Sir Walter Scott

The visitor to Abbotsford, looking up at the ceiling of the hall, beholds, in the painted shields, the heraldic record of the “heredity” of Sir Walter Scott. In his time the doctrine of heredity had not won its way into the realm of popular science, but no man was more interested in pedigree than the Laird. His ancestors were part of himself, though he wasnot descended from a “Duke of Buccleuch of the fourteenth century,” as the Dictionary of National Biography declares, with English innocence. Three of the shields are occupied by white cloudlets on a blue ground; the arms of certain of the Rutherford ancestors, cadets of Hunthill, could not be traced. For the rest, if we are among those who believe that genius comes from the Celtic race alone, we learn with glee that the poet was not without his share of Celtic blood. He descended, on the female side, from the Macdougals of Makerston, and the Macdougals are perhaps the oldest family in Scotland, are certainly among the four or five oldest families. But they stood for the English cause against Bruce, a sorrow, no doubt, to their famous descendant. The wife, again, of Scott’s great grandfather, “Beardie” the Jacobite, was a Miss Campbell of Silvercraigs, counting cousins with the Campbells, (who are at least as much Douglases as Campbells) of Blythswood. Finally, the name of Scott, I presume, was originally borne by some infinitely remote forefather, who was called “The Scot” because he was Irish by birth though his family was settled, first in Lanarkshire, later among the Cymri and English of Ettrickdale and Teviotdale. So much for the Celtic side of Sir Walter.

On the other hand, the Rutherfords—his mother was a Rutherford—are probably sprung from the Anglo-Norman noblesse who came into Scotland with David I, and obtained the lands whence they derive their name. They are an older family, on the Border, than the Scotts, who are not on record in Rankilburn before 1296. One of them (from whose loins also comes the present genealogist) frequently signs (or at all events seals) the charters of David I about 1140. The Swintons, famous in our early wars, and the Haliburtons, cadets of Dirleton, have a similar origin, so that in Scott met the blood of Highlands andLowlands, Celtic, Teutonic, and Norman. “There are few in Scotland,” says Lockhart, “under the titled nobility, who could trace their blood to so many stocks of historical distinction.” All Scottish men have a share in Sir Walter. The people of Scotland, “gentle” or “simple,” have ever set store on such ancestral connexions, and they certainly were a source of great pleasure to Scott.

His mind was, in the first place, historical; rooted in and turning towards the past, as the only explanation of the present. Before he could read with ease, say at the age of four or five, he pored over Scott of Satchells’ rhyming True History of several Honourable Families of the Right Honourable Name of Scot. “I mind spelling these lines,” he said, when Constable gave him a copy of the book, in 1818. Indeed, he was always “spelling” the legends and history of his race, while he was making it famous by his pen, since accident forbade him to make it glorious by his sword. One legend of the Scotts of Harden, the most celebrated of all, is, I think, a Märchen, or popular tale, the story of Muckle Mou’d Meg and her forced marriage with young Harden. Suppose the unlikely case that William Scott, younger, of Harden, did undertake a long expedition to seize the cattle of Murray of Elibank, on the upper Tweed. I deem this most improbable, in the reign of James VI, when he was seated on the English throne. But suppose it occurred, who can believe that Elibank would dare to threaten young Harden with hanging on the Elibank doom tree? Even if Scots law would have borne him out, Elibank dared not face the feud of the strongest name on the Border. Thus it is not to be credited that young Harden chose “Muckle Mou’d Meg,” Elibank’s daughter, as an alternative to the gallows. Moreover, the legend, I am informed, recurs in a province of Germany. If so, the tale may be much older than the Harden-Elibank marriage. The contract of that marriage is extant, and is not executed “on the parchment of a drum,” as Lockhart romantically avers. Scott, better than most men, must have known how more than doubtsome is the old legend.

He let no family tradition drop: rather, he gave a sword and a cocked hat, in his own phrase, to each story. The ballad of Kinmont Willie, the tale of the most daring and bloodless of romantic exploits, certainly owes much to him, and he “brought out with a wet finger” (in Randolph’s phrase) all the dim exploits and fading legends of Tweed, Ettrick, Ail, Yarrow, and Teviot; streams, Dr. John Brown says, “fabulosi as ever was Hydaspes.”