BOOKS.
THE HOUSE OF STAIR.*
AsfoNO the great Houses- of Scotland, there are few which have so marked• and distinctive a character as the Dalrymples of Stair. In point of antiquity, as a leading house, they cannot indeed for a moment compare with such families as the Campbells of Argyll, the Hamiltons, and others of those great historic chiefships which, in Scotland, embrace within the compass of their personal actions, at least for some time, nearly the whole national history. Compared with these, the Talrymples, in a political sense, were parvenus, mere country- lairds; down to the' time of the later Stuarts', and even after that time never attained the rank of a princely and primary house: Nevertheless, they set their mark so distinctly on the history of Scotland from the time when their ability first brought them to the front of politics, that the course of events was thenceforward sensibly affected by the peculiarities of their temperament and the position they held in the estimation of their countrymen. The story of their careers is not indeed the record of men of exalted virtue and spotless reputation, but it is that of strong men, to whom the nation was indebted for several practical benefits, and to whom, however she-might cavil at or -dislike them at other times, she always turned in time of need for -advice and help.
It is not easy to tell the tale of such a family without being led away' too much either in the- direction of censure or of admira- tion. We- have almost to erect a standard for them alone, and to judge them not by what they were according to the ordinary rules of morality, but by the value set upon them by the general voice of their countrymen, whether friends or enemies. Mr. Graham has, we think, under these circumstances pursued the best plan of wilting their history; by letting them tell it as much as possible themselves, in their own letters, so as to bring the modernreader into that closer contact with them from which arose the strange mixture of confidence and hate with which they were regarded in the days when they actually lived. This feeling respecting them grew up gradually and almost insensibly, and we can only bring it back to ourselves in however faint a degree by allowing the men to place their own actions as it were in succes- sive review before our eyes. The present author—or, we ought perhaps rather to say editor—is better qualified for the task of placing his heroes hi this light than he would have been for any exposition of their characters based on his own powers of analysis. His moral and ethical criticisms, when they do occur, are seldom of much value ; but he has selected and arranged the documents which form the substance of his narrative with remarkable skill, avoiding repetition, and not breaking the flow of the story by abrupt tran- sitions of time and subject. He does not profess to contribute to the lives of the two first members of the family thus de- lineated any original materials for forming a judgment concerning them, but he has put those which already existed in a clear light before us ; while his life of the second Earl of Stair, which forms the latter part of his volumes, is drawn from correspondence and -State papers in the Stair archives and elsewhere not before ex- hibited in print.
The foundation of the House of Stair may be said to have been
* A, ri I'S and Correspondence of the Viscount and the First and Second Earls of Stair. By Job., Murray Graham. 2 vols. London: W. Blackwood and Sons. 1875. laid in the year 1450, when a Dalrymple "acquired the lands of Stair-Montgomery, on the water of Ayr, by marriage with the heiress of these lands, Agnes Kennedy." The religious position of the family was in a certain sense fixed towards the close of the same century and beginning of the next, by the appearance of the wife of William Dalrymple, the offspring of the above union, in Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland, as one of the Lollards of Kyle, a district in Ayrshire ; and of the descendants of this William, as "staunch adherents of the Scottish Reformation." The representative of the family half a century later was the James Dalrymple whose biography occupies the first part of these volumes, and who was the founder of the political fortunes of the house. Born at the paternal home in Ayrshire in the year 1619, and therefore soon after the accession of the House of Stuart to the Throne of England, James Dalrymple, and his two immediate lineal descendants, lived to be leading agents in the Revolution which displaced the elder branch of that family from the throne, and in the consolidation of the dynasty which was ultimately substituted for it. A Presbyterian by religious conviction, but a Royalist in political leanings, James Dalrymple seemed formed by nature for the practical but not very lofty character of a trimmer between opposite parties. His patron in the dangerous