Susan Johnson (34 page)

1.
As chief of the Campbells, the Duke of Argyll had more men at his command than there were regular troops in Scotland, and better fighting men at that. At the time, the Scots army consisted of three thousand men. With a large Campbell fighting force loyal to him, the Duke of Argyll’s influence extended beyond the political arena.

2.
The Duke of Hamilton, leader of the Scottish party for independence, was, after the Parliament of 1704, increasingly erratic in his behavior. Reports of his willingness to negotiate with the queen were already in the air by the fall of 1704. Roxburgh wrote from London to Baillie of Jerviswood on December 12, 1704: “I have been told by a
friend of Duke Hamilton’s, and one that knows him well, within this eight and forty hours, that if the Queen has a mind for this business, Duke Hamilton was vain and necessitous.” And James Johnstone, who as Lord Register was a key figure in the conduct of Scottish affairs in London, also wrote to Jerviswood on January 13, 1705: “I have had suspicions, but now I am certain, that Duke Hamilton is tampering by the means of Harley with the Lord Treasurer…. He must have his debts payed.” And again, on February 15, 1705, he addressed Jerviswood: “Duke Hamilton’s friends are so gross as to intimate to great men here that he is
Chambre a Louer
(Room for Hire). But for all that’s to be done now, I find it’s thought scarcely worth the while to make the Purchase.” Before the 1705 session was over, however, Hamilton apparently found a way to prove that his support was worth the purchase.

3.
Condoms were referred to as French
lettres
because they were tied at the open end with a ribbon. The French, though, referred to condoms as
redingotes des Anglais
(English riding coats). The earliest published description of a condom used to prevent conception appears in Gabriel Fallopio’s
De Morbo Galileo
(Padua, 1563). In English, it was named for a Dr. Condom, physician at the court of Charles II, who ruled from 1660 to 1685. In the Argyll Papers, Myln says: “John, Duke of Argyll, was made Commissioner to the Parliament 6th March 1705. He brought along with him a certaine instrument called a Quondam, which occasioned the debauching of a great number of ladies of quality, and other young gentlewomen.” John Campbell regarded women as available for his pleasure, and he came to Edinburgh prepared.

4.
A Scottish peerage didn’t necessarily allow a Scottish noble to sit in the English House of Lords, whereas
an English peerage automatically bestowed that privilege. Also, an English peerage was more likely to offer the recipient an opportunity to share in the numerous highly lucrative government offices, positions, and pensions. For his part in passing the Union treaty, the Duke of Argyll was rewarded with the English titles of Baron Chatham and Earl of Greenwich. Since he had no son to inherit, only five daughters by his second marriage, he arranged for his eldest daughter, Lady Caroline, to have the rights of a male heir to those titles. Otherwise they would have passed to his younger brother, whom he disliked.

5.
The property rights of married women in Scotland were strong in some respects and weak in others. A wife’s moveable property was under her husband’s control, although marriage contracts could be used to enlarge or restrict the wife’s rights. In the case of heritable or immoveable property, the married woman had stronger rights. She could not dispose of this without consent, but neither could the husband sell his wife’s land without her permission, and he could not arbitrarily deny his wife permission to dispose of her separate estate without good cause.

Unmarried women, however, enjoyed superior legal rights, and widows were effectively on a par with men. Widowhood was the only stage of the female life cycle in which women could be truly economically and legally independent. Widows not only controlled their own wealth, but they were entitled by law to at least a third of their husband’s moveable estate and could also take over his business.

6.
For Hamilton’s treachery, he was rewarded by the English with an English dukedom, The Order of the Thistle and the Garter, and the appointment as ambassador
to Paris. Generous monetary rewards accompanied each of these honors.

In terms of Argyll’s compensations, he was both arrogant and self-confident in his dealings with the English. He wrote to the Earl of Mar during his negotiations with the English court: “My Lord, it is surprising to me that my Lord Treasurer, who is a man of sense, should think of sending me up and down like a footman from one country to another without ever offering me any reward. Thier is indeed a sairtain service due from every subject to his Prince, and that I shall pay to the Queen as fathfully as anybody can doe; but if her ministers thinks it for her services to imploy me any forder I doe think the proposal should be attended with an offer of a reward.”

