Scottish Books
Rogues, misers and madmen
Allan Massie A Wild Flight of Gordons Archie Gordon, 5th Marquess of Aber- deen and Temair (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £10.95)
Scotch Verdict Lillian Faderman (Quartet £12.95) rr he Gordons have been the great family of Aberdeenshire since the 14th cen- tury, when they were granted the lands of Strathbogie by Robert the Bruce, and so moved from Berwickshire, where there is still the village of Gordon. Since then they have been successively Earls of Aboyne, Marquesses of Huntly, Dukes of Gordon, and (another branch of the family) Earls and subsequently Marquesses of Aber- deen. They have produced rogues, villains and heroes; misers and spendthrifts; only one man of genius (Byron, a Gordon of Gight on his mother's side), but many of quite unusual talent; several lunatics, the most distinguished of whom was Lord George Gordon, younger son of Cosmo, 3rd Duke of Gordon, and Catherine, daughter of the 2nd Earl of Aberdeen — the author of this delightful and informa- tive book notes that Lord George 'is the principal witness that a double dose of Gordon blood can be a troublesome inheri- tance'. Lord George led the famous anti-
Catholic Gordon riots of 1780, which form the matter of Barnaby Rudge; he became a Jew, taking the name of Israel bar Abra- ham George Gordon, undergoing cir- cumcision and 'preserving the evidence of this rite in a suitable box', and died in Newgate, 'probably the happiest period of his life'; `no wonder', says the author; 'a portrayal of his serving maid, Polly Levi, who cooked kosher meals for him and his guests, shows a very pretty face of modesty and charm, wearing clothes that look absurdly fashionable'; a delightful sent- ence, even if it offers evidence of Lord Aberdeen's aristocratic disregard for English grammar.
Lord George was the maddest Gordon, but there have been plenty of eccentrics, of whom Chinese Gordon was certainly one, even if Lytton Strachey's portrait of him in Eminent Victorians is no more to be trusted than any other of Strachey's biographical studies. But there was also, for instance., the 7th Laird of Gight, who buried a treasure in the Ythan to protect it from the Covenanters. After his pardon in 1647, he sent down a diver to recover his treasure. The diver found the devil sitting at table with the Laird's silver before him, waiting for dead babies to be cooked for supper. The terrified man refused to return to fetch the treasure, till the Laird persuaded him by pulling his fingernails and sticking pins in him. 'Better the Devil than the Laird of Gight,' he cried, and dived again. His quartered body surfaced, with 'a knife impaling his still quivering heart'. Fact.
The early chapters are full of violence and martial exploits — Nathaniel Gordon, who was Montrose's lieutenant and be- headed in Edinburgh after Philiphaugh; Patrick Gordon who became General and Admiral of Peter the Great — the ter- centenary of his birth was celebrated by the Bolsheviks in 1935; his nephew Thomas, also a Russian admiral.
Then Lord Aberdeen turns to chronicle the rise and fall of his own branch. The first Earl of Aberdeen was a scholar and lawyer: professor at King's College, Aber- deen, President of the Court of Session, Lord High Chancellor of Scotland. He and his son had Jacobite sympathies, but pru- dence restrained them from giving these damaging expression. Throughout the 18th century, the Aberdeen estates spread over
the country, as they engrossed the propertY of their neighbours. They bought Fyvie Castle, one of the great houses of the north-east, and employed William Adam to re-build Haddo House, from which estate the sons of the family took their courtesy title. This Palladian mansion was to be the centre of the family's activities thereafter, till the bulk of the estate was sold after the First War. Even recently, however, the wife and widow of the 4th Marquess (the author's brother) has made it the heart of musical and cultural life in Aberdeenshire.
