The Heir of Douglas Read online

  They soon found a suitable lodging with a good address: St. James’s Place. They removed thither in a hackney coach, and had not even enough money in pocket to pay the fare. Nevertheless, the landlord, a fellow Scot named John Murray, made them more than welcome. They had engaged the two-pair-of-stairs floor; but when Mr. Murray learned my Lady’s name and quality, he cried:

  “Madam, be pleased to walk into my first floor.”

  Impossible, said poverty-stricken Lady Jane.

  “Lady Jane Douglas shall never be put into a second floor under my roof; I know you will pay me when you can; pray be so kind as to walk in.”

  So Lady Jane Douglas walked in to Mr. Murray’s parlor floor. There they had a dining-room, a bed-chamber with a dressing-room, and a middle room furnished with a turn-up bed without curtains. The serving-lasses were consigned to a cock-loft at the top of the house.

  Landlord Murray was charmed with his new lodgers. He became especially attached to pretty little Sholto, and called him his darling, his little daty. It was the first word they heard Sholto speak—“daty.” He learned his second word, too, in Mr. Murray’s arms. While the landlord was dandling the boy at the window, idly looking toward the square, the old-clothes-man came along, with his armful of dubious garments and the hats piled six deep on his head, chanting his ancient musical cry of “Old clo’! Old clo’!” Sholto was delighted. “Old clo’!” he chortled in his turn.

  Kind landlord Murray proved a friend indeed. It was upon his credit, at first, that the butcher, the baker, the coal-merchant, and the tallow-chandler provided the family with the necessities of life. Lord Morton would do no more for them. Lord Mark Kerr got tired of their appeals, and sharply cut off all communication in a curt letter: “Your behaviour, thirty years ago next month, and four years agone very soon now, are both mighty fresh in my memory: so I must tell you plainly, that, from henceforward, I give up all correspondence.” He added an emphatic “N. B.” at the foot of the page: “Madam, it is all your own doing, with bad advice too.” By bad advice he meant Mrs. Hewit.

  At this juncture Colonel John could think of no better resource than to try to raise money on his prospects as presumptive heir to Steuart of Grandtully. He went to one of the tribe of the money-lenders, and struck a bargain for five hundred pounds. As they sat at their tavern table, with so much lovely money counted out upon the board, Colonel John in a burst of cordiality said to the liberal Israelite:

  “You have made a good bargain, friend, for my brother has a palsy in one side this year past, and one foot in the grave.”

  “Say you so?” said the money-lender, and drew the notes into his hands again. “Then I’m off. For I knew a man who had a palsy in one side who lived ten years.”

  Off went money-lender and money, leaving Grandtully’s heir as poor as he came. The Israelite’s figure was to prove depressingly accurate with respect to Sir George’s life-expectancy.

  The situation was growing desperate. Colonel John had left angry creditors behind him when he left London ten years before, and now he had put himself within their reach again. All too soon came the day when Mr. Murray looked out of his window and saw a pair of catch-polls watching the house, and pointing at the windows. He acted at once. By means of a ladder the Colonel was spirited out at a back window and across to the window of a neighbour. Thence he was smuggled into a sedan chair and transported with drawn blinds to a place of sanctuary.

  The chosen sanctuary was Spring Gardens, within the verge of Court, where arrests could not be made. There the fugitive found asylum with an old friend, a Scotch lawyer, Daniel Mackercher, him who had formerly beggared himself to get justice for the outcast heir of Annesley. At his house the harried debtor would be safe. There Mr. Murray found the Colonel at seven that night, so cheerful over a bottle that he had not the faintest recollection of what brought him there.

  But a man could not lie perdu forever. There was something to be said for giving oneself up. The court would order you to pay, and when you couldn’t they would throw you in gaol until you could. You thus became unable to take any steps to acquire any money, and you could rot in gaol indefinitely. Needless to say, the prisons under this system had a way of speedily becoming over-populated with debtors. Then Parliament would pass an act and let them all out. Such a move was in the wind. Lady Jane urged on Colonel John the advisability of going to prison now for the express purpose of being let out again with the slate cleared.

