First printed by the Foulises, Glasgow, 1755, after a copy furnished by Sir David Dalrymple, "who gave it as it was preserved in the memory of a lady." This information we derive from Percy, who inserted the Dalrymple ballad in his Reliques, 1765, I, 99, "improved, and enlarged with several fine stanzas recovered from a fragment ... in the Editor's folio Manuscript" Seven stanzas of the enlarged copy were adopted from this Manuscript, with changes; 162,4, 30, 35, 36, are Percy's own; the last three of the Glasgow edition are dropped. Herd's copy, The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1769, p. 234, is from Percy's Reliques; so is Pinkerton's, Scottish Tragic Ballads, 1781, p. 43, with the omission of the seventh stanza and many alterations. Ritson, Scotish Songs, 1794, II, 17, repeats the Glasgow copy; so the Campbell Manuscripts, I, 155, and Finlay, I, 85. The copy in Buchan's Gleanings, p. 180, is Percy's, with one stanza from Ritson. Of twelve stanzas given in Burton's History of Scotland, V, 70 f., 3-6 are from Percy's Reliques (modified by E, a fragment obtained by Burton), the rest from D.
During the three wretched and bloody years which followed the assassination of the regent Murray, the Catholic Earl of Huntly, George Gordon, was one of the most eminent and active of the partisans of the queen. Mary created him her lieutenant-governor, and his brother, Adam Gordon, a remarkably gallant and able soldier, whether so created or not, is sometimes called the queen's deputy-lieutenant in the north. Our ballad is concerned with a minor incident of the hostilities in Aberdeenshire between the Gordons and the Forbeses, a rival but much less powerful clan, who supported the Reformed faith and the regency or king's party.[foot-note]
"The queen's lieutenant-deputy in the north, called Sir Adam Gordon of Auchindown, knight, was very vigilant in his function; for suppressing of whom the Master of Forbes was directed, with the regent's commission. But the first encounter, which was upon the ninth day of October [1571], Auchindown obtained such victory that he slew of the Forbeses a hundred and twenty persons, and lost very few of his own." This was the battle of Tulliangus, on the northern slope of the hills of Coreen, some thirty miles northwest of Aberdeen. Both parties having been reinforced, an issue was tried again on the twentieth of November at Crabstane, in the vicinity of Aberdeen, where Adam Gordon inflicted a severe defeat on the Forbeses.[foot-note]
"But what glory and renown," says the contemporary History of King James the Sixth, "he [Gordon] obtained of these two victories was all cast down by the infamy of his next attempt; for immediately after this last conflict he directed his soldiers to the castle of Towie, desiring the house to be rendered to him in the queen's name; which was obstinately refused by the lady, and she burst forth with certain injurious words. And the soldiers being impatient, by command of their leader, Captain Ker, fire was put to the house, wherein she and the number of twenty-seven persons were cruelly burnt to the death."
Another account, reported by a contemporary who lived in Edinburgh, is that "Adam Gordon sent Captain Ker to the place of Toway, requiring the lady thereof to render the place of Carrigill to him in the queen's name, which she would noways do; whereof the said Adam having knowledge, moved in ire towards her, caused raise fire thereintill, wherein she, her daughters, and other persons were destroyed, to the number of twenty-seven or thereby."[foot-note] This was in November, 1571.
We have a third report of this outrage from Richard Bannatyne, also a contemporary, a man, it may be observed, bitterly hostile to the queen's party. "Adam of Gordon ... went to the house of Towie, which he burnt and twenty four persons in the same, never one escaping but one woman that came through the corns and hather which was cast to the house-sides, whereby they were smothered. This was done under assurance; for the laird of Towie's wife, being sister to the lady Crawfurd (and also died within the house), sent a boy to the laird in time of the truce (which was for the space of twelve hours) to see on what conditions they should render the house. In the mean time, Adam Gordon's men laid the corns and timbers and bather about the house, and set all on fire."[foot-note]
Buchanan puts the incident which mainly concerns us between the fights of Tulliangus and Crabstone; so does Archbishop Spottiswood. "Not long after" the former, says the archbishop, who was a child of six when the affair occurred, Adam Gordon "sent to summon the house of Tavoy, pertaining to Alexander Forbes. The lady refusing to yield without direction from her husband, he put fire unto it and burnt her therein with children and servants, being twenty-seven persons in all. This inhuman and barbarous cruelty made his name odious, and stained all his former doings; otherwise he was held both active and fortunate in his enterprises."[foot-note]
Buchanan dispatches the burning of the house in a line: Domus Alexandri Forbosii, cum uxore pregnante, liberis et ministris, cremata. Ed. 1582, fol. 248 b.
