3

Auld Robin Grey

1770–1771

The most powerful investment banker of the age made his intentions towards Margaret clear from the outset. Alexander Fordyce’s first visit to Balcarres lasted barely a morning but once an inspection confirmed reports of her beauty, he started to move the pieces of his campaign into place. In the weeks that followed, Uncle Charles Dalrymple wrote to Lady Balcarres of the noble grapes sent by Mr Fordyce from his hothouse, his admirable Stilton cheese. Mrs Dalrymple declared Fordyce ‘a devilish handsome fellow’ and extolled his ‘princely country house near Richmond, his chapel, his riding house’.¹

Practised at getting what he wanted, Fordyce also made a point of ingratiating himself with the person closest to Margaret. ‘If fame reports it fairly,’ he wrote to Anne, ‘you, Madam, have had more lovers than your sister.’ He followed with further flattery: ‘You seem to be one of the few females in your world who will not, cannot, be spoiled by the approbation of your friends.’ And addressing his reputation for ruthlessness: ‘I have sometimes, at the expense of being thought cold-blooded and frigid, kept myself from loving my friends too well.’²

The fact was Anne had an aversion to Fordyce from the start. He was, she agreed, good-looking, despite a pate as smooth as a billiard ball, with long locks that curled down the side of his head like a Stuart monarch and an imperial nose; but she shivered to see how he gazed at Margaret with a level-eyed insolence, as if she was to be won with a wave of his handkerchief. She was not alone in her dislike; but whereas Edinburgh gentry objected to the former hosier on grounds of class – ‘a low fellow, a mushroom, a bashaw, a citizen!’ declared Robert Keith – Anne thought his manner crass, his heart unfeeling.*

He returned to Balcarres in the spring of 1770, arriving in his own coach, packed with trunks and trailing servants. On emerging to be met by Margaret, he looked disappointed and declared: ‘Good God! How much this lovely woman is changed since I saw her last!’³ No less disturbing to Anne was the way her sister appeared in awe of him. When Anne voiced her fears about what she perceived as Fordyce’s vile temper, they had a rare spat. Having tried to speak her mind, Anne then felt compelled to make it up by saying she was sure he was also generous and clever.

Fordyce was to spend three weeks at Balcarres during which, convention dictated, he would make himself agreeable and win Margaret’s family to blending her blood with his money. He presented himself in outfits that included a pea-green coat and pink silk waistcoat embroidered with silver, and walked out alone, impressing inhabitants of the earl’s village of Colinsburgh by handing out coins. He flattered Lady Balcarres, Henrietta and, above all, Anne, though she was clear that: ‘I could not have married him had he possessed the Universe’.⁴

The one female of the household who did not receive his particular attention was Margaret; and, as Anne noted, her sister’s usually acute eye for human absurdities was in this case blind – ‘or by some compulsion [was] resolved not to see’.

Lady Balcarres appeared surprisingly neutral. Anne even perceived something of a mellowing in her. She remained a stern matriarch, ever ready with reproof, but she had acknowledged Margaret as an adult too; and though she saw how Fordyce’s fortune would benefit the family, she was not ready to compromise – as became clear one evening as they all sat drinking tea in the drawing room. Her mother was in good humour, Anne recalled, when she declared:

‘Tomorrow, ladies, I will go to the church.’

‘Will?’ repeated Mr Fordyce. ‘Will, my good Lady Balcarres? Shall if you please, we always say so in England.’

‘Do you so, Sir?’ cried she, her face kindling. ‘Do you so? Then to shew you that in Scotland we know the meaning of Shall as well as Will, know you that you neither Shall nor Will have my daughter . . . There Sir, take your answer and take it to England with you as soon as you please . . . Arrogant, insolent fellow,’ muttered she to herself.

