Stories of the Border Marches | ||
THE KIDNAPPING OF LORD DURIE
"It is commonly reported that some party, in a considerable action before the Session, finding that Lord Durie could not be persuaded to think his plea good, fell upon a stratagem to prevent the influence and weight which his lordship might have to his prejudice, by causing some strong masked men to kidnap him, in the Links of Leith, at his diversion on a Saturday afternoon, and transport him to some blind and obscure room in the country, where he was detained captive, without the benefit of daylight, a matter of three months (though otherwise civilly and well entertained); during which time his lady and children went in mourning for him as dead. But after the cause aforesaid was decided, the Lord Durie was carried back by incognitos, and dropt in the same place where he had been taken up." (Forbes's Journal of the Session, Edinburgh, 1714.)
With the early part of the seventeenth century, moss-trooping in the Border country had not yet come to an end. Its glory, no doubt, and its glamour, had begun to fade before even the sixteenth century was far spent, and where were now to be
Yet in Eskdale there was one patriot, at least, who boasted himself that as his fathers had been, so was he. Willie Armstrong of Gilnockie was that man--"Christie's Will," he was commonly called, a great-grandson of the famous Johnnie, and not unworthy of his descent. Had he lived when Johnnie flourished, there might indeed have been two Armstrongs equally famous. As it was, Willie spent his days at constant feud with the law, and even the strong walls of Gilnockie were not for him always a secure shelter. Once it befell that the Lord
"Now, what's broucht ye to this, Gilnockie?" the Earl inquired.
"Oh, nocht but having twa bit tethers in my hand, my lord," said Willie. But: "Weel, I wadna say but there micht mebbes hae been twa cowt at the tae end o' the tethers," he admitted, on being pressed by the Earl.
Now, it happened that Willie was well known to Lord Traquair--had, in fact, more than once been of considerable service to his lordship; and it was no failing of the Earl to desert a friend in trouble, if help might be given quietly and judiciously. So it came about that the prison gates swung back for Christie's Will, the halter no longer threatened his neck, and Lord Traquair acquired a follower who to repay his debt of gratitude would stick at nothing.
Some little time later it chanced that a great lawsuit fell to be decided in the Court of Session. In this lawsuit Lord Traquair was deeply concerned. A verdict in his favour was of vital importance to him, but he very well knew that the opinion of the presiding judge was likely to be unfavourable to his claim, and that should Lord Durie preside, the case in that event would almost certainly go against him. Could that judge, however, by any means be quietly spirited away from Edinburgh before the date fixed
By the lightning, the wind, and the rain,
That if ever of Christie's Will I had need,
He would pay me my service again.'"
And Lord Traquair did not plead in vain. It was a little thing to do, Will thought, for one who had saved him from the gallows tree.
'I've stown the horse frae the sleeping loon;
But for you I'll steal a beast as braid,
For I'll steal Lord Durie frae Edinboro toon.'"
* * * * *
A light northerly breeze piped shrill through the long bent grass beyond Leith Links, sweeping thin and nippingly across shining sands left bare by a receding tide; down by the rippling water-line, as the sun of a late spring day neared his setting, clamouring gulls bickered noisily over the possession of some fishy dainty. Out from near-lying patches of whin, and from the low, wind-blown sand-hills, rabbits stole warily, nibbling the short herbage now and then, but ever with an air of suspicion and manifest unease, for behind a big clump of whin, during half the day there had lain hid a thick-set, powerfully built man.
"De'il tak' the body!" he grumbled, sitting up and stretching himself as he glanced along the beach; "he's lang o' comin'."
As he gazed, the sight of a distant horseman riding westward brought him sharply to his feet, and snatching up a long cloak that lay by his side, he walked leisurely through the yielding sand till he reached the firm beach within tide mark, along which the horseman was now quietly cantering.
"Ye'll be Lord Durie, I'm thinkin'," he cried, raising his hand to stay the rider, a middle-aged, legal-faced man, who sat his sober steed none too confidently, with thighs but lightly wed to the saddle.
"Yes, I'm Lord Durie. What can I do for you?"
