The Chevalier de Johnstone - by Ann Swinfen

Broughty Ferry is a former fishing village on the Tay estuary, four miles down river from Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland. The fishing boats have gone now, together with the men who sailed them and who manned the whaling ships which made the perilous journeys to Arctic waters in the days when whale oil was a precious commodity. In the nineteenth century the ‘jute barons’ of Dundee began to build their handsome houses here, and ever since it has been a place for quiet homes, with nothing more disturbing than the cry of gulls and oyster-catchers, the river carrying little traffic, but providing a home for seals and dolphins. The last place you would imagine to have witnessed dragoons in pursuit of a fleeing Jacobite officer in the aftermath of a terrible battle. Yet it is the place where the Chevalier de Johnstone made his dramatic escape, thanks to the courage of some unlikely friends.

 

The harbour at Broughty still guarded by its medieval castle

James Johnstone, later known as the Chevalier de Johnstone, was born in Edinburgh on 25 July, 1719, and grew up in Scotland and London. In 1738 he visited two uncles in Russia, evidence of an early taste for adventure which would shape the rest of his life. Almost immediately after Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard at Glenfinnan on 19 August 1745, Johnstone joined the Jacobite army in Perth, and soon rose to the rank of captain. Throughout the 1745 rebellion, he participated in all the major battles, culminating in the massive defeat at Culloden, on 16 April 1746, when the Jacobite forces were scattered and then pursued ruthlessly throughout the Highlands by the Duke of Cumberland’s army. Most of those who were caught were hanged, while Prince Charles Stuart turned tail and fled, abandoning his followers and escaping to France. Writing later in his memoirs, Johnstone was severely critical of the prince, claiming that he could have rallied his forces instead of deserting them.

 

Prince Charles Edward Stuart

Most of the Jacobites who survived tried to go to ground in the mountains and glens of the Highlands. Some made their escape, like the prince, via the western isles and thence to France (always a supporter of the Scots against England). James Johnstone, however, made the perilous decision to head south, into the Lowlands which were held by the English army and by the Protestant Lowland Scots who remained loyal to the English crown and not to the half Polish, quarter Italian, French speaking Catholic Prince Charles.

And this is where Broughty Ferry enters the story of the Chevalier de Johnstone.

Johnstone managed to reach the estate of a Mr Graham at Duntrune, a man he had been told might be willing to provide help. Graham’s two sons had fought with the Jacobites, and his family had been involved in the 1715 rebellion, but he had stayed at home during the present troubles, and so was not suspect. Inspired by a particularly vivid dream, which was to prove accurate, Johnstone was trying to make his way south to Edinburgh, where he had old friends who (he hoped) might be able to smuggle him on board a ship for France. However, to reach Edinburgh he would have to cross the two great east coast rivers – the Tay and the Forth. Graham’s estate at Duntrune was some five miles to the north of the Tay, and the whole area between Duntrune and a possible crossing place at Broughty was alive with Cumberland’s dragoons.

 

Butcher Cumberland

Graham hid Johnstone in an enclosure on his estate, full of high bushes of broom, and provided food – eggs, butter, bread, and cheese for breakfast, washed down with a bottle of wine and a bottle of beer – Johnstone’s first decent meal for weeks. Afterwards, while the fugitive slept, Mr Graham devised a plan for him to reach Broughty, as it was known then (or ‘Brochtie’ in Scots, 'Bruach Tatha' in Gaelic), where he arranged for fishermen to row him across the river. He then returned to provide Johnstone a dinner of the best piece of beef he had ever tasted. Over an excellent bottle of claret, Graham explained the plan and the two men synchronised their watches. First, at five o’clock Johnstone must follow, at a discreet distance, one of Graham’s men as he walked some miles to a windmill carrying a sack of grain for his master. This Johnstone did, waiting in hiding for his next guide, an elderly woman who led him on until they reached the hill overlooking Broughty.

‘You must wait here,’ she said, ‘while I go into Broughty to see the fishermen.’

Johnstone hid himself behind the trees and undergrowth in a furrow on the edge of a ploughed field beside the road down into Broughty, more or less where our nineteenth century house stands today. On the other side of the road, on Fort Hill, stood the fort (or what remained of it) built two hundred years earlier by Henry VIII’s forces during the ‘Rough Wooing’, a campaign which was intended to bring about a marriage between the children Mary Queen of Scots and the future King Edward VI. (It failed.)

