther he was from London the more freely he would breathe just at present, and the less chance was there of that breathing being permanently stopped. Policemen had not been invented in those days, and there was not much chance of his being arrested for duelling, for what was then called "the watch" was singularly inefficient, and seldom to be found when wanted. Nevertheless, it was now no easy matter for Stokoe to shake off the little "tail" of admirers who insisted on following him; it was not every day that they had the chance of seeing a man killed in fair fight, and they were loth to lose sight of the man who had done it--a hero in their eyes. However, by dint of plunging down one narrow street and up some other unsavoury alley, and repeating the manoeuvre at intervals, blinding his trail as far as possible, he at length shook off the last persevering remnant of his admirers, and, without
Frank Stokoe's position was an unfortunate one from now on. He was a proscribed man; his property had been seized, and those now in possession threatened if he put in an appearance, or made any attempt to regain the property, that they would give him up to Government. Times consequently became hard for poor Stokoe; his affairs went from bad to worse, and though his name was included in the general pardon which Government issued some time later, he never got back his land nor any of his possessions. Part of the land passed with the Derwentwater Estate to Greenwich Hospital, part, including the peel tower, where he and his ancestors had lived for generations, remained in the clutches of those who had seized it. Old age came upon Frank and found him poverty-stricken; want came, "as an armed man," and found him too weak to resist. The spirit was there, but no longer the strength that should have helped the spirit. He sank and died, leaving behind him no shred of worldly gear.
Another noted Northumbrian who was "out" in the '15 was him whom men then called "Mad Jack Hall" of Otterburn. Not that he was in any sense
In this instance, the sin of not interfering to prevent a duel--or a murder, as popular opinion called it--was punished, firstly, by Hall's house at Otterburn being burned to the ground, together with all his farm buildings and great part of his farm stock; and, secondly, this grievous loss was followed in the time of harvest by a devastating flood in the Rede, which swept away from the rich, low-lying haughs every particle of the fat crops which already had been cut, and were now merely waiting to be carried home.
By such drastic means having apparently been purged of his sin, Mr. Hall seems to have regained his normal popularity, and an incident which presently occurred raised it to an even greater height than before. As far back at least as the time of Cromwell it had been customary to send offenders against the law, political prisoners and the like who were not judged quite worthy of the gallows or the block, to what in Charles the Second's day were called His Majesty's Plantations--our colonies, that is, in America or the West Indies. Not only were "incorrigible rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars" thus dealt with, but those also who attended illegal prayer-meetings found themselves in the same box if they happened to have been previously convicted of this heinous offence; and the moss-troopers of
It was "Mad Jack Hall's" fortune to save from this fate of being kidnapped and sent to rot in fever-laden swamps of the West Indies a young Northumbrian at that time in his service. It was the time of year when Stagshaw Bank Fair was held, and Mr. Hall, meaning to attend the fair, had instructed this young man to join him there at a certain hour, and himself had ridden over to Corbridge, there to pass the night. In the morning, when Jack Hall reached the fair at the appointed hour, he was astonished to find his servant, very dejected in appearance, being led away in charge of a man on horseback. Hall questioned the lad, who brightened up vastly at sight of his master, but could give no explanation as to the cause of this interference. All he knew was that as he stood waiting for Mr. Hall, this man had ridden up, claimed him as a prisoner, and was now marching him off. Hall looked at the mounted man, and recognised him as one of a family named Widdrington, who claimed to be invested by the Government of Queen Anne with authority to arrest from time
Hall, however, was not the man to let his servant be taken without protest, even if this Widdrington really had the authority he claimed to possess. But to all Hall's remonstrances Widdrington merely replied haughtily that he was accountable to no one, save only to her most gracious Majesty the Queen; that he was there in the execution of his duty, and that anyone interfering with him did so at his own peril. The situation was awkward. On the one hand, if this man really was acting within his rights and in the execution of his duty, then Hall himself was likely to get into serious trouble; on the other, he was not going to see a young man, his own servant, a man, so far as he knew, innocent of all offence against the law, marched off in this way, if by any means he might be saved. As mere remonstrances appeared to be of no avail, Hall hotly pressed his horse close up to Widdrington's, completely barring his way, and demanded that, if he
"This is my authority," cried Widdrington, drawing his sword.
"We'll soon prove whether that's strong enough," replied Hall, jumping from his horse and also drawing his weapon. There was, as it chanced, close to the lane in which the two had been wrangling, a bit of nice level ground covered with short, crisp turf, and to this Hall quickly made his way, followed by Widdrington and by a crowd of people who had run up from the fair, attracted by the quarrel. A very few minutes sufficed to prove that Widdrington's "authority" was not strong enough. He fought well enough for a time, it is true, and his opponent had need of all the skill he could command, but within five minutes Hall had caught Widdrington's point in the big basket hilt of his sword, and with a sudden jerk had sent the weapon flying, leaving the disarmed man entirely at his mercy. That was enough to satisfy Hall, who was too much of a man to push his advantage further. But it by no means satisfied the surrounding crowd of country people. By them these Widdringtons had long been feared and detested, and only the belief in the minds of those simple country folk that, in some mysterious way beyond their ken, the law was on the side of their oppressors, had on more than one occasion prevented an outbreak
As for Hall, henceforward an angel of light could not have been more highly regarded, and his fate, a very few years later, brought grief on the county almost as universal as that felt for the Earl of Derwentwater himself.
Hall was at Preston with Derwentwater, but he did not, like Frank Stokoe, ride for it when Forster surrendered. One would almost have expected a man of his fiery, reckless disposition to have made a dash for it, and to fight his way through or fall in the attempt. Perhaps he considered it a point of honour to stick by his friends, and share their fate, whatever it might be. Anyhow, he surrendered with the rest, and with the rest was condemned to death. Time after time he was reprieved, owing to
Stories of the Border Marches | ||