Towie was a place of no particular importance; judging both by the square keep that remains, which is described as insignificant, and by the number of people that the house contained, it must have been a small place. It is therefore more probable that Captain Ker burnt Towie while executing a general commission to harry the Forbeses than that this house should have been made a special object. But whether this were so or not, it is evident from the terms in which the transaction is spoken of by contemporaries, who were familiarized to a ferocious kind of warfare,[foot-note] that there must have been something quite beyond the common in Captain Ker's proceedings on this occasion, for they are denounced even in those days as infamous, inhuman, and barbarously cruel, and the name of Adam Gordon is said to have been made odious by them.
It is not to be disguised that the language employed by Spottiswood might be so interpreted as to signify that Ker did not act in this dreadful business entirely upon his own responsibility; and the second of the four writers who speak circumstantially of the affair even intimates that Ker applied to his superior for instructions. On the other hand, the author of the History of James the Sixth says distinctly that the house was fired by the command of Ker, whose soldiers were rendered impatient by an obstinate refusal to surrender, accompanied with opprobrious words. The oldest of the ballads, also, which is nearly coeval with the occurrence, speaks only of Captain Car, knows nothing of Adam Gordon. On the other hand, Bannatyne knows nothing, or chooses to say nothing, of Captain Car: Adam Gordon burns the house, and even does this during a truce. It may be said that, even if the act were done without the orders or knowledge of Adam Gordon, he deserves all the ill fame which has fallen to him, for not punishing, or at least discharging, the perpetrator of such an outrage. But this would J^e applying the standards of the nineteenth century (and its very best standards) to the conduct of the sixteenth. It may be doubted whether there was at that time a man in Scotland, nay, even a man in Europe, who would have turned away a valuable servant because he had cruelly exceeded his instructions.[foot-note]
A favorable construction, where the direct evidence is conflicting, is due to Adam Gordon because of his behavior on two other occasions, one immediately preceding, and the other soon following, the burning of the house of Towie. We are told that he used his victory at Crabstone "very moderately, and suffered no man to be killed after the fury of the fight was past. Alexander Forbes of Strath-gar-neck, author of all these troubles betwixt these two families, was taken at this battle, and as they were going to behead him Auchindown caused stay his execution. He entertained the Master of Forbes and the rest of the prisoners with great kindness and courtesy, he carried the Master of Forbes along with him to Strathbogie, and in end gave him and all the rest leave to depart."[foot-note] And again, after another success in a fight called The Bourd of Brechin, in the ensuing July, he caused all the prisoners to be brought before him, they expecting nothing but death, and said to them: "My friends and brethren, have in remembrance how God has granted to me victory and the upper hand of you, granting me the same vantage ['vand and sching'] to punish you wherewith my late father and brother were punished at the Bank of Fair; and since, of the great slaughter made on the Queen's Grace's true subjects, and most filthily of the hanging of my soldiers here by the Earl of Lennox; and since, by the hanging of ten men in Leith, with other unlawful acts done contrary to the laws of arms; and I doubt not, if I were under their dominion, as you are under mine, that I should die the death most cruelly. Yet notwithstanding, my good brethren and countrymen, be not afraid nor fear not, for at this present ye shall incur no danger of your bodies, but shall be treated as brethren, and I shall do to you after the commandment of God, in doing good for evil, forgetting the cruelty done to the queen and her faithful subjects, and receiving you as her faithful subjects in time coming. Who promised to do the same, and for assurance hereof each found surety. After which the Regent past hastily out of Sterling to Dundee, charging all manner of man to follow him, with twenty days victuals, against the said Adam Gordon. But there would never a man in those parts obey the charge, by reason of the bond made before and of the great gentleness of the said Adam."[foot-note]
After the Pacification of February, 1573, Adam Gordon obtained license to go to France and other parts beyond sea, for certain years, on condition of doing or procuring nothing to the hurt of the realm of Scotland; but for private practices of his, contrary to his promise, in conjunction with Captain Ker and others, he was ordered to return home, 12th May, 1574. His brother, the Earl of Huntly, upon information of these unlawful practices in France, was committed to ward, and when released from ward had to give security to the amount of 20,000. Adam Gordon returned in July, 1575, "at the command of the regent," with twenty gentlemen who had gone to France with him, and was in ward in 1576. He died at St. Johnston in October, 1580, "of a bleeding." As he was of tender age in 1562, he must still have been a young man.[foot-note]