 

18th century dragoon

As Johnstone waited in considerable fear, a large troop of dragoons rode up the hill from Broughty, passing within feet of his hiding place, having searched every fisherman’s cottage, boat shed, and tavern in the village. They were closely followed by the old woman, in a state of panic. As it was drawing toward dusk, the dragoons rode away, having failed to find any of the Jacobites for whom they had been searching. The old woman, however, warned that the fishermen now refused to row Johnstone over the river, having been intimidated by the threats of the dragoons. She urged him to return to Duntrune.

This the Chevalier de Johnstone refused to do, and left his hiding place to hurry down the hill to the village where he had expected to be taken across the river on the next stage in his escape. He had no difficulty in finding the fishermen’s inn on the shore, and no difficulty in finding the fishermen. But the men continued to be terrified and flatly refused to take him across the river. Johnstone argued that, since the dragoons had just searched the whole village and found nothing, now was the safest time to make the journey. Still they refused.

 

The Ship Inn on the river front may stand on the same spot

The innwife, Mistress Burn, had two exceptionally beautiful daughters, Mally and Jenny. They taunted the men with their cowardice, but to no effect.

‘O Jenny,’ said the elder girl, ‘they are despicable cowards and poltroons. I would not for the world that this unfortunate gentleman were taken in our house. I pity his situation. Will you take an oar? I’ll take the other, and we will row him over ourselves, to the eternal shame of these pitiful and heartless cowards.’

[So the Chevalier de Johnstone reports her. She is very well spoken for a Broughty innwife’s daughter!]

 

The wide Tay at Broughty

At ten o’clock, Johnstone and the two girls ran the boat down the pebble beach to the river and got aboard. The Tay was then about two miles wide at this point, and it carries more water than any other river in Britain. To row across it, in the dark, in time of war, was no small undertaking, but the two girls took turn about on one oar, while the Chevalier de Johnstone took the other, and thus the fugitive officer was rowed safely across to Fife, reaching it around midnight. Once on shore the girls set him on the road to St Andrews. They refused any payment, but Johnstone managed to slip ten or twelve shillings into Mally’s pocket, before kissing them both soundly and continuing on his flight to Edinburgh. He was never to see them again, but he never forgot them.

After more adventures, the Chevalier de Johnstone reached Edinburgh and travelled thence to Rotterdam and Paris, disguised as a servant to Lady Jane Douglas, as foretold in his dream. He would continue to lead an exciting life for many years in Europe and Canada, eventually recorded in The Memoirs of the Chevalier de Johnstone.

As for Broughty and the two girls, Mally and Jenny Burn? No doubt Broughty slipped quietly back into its life as a fishing village, and presumably the girls held their tongues, for there is no record of reprisals by Cumberland’s forces. Today a simple plaque stands as a memorial to their act of defiance and courage, in the face of the fishermen’s cowardice.

The plaque in Broughty commemorating the escape

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

Textures & textiles of Scottish Artists by Janie Hampton

Queen Victoria was brought up reading the novels of Walter Scott and after her first trip to Scotland in 1842, she became besotted with this part of her kingdom, promoting Highland cattle, tartans and bagpipes. On show at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, is a selection of Scottish paintings from the royal collection. I skidded past the misty landscapes that could have been in my great aunt's spare room. The paintings that caught my eye were those dominated by clothes.

The full length portrait of George III (1738-1820) by Alan Ramsay (1713-1784) is a superb example of textile and texture. You can see, and almost feel, the gold brocade jacket and breeches, shiny shoes and smooth white silk stockings of the king's coronation costume. You want to stroke the soft ermine lining the voluminous cloak draped around his shoulders. (How many hundreds of winter stoats (mustela erminea) died to make it?) The 23 year-old king is standing, tall and imposing, on a fabulous Persian carpet, beside soft velvet curtains with golden tassels. His legs appear rather long for his small head, but the point of the portrait was to impress with the sumptuousness of his clothes and textiles. Ramsay made 150 copies of this painting at 80 guineas each (about £150,000 in today's money) for sovereigns, ambassadors and courtiers. He was the first Scot to be made 'King's Painter' and given the title 'Principal Painter in Ordinary'.