‘As to your sentence that I Shall not have your daughter, Madam,’ replied he, smiling disagreeably, ‘I should be very sorry for it, but when you say I Will not have your daughter, you are very much mistaken . . . Do not be so keen, Madam,’ said he attempting to take her hand. ‘By heavens! I did not mean to offend your Ladyship, but I find we shall never agree in the English language without the aid of Dr Johnson.’5

This telling row was still fresh when Margaret came to the one person whose advice she could depend upon, and asked whether she should refuse what was plainly an imminent proposal. While Anne never explicitly took responsibility for her sister’s marriage to Fordyce, she always felt a profound sense of guilt. Margaret, having in the past deferred to her, was starting to assert herself; yet she was still only seventeen and – on the verge of the biggest decision of her life – out of her depth. She needed, Anne reflected, to be ‘properly piloted thro’ this gale’.⁶ Caught between her own misgivings about Fordyce and perhaps with their own recent quarrel still in mind, Anne was indecisive at the crucial moment.

‘You would have me refuse him, would you?’ Margaret asked.

‘I dare not say it,’ Anne replied. ‘I know not what I would recommend, but look into your heart my dearest sister, and if it does not go along with your hand, oh, do not give it.’7

They embraced and a servant appeared to announce that Fordyce awaited Margaret in the drawing room. An hour later he emerged, his lips trembling, declaring: ‘I am the happiest of men.’ Lady Balcarres found it within herself to forgive and Anne took him in her arms ‘with a fervency that proved my love for [Margaret] more than for him’. For the time being she cherished the hope that she might have been wrong.

One final issue remained to be resolved – the marriage settlement. At the insistence of her mother, a paper was drawn up which settled £500 a year to be paid by trustees to Margaret, irrespective of any debts of Fordyce’s. Lady Balcarres may stand out as one of those Edinburgh women said by James Boswell to have had ‘a too-great violence in dispute’; but as her daughters always said, she had common sense with it.⁸

The marriage took place at Balcarres soon after Margaret’s seventeenth birthday and the summer equinox of 1770.

The servants were assembled, the company met, the old Presbyterian clergyman appeared in his bands. Mr Fordyce looked handsome, very handsome, dressed in gawdy colours as he was, like the proud falcon unhooded to gaze on the Sun and pounce on his prey.⁹

Any bright sense to the occasion was overshadowed by the separation it heralded; and when the moment came it was so agonising Fordyce felt constrained to come between them. ‘Come, come, Margaret,’ he cried with forced gaiety. ‘I shall be jealous if you are so sorry to part with your sister.’ Anne watched her step into his coach: ‘We did not cease to strain our mournful eyes to gaze on each other till its wheels had conveyed her out of sight.’¹⁰

*

Balcarres grew darker still. The Black Broth never provided a recipe for joy and with Margaret’s departure it became miserable. Anne would climb up to their room alone and as summer turned to autumn the place infected her with gloom . . . ‘the old rooks with their melancholy note, the company of the parson and his wife our only jubilee, the whistling winds tuning their dreary notes thro’ all the turnings of our winding staircase’.11

Separation opened up the correspondence that, though intermittent, fed both their souls and lasted Margaret’s lifetime. Most of their hundreds of letters went up in the bonfire Anne made of her papers towards the end of her life – possibly as an act of censorship, in the same way Cassandra Austen burnt or cut up large quantities of her beloved Jane’s correspondence, to preserve the image of a perfect sister.¹² Those that survive, however, testify to the intimacy of these exchanges. They wrote in the florid style of the period, declarations of love, support and loneliness which turned into prolonged conversations renewed by each exchange. Margaret’s letters from this time have an especial intensity.

I feel the want of you! I wish for your company, for your conversation. I can get neither, and the knowledge fills my eye with a tear. You were never in your life half so dear to me as you are now.¹³

‘Oh, that I were with thee,’ she wrote when Anne was under renewed pressure to accept Henry Swinton. ‘They none of them understand thee thoroughly but myself.’¹⁴ In brighter vein she urged Anne to ‘seize upon some General Scot or other, make a Benedict of him, clap him into a coach, whisk him up to London, and let us make a quartet’.¹⁵