Thomas Ker was a captain "of men of war"; that is, a professional soldier. As such he is mentioned in one of the articles of the Pacification, where it is declared that Captain Thomas Ker, Captain James Bruce, and Captain Gilbert Wauchop, with their respective lieutenants and ensigns, and two other persons, "shall be comprehended in this present pacification, as also all the soldiers who served under their charges, for deeds of hostility and crimes committed dm'ing the present troubles." He was accused of being engaged in practices against the regency, as we have already seen, in 1574. He was released from ward upon caution in February, 1575. 1578, 26th July, he was summoned to appear before the king and council to answer to such things as should be inquired of him. He is mentioned as a burgher of Aberdeen 1588, 1591. 1593, 3d March, he is required to give caution to the amount of 1000 merks that he will not assist the earls of Huntly and Errol. His "counsail and convoy was chiefly usit" in an important matter at Balrinnes in 1594, at which battle he "behavit himself so valiantly" that he was knighted on the field. November 4, 1594, Captain Thomas Ker and James Ker, his brother, are ordered to be denounced as rebels, having failed to appear to answer touching their treasonable assistance to George, sometime Earl of Huntly; and this seems to be the latest notice of him that has been recovered.[foot-note]
In the Genealogy of the family of Forbes drawn up by Matthew Lumsden in 1580, and continued to 1667 by William Forbes, p. 43 f., ed. 1819, we read: "John Forbes of Towie married — Grant, daughter to John Grant of Bandallach, who did bear to him a son who was unmercifullie murdered in the castle of Corgaffe; and after the decease of Bandallach's daughter, the said John Forbes married Margaret Campbell, daughter to Sir John Campbell of Calder, knight, who did bear him three sons, Alex. Forbes of Towie, John Forbes, thereafter of Towie, and William Forbes... The said John Forbes of Towie, after the murder of Margaret Campbell, married Forbes, a daughter to the Reires,"by whom he had a son, who, as also a son of his own, died in Germany. Alexander and William, sons of Margaret Campbell, died without succession, and by the death of an only son of John, junior, the house of Towie became extinct." The rest of the said Margaret Campbell's bairns, with herself, were unmercifullie murdered in the castle of Corgaffe."[foot-note]
According to the Lumsden genealogy, then, Margaret Campbell, with her younger children, and also a son of her husband, John Forbes of Towie, by a former marriage, were murdered at the castle of Corgaffe. Corgarf is a place "exigui nominis," some fifteen miles west of Towie, and, so far as is known, there is nothing to connect this place with the Forbes family.[foot-note] Three sixteenth-century accounts, and a fourth by an historian who was born before the event, make Towie to be the scene of the "murder," and Towie we know to have been in the possession of a member of the house of Forbes for several generations. Since Lumsden wrote only nine years after the event, and was more particularly concerned with the Forbes family than any of the other writers referred to, his statement cannot be peremptorily set aside. But we may owe Corgarf to the reviser of 1667, although he professes not to have altered the substance of his predecessor's work.
Reverting now to the ballad, we observe that none of the seven versions, of which one is put towards the end of the sixteenth century, one is of the seventeenth century, two are of the eighteenth, and the remainder from tradition of the present century, lay the scene at Towie. B, which is of this century, has Cargarf. A, B, the oldest copies (both English), give no name to the castle. Crecrynbroghe in A, Bittonsborrow in B, are not the name of the castle that is burned, but of a castle suggested for a winter retirement by one of Car's men, and rejected by the captain. The fragment C (English again) also names no place. D transfers the scene from the north to the house of Rodes, near Dunse, in Berwickshire, and F, G to Loudoun castle in Ayrshire; the name of Gordon probably helping to the localizing of the ballad in the former case, and that of Campbell, possibly, in the other.
Captain Car is the leader of the bloody band in A, B; he is lord of Eastertown A 6, 13, of Westertown B 5, 9; but 'Adam' is said to fire the house in B 14. Adam Gordon is the captain in C-G. The sufferers are in A Hamiltons,[foot-note] in F, G, Campbells. The name Forbes is not preserved in any version.
A, B. Martinmas weather forces Captain Car to look for a hold. Crecrynbroghe, A, Bittonsborrow, B, is proposed, but he knows of a castle where there is a fair lady whose lord is away, and makes for that. The lady sees from the wall a host of men riding towards the castle, and thinks her lord is coming home, but it was the traitor Captain Car. By supper-time he and his men have lighted about the place. Car calls to the lady to give up the house; she shall lie in his arms that night, and the morrow heir his land. She will not give up the house, but fires on Car and his men. [Orders are given to burn the house.] The lady entreats Car to save her eldest son. Lap him in a sheet and let him down, says Car; and when this is done, cuts out tongue and heart, ties them in a handkerchief, and throws them over the wall. The youngest son begs his mother to surrender, for the smoke is smothering him. She would give all her gold and fee for a wind to blow the smoke away; but the fire falls about her head, and she and her children are burned to death. Captain Car rides away, A. The lord of the castle dreams, learns by a letter, at London, that his house has been fired, and hurries home. He finds the hall still burning, and breaks out into expressions of grief, A. In B, half of which has been torn from the manuscript, after reading the letter he says he will find Car wherever Car may be, and, long ere day, comes to Dractonsborrow, where the miscreant is. If nine or ten stanzas were not lost at this point, we should no doubt learn of the revenge that was taken.