The third Earl, known as Lord Skinflint., was the chief buyer of property, the fami- ly's rise being in no way impeded by his marriage to the cook of a Yorkshire inn. The 4th Earl was a great art collector, his acquisitions including the Titian, An Alleg- ory of Prudence, now in the National Gallery in London; he bought it when Lucien Bonaparte's collection was sold in 1816. Valued at £2,000 in 1883, it was then sold by the 1st Marquess. Curiously, the author says little of the 5th Earl, Prime Minister during the 01- mean War, in worldly terms the most successful member of the family, but there is a full and fascinating account of his son the 6th Earl, who had such a horror of debt that, misunderstanding the nature of bur- dens on the estate required to pay bequests to his brothers and sisters, he determined to draw no money from his lands till all encumbrances had been cleared, and emi- grated to the United States, where he lived incognito as a labourer and seaman. He died at sea, and it took some time for his death to be proved and for it to he established that he had died without issue. His successor was the author's grand- father, the 7th Earl and 1st Marquess. A Liberal (or Whig) politician, Gladstone s Viceroy of Ireland and Governor-General of Canada, he married a remarkable wile, Ishbel Marjoribanks. In them the aris- tocratic ideal came to full fruition and then exhausted itself. They were both endlesslY benevolent and endlessly extravagant. During the agricultural depression of the 1880s, they remitted between £20,000 and £25,000 of rents due from their tenants. They also offered a revaluation which committed them to an 111/2 per cent re- duction in rental for the duration of all leases. This was magnanimity indeed. Though in 1883 the Aberdeen estates covered 62,422 acres worth £44,112 a years they were always in the red, disproving Lord Durham's assertion, made admittedly 50 years earlier, that 'a man can jog along on £40,000 a year'. Sales of land began almost immediately. By the 1920s theY were in effect living on charity extended by parvenus like Sir Alexander MacRoberi and Lord Cowdray. Sales of some 45,000 acres in 1919 had produced £445,000, but after payments of expenses and the discharge of all loans and mortgages, less than £5,000 was left to the vendor. When the first Marquess died, his personal estate amounted to £204.
The author is at times bitter about his remarkable grandparents' almost insane extravagance. Yet he admires their quality, their benevolence and genuine goodness. If the aristocratic way of life was passing anyway, and part of the underlying pur- pose of this book is to show how that happened, then the Gordons' decline was at least evidence that they had accepted the Principle of 'noblesse oblige'. 'We Twa', as the first Marchioness entitled her auto- biography, could at least claim they had 'done more good than harm'. How many of their predecessors could have said as much?
Probably not Helen, Lady Cumming Gordon of Gordonstoun, who is one of the Principal figures in Scotch Verdict. This is an extraordinary work by a Distinguished Professor of English at California State University. It is an examination of a celebrated court case in Edinburgh in 1811-12, which formed the basis of Lillian Hellman's play, The Children's Hour. Very briefly: two young Edinburgh ladies, Miss Pine and Miss Woods, kept a girls' school. One of their pupils was Jane Cumming, the bastard Eurasian grand-daughter of Lady Cumming Gordon. She accused her schoolmistresses of unnatural practices. Lady Cumming Gordon, with no investiga- tion, removed the girl and advised the Other parents to do the same. Miss Pine and Miss Woods then brought an action for libel against her.
The Distinguished Professor attacks the case with real zeal and a total absence of scholarship. She has, admittedly, gone to the original records, but she transcribes them indiscriminately, modernising, omit- ting and modifying. Though she claims to have had 'always a respect for the accuracy Of the ideas expressed in the original documents', we have only her word for it.
The whole is enveloped in a tissue of supposition; this is one of these books full 01 'must haves' and 'would haves'. It could only have been brought off by someone steeped in the period, which the Disting- uished Professor isn't. Her interest in the subject is a feminist one. She is herself a lesbian; I mention this with no pejorative intention, but simply because she intro- duces herself and her lover (also an academic, working on a study of British Jurisprudence as a Shaper of Western Thought) throughout her account, and uses their experience as modern American les- bian feminists as a means of trying to understand Miss Pine and Miss Woods.
It is, I think, an honest book, in the sense that the Distinguished Professor tries very hard to decide what actually hap- Pened, but it is also a naive and ridiculous one, full of infelicities which make it a collector's piece of unintended comedy. I Would like to have evidence for her state- ment that in the New Town of Edinburgh 'houses were sometimes blown down' by the 'very violent winds, even worse than those which raged in the old town with incredible fury'. Certainly I know no signs of such gale damage in Charlotte Square.
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