"Weel, my lord, I've come far to see ye. They say there's no' a lawyer leevin' or deid that kens mair nor you on a' thing. It's jist a bit plea that I've gotten," said the man, laying a hand on the horse's neck and sidling along close to his rider's knee.
"For onny advice on kittle points o' law, ye maun go to counsel, my friend. I'm a judge, no' an advocate. Gude e'en to ye."
"Ay, but, my lord," said the man, laying a detaining left hand on the near rein, "it's this way it is; ye see--" and at that, with a sudden powerful upward push of the unskilled rider's leg, Lord Durie was hurled from the saddle and lay sprawling on his
"Goad's sake! what's this o't?" cried the poor judge, already tangled in the folds of the long cloak, and struggling to rise. "Wad ye murder are o' his Majesty's judges!"
"Lie still, my lord, lie still! There's no skaith will come to ye 'gin ye but lie still. De'il's i' the body; wull the auld lurdane no hand sae!"
Of small avail were the judge's struggles; as well might an infant struggle in the folds of a python. Ere even an elderly man's scant breath was quite spent, he lay among the whins, bound hand and foot, trussed like a fowl, and with the upper part of his body and his head wrapped in the stifling folds of the great cloak.
That was the last of the outer world that Lord Durie knew or saw for many a long day. His horse, with muddied saddle, and broken reins trailing on the ground (muddied and broken, no doubt, by the horse rolling), was found next day grazing on the links. But of the judge, no trace. He might--as some, with the superstition of the day, were disposed to believe[1]--have been spirited away by a warlock; or,
1: In the seventeenth century belief in witchcraft was almost at its height over the whole of Europe, and in Scotland the hunt after witches and warlocks was peculiarly vindictive. To obtain confession, the most incredible tortures--as cruel as anything practised by Red Indians on their prisoners--were inflicted on accused persons, men and women, and escape was seldom possible for these poor creatures. Nor were such beliefs and practices confined to the benighted times of the seventeenth century. Even as late as 1722, in Sutherlandshire, a woman was burned for witchcraft. Her crime was that she had transformed her own daughter into a pony, and had ridden her throughout an entire night. Conclusive proof of the charge was found in the fact that the poor woman's daughter was lame afterwards both in hands and feet.
Nothing was too absurd, no charge too wicked or too childish, to obtain universal belief in those times.
Meantime, bound to the saddle in front of his captor, by little-known hill paths the judge had been borne swiftly through the night. The long, melancholy wail of a whaup, the eerie hoot of an owl, at times smote dully on his ear; but to all his entreaties and his questions no human voice made answer; in stony silence his abductor rode steadily on. Over hill and dale, over rough ground and smooth, splashing
Then, later, it seemed to him that he woke from
Few, very few, persons at that day were above the weakness of a firm belief in witchcraft; even a judge of the Court of Session would not dare openly to question the justice and humanity of the Mosaical law: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Superstition was rampant, and to Lord Durie there had ever seemed nothing incongruous in accepting belief in the undoubted existence of both witches and warlocks. Could it be that he was now actually in the power of such beings? His mind was yet in a whirl, and he could form to himself no connected account of yesterday's happenings, if indeed it was really yesterday, and not in some remote, far-away time, that he had last
When the judge again awoke it was in a prison somewhat less gloomy, for a thin splash of pale sunlight now struck the wall, and gave light sufficient to show every corner of the room. Again Lord Durie went through his fruitless search, and then, feeling hungry, and having suffered no visible ill effects from his first incautious draught of small-beer, he ate and drank heartily. From the way in which the patch of sunlight crept up the wall, it was easy to tell that the time was evening. Could it indeed be that no more than twenty-four hours
What was that voice that he now heard, thin and hollow, on the evening air? "Far yaud! far yaud!" and then, with eldritch scream, "Bauty," it cried. Such sounds, coming from he knew not where, fell disturbingly on the unaccustomed ears of a seventeenth-century Judge of Session, and Lord Durie's sleep that night was broken by grim dreams.