crisis when Scotland was being remodelled in its outward organisation by the hand of Cromwell was General Monk, whose interference on his behalf secured him a Judgeship in his own country, which he occupied without the necessity of anything more than a passive and official conformity to the then existing Government. At the Restoration, his Royalist proclivities, and the fact of his having been employed as an agent in the earlier negotiations of the Scottish Presbyterians with the exiled King, sheltered him from the storm of proscription which soon thinned the judicial Bench and other Boards of administration in Scotland ; but the influence of Lauderdale, his second patron, whose previous political career had been somewhat similar to his own, was unable in this case to shield him from the ordeal of a test-subscription, which, if taken without reserve, would have committed him to the most extravagant doctrines of right-divine and passive obedience in Church and State. And here the character of the man was displayed in a very curious manner. He had a con- science, but it was a conscience the essence of which was broad common-sense rather than sentiment. He was a Presbyterian in his tendencies, chiefly because he considered it the most sensible mode of Church discipline, and the best barrier against "Popery," of which he had a lawyer-like dread. He was a Whig by antici- pation in his politics, because he disliked and dreaded absolute monarchy as another form of anarchy in the administration of Government. He did not wish either to support or to seem to be committed to the approval of views diametrically opposed to the above, but he also had a strong aversion to letting go for a moment any grasp which he had obtained of admhiititrative func- tions, believing, no doubt very sincerely, and with some reason, that there were few men more capable of exercising those functions beneficially than himself. The manner, then, in which he evaded this dilemma was the following :—He went up to London, and had interviews with King Charles, to whom he was already per- sonally known. The result of this negotiation was that he was obliged to subscribe the objectionable declaration as a sine qua non of his continuing a Judge, but he was allowed to band in at the same time to the officer by whom the declaration was taken a written explanation of the sense in which he subscribed,—an explanation emptying the' subscription of all significance. This explanation the officer, having read it to himself, returned to Dalrymple without remark. The latter thus appeared to the world at large to be an uncompromising supporter of the Govern- ment doctrines, while he satisfied his own conscience by telling himself that the sense in which he intended to make the declara- tion was known to the official by whom it was administered. At the same time, he had it always in his power, in case of a change of affairs, to plead this officially received, though not officially recorded, explanation as a proof that he had never committed himself to the absolutist creed. He continued to regulate his political conduct during the remainder of this reign and the beginning of the next by the same policy of astute evasion of positive issues, and by moderation in his exer- cise of duties which he could not evade, though opposed and most distasteful to his own principles. The uncompromising and headstrong course of King James at length destroyed this locus standi of James Dalrymple. He saw this, and with a sagacity which rises almost to the height of genius, determined for once to play a bold though dangerous game, in the place of his old cautions I policy. He opposed the measures of Government, was dismissed
from his Presidentship of the Court of Session ; and, harassed by legal proceedings in his country retirement, he anticipated more violent measures against him by a timely flight to the Court of William of Orange, in whom his penetration recognised the future master of the situation. He returned with the Prince, and though he had the moderation or good-sense not to seek at once to displace his successor in the Presidentship, at the death of the latter he resumed his former judicial seat, became one of the new King's most trusted advisers, and instead of simple "Sir James," Viscount Stair, and died peacefully in 1695.
We cannot here enter on the discussion of the real facts at the foundation of the romantic story from which Sir Walter Scott drew the materials for his powerful tale of the Bride of Lammermoor. The author of these volumes favours the idea that Janet Dalrymple, Stair's eldest daughter, died of consumption, brought on by a broken heart. We cannot think that he at all establishes this as probable, though it is not possible to determine the real nature of the tragedy which has invested the family of Dalrymple with a romantic interest not quite in harmony with the leading family characteristics.