As later became clear, Margaret’s letters were an outlet for the love absent in her marriage. But to start with, Anne thought them ‘affectionate and gay and I could not resist thinking she was happy’. With a fine home in Richmond and fast becoming a figure in London society, Margaret, it seemed, had been ‘transported at finding herself mistress of a thousand things she never had before’.16

Quite when Anne’s melancholy set in train the work that brought her literary fame is unclear; from this point her pen was her companion and as well as being a dedicated recorder and letter-writer, she would ‘scribble away poetically and in prose till I made myself an artificial happiness’.¹⁷ What we know is that separation from Margaret sent her back to a song they used to sing together and which provided her with the metre for a ballad she began around 1770, a lament of love entitled ‘Auld Robin Grey’.^†

They had been taught the song by Sophy Johnston, the eccentric Amazon, who – as Anne told Sir Walter Scott many years later – used to render an ancient Scottish melody with ‘very naughty words’. (Perhaps reflecting that this might seem to lack rectitude or sufficient disapproval, she went on to call them ‘coarse and odious’.) Here is evidence that while not yet twenty, Anne was more worldly than most well-born young women as, although the exact words sung by Sophy are not known, most versions of the song ‘The Bridegroom Greets (When the Sun Gaes Doun)’ concern a man’s sexual inadequacy.¹⁸ Her own lyrics were of a quite different order. ‘Auld Robin Grey’, named after the shepherd from her childhood at Balcarres, tells the tragedy of a country girl’s love for a lad named Jamie who goes to sea, intending to return and make her his wife. In his absence her family falls on hard times and is supported by old Robin Grey who woos her until, pressed by her mother and believing her long-absent lover to be dead, she marries him – only for Jamie to return. It ends:

I gang like a ghaist, and I carena much to spin,

I dare no’ think of Jamie, for that would be a sin;

But I will do my best a gude wife to be,

For O! Robin Grey, he is sae kind to me!

The theme of ‘Auld Robin Grey’, of poverty driving a young woman into a dutiful but loveless marriage, arose from Margaret’s loss of her first sweetheart and subsequent courtship by a richer, older man: James Burges, sent away to acquire a profession, is represented as Jamie while Fordyce, then still capable of being idealised as kindly, is Robin. But the subject was universal and ‘Auld Robin Grey’ went on to win fame, both as a popular ballad sung to the original melody, and as a verse admired by Scott, Wordsworth and Hardy.19 It retained a place in folk culture, being passed down orally – not least to Scott who heard it first as a boy in Edinburgh from his grandmother – before being anthologised for Victorian readers. More recently it has been cited for its subversive character, ‘showing how duty and virtue as defined by conventional morality lead to human misery’, along with a suggestion that Anne also had in mind her mother’s marriage to an elderly man.²⁰

Anne, while professing herself mystified as to how ‘Auld Robin Grey’ gained renown, had set the process in train by singing it herself at music evenings, from where ‘somehow it got into the world’.²¹ Among those impressed was Mrs Cockburn, who had written another enduring example of the Scottish ballad, ‘Flowers of the Forest’, published as early as 1765 and admired by Robert Burns as well as Scott. (Both Alison Cockburn and Anne Lindsay opted for anonymity as poets, the condition seen as proper for their sex and one which Anne, as we shall see, persisted in maintaining almost to the end of her life.)

After the household was transported from Balcarres to Edinburgh for the winter Anne became a bright spark at literary evenings in Mrs Cockburn’s parlour where she resumed her engagement with the local intellectual order. Mrs Cockburn and David Hume both championed Rousseau – Hume to the extent of helping the French thinker to a refuge in Britain – and they seem to have introduced his writings to Anne.

Two other well-known Enlightenment figures, Lord Monboddo and Lord Kames, were also regular guests. Monboddo, whom Anne had known since her youth, encouraged further progressive thought with the incredible statement that ‘men were derived from monkeys’.22 Kames was a more forbidding figure, an essayist and judge noted for robust sentencing and his frequent use of the term ‘bitch’ from the bench.²³ Even in so relatively enlightened a society, women walked a fine line. When Anne Lindsay crossed that line it led to an agonising rupture with Edinburgh’s gentry and flight to England.