Day followed day, week pressed on the heels of week, and still never a human face smiled on the unhappy judge. Each morning he found on his little table a supply of food and drink, all good of their kind and plenty--boiled beef or mutton, oaten cakes, pease bannocks, and always the jack of small-beer--but never did he see human hand place them there, never did human form cheer him by its presence.
The solitary confinement and the utter want of occupation told on a nervous, somewhat highly strung temperament; and in the judge's mind superstition began to hold unquestioned sway. Things taught him in childhood by an old nurse, things which now folks, indeed, still believed, but which he himself had to some extent given up or dismissed from his thoughts, began to crowd back again into his brain. No mere human power, surely, could have brought him here as he had been brought. Was it in the dungeon of some sorcerer, of some
So the weeks dragged past, and Lord Durie lost all reckoning of the flight of time; but ever the belief strengthened that it was no mere human power that held him in bondage. And this belief received confirmation at last, for he awoke one night from confused and heavy sleep, to find himself once more bound, and wrapped, body and head, in the thick folds of a cloak. Then, seemingly without moving from his bed, he was borne through the air and set upon a horse; and again
It was warlocks who had dealt with him--so his family and all his friends agreed when his tale was told. But his successor in office mourned, perhaps, that their dealings had not been more effectual, for he liked ill to give up a post he had filled with ability for an all too short three months.
To Lord Durie's regret, his return was too late to enable him to preside in the famous case which was about to come on shortly after the date of his disappearance. That had already been decided in a manner of which he could not have failed to disapprove, and Lord Traquair had secured a verdict.
For long the judge held to the warlock theory, and he was not averse, after dinner, over a bottle, from telling at great length the story of his terrible experiences during those mysterious three months of captivity. Younger men, indeed, began to find
Yet something did happen, later, which at least seemed in some measure to have shaken his faith, and it was noticed that, towards the end of his life, he was not fond of dwelling on the subject--had even been known, in fact, to become irritable when pressed to tell his story. It fell out, a year or two after the events which he had loved to narrate, that Lord Durie had occasion to visit Dumfries. On the way back to Edinburgh, travelling with some colleagues, it chanced that a heavy storm caught them, and necessity drove them to take shelter for the night in a farmhouse near to an old peel tower which stood on the verge of the wild moorland country beyond Moffat.
That night Lord Durie, in his stuffy box-bed, dreamed a terrible dream. He was once more in the power of the wizard or warlock; and it seemed to him that in his dream he even heard again those mysterious words that had once so haunted him. With a start he woke, bathed in perspiration, to find that day had broken, and that from the hillside
"What was yon cry oot on the hill? Oh, jist oor Ailick cryin' on his dowg, Bauty, to weer the sheep," said the grey-haired, brown-faced old woman to whom they had owed their shelter for the night.
"Veesitors?" she continued, in reply to further questions. "Na. We hae nae veesitors here. There was aince a puir sick man lay twa three months i' the auld tower yont by, a year or twa back, but there's been nae veesitors. They said he was daft, an' I was kind o' feared whiles to gie him his meat. But, oh, he wad be jist a silly auld body that did naebody hairm. Na, I never richtly got sicht o' his face, for I aye put his bit meat an' drink doon beside him whan he was sleepin'. An' them that broucht him took him awa again whan they thoucht he was some better."
It was noted that after this visit Lord Durie no longer pursued the subject of warlocks.
[NOTE.--The story of Lord Durie's abduction and captivity is differently told by Chambers in his Domestic Annals of Scotland, as far, at least, as the instigator of the kidnapping and its accomplisher are concerned. It is there recorded that the maker of the plot to kidnap the judge was George Meldrum
Tradition tells of his long ride to convey important papers from Lord Traquair to King Charles I, and of his perilous return journey, bearing a reply from his Majesty. Tidings of his mission had come to the ears of the Parliamentarians, and orders were issued to seize him at Carlisle. In that town, Will, unwitting of special danger, had halted an hour to refresh man and beast, and as he proceeded on his journey, and was midway over the high, narrow bridge across the Eden, the sudden clatter of horses' feet and the jingle of accoutrements at either end of the bridge showed him that his way was effectually
Stories of the Border Marches | ||