The Remarkable Lady Nithsdale

by Lynne Benton

Traquair House, in the Scottish Borders, is the oldest inhabited House in Scotland.  It dates back to 1107, and although it was originally built as a hunting lodge for Scottish kings and queens, it has been lived in continuously by the Stuart family since 1491.

In the early 1700’s the political situation in Scotland was very unsettled, with the Catholic James II now exiled in France and deposed by his daughter Mary and her Protestant husband, William of Orange.  Many Catholic Scots were fiercely against interference from the English Protestants, and remained loyal to James.  Charles Stuart, the 4^th Earl of Traquair, was a staunch Catholic, and became one of James’s band of supporters known as the Jacobites, who worked secretly to restore the Stuarts to the throne.

It was on a visit to Traquair House that I first learnt the fascinating story of Lady Winifred Nithsdale, Charles Stuart’s sister-in-law.  I was so interested that I subsequently bought a book called “Lady Nithsdale and the Jacobites”, by Flora Maxwell Stuart, wife of the 20^th Earl and mother of the current Lady Traquair, which tells in more detail the story of this remarkable lady.

In 1715 Lady Winifred’s husband, William Nithsdale, took part in the first Jacobite rebellion and was imprisoned in the Tower of London and sentenced to death.  He was kept in solitary confinement on the second floor of the Lieutenant’s Lodgings, well-guarded by warders.  It appeared that his only way out was going to be via the scaffold, but his wife did not intend to sit back and let this happen.

With the support, both moral and financial, of her brother-in-law, Charles Stuart, Winifred decided to go to London and find a way of getting William out.  Leaving her young daughter at Traquair, she made her way, with only her faithful servant Cecilia Evans for company, to London, about 400 miles away.  It was a bitterly cold December, with snow covering the whole country, but this did not deter her.  They set off on horseback, avoiding the main roads for fear of being stopped by the government troops, and intending to join the London coach at Newcastle.  This took a few days, stopping at wayside inns overnight, but when they reached Newcastle they discovered that the coach was already full.  So they rode on to York, hoping to pick up another coach there.  At York Winifred did get the last place on the coach, and with Evans riding behind they set off through a fierce blizzard.  Their luck didn’t last, however.  After about 60 miles the coach became stuck in a snowdrift and could go no further.

Undaunted, Winifred hired two more horses, and she and Evans rode the rest of the way to London, with snow sometimes so deep that the horses were almost buried.  Arriving on the point of collapse after their journey, they went to stay with Winifred’s old friends, Mr and Mrs Mills in Duke Street.  Despite her exhaustion Winifred went straight to the Tower to visit her husband, where, with a little judicious bribery she persuaded the warders to let her in.  She found William pessimistic about her chances of setting him free, but she was still determined to get him out somehow.  When she returned to Duke Street, although her hostess insisted on her going to bed for a few days to recover her strength, Winifred’s mind was busy with plans for her husband’s release.

As soon as she was well enough she decided her first port of call was to the king, George I, to beg a pardon for William. 

Mrs Mills had a friend called Mrs Morgan who had been to the king’s court several times and knew her way around, so the two women accompanied Winifred. 

Unfortunately George refused to listen to Winifred or to read her petition, and furthermore was extremely rude to her, so much so that his courtiers were shocked and told everyone about the incident, which caused his popularity to plummet.  (Not surprisingly, he blamed Winifred for this rather than himself, and never forgot nor forgave her.)

That avenue closed to her, Winifred then devised a very daring, plan. She explained it to her hosts and Mrs Morgan, whose help she needed, and they agreed to play their parts. Then, two days before the date set for William’s execution, she returned to the Tower and, smiling at the warders, pretended that her petition for his release had been successful, and dropping a few coins in their hands urged them to drink to the king and the prisoners’ health.  Once out of their hearing, she told William what had really happened, but said if he would trust her and do everything she said, she would get him out.

The following day she returned to the Tower for a “final visit” to her husband, this time accompanied by Mrs Morgan, who was wearing an extra petticoat and cloak which would not show.  Once in William’s cell Mrs Morgan removed the extra clothes, had a few words with William and left.  As Winifred saw her out she asked her in a loud, excited voice to find her maid quickly as she must present one final petition to the Lords that evening.  She made certain the warders heard her.  

Returning to William’s cell, Winifred begged him to do exactly as she said, and waited for Mrs Mills to come next.  Mrs Mills duly arrived, sobbing and holding up a handkerchief to her face as she passed the warders.  In William’s room she hastily took off her cloak and petticoat and put on those left by Mrs. Morgan.  When Mrs Mills left she walked out with her face exposed and in her new clothes, looking like a different woman.  Winifred accompanied her out, asking her loudly to hurry and remind her maid to come for her, so they could go to hear the petition that evening.  Again she made certain the warders heard her.

Finally, returning to the cell, she helped William put on Mrs. Mills’ clothes, and told him to go out with her, holding his handkerchief to his face and sobbing as Mrs Mills had done, hoping that the warders would assume it was the same woman.  Positioning herself between William and the warders, Winifred appeared to be very agitated as they walked out, and begged “Mrs Mills” to tell her maid to come without delay to accompany her to the Lords to hear the final petition.  This gave her the excuse to be in a hurry to leave, and seeing her agitation the warders opened the door and let the disguised William out.