A lull in courtship had been a relief. Count Bentinck continued to write from Europe but did not long remain a contender once his patron, the Duke of Portland, insisted he had to marry a woman of fortune and connections. Bentinck wrote that he continued to love Anne, but did not know how to refuse the duke. At first she was furious at what she called ‘this false, unmanly reasoning’; but on hearing that his father had threatened to disinherit him as well she dried her eyes, reflecting ‘ ’twas better to be jilted than to jilt’ and that ‘I had still my liberty and had not shown Bentinck that attachment which entitled me to expect much sacrifice on his part’.²⁴ With young Gordon off in the West Indies that left Henry Swinton.

Mrs Cockburn was quick to inform ‘my much lov’d friend Mr Swinton’ of Bentinck’s abdication, and just as quick to convey to Anne his revived ardour. She wrote: ‘How different is the real passion of love in one person and in another. If you had seen what I lately have, the swelling joy of learning that a rival is no more, checked by the tender sorrow for what a beloved object might be suffering . . .’²⁵

Now that Anne was back in town Swinton could call almost at will. He was not alone. Another proposal came from the son of a rich lawyer, of whom Anne remarked with unusual cynicism: ‘The father had been a complete miser, but a dead miser is not a bad thing . . . I rejected his suit without any modifying words.’26 Then there was George Home, son of Lord Kames. She thought Home pleasing, well-dressed and a perfect gentleman. But Swinton was relentless.

Sometimes she tried ‘to get the better of myself and endeavour to make everybody happy – to marry Mr Swinton in idea, to sit down by the cork arm, caress his hand without the forefinger, stifle in myself all little disgusts – in short to be a heroine if I possibly could’.²⁷ Her real feelings were better revealed to Sheriff Cross, her clutching old muse, who asked whether she preferred Swinton to Home – to which she replied: ‘I am sick of them and will have nothing to do with them, or with you.’^**

Here, in a flash of anger, she spoke with a too rarely heard spontaneity. She was caught between two forces: on the one hand, her need for approval; on the other, resentment at the demands being foisted upon her. Inadvertently, perhaps because Cross was one of the few (possibly only) individuals to whom she could give vent to anger, she had taken him into her confidence. Cross was no simple predator but one of Edinburgh’s minds, whom she and Margaret had dubbed Anacreon, after the Greek versifier of love, infatuation and bacchanalia, and who, as she saw it, understood her as no other man did. He once told her:

‘Your judgment is strong and brilliant, but it dazzles itself with its own light, for confess now, does not fancy place so many sides of every question before you that you are puzzled how to act?’ (Oh, how true thought I!) ‘You remind me,’ continued he, ‘of your friend Hume’s father, who was an excellent lawyer but a very indifferent judge. Do what you like, Anne, and follow your nose without ambling after systems and trying to please all the world. As for finding a man as perfect in everything as I see you hope for, do not expect it.’28

It was good advice. But she was sick of suitors, sick of courtship, and sick of the code that dictated she should act ‘in the common, dull way which is the best for women to proceed in – [or be] liable to misrepresentation’.²⁹

Had she been equally forthright in Edinburgh’s drawing rooms, not so desirous to please, she may have been less misunderstood. To others, however, her prevarication had become plain coquettishness. Henrietta’s accusation that she was ‘teazing everyone around you and keeping [Swinton] on the rack to gratify your vanity’ came as nothing new. But a vitriolic attack by Lord Kames left Anne stunned. Convinced that she was toying with his son George Home, the judge burst out one night: ‘There she sits looking so good humoured and naïve. What a veil she draws over her heart! You witch, you little she-devil. No sooner do you gain a heart I am told than you tear it in pieces. But have a care Miss how you treat some I know.’ Anne recoiled in shock but Kames persisted: ‘You assume any shape you please – You look like an angel till you gripe [sic] us fast, and then like a serpent you destroy us!’³⁰

She was still digesting this onslaught when one of her disagreeable Dalrymple uncles called one morning to announce that Swinton had been taken off to a sanatorium. ‘The man is done, his health and spirits broken and they have ordered him there as a last resource. If he dies you have made an end of him.’³¹ Swinton had, it seemed, attempted to take his life.