  Colonel John considered it. The judge would send him to the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark, which was old, noisome, and ruinous. Still, it could be escaped. He could take out a writ of habeas corpus and put himself into the Fleet, more interestingly located in the heart of the city. Against such a move Lady Jane cried out. The Fleet, she cried, was notorious as the most abominable place under heaven for bad company, drinking, and all manner of vices practised there, and the most abandoned manners used by the people inhabiting these parts.

  “I do beg and entreat you,” she cried, “for your own sake, for that of your best friends, and for the love that you have so long professed and honoured me with, that you will lay aside any intention of making so bad a place your abode.”

  The Colonel adored his wife. If she said he should go into the King’s Bench, to the King’s Bench he went. On February 6, 1750, he allowed himself to be committed.

  Colonel John had no mind, however, to live within those ruinous old walls. He got a friend to go on his bond, and obtained the privilege of lodging more comfortably outside, in the neighbourhood to which the rules of the King’s Bench extended. There he stayed. Parliament was in no hurry to let him out again.

  Meanwhile Lady Jane was busy on a new scheme for obtaining something to live on. They had had it in view in coming to England; but it was a long process. She meant to apply to the King himself for a pension. She had very little idea how to go about it, but landlord Murray soon put her on the right track. He suggested that she apply to the King’s Solicitor-General for his backing. The Solicitor-General was Mr. Murray’s relation, William Murray, later Lord Mansfield, a handsome, brisk, clever young Scot who was rising fast at the English bar.

  My Lady Jane made an impression which William Murray never forgot. He remembered her as a famous toast in his boyhood, as a great character of a woman. Now, white and thin, she came once and again, and went away silent. She looked to Murray like a woman absolutely literally starving, without a morsel of bread. The third time she brought out with difficulty a few words of her situation, how she had married the man proscribed in the ’15, and was now penniless with two boys to support. Murray put his hand to his purse; but my Lady could not bring herself to ask, and the lawyer feared to insult her by offering. Still, somehow she had made the Solicitor-General understand that this was a case for his Majesty’s bounty, and he acted as her advocate with the administration. Soon Lady Jane understood that she must make her application to Newcastle’s brother. She did so in a letter which became famous as a specimen of epistolary excellence, and landlord Murray delivered it with his own hand.

  Soon enough, as such things go, Lady Jane had the assurance of three hundred pounds a year from the Royal bounty. Newcastle’s brother advanced the first quarter out of his own pocket. This seasonable relief enabled her to buy clothes suitable to her rank and dignity, in which, early in the new year of 1751, she went to Court.

  His Majesty George II had been prepared to receive her with a great deal of talk about the loyalty of the Douglas clan, and not a word about the inconvenient Jacobite Colonel so providentially removed from the scene by his creditors. The elderly Hanoverian monarch can scarcely have appeared to advantage to the Jacobite’s wife when she remembered that Court at Holyrood, and the beautiful young adventurer who had glittered there; but his day was over. Lady Jane curtsied deep to the Hanoverian as he entered and strolled about the ring of courtiers, distinguishing one here and there with a pause and a word. Three times he so honoured Lady Jane, while the courtiers whispered.
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br />   “Is your brother kind to you, Lady Jane?” said he.

  “No,” said my Lady faintly, too surprised to dissemble, “he is not good for much—but,” she added, getting her wits back a little, “he is a faithful subject to your Majesty.”

  “Well,” said the King, smiling, “that is very good so far.”

  The Court was much impressed; the greatest favourite could not have met with more marks of good will and kindness. My Lady’s triumph was completed when she was received, the next week, by the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Princess Amelia, and the Butcher Duke of Cumberland.

  The Royal approval, and still more the Royal bounty, launched my Lady on a pleasant London season. She went to the play and the pleasure-gardens. She paid and received calls. She left the little boys at home with the maids; but such was her maternal anxiety, she felt they needed more protection.

  “Mrs. Murray,” she would say, “pray let the children stay in your parlour till I return; my maid-servants are glaikéd [light-struck]; but if the children be with you, my mind will be perfectly at ease.”

