Lady Grisell Baillie - Mistress of Mellerstain

Lesley Abernethy

Description

With the first factually accurate biography of a great lady's entire life, Lesley Abernethy introduces Lady Grisell Baillie - the Mistress of Mellerstain. Lady Grisell Baillie's lifetime encompassed Scotland's covenanting 'killing times' when her heroic youthful efforts ensured her father Sir Patrick Hume's safety before the entire family fled into exile in Holland. After their return in the 'glorious revolution' of 1688, she refused a post of maid of honour to Queen Mary, preferring instead to marry George Baillie. Following her marriage in 1691 she became mistress of George Baillie's restored estates of Jerviswood in Lanarkshire and Mellerstain in Berwickshire and shortly afterwards began her meticulous accounts. Through the book, we see how her life was directly affected by the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, and by the financial disasters ofthe Darien Scheme and the South Sea Bubble. But though strife was a common aspect of her life, she still found great joy. Lady Grisell'smarriage was a lifetime love affair, and her devotion to both close and extended family was exemplary, including organising a journeythrough mainland Europe to Naples in the hope of saving the life of her son-in-law Lord Binning, suffering from TB. A patron of poets andmusicians, she had commissioned portraits from all the outstanding painters of the day, as well as work by eminent silversmiths, furnituremakers and architects, including William Adam, chosen as architect for the new house at Mellerstain.Her copious letters and numerous account books reveal life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland and England in intimateand sometimes surprising detail, but above all reveal the warm personality of a remarkable, energetic and courageous woman.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• City (Londres)
• Edimburgo
• North Holland
• South Holland
• Edinburgh
• City of London
• Cité de Londres
• Édimbourg

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838595715
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2020 Lesley Abernethy

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781838595715

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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To the memory of
my mother and father
Laura and Ronnie Webster
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. Childhood at Redbraes
2. Exile
3. Bride and Mother
4. Edinburgh Before the Union
5. Divided Household
6. Life in London
7. Turbulent Years
8. A New House for Mellerstain
9. Journey to Naples
10. Return to Mellerstain
11. Oxford Student Days
12. Scotland Once More
13. Albermarle Street, London

Appendices
Foreword
The archives at Mellerstain document the affairs of the Earls of Haddington dating back to the 16 th Century. The books of accounts, and bundles of letters and maps provide a compelling insight into the domestic and political lives of my ancestors.
Whilst sections of the archive have been put into the public domain, much of this material has remained private and unpublished, but when Lesley Abernethy, one of the charming and knowledgeable tour guides at Mellerstain House (and my teacher at Coldstream Primary School), proposed to us that she write a historical biography of my ancestor Grisell Baillie, we were delighted to open those archives to her.
The lifetime of Grisell Baillie (née Hume) marks a particularly colourful period in Scottish history, in which the family became fatally embroiled. In the 17 th Century religious authority and political power were still inseparable, and the Covenanters, whose ranks included the Baillies and Humes, fought against the Anglican and subsequently Catholic monarchy, for the spiritual independence of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. In the 18 th Century Grisell’s family found their friendships divided by the Jacobite uprisings, but remained loyal to the Hanoverian succession. Against this noisy backdrop, Lesley has been able to distinguish Grisell’s remarkable story.
As a child, Grisell’s bravery in the face of religious persecution marks her out as a heroine of Scottish history. Her prudence and determination in safeguarding her family’s survival and developing her husband’s restored estates, and her shrewd oversight in the first phase of building Mellerstain House, are the achievements of a unique woman of her time.

George Haddington
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Lord Polwarth and the family of Scott of Harden for their kind permission to publish several quotations from the National Records of Scotland series GD158 (Papers of the Family of Hume of Polwarth), and to Shepherd and Wedderburn LLP for permission to publish from GD206/6 (Papers of the Hall Family of Dunglass). I am indebted to the National Records of Scotland for permission to publish from GD206/2 (Hall of Dunglass), RH15/15 (Papers of Sir Andrew Home, Lord Kimmerghame), GD1/1209/1, (Account Book of Dame Grisell Ker), GD1/649 (Transcript of the Diary of George Home of Kimmerghame) and Conjoined Processes of Separation CC8/6/167
In addition to the above unpublished material, printed sources most frequently referred to are:

Marchmont and the Humes of Polwarth (Margaret Warrender 1894)
The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie (Ed. Robert Scott-Moncrieff 1911)
Memoirs of the Lives and Characters of the Right Honourable George Baillie of Jerviswood and of Lady Grisell Baillie (Lady Murray of Stanhope 1822)
Observations on the Historical Work of the late Right Honourable Charles James Fox (George Rose 1809)
Scottish Lifestyle 300 Years Ago (Helen and Keith Kelsall 1993)
The Lockhart Papers (George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1702-45, published 1817)

