Chapter XXXVIII: Appendix (14)

What should prompt Lawrie to malice against the marchioness is
unknown. Kinloch, Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 58, accepting the story
of the old woman from whom he obtained #E#, says: “The Laird of
Blackwood and the Marquis of —— were rivals in the affection of a
lovely and amiable young lady, who, preferring the latter, became his
wife. Blackwood ... vowed revenge,” etc. Chambers, who repeats this
account, Scottish Ballads, p. 150, remarks that Lawrie seems to have
been considerably advanced in life at the time. Lawrie’s son made a
“retour of services” in 1650, and may be supposed then to have been of
age. The Marquis of Douglas was in his twenty-fourth year when he
married, in 1670, and probably Lady Barbara Erskine was not older.
Maidment is surprised that Lawrie, “a man of uncertain lineage,”
should have succeeded with the widow Marion Weir. What is to be
thought of his aspiring, at the age of sixty, or more, to “the
affection of a lovely and amiable young lady” of the family of Mar,
one of the most ancient in Scotland?

Footnote 72:

Kinloch MSS, I, 95 f. For one or two points see Maidment’s Scotish
Ballads and Songs, 1868, II, 262 ff., the preface to the ballad there
called ‘Lady Barbara Erskine’s Lament.’

Footnote 73:

“Matthew Crawford, weaver, Howwood, sings ‘Jamie Douglas’ with the
conclusion in which the lady dies after her return and reconciliation
with her lord.” Motherwell’s Note-Book, p. 56.

“I was informed by A. Lile that she has heard a longer set of the
ballad in which, while Lady Douglas is continuing her lament, she
observes a troop of gentlemen coming to her father’s, and she
expresses a wish that these should be sent by her lord to bring her
home. They happen to be sent for that purpose, and she accompanies
them. On her meeting, however, with her lord, and while putting a cup
of wine to her lips, her heart breaks, and she drops down dead at his
feet.” Motherwell, note to #G#, MS., p. 347.

Lawrie came near losing his head in 1683 for political reasons, but he
survived the revolution of 1688, “got all the proceedings against him
annulled, and a complete rehabilitation.” Wodrow, II, 295; Maidment,
1868, II, 268.

Footnote 74:

All but #E# have #b# 4: #E# has #a# 4. All but #A#, #D#, #E#, #L#, #M#
have 1. #A#, #C#, #E# have 10; #J# has 2, 3; #A# has 8; #F# has 9.

Footnote 75:

It must be said, however, that stanza 8, ‘When we came in by Glasgow
town,’ etc., hardly suits the song, and would be entirely appropriate
to the ballad (as it is in #A# 2). It may have been taken up from this
ballad (which must date from the last quarter of the seventeenth
century), or from some other.

Footnote 76:

#a# is followed in Percy’s Reliques, 1765, III, 144, Herd, Ancient and
Modern Scots Songs, 1769, p. 196; #b#, in the Musical Museum, p. 166,
No 158; with slight variations in each copy.

Footnote 77:

Scottish Psalter, 1566, Wood’s MSS, Bassus, Laing’s MSS, University of
Edinburgh, MS. Books, 483, III, p. 209. The medley is by a different
and later hand: Laing in the Musical Museum, 1853, I, xxviii f., IV,
440*. It is printed in the second edition of Forbes’s Cantus,
Aberdeen, 1666.

There was a much older stave, or proverb, to the same purport, as we
see by Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, vv. 855, 57.

But sooth is seyd, algate I fynde it trewe,
Loue is noght old as whan that it is newe.

Footnote 78:

“Public worship was begun by Mr Douglas, when the accounts came to
them that Claverhouse and his men were coming upon them, and had Mr
King and others their friends prisoners. Upon this, finding evil was
determined against them, all who had arms drew out from the rest of
the meeting, and resolved to go and meet the soldiers and prevent
their dismissing the meeting, and, if possible, relieve Mr King and
the other prisoners.” Wodrow’s History, 1722, II, 46.

Footnote 79:

(_Postscript_: “My lord, I am so wearied and so sleepy that I have
written this very confusedly.”) See Russell, in the Appendix to C. K.
Sharpe’s edition of Kirkton’s Secret and True History of the Church of
Scotland, p. 438 ff.; Napier’s Memorials and Letters of John Graham of
Claverhouse, II, 219–223. There is a good account of the affair in
Mowbray Morris’s “Claverhouse,” ch. iv.

Footnote 80:

Napier interprets the cornet to be Mr Crafford (Crawford), who, in the
preceding February, was a corporal in the troop: Memorials, II, 191.
But Creichton, in his Memoirs, mentions “the loss of Cornet Robert
Graham” at Drumclog. Russell speaks of a Graham killed at Drumclog,
and, like Creichton, tells a story of the disfigurement of his face
(which he attributes to the cornet’s own dog). Lawrie of Blackwood,
Lord Jamie Douglas’s Jago, was indicted and tried, Nov. 24, 1682–Feb.
7. 1683, for (among other things) countenancing John Aulston, who “in
the late rebellion” murdered Cornet Graham: Wodrow, II, 293, 295.
Guild, in his Bellum Bothuellianum, cited by Scott, has “signifer,
trajectus globulo, Græmus.”

Napier will know only of a William Graham as cornet to Claverhouse,
“and certainly not killed at Drumclog.” William Graham is referred to
in a dispatch of Claverhouse’s, March (?) 1679, as commanding a small
garrison: Napier II, 201. A Cornet Graham in Claverhouse’s troop
captured a rebel in March, 1682: R. Law’s Memorials, ed. Sharpe, p.
222. A William Graham was “cornet to Claverhouse,” January 3, 1684:
Wodrow, II, 338. (See “Clavers, The Despot’s Champion, by a Southern,”
London, 1889, p. 48 f., a careful and impartial book, to which I owe a
couple of points that I had not myself noticed.)