MORE OLD PAPERS. A MONG the rarest of Scottish autographs are
letters of the much-maligned John Grahame of Claverhouse, the " Bloody Clovers" of Covenanting hagiologies. My letter is of some interest as being dated from York on October 17th, 1688, not long before he went north to raise the standard in Scotland. It is addressed to " Mester Blathwayt, Secretary at War, London," and acknowledges the receipt of H.M. orders " anent the conduct of the horse and dragoons from Scotland under my command which I shall indevor punctually to observe in case of the landing of the Dutch." .The seal is as clear and red as if it had been affixed yesterday. There is something feminine about the handwriting.
Claverhouse owes his evil reputation largely to Macaulay, who in a well-known passage in his History of England refers to him as " the chief of this Tophet on earth." Macaulay derived his information regarding the so-called " Persecutor " chiefly from Wodrow s History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, which is about as trustworthy a source as would be a Sinn Fein record of the doings of the British Army in Ireland, 1916-22. Recent biographers of Claverhouse, Professor C. S. Terry and Mr. Michael Barrington, who base their statements on documentary evidence, give a very different account of the man. The truth is that he was a resolute and able soldier, pure and sober in his private life, and, on the whole, moderate and just in his treatment of the rebels in S.W. Scotland. The state of Wigton and Galloway was then not unlike the condition of parts of Ireland at the present time. Claverhouse was a man under authority, and it was his duty to carry out laws which were no doubt severe, but not more so than the English Penal Code at a much later date. When denouncing Claverhouse, Macaulay would have done well to remember that in his own lifetime shop-lifting was a capital offence and that when Romilly in 1810 tried to repeal that atrocious law seven Bishops, led by the Metropolitan of England, opposed the motion for reform. Are not the names of those eminent Christians em- balmed on page 133 of Volume II. of Walpole's History ? The " Persecutor " had to deal with armed fanatics. He shot about a dozen of them, including the notorious John Brown of Priest Hill, who had fought at Bothwell Brig, and in whose house both ammunition and incriminating papers were discovered. Some of the executed rebels were also murderers. The " godly," in those lively times, thought nothing of shooting soldiers from behind a hedge. " Black John the Warrior," as the Highlanders called him, was, like many great soldiers, a small, well-pro- portioned man. His portraits, notably the one at Glamis and the attractive contemporary drawing at the National Gallery at Edinburgh, show him to have possessed exceptional personal beauty. It would be hard to find a more prepossessing face. He loved horses and was always superbly mounted. He wore his own dark, flowing locks, which at Killiecrankie _were already flecked with grey. His widow, née Miss Jean Cochrane, had a curious fate. She afterwards married Lord Kilsyth and during a visit to Holland was killed at an inn at Utrecht by the fall of her bedroom ceiling. I was fortunate to find in Paris last year a letter of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, afterwards Comtesse de Villelume. Attempts have been made, chiefly by writers with Bolshevik tendencies, to cast doubts on her famous act of filial devotion during the September massacres. But the story is no lie and was vouched for by her son, who testified to the fact that his mother would never drink red wine. So accurate an historian as Lord Acton accepts the tale as true. Madame de Villelume survived the Revolution many years and my letter is dated 1822. It is sad to think that her devotion only temporarily saved her father, who perished on the scaffold not long before the fall of Robespierre. Her heart is very fittingly buried at the Invalides, where once her father was governor.
Lying near her letter I find one in the handwriting of the famous Lamoignon de Malesherbes, " ce grand magistrat et citoyen, as Sainte Beuve justly calls him. His writing is strangely illegible, one of those hands which seem clear enough until one tries to read them. He was in Switzerland in June, 1792, when affairs in Paris took a decided turn for the worse. When asked why he was going home he replied : " Les chores deviennent plus graves ; je vais a mon poste ; le roi pourrait avoir besoin de moi." If all the French noblesse had shown that spirit perhaps the Revolution might not have forsaken the path of wise reform. He was with the King to the last and one of his ablest defenders. He survived till April, 1794, when he was butchered with literally the whole of his family. It is strange that in nearly the last letter he ever wrote—one to Fouquier Tinville—he apologized, as well he might, for the badness of his handwriting. Malesherbes was one of the finest characters the ancien regime produced. Great as a magistrate he failed as a politician, although he formed part of the Ministries of Turgot and Brienne. Lord Shelburne says of him (I quote Sainte Beuve), " Si je fais quelque chose de bien dans tout le temps qui. me reste a vivre je suis stir que le souvenir de M. de Malesherbes animera mon &me."
Such was the defender of Louis XVI. " II await, en un mot, cru a la Terre Promise avant le passage de la Mer Rouge." He believed in sane reform and could not realize the Marats, Robespierres and Carriers of this world.- - A great contrast to Malesherbes was his contemporary, the Marechal Due de Richelieu, the Lovelace par excellence of the eighteenth century. As MaIesherbes represented all that was noblest in France, so Richelieu's long career was one continuous scandal. It was, indeed, long, as he was born in 1696 and died in 1788. What a strange existence ! He had been imprisoned by Louis XIV. for making love to the heir-apparent's wife, the charming Duchess° de Bourgogne; he saw Louis XV. ascend the throne and "die nearly sixty years later; he had been Ambassador at Vienna and Governor of Bordeaux. He had helped to defeat the British at Fontenoy and had expelled us from Minorca. Almost incredibly depraved as he was he had a fine' taste in pictures and objets d'art. His collections were " com- mandeered " for the nation under the Convention, and I think that Freron superintended the robbing of his palaces. It is not without humour that such ideal gibier de la guillotine " should have missed the Revolution by one year. His third wife lived till 1815 and I believe occasionally astonished people by beginning a sentence, " Comme le Roi Louis XIV. disait a mon marl ! "
Spelling was not Richelieu's strong point. My letter, written from La Rochelle in 1764 does not, however, give the impression that the writer was an uneducated
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