Hanging next to him is George's wife, Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) with her two oldest sons. She is depicted as the young, adoring mother of Prince Frederick, later Duke of York, who is sitting on her lap, and Prince George, later George IV, standing at her side. The Duke of York wears a delicious cream silk frock and lace cap. Boys wore 'coats' then until they were 'breeched' at five years old. (Even my uncle, born in 1909, wore frocks until he was five.) Prince George, then about two and half years old, may be in pale blue lace with frills and a satin sash, but he holds a bow to show how manly and fearsome he will become as a king. When she was just seventeen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was chosen as a suitable wife for the king. It took two weeks to travel from her home in Germany to London, and they were married just six hours after their first meeting. Over the next 20 years she had 15 children. But of the 13 who survived to adulthood, only three produced offspring. Their descendants include all the current European royalty, and, illegitimately, the recent British Prime Minister David Cameron. Charlotte founded orphanages, and was patron of 'Queen Charlotte's Lying-in- Hospital' the first ever maternity hospital. She supported the education of women, including her seven daughters. Ramsay’s talent is shown in the elegance, subtlety and exquisite colouring of this painting, in which he combines the grandeur of a royal portrait with the intimacy of a domestic scene.

In the gallery next door, the full length portrait of  Bonnie Prince Charlie Entering the Ballroom at Holyroodhouse, made me yelp with delight. The painting was executed by John Pettie (1834-93) over a hundred years after the prince's death it was exhibited at London's Royal Academy in 1892. It depicts a moment in 1745 just before Prince Charles (1720-88) marched south unsuccessfully to claim the English throne.

The prince emerges from the shadows into the bright light of the ballroom, with silk ribbons and flowers scattered at his feet. In fact the ball at at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, was invented by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Waverley. My yelp was caused not by his elegant legs clothed in striped socks, nor by the exquisite silk waistcoat which reminded me of the mayor's waistcoat in Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester.

Mayor of Gloucester's waistcoat, embroidered by mice.

 It was his kilt that startled me. My family once had a connection with this kilt.  In 1880 my great grandmother, Janie Bruce, died aged 42, leaving 11 children. The six youngest children, including my grandfather Rosslyn, were sent to live in Edinburgh with their great uncle, a bachelor aged 71, called William Forbes Skene. William's father, James Skene, had been Walter Scott's best friend, and William was the first person to write a history of Scotland from the Scots point of view: The Highlanders of Scotland, their Origin, History and Antiquities (1837). Shortly after the arrival of his great nieces and nephews, he was made the Historiographer Royal of Scotland. One day the children were bored and labelled the drawers of an old chest with the names of their dolls. Inside was some old tartan cloth, out of which they made tiny kilts for their dolls, one of whom was a sailor-doll called Gerald. The chest had belonged to Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the old cloth was his kilt. John Pettie and William Skene lived in Edinburgh at the same time and probably knew each other. Did Pettie ever see the real kilt, either before or after its re-cycling?

Prince Charles Edward Stuart tartan,
All tartan was banned after the 1745 rebellion
and only reinstated in Scotland in 1822, 

The paintings in this exhibition were collected between 1750 and 1900 and reflect the distinctive tastes of Georges III, IV and V, and Queen Victoria. All the artists were born in Scotland and the romantic episodes they painted contributed to strengthening Scottish identity.

ScottishArtists 1750-1900.

The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London.

Until Sunday, 9 Oct 2016

www.janiehampton.co.uk

The Ghost That Spoke Gaelic - by Katherine Langrish

'An Incident at the Battle of Culloden' by David Morier, oil on canvas.

It was 1749, just four years after the failed Jacobite rising, and the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the clans at the Battle of Culloden. Reprisals had been severe; the wearing of kilt and tartan was forbidden; the rising was still fresh and sore in everyone’s minds and by no means necessarily still over. Messages (and money) flew between the Prince in exile and his loyal supporter Cluny MacPherson, in hiding on Ben Alder.

Into this volatile, still smouldering arena marched, in summer of 1749, the newly married – and, it has to be said, completely and complacently naïve – Sergeant Arthur Davies of ‘Guise’s Regiment’, in charge of a patrol of eight private soldiers, heading over the mountains from Aberdeen to Dunrach in Braemar, for no more interesting purpose than to keep a general eye on the countryside.

This kind of countryside...