Lord Treasurer Godolphin eventually agreed. Argyll was created Baron Chatham and Earl of Greenwich—later Duke—and given the rank of Brigadier General in the English army—later commander in chief of the English forces in Spain. His emoluments for the last position alone amounted to close to 100,000 pounds per year. Argyll’s younger brother, Archibald Campbell, only twenty-three at the time of the Union, was made Viscount of Islay, Lord Oransay, Dunoon, and Arrase.

7.
In traditional Scottish society, a married woman retained her father’s surname. Among the Edinburgh middle classes, however, the convention of adopting the husband’s surname began in the late seventeenth century and became the norm by the late eighteenth. The late-seventeenth-century observer Thomas Morer believed that retention of the maiden name implied that Scottish women were more independent of their husbands than was the case in England. J. Wormald agreed, and argued further that the wife
and her relatives were not fully joined to her husband and his family since descent in Scotland was reckoned agnatically (through the male line) rather than cognatically (female line) as in England.

8.
Daniel Defoe led a checkered life. Although the son of a tallow-chandler, he was determined to claim for himself the status of a gentleman. His quest for position and wealth began with his decision to become a London merchant. By 1706, when he came to Edinburgh (I’ve taken literary license and placed him in Scotland a year earlier), he’d been educated for the ministry, had a failure of faith, married a lady from a family of means, become a prosperous merchant, gone bankrupt twice, and been imprisoned, pilloried, and saved from the hell of Newgate Prison by Robert Harley, Speaker of the House of Commons. From that point on, he became “Robert Harley’s man,” and both his writings and activities were for the greater good of the moderate Tory position as represented by Robert Harley. He was sent to Scotland as an English agent to write pro-Union propaganda and send back information on the state of the Union negotiations. Serving ostensibly as a merchant conducting business in Scotland, he used that role to acquire information to report back to his masters. Just for fun, I added him to Queensberry’s spies.

9.
The Covenanters were a powerful Presbyterian influence on Scottish history for 150 years after the Reformation. They regarded their spiritual kingdom as superior to the state, and promulgated the ideology that each person made his or her own direct and individual covenant with God. At various levels of zealotry, they pledged to be good examples to others of Godliness, Soberness, and Righteousness;
to fight against the Popish Tyranny; and to defend true religion all the days of their lives. As with so many zealots, they had no tolerance for other religions.

10.
When William of Orange landed in England to take the throne from James II, Archibald Campbell was at his side, ready to repair his fortunes. For Argyll’s help in putting William on the throne, the new king restored his estates and elevated him to Duke of Argyll, Marquess of Kin tyre and Lome, Earl of Campbell and Cowal, Viscount of Lochow and Glenila, Lord Inveraray, Mull, Morven, and Tiry.

When it came to the game of political chess, the first duke (John Campbell’s father) spoke plainly: “When I come to speak, even with those I am best with, of making a model to carry the King’s business, by buying some, purchasing others, and making places void for others, tho’ these be but of the smaller sort, nor is it yet advisable; many other I meet with, this tutor has this friend to protect, the other has another, which does confound affairs…. However … I will send for you, for your satisfaction and mine, a schedule, by which I’d carry thirty members of parliament off, and so carry the affair.” Argyll’s sons owed as much to nature as to nurture.

11.
The landed families of Scotland, whatever rank or extent, were united by a complicated tangle of relationships. There was a kinship of feeling, a realization of common interest, a sense of loyalty that arose partly from the feudal relationship that bound the laird’s Jock’ to the laird as it bound lesser noble to magnate and magnate to king. Heads of noble families had to provide for substantial establishments and large kinship groups, so their need for funds was predicated on the size and number of their dependencies.