The eldest surviving son of James Dalrymple, John, second Viscount and afterwards first Earl of Stair, is chiefly known in his- tory in connection with the Massacre of Glencoe, which clouded his reputation and for the time depressed his fortunes ; and in con- nection with the Act of Union with England, which he was one of the principal agents in promoting, and to which, in fact, he sacrificed his health and life, though by so doing he also redeemed his reputa- tion in the public eye. His father cannot be said to have been very scrupulous, though he was a cautious man, who did as little evil as he could without loss of position ; but John Dalrymple was of a bolder temperament ; he was more enterprising, and he was more openly unscrupulous. He did not attempt to disguise the evil of any of his actions, either from the public or from him- self, but he sought to efface the recollection of them by other acts commanding as strongly popular approval. After sharing without demur in some of the worst acts of James IL's Govern- ment, even when his father had abandoned the position as untenable, he coolly deserted the King in the crisis of the Revolution, and with the greatest effrontery transferred his services to the new Government, to the scandal of both Presbyterians and Jacobites. He had no scruple in juggling the unfortunate Mac- donalds of Glencoe to their death, when he had received a hint that such a result would be acceptable to King William ; but he bore the storm which afterwards arose against him with calm and sagacious self-restraint, and biding his time, contrived by his sub- sequent conduct to impress both Court and people with the con- viction that he was one of the ablest, and where his own interests were not concerned, one of the most reliable of the statesmen of his day.
The first divergence from the strict family type, though it was only a partial divergence, occurs in the person of John, second Earl of Stair, and son of the preceding peer. The good-sense and clear-headed sagacity which marked the family continued to operate in him, so far as the perception of general policy was concerned, but in the management of details personal feeling was allowed to exercise an influence from which it had been entirely debarred in the case of his two predecessors. This difference, which seemed often to indicate a greater amount of moral honesty in the second Earl, disqualified him at the same time for the sort of practical statesmanship by which the two previous heads of the family had raised themselves in the political world. The man, in- deed, whom Marlborough thought highly of as a soldier, and whom Stanhope trusted with the post of Ambassador at Paris, when judgment and penetration were most needed in order to consoli- date the throne of the new Hanoverian dynasty, could not have been a man of inferior calibre, or wanting in the main features by which his family had recommended itself to public confidence ; but the wise and active diplomatist could not forget always, as he ought to have done, and as his father and grandfather would have done, his own personal feelings in matters of public policy. He allowed himself to drift into hostile feelings towards the Ministers of the Government to which he was accredited, and was unable to avoid expressing in public his dislike of the adventurer Law, without remembering that if he was an unsound financier, he was also the favourite of the Regent Orleans, whom it was the interest of England to secure as a friend by every sacrifice of personal considerations. This want of temper, or too great honesty, so un- usual in a Dalrymple up to that time, led to his breach with that section of the Whig party which had the means of giving him opportunity and sphere for the exercise of his con- siderable talents, and so robbed his country of several of the best
years of his life. Never was a character drawn with more ability- or with more singular frankness by one friend of another than that of Lord Stair by Mr. Secretary Craggs (Vol. IL, pp. 411 -12-13),. on the eve of the former's recall from his post as Ambassador, but our limits are too confined to admit of its insertion here.
We wish we had space to give some extracts from the- correspondence of the second Earl of Stair, which is full of vivid illustrations of the political and social life of the period. The old Duchess of Marlborough figures here frequently, on all topics, from the interests of the dynasty to commissions for various articles of ladies' dress to be smuggled by the Ambassador through the Customs for the benefit of herself and friends ; while Lord Finch, one of the best letter-writers in the book, by-the-bye, presents a most amusing picture of the man-about-town of those days, with his professed bad opinion of all women, English and French alike, and his good-natured chivalry in behalf of the same sex, when hard-hearted fathers or husbands kept them too long in the country away from the gaieties of London. But the most in- teresting character which appears in this correspondence is the widow of the first Earl, a Puritan lady of the genuine old stamp, equally strong in her religion and in her housekeeping and steward- ship of the family estate. Her gratitude to Heaven for the death of Queen Anne is one of the most naive expressions of religious and political feeling we ever remember to have met with in writing.
By this it will be seen that these volumes contain, besides their inherent value as materials for history, not a few matters of■ lighter interest which may recommend them to a wider circle of readers, and we have to thank Mr. Graham for the labour- which he has bestowed on his task, and the efficient manner in which he has dealt with the difficulties attendant upon such an, undertaking.
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