Electronic resources provided access to Kirk Session Records ( www.scottishdocuments.com ) and to Old Parish Records ( www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk ). Historical Tax Rolls were accessed at https://scotlandsplaces.gov.uk/ , and Westminster Rate Books at www.findmypast.co.uk
All quotations marked with an asterisk * are from newspapers printed in London, England, and part of the Burney Collection, accessed digitally via the National Library of Scotland.
All photographs are the work of George Haddington, with the exception of Plates 1a and 7 (Ian Abernethy), and Plate 5 (George Holywell), to whom my thanks are due. Plate 27b is my own, as are any mistakes in this work or misinterpretations of the available evidence.
I would like to thank the unfailingly helpful staff of the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, the National Museum of Scotland and the Scottish Borders Heritage Hub in Hawick.
Kristina Bedford of Ancestral Deeds gave unstinting advice and encouragement and my husband Ian showed enormous tolerance of my obsession with a woman who lived three centuries ago.
Most of all, my thanks are due to George, Earl of Haddington and his mother, Jane, for giving me privileged access to the private archive of letters, accounts and other documents held at Mellerstain, from which the majority of the original material in this book derives.
Introduction
Lady Grisell Baillie has for over two centuries had a place in the literature of Scotland as a ‘Scottish heroine’. Her story, or part of it, has been endlessly re-told since first appearing in print in 1809 when it formed an Appendix entitled ‘Lady Murray’s Narrative’ in a work by George Rose, Observations on the Historical Work of the late Right Honourable Charles James Fox . (This work was not as unrelated to Lady Grisell as the title might suggest as it is a defence of her father Sir Patrick Hume). Lady Murray, Grisell Baillie’s elder daughter, had committed her thoughts to paper at Mellerstain in the Scottish Borders on 12 December 1749, entitling her 76-page narrative ‘Facts relating to my mother’s life and character’. Writing at Oxford in 1739, she had written a similar 25-page memorial of her father, George Baillie, ‘Plain facts relating to my father’s character, of which I could give many more.’ Being aware that her affection for her mother might result in a too biased account, Lady Murray says, ‘I will therefore set a guard upon myself, to keep strictly to truth, and relate facts which speak for themselves.’ Relying largely on remembered conversations, a number of Lady Murray’s ‘facts’ prove to be inaccurate in the light of documentary evidence, but as Lady Grisell Baillie’s first biographer, with a lifelong personal acquaintance of her subject, her account is nevertheless invaluable. After its first obscure appearance in print in 1809, Lady Murray’s memoir appeared as an independent work, published in Edinburgh in 1822 by Thomas Thomson, Deputy Clerk Register, with the somewhat unwieldy title: Memoirs of the Lives and Characters of the Right Honourable George Baillie of Jerviswood and of Lady Grisell Baillie by their daughter Lady Murray of Stanhope .
One year before Thomson’s edition of 1822, Joanna Baillie, who claimed a doubtful distant kinship, had written the first of many romanticised versions of Grisell’s story in her Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters . Perversely, she names her heroine ‘Griseld’, not the ‘Grisell’ (with variant spellings, and rhyming with ‘drizzle’) that friends and family called her. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Lady Grisell’s name became familiar in many guises from articles in children’s penny papers, to fictionalised accounts of her life and plays for schoolchildren to act out, all stressing her youthful heroism and selflessness. Scholars and social historians have pored over the detail of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century life revealed in the publication by the Scottish History Society in 1911, of extracts from her numerous account books which appeared under the title The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie 1692-1733.
Each of the publications mentioned above gave only snapshots of particular features of her life; she has been pigeon-holed in print as a ‘Youthful Heroine’, ‘Meticulous Housekeeper’ and ‘Scottish Songwriter’, ignoring many aspects of a truly remarkable and forceful personality. Those who encountered her in her lifetime might have added to the descriptions above: estate manager, politician, landscape gardener, building supervisor, homemaker, traveller, letter-writer, patroness of the arts, educator, needlewoman, devoted wife and indefatigable nurturer and defender of her extended family. The detail of Lady Grisell’s life as revealed in her own words and those of her contemporaries also sheds light on a long period of history encompassing the events characterised as the Restoration, the Killing Times, the Glorious Revolution, the Darien Scheme, the Union of 1707, the South Sea Bubble of 1720 and the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, all of which had direct impact on the lives of Lady Grisell and her family.


a note about names

Repetition of names over several generations is problematical. The most f