In the short fragment C, upon surrender being demanded, reply is made by a shot which kills seven of the beleaguerers. An only daughter, smothered by the reek, asks her mother to give up the house. Rather would I see you burnt to ashes, says the mother. The boy on the nurse's knee makes the same appeal; her mother would sooner see him burnt than give up her house to be Adam of Gordon's whore.
D makes the lady try fair speeches with Gordon, and the lady does not reply with firearms to the proposal that she shall lie by his side. Nevertheless she has spirit enough to say, when her youngest son beseeches her to give up the house, Come weal, come woe, you must take share with me. The daughter, and not the eldest son, is wrapped in sheets and let down the wall; she gets a fall on the point of Gordon's spear. Then follow deplorable interpolations, beginning with st. 19. Edom o Gordon, having turned the girl over with his spear, and wished her alive, turns her owr and owr again! He orders his men to busk and away, for he cannot look on the bonnie face. One of his men hopes he will not be daunted with a dame, and certainly three successive utterances in the way of sentiment show that the captain needs a little toning up. At this point the lord of the castle is coming over the lea, and sees that his castle is in flames. He and his men put on at their best rate; lady and babes are dead ere the foremost arrives; they go at the Gordons, and but five of fifty of these get away.
This is superior to turning her owr and owr again, and indeed, in its way, not to be improved.
Nothing need be said of the fragment B further than that the last stanza is modern.
F is purely traditional, and has one fine stanza not found in any of the foregoing:
There is no firing at the assailants (though the lady wishes that her only son could charge a gun). Lady Margaret, with the flame in her hair, would give the black and the brown for a drink of the stream that she sees below. Anne asks to be rowed in a pair of sheets and let down the wall; her mother says that she must stay and die with her. Lord Thomas, on the nurse's knee, says, Give up, or the reek will choke me. The mother would rather be burned to small ashes than give up the castle, her lord away. And burnt she is with her children nine.
G has the eighteen stanzas of F,[foot-note] neglecting slight variations, and twenty more (among them the bad D 21), nearly all superfluous, and one very disagreeable. Lady Campbell, having refused to "come down" and be "kept" (caught) on a feather-bed, 5, 6, is ironically asked by Gordon to come down and be kept on the point of his sword, 7. Since you will not come down, says Gordon, fire your death shall be. The lady had liefer be burnt to small ashes than give up the castle while her lord is from home, 10. Fire is set. The oldest daughter asks to be rolled in a pair of sheets and flung over the wall. She gets a deadly fall on the point of Gordon's sword, and is turned over and over again, 18, over and over again, 19. Lady Margaret cries that the fire is at her garters and the flame in her hair. Lady Ann, from childbed where she lies, asks her mother to give up the castle, and is told that she must stay and dree her death with the rest. The youngest son asks his mother to go down, and has the answer that was given Gordon in 10. The waiting-maid begs to have a baby of hers saved; her lady's long hair is burnt to her brow, and how can she take it? So the babe is rolled in a feather-bed and flung over the wall, and gets a deadly fall on the point of Gordon's ever-ready sword. Several ill-connected stanzas succeed, three of which are clearly recent, and then pity for Lady Ann Campbell, who was burnt with her nine bairns. Lord London comes home a "sorry" man, but comforts himself with tearing Gordon with wild horses.
A slight episode has been passed over. It is a former servant of the family that breaks through the house-wall and kindles the fire, A 21, D 12-14, F 5, 6, G 13, 14. In all but A he makes the excuse that he is now Gordon's man, and must do or die.
There is a Danish ballad of about 1600 (communicated to me by Svend Grundtvig, and, I think, not yet printed) in which Karl grevens søn, an unsuccessful suitor of Lady Linild, burns Lady Linild in her bower, and taking refuge in Maribo church, is there burned himself by Karl kejserens søn, Lady Linild's preferred lover. See also 'Liden Engel,' under 'Fause Foodrage,' No 89, II, 298. The copy in Percy's Reliques is translated by Bodmer, I, 126, and by Doenninges, p. 69; Pinkerton's copy by Grundtvig, No 9, and by Loève-Veimars, p. 307; Knortz, Schottische Balladen, No 13, apparently translates Ailingham's.
This page most recently updated on 26-May-2011, 19:13:59. Return to main index