Feeling herself ‘entangled like a poor fly among cobwebs’ and just turned twenty, Anne lost the power of resistance. Swinton might be old, ugly and maimed, but his devotion was beyond doubt. On a night when Lady Balcarres arranged to be at the theatre, he presented himself, proposed and was accepted.

The climax of a courtship deeply damaging on both sides was orchestrated by the Dalrymple clan. Having impressed on Anne her duty to bind herself to Swinton’s fortune, Lady Balcarres and her brothers Charles and Hew started to have doubts when it emerged that this treasure was less substantial than first thought. The nabob had returned from India with debts as well as capital, much of which he then spent on an uncultivated estate, Kimmerghame, about forty miles east of Edinburgh. That left him with an income of a mere £200 a year. While he was blissfully happy at the prospect of a rural idyll and reassured Anne, ‘We will farm a little and you will have your poultry, your dairy, your music and painting,’ Lady Balcarres now saw him as a far from appropriate match.

Anne was torn. Swinton had actually gone up in her opinion: ‘He was poor but he was estimable. He demanded nothing of me but what was right.’ Marry him ‘and the balm of self-applause would shed its soothing influence over my heart’. Moreover, she felt betrayed by the relatives who, ‘awed by the reputation of his Indian property, had been afraid to ask questions!’

Lady Balcarres and her brothers presented Swinton with an ultimatum: Kimmerghame must be sold. Swinton returned to Anne, saying that no man of honour could submit to such terms. Money was ‘a subject unworthy of hearts and fit only for heads such as your mother’s’. At this point Lady Balcarres entered the room and a furious row broke out, with Anne trying vainly to restore calm.32 A few days later a letter came from Swinton:

It is not to be expressed with what regret I resign any pretensions to a treasure I have never ceased to aspire to for these two years past. But as I find neither my fortune or plans can render Lady Anne Lindsay happy, it would be doing her infinite injustice to prosecute them further . . . I can never cease to remember Lady Anne with that esteem and admiration which her numberless perfections so justly entitle her to. I pray Heaven to shower upon her its choicest blessings.33

When Swinton’s advocate Mrs Cockburn came to call, her frostiness turned to anger, and though she was not so savage as Lord Kames, Anne was again accused, and now by a woman friend, of using feminine wiles to torment a decent heart. Mrs Cockburn apologised the next day, writing to say that she had been hasty and having since realised ‘that your mother and uncles interfered to stop your marriage’ she wished to patch up their friendship. ‘My temper thoroughly irritated, I threw out some sarcasms, for which Lady Anne I ask your pardon,’ she wrote, concluding warmly: ‘God Bless you, my child!’³⁴ There is no record of any answer and, from the ripostes Anne added in her notes on the letter, the episode evidently continued to rankle long afterwards.

Instead of replying to Mrs Cockburn, she wrote – as always in a crisis – to Margaret, in this instance in the third person.

Wretched, wretched Anne, into what a labyrinth of sorrow and difficulty the desire of making others happy has led thee! As to me, Beloved Margaret, happiness is nowhere in view!³⁵

As ever, her sister responded with reassurance: ‘Good God! What motive can that man have to give up a heart like my Anne’s? . . . Had I been with you, you could not have been agitated so . . . Thou art a blessing my Anne, and shall be a blessing to some other man whom thy Creator will give thee as a reward for the virtuous part thou hast acted here.’³⁶

Swinton went on to marry a young woman he thought resembled Anne but who became alarmed by his mental state and fled naked from the house one night to seek refuge with neighbours. Anne’s mother wrote: ‘Amongst all the pieces of good fortune that has befallen you, none is the more worthy of grateful acknowledgment than your amazing escape from Mr Swinton . . . Some months ago he became disordered in his senses.’37 Despite financial difficulties, Swinton proved his devotion to Kimmerghame by clinging on to the estate, Anne noted, until ‘He died, in peace and sanity.’³⁸

But Anne had been damaged too. Confidence in her own judgement, never robust, had been profoundly shaken. ‘I am a weak, foolish, unfortunate creature,’ she reflected. ‘My heart is good, my head is bewildered.’ There would be a good deal more in the same vein, along with what became a growing tendency towards self-pity.