12.
A Scot’s pound equaled one-twelfth sterling (English pound).

13.
When Argyll was twenty-one (then Lord Lome) he met Mary Browne, and the gossip of the day reported that the young lord was strongly drawn to her. His passionate, impetuous wooing led to a speedy marriage. On December 30, 1701, the contract was signed. Unfortunately, in the early days of their marriage they discovered they were unsuited to each other. The disillusion affected John more severely than Mary, who was even then in delicate health. They immediately separated, but she didn’t die until January 1717. He remarried in June of that year.

14.
One of the more blatant instances of the Campbells’ using children as pawns took place in 1498. John Cawdor’s daughter, Muriel, born after his death, was left without a protector. And there was more than one powerful leader ready to move in and act as guardian to the girl for the sake of her fortune. However, Archibald Campbell, second Earl of Argyll, who was Lord High Chancellor at the time, had political priority and moved first.

For about four years Muriel was left with her maternal relatives, the Roses. Then one day the Campbells came to take her under their guardianship. They gave as an excuse that it was time for her to start school, and they proposed to take her to the Argyll country. In the ensuing disagreement there were casualties on both sides, with seven Campbells lost. As the fight progressed some of the Campbells seized the girl and rushed her away with a guard. Everyone knew there was much more than the girl at stake, for when she rode south with the Campbells, the Cawdor inheritance rode with her.

When Campbell of Inverliver, who led the sortie, was
asked if he didn’t consider seven men a high price to pay for the custody of a four-year-old girl who might die before her inheritance could be impounded, he replied: “The lassie can never die sae long as there is a red-headed lass on the shores of Loch Awe.”

15.
Many young men of good family became lawyers, simply for the value of legal training in politics or in estate management, or merely for a broadening of their education. In 1720, Professor Alexander Bayne had addressed his first-year students (students began university much younger in those days—between 13 and 16) in the class of Municipal Law at Edinburgh University with the argument: “But besides, gentlemen, you will consider what an ornament it is to know the law of your country…. Let us but consider, then, the knowledge of our law, as the proper embellishment of a gentleman, without regard to the useful part; and does it not even in that abstracted light deserve your application?”

16.
Since wealth and landed estates were kept in the family whenever possible, marriage between cousins was common. The following anecdote is an example of a variation on that custom: In the late sixteenth century, Thomas Craufurd’s fortune fell to his granddaughter, who became “the heiress of Crosbie.” But the title and land would pass to a male relative. In order to retain her property and grandfather’s title, Jean Craufurd was determined to marry her second cousin Patrick. The problem was that Patrick was, in the words of the song, “ower young to marry yet,” since he was ten years younger than Jean. However, she “reserved herself” for her cousin and married him in 1606, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-eight. Thus the two families of Craufurd of Crosbie and Craufurd of Auchenames were once more conjoined. Patrick and Jean settled down to a long and
happy married life at Crosbie. They had six sons and two daughters.

17.
It was an age of heavy drinking. At dinner, the lady of the house did the first honors—the toast given without delay. French wines were the drink of choice, and both sexes drank heartily. English visitors always remarked on the conviviality of the social occasions in Scotland, and how differences of rank weren’t regarded as an impassable barrier, as they were in England. Social gatherings always encompassed an interesting mix of guests. The eighteenth century was also the age of the tavern clubs, most situated in the thoroughfare leading from the Castle to the Watergate. They were open round the clock—“from the gill-bells to the drum.” From well-known clergy to esteemed judges, the habitues of the taverns ran the whole gamut of society. Even society women would on occasion join a party at a tavern, particularly in the winter, when the Firth of Forth oysters were best. Raw oysters and porter were set in huge dishes on the table, and everyone would indulge without restraint. Hospitality and conviviality were a particular characteristic of Scottish society, with women participating in equal measure.

18.
In England the ladies left the table directly after dessert and retired to the drawing room for tea. In Scotland the ladies stayed to share the gaiety after dessert. The cloth was taken up and the table was covered with decanters of port, sherry, Madeira, and pitchers of punch, along with the profusion of small glasses. The health of each lady was drunk, and then the guests’, each in turn by name. A much more open socialization between men and women was practiced. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, English customs had infiltrated the Scottish dinner
table, and ladies would often adjourn for tea when the table was cleared.