Sergeant Davies was a fine figure of a man, but not at all sensibly dressed considering what he was about. He carried on him a green silk purse containing fifteen and a half guineas which he had saved; he wore a silver watch and two gold rings. There were silver buckles on his brogues, two dozen silver buttons on his striped ‘lute string’ waistcoat; he had a silk ribbon to tie his hair, and a silver-laced hat. Thus attired he said goodbye to his wife, who never saw him again, and set off – encountering on the way one John Growar, in Glenclunie, whom he told off for carrying a tartan coat. And shortly after this, the over-confident Sergeant left his men and went off alone over the hill, to try and shoot a stag.

And ‘vanished as if the fairies had taken him’. His men and his captain searched for four days, while rumours ran wild about the countryside that Davies had been killed by Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald. But no body was found…

Until, in June 1750, a shepherd called Alexander MacPherson came to visit Donald Farquharson, the son of the man with whom Sergeant Davies had been lodging before his death. MacPherson, who was living in a shepherd’s hut or shieling up on the hills, complained that he ‘was greatly troubled by the ghost of Sergeant Davies’ who had appeared to him as a man dressed in blue and shown MacPherson where his bones lay. The ghost had also named and denounced his murderers – in fluent Gaelic, of which in life, Sergeant Davies had of course not spoken a word… But Farquharson accompanied MacPherson, and the bones were duly found in a peat-moss, about half a mile from the road the patrol had used, minus silver buckles and articles of value. The two men buried the bones on the spot where they lay, and kept quiet about it.

But of course the story spread. Nevertheless it was not till three years later, in 1753, that Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald were arrested for the Sergeant’s murder on the testimony of his ghost. At the trial Isobel MacHardie who had shared shepherd MacPherson’s shieling during the summer of the ghost, swore that ‘she saw something naked come in at the door which frighted her so much she drew the clothes over her head. That when it appeared, it came in a bowing posture, and that next morning she asked MacPherson what it was, and he replied not to be afeared, it would not trouble them any more.’

Apart from the ghostly testimony, there was plenty of circumstantial evidence to convict the murderers. Clerk’s wife had been seen wearing Davies’ ring; after the murder Clerk had become suddenly rich. And a number of the Camerons later claimed to have witnessed the murder itself, at sunset, from a hollow on top of the hill: they never volunteered an explanation of what they themselves had been doing up there – doubtless engaged in the illicit business of smuggling gold from Cluny to the Prince.

Things looked black for the accused murderers. Yet a jury of Edinburgh tradesmen, moved by the sarcastic jokes of the defence, acquitted the prisoners. They could not take the ghost story seriously - not necessarily because it was a ghost: though scepticism was on the rise, ordinary people were still superstitious: the last Scottish prosecution for witchcraft had been only in 1727.  But they could not believe in a ghost which had managed to learn Gaelic.

Andrew Lang, in whose ‘Book of Dreams and Ghosts’ I came across this tale, adds a postscript sent to him by a friend: the words of an old lady, ‘a native of Braemar’, who ‘left the district when about twenty years old and who has never been back’. Lang’s friend had asked her whether she had ever heard anything about the Sergeant’s murder, and when she denied it, he told her the story as it was known to him. When he had finished she broke out:

“That isn’t the way of it at all, for… a forebear of my own saw it. He had gone out to try and get a stag, and had his gun and a deerhound with him. He saw the men on the hill doing something, and thinking they had got a deer, he went towards them. When he got near them, the hound began to run on in front of him, and at that minute he saw what it was they had. He called to the dog, and turned to run away, but saw at once he had made a mistake, for he had called their attention to himself, and a shot was fired after him, which wounded the dog. He then ran home as fast as he could…”

But at this point, the old lady ‘became conscious she was telling the story,’ and clammed up. No more could be got out of her.

What a skein this is of tangled loyalties and hatreds, of secret goings-on in the heather, of rebellion and politics, of a murder where the whole countryside knew straight away who’d done it, but wouldn’t - or dared not - say; of a ghost’s evidence, and of poor, foolish Sergeant Davies in the middle of the Highlands, four years after the ’45, behaving as though it was an adventure playground through which he could strut in his finery and shoot at stags... What a lesson for more recent times too, in places where foreign troops attempt to patrol wartorn countrysides riven by conflicting loyalties and fears.

And how ironic that the very ghost story which brought the murder to light – almost certainly devised by Alexander MacPherson in order to denounce the murderers without bringing unwelcome attention upon himself – seemed so incredible to a Lowlands jury that they would not convict.



Photo credit: Glen Clunie & Clunie Water, the road from Braemar  © Copyright Nigel Corby