She might have spared a little more compassion for Swinton. A man who had demonstrated love, simple values and steady principles would be described in her memoirs as a ‘great spider who had caught me by the throat and was dragging me to his nest’.³⁹ Nor did she show much consideration for Mrs Cockburn. The older woman had doubtless played matchmaker with zeal, but so had Lady Balcarres and her brothers until Swinton’s modest means were revealed. Mrs Cockburn came far closer to Anne’s own way of thinking than her family when she wrote in her letter: ‘I hate the questions of people who live upon the excrements of the human race and whose constant chase is a pursuit of malignant stories of their poor fellow creatures.’⁴⁰ Mrs Cockburn was in many ways a kindred spirit; but Anne was not used to being rebuked by one of lower standing, and there may have been a hint of the grande dame in her response.

The upshot of this disastrous affair was that Anne resolved to have no more to do with lovers of any sort. When George Home – perhaps her most suitable admirer yet – asked to see her, she refused. That only tended to reinforce a view now widely held in town: Lady Anne Lindsay was a complete coquette. Home’s father, Lord Kames, was among Edinburgh’s most powerful men – not merely a judge but also the author of such opinion-shaping volumes as Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion. His speech was earthy, sometimes coarse, and his judgments were harsh. He sentenced an old chess partner Matthew Hay to death for murder with the words: ‘That’s checkmate to you, Matthew.’ It may be assumed that if Kames was prepared to call a lady of quality ‘a witch and a she-devil’ to her face, he would have said as much to others too.

Anne could not understand how she had been so maligned. As she wrote in a parting letter to Swinton, ‘I am fond of amusement because I am young and have tasted so little of it that it has not lost its relish yet.’41 She told Margaret she felt like Rousseau when he said he was being misconstrued by everybody. Indeed, at times she seems to have suffered something approaching the paranoia that afflicted the philosopher. ‘As one who had risen every morning with the desire of being on charity with all mankind, to be confronted with cold looks and eyes of distrust threw a thick fog over the sunshine of life.’⁴²

Suddenly it became important to ‘get out of the cruel circle and a country where I experienced that prosperity alone is virtue, where innocence was oppressed by envy’. At this moment of despair, Margaret extended her familiar, loving hand:

Come to my bosom, my dear, my generous gentle noble creature, come to my sisterly bosom and repose all thy griefs with me. My soul flys to meet thine and to pour the balm of consolation into thy torn mind . . . The town to be sure will talk. Let it talk – leave it and its animadversions. Come to me. The sooner you leave Edinburgh the better . . .

How I long to have you once more with us. You shall divide your vexations with me and you will be once more the Anne Lindsay who can captivate hearts as well, and better than anyone I know, and then perhaps we may not be again divided. But hush Margaret – lest my Mother should hear . . . That is not her plan. It is natural to be sure for her to wish you fixed near herself.43

So it proved. Early in 1771 Anne was on a coach bound for London. Her hopes for a fresh start might have been brighter had Lady Balcarres and Henrietta Cumming not been seated beside her.

* Mrs Thrale used to relate a story, possibly apocryphal, that Fordyce sent a rank haunch of venison to Margaret, who was warned by Anne, ‘Have nothing to do with this fellow, he begins with both bribery and corruption.’

† The song has since become generally known as ‘Auld Robin Gray’, but in Anne’s hand it was always entitled ‘Auld Robin Grey’.

‡ Cross’s response amounted to a further act of physical interference. Anne wrote: ‘He replied, “Very well then Madam, I will kiss you, ’tis the only way to make a young woman listen to reason.” This incensed me, a struggle ensued, my hands were tied behind my back and to my great resentment I was kissed till tears came while he laughed ready to kill himself and eventually I was forced to laugh too.’ (Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 197)