  Mrs. Murray reflected that if my Lady Jane had any foible, it was an over-fondness for her sons.

  Lady Jane’s high-bred companions made the same observation. My Lord Lindores witnessed a touching little scene. Small Sholto, just learning to walk, struck his head against the tea-table and collapsed with a howl of anguish; upon which Lady Jane immediately fainted away, and fell back in her chair. The smelling-bottle being brought into play, the anxious mother was revived, and Sholto carted off to bed. But my Lady could not be easy; she was up from the supper table six or eight times to run up the stairs and visit the wounded boy. My Lord admired her motherly tenderness and affection.

  While my Lady Jane took her pleasure in Mayfair, Colonel John took his ease within the liberties of the King’s Bench. He was comfortably lodged in Blackman Street, in the house of a silk-dyer, and he engaged a valet to groom his perruke and run his errands at three pounds a year. It was unthinkable for a gentleman, even in the King’s Bench Prison, to do such things himself.

  It was a carefree, convivial life, while the money lasted. The jolly debtors drank together in the tap-rooms or played fives, rackets, or nine-pins in the prison court, or billiards, backgammon, cribbage, or whist in the coffee-rooms; or they read the gazettes, or just swore and talked bawdy. Though Colonel John was adept at all these sports, he did not forget the serious business of life; that is, getting up schemes to raise a little money. Characteristically, he took his imprisonment like a philosopher.

  My dearest Lady [he wrote to his beloved wife], please remember it is no fault to be poor; I would chuse to be honourably so, rather than purchase riches at the expence of it. This cloud will soon disperse, we have reason to hope, and will prove but a whet, to make us relish the more, better times when God pleases to send them. I am intirely resigned to his will, and can bear every cross with patience, but being kept from the pleasure and happiness of being with you; and even in that, I am supported by hopes that our separation can be of no long continuance, which I have reason to expect from many different views, any one of which will put an end to the only misfortune I regret, providing you are easy till that happy period.

  Lady Jane was easy. She did her best to keep the prisoner happy. Whenever she could, she honoured him with a visit. When coach-hire was ill to find, she wrote him affectionate little notes, bidding him keep up his heart and trust in God, referring to many a “prospect of a transaction,” inquiring anxiously after his health and reporting on that of “the little men.”

  She sent him books: history and poetry, a Hudibras, his favourite; a Shakespeare, which he promptly lost. This accident he much regretted, especially after he learned that into the volume she had slipped thirty pounds in banknotes. She sent him a Thomas à Kempis, recommending it for heavenly and worldly wisdom. Colonel John took so kindly to Thomas à Kempis that my Lady verily believed he was on the way to becoming a saint himself.

  He took even more kindly to a little work called The Oeconomy of Human Life, just hot from the pen and the press of publisher Robert Dodsley.

  A noble spirit [exclaimed this inspiring work in quasi-Biblical periods], disdaineth the malice of fortune; his greatness of soul is not to be cast down.

  But woe unto him that heapeth up wealth in abundance, and rejoiceth alone in the possession thereof … the curse of iniquity pursueth him; He liveth in continual fear, and the rapacious desires of his own soul, take vengeance upon him, for the calamities he hath brought upon others.

  That was something like. Colonel John considered that it applied to the Duke of Douglas.

  Dodsley was offering copies in half-dozen lots, at a reduced price, to those who might be inclined to distribute them as gifts. Colonel John distributed more than one consignment before Lady Jane got tired of the whole thing.

  “I think,” she wrote dryly, “all you have to do, is to direct any person or persons to where they are to be sold, and not to make presents to every one of your acquaintances; they certainly are as able, if not more so, to buy them, than you to bestow even such a trifle; but I’ll say no more on this subject, as I know you’re intending now to grow each day more and more prudent and circumspect.”