Through the doorway Winifred could see Mr Mills, who was to take William to a safe house, and Evans waiting for her as promised.  But she still had the most difficult part of her plan to do.

Returning to William’s cell, she hurriedly shut the door behind her and talked to him as if he was still there, giving his replies in a gruff voice.  She waited until she guessed enough time had elapsed for him to have been taken to the safe house, and then said goodnight, adding loudly that she was afraid something serious must have happened to delay her maid, so she would have to go on her own.  She said she would come again to see him that evening, and hoped to have good news by then.

She then shut the door, carefully pulling the little string that lifted the latch through to the other side, so that it could only be opened from inside.  She told the servant waiting to light the candles that her husband was saying his prayers and didn’t want to be disturbed, and then, bidding the warders goodnight and muttering frenziedly about the petition, she hurried down the stairs and outside, got into a hackney coach and left.

Having released William from the Tower, it was now imperative to get him away from London as quickly as possible.  After a few days in hiding, with the help of Mr and Mrs Mills and other sympathetic friends, William was disguised as a footman and smuggled across the Channel to France, where the Nithsdales had friends and relatives.  He begged her to go with him, but she insisted on returning to Scotland first, to collect their small daughter.

This was not quite as easy as it sounded, since she was well aware that George was furious that William had escaped and she was afraid she might be accused of helping him.  However, since the weather had by now greatly improved, she was undaunted by the prospect of riding all the way back to Scotland, and this she did, once again taking a cross-country route to avoid being noticed.

There, having been reunited with her daughter and arranged for the contents of her house to be transferred to Traquair for safekeeping, she followed William to France and, ultimately, to Italy where they lived for the rest of their lives.

However, Winifred’s troubles were still not quite over, for although she knew William was profligate, it wasn’t until he died in 1744 that she realised he had left huge debts for her to deal with.  But deal with them she did, and managed to pay them all off within one year.

A remarkable lady indeed.

She died peacefully in Rome in 1749.

A small postscript to this story:  the guide at Traquair House told us that in 1739 the 5^th Earl of Traquair, like his father a staunch Jacobite, had some splendid gates built at the top of the Avenue leading to the house.  With statues of bears on each gatepost they were known as the Bear Gates.  Six years later, however, after a visit from James's grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Earl was so incensed by the behaviour of the next English Protestant king, George II, that he gave orders for the Bear Gates to be closed and locked, and swore that they would never be opened until a Stuart king sat on the throne again.

Accordingly they have been locked ever since 1745.  However, the guide said, since Prince William is a Stuart through his mother’s line, when William becomes king the Bear Gates will once again be opened.

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

Ralph Allen by Marie-Louise Jensen

I think everyone who lives in Bath has heard of Ralph Allen, though he is not nationally known. A Bath state secondary school is named after him, the grand house he built on the southern slopes of the city is now a private school, and the steep road that leads to and past it is called Ralph Allen Drive.

Here in Bath, we know him mainly as a great entrepreneur who transformed the city: he had a vision of how the city could look if it were to be rebuilt. To this end, he opened a quarry on the downs on the southern side of the city and built a sort of tram/railway to bring the stone down. He built a show home (now Prior Park College) to advertise the wonderful mellow Bath stone and sure enough, the city was rebuilt. The honey-coloured Georgian buildings are one of the features that make Bath so popular as a city to live in and as a tourist attraction.
But all this was of local importance. Ralph Allen had very limited success marketing his stone further afield and so his influence did not extend beyond his own city.
But in fact he had been involved in events of national importance earlier in his life, when he was postmaster in Bath. He could even have been said to have helped shape British history.

In 1715, when the Jacobite forces planned to rise up against the newly-crowned Protestant King, George I, Britain stood at a crossroads. Parliament had chosen a distant heir to the throne who wasn't even British, to avoid what they saw as the calamity of another Catholic monarch on the English throne. They even made a law to support their decision. But many Tories and High Church supporters saw the betrayal and rejection of the true Stuart heir as an outrage. And so rebellion was planned, plots were laid; forces and weapons were concealed strategically.
Fashionable Bath was to be the centre of rebellion in the south. But somehow, the plans were foiled. The government forces knew where the weapons were concealed and which men were ringleaders. General Wade marched into the city and arrested them; the gunpowder and other weaponry was seized and the status quo was preserved.
The man who was the key to this defeat was none other than Ralph Allen himself. He used his position as postmaster to open and read mail; in effect he was a spy for King George. His reward was to be granted great influence in reforming the post office, where he then made his first fortune. His second fortune came from the quarries - he used the money he had made in the post office to fund his venture.
Whether you view Allen as a hero of the people who saved Britain from civil war, or the sneaking and treacherous letter-thief who prevented the accession of the true King to the throne will depend on your sympathies; Tory or Whig, Catholic or Protestant. Either way there was no doubt of his significance. It is a strange fact, though, that locally he is known only as postmaster and quarry owner. His role as spy is not general knowledge. But I have, of course, cast him in my latest book in this secret role.