  From time to time Lady Jane would send him wherewith to slake his bodily thirst, Lisbon, red port, vin ordinaire, for which the vintner was never paid until the heir of Douglas was grown to be a man. If the Colonel drowned his incarceration by drinking up these generous supplies while lying in bed, who can blame him? He certainly never drank alone; he was not that kind of man. Neither did he eat alone. It was a gala day at the King’s Bench when Lady Jane sent down a fine fowl, a good piece of beef, or a fat pig. The board would be crowded, and Colonel John in high spirits would preside over the feast.

  Among the hangers-on was a derelict bit of royalty, King Theodore of Corsica. The King was a soldier of fortune who had been elected and deposed again with considerable rapidity before drifting to London and into the King’s Bench. It is likely he and the Colonel had met in early days, when both were implicated in the plots of the ’15. Now they met again in debtor’s prison, where King Theodore still kept his state in an apartment hung with halfpenny ballads in lieu of tapestries, sitting on a truckle-bed without curtains, wearing a woollen night-cap instead of a crown. Generous Colonel John got into the habit of dipping into his own scanty treasury to support the necessitous monarch. While he had a shilling, he always had sixpence for someone less fortunate than he.

  But, alas, the good days of going to Court and feasting in the King’s Bench did not last. The King’s bounty came slowly; with the back debts pressing and nine mouths to feed (counting King Theodore and two footmen), always too little and too late. Mr. Murray was beginning to show a most unobliging desire to have the rent paid, and the other bills. It made Lady Jane feel as if she were in the Inquisition. She determined to move to cheaper quarters in Chelsea, and she began a humiliating round of borrowing among her acquaintances to raise enough money to buy her way out of the house on St. James’s Place. It was hard sledding, but she kept up her courage. “I hope,” she wrote to the Colonel in the King’s Bench, “to get a small supply, to enable me to leave this house today or Monday morning, from a gentleman, a friend of mine; the larger one I expected from two rich ladies have both failed, which vexes me a good deal, because I resolved to have sent you the greatest part of it, had my project succeeded; but now, alas! I am only to receive what will but just free me from my interested landlord; happy that I can even procure that.”

  She parted from the Murrays, after all, in a smooth and civil way. Mr. Mackercher was on hand to prevent any uproar, which my Lady Jane considered “these odd people” very apt to raise; but there was none.

  Soon they were settled in their little cottage, Lady Jane and Mrs. Hewit, the fair little boy and the dark one, and Isabel Walker. The younger maid had found another mistress with a longer purse.

  “The children are mighty well, I
bless God,” wrote Lady Jane to Colonel John, “and agree hitherto mighty well with this place, and are almost always in the garden. You need not send them any toy, but if you will needs do it, let it be some mere trifle, for at their age they break everything.”

  Colonel John gifted the destructive young fellows with something they could not break—new hats.

  As money became scarcer and scarcer, life in the King’s Bench became less comfortable. James the three-pound footman had left his master manless. Convicted of the theft of some of the Colonel’s clothes, and worse, of some of his money, the faithless lackey was summarily cashiered, and somehow never replaced. The down-at-heels Colonel must brush his own coats and wipe his own shoes. His tattered shirts went home to be mended.

  The little exactions on a man in prison were becoming harder and harder to meet. Even the money for a day’s liberty was getting hard to find. Over and over Lady Jane was put to her shifts to buy those precious days of grace.

  I wish you could borrow [she would write], as much as could bring you this length tomorrow, if the weather proves good; this request is only because I long to see you those days when it is in your power to come, not that I have any particular business to communicate to you.

  Dear Mr. Steuart [she would write, with a formality proper to their station], you may judge how low money matters are with me at present, by this most scurvy poor half-crown I send you; I’m quite ashamed of it, and, to conceal it from my servants, I have enclosed it well wrapt up in the pretty little money-box, which ought to contain gold; wish to heaven I could send of that useful, but rare metal with us. This poor bit of silver I send just to procure you a little rapee.

  Don’t be in pain about money when the time of day rules come, for then I’ll pawn my coat, rather than you should want money for coming out every day as long as these days of freedom last; keep but up your spirits as I do mine; I am perfectly content and easy as to myself, all my distress of mind is for you, lest you should be discouraged.