OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [High Street 5748
an interesting page in popular literature, and been
the theme of more than one work of fiction.
She was Rachel Chiesley, the daughter of that
Chiesley of Dally who, in a gust of passionate resentment,
shot down the Lord President Lockhart,
and she inherited from him a temper prompt to ire.
She and her husband had been married upwards of
dislike, and would live with her no longer ; while
he, on the other hand, asserted that he had long
been tortured by her ? unsubduable rage and madness,?
and had failed in every effort to soothe or
bring her to reason. She was a woman of more
than common beauty, Another account has it
1 that in her girlhood Grange had seduced her, and
GEORGE BUCHANAN.
(From a Print that brfoqed to tke fate David Lainf.)
twenty years, and had several children, when a
separation was determined upon between them.
?Some portion of her father?s violent temper
appears to have descended to the daughter,? says
the editor of Lord Grange?s Letters, ?and aggravated
by drunkenness, rendered her marriage for
many years miserable, and led at last, in the
year 1730, to her formal separation from her
husband.??
According to Lady Grange?s account there had
been love and peace for twenty years between her
and Lord Grange, when he conceived a sudden
she compelled him to marry her by threatening
to pistol him, and reminding him that she was
Chiesley?s daughter. .
In effecting the separation, he allowed her
EIOO a year so long as she lived peacefully
apart from him; but his frequent journeys to
London, and rumours of certain amours there,
inflamed her jealousy, and after being for some
time in the country, she returned and took a
lodging near her husbands house in Niddry?s
Wynd, as she herself touchingly relates, ?that I
might have the pleasure to see the house, he was
High Sir=er.] ABUUCTlON OF LADY GRANGE. 2.19
in, and to see him and my children when going
out ; and I made his relations and my own speak
to him, and was always in hopes that God would
show him his sin of putting away his wife contrary
to the laws of God and man; and this was nc
secret, for the President of the Session, and sonit
of the Lords, the Solicitor-General, and some oi
the advocates and ministers of Edinburgh, know
all this to be truth, When I lost all hopes, then I
resolved to go to London.?
Lord Grange?s account is somewhat different.
She tormented him and the children by reproachful
cries from her windows; and he states, that ?in his
house, at the bottom Qf Niddry?s Wynd, where
there 5 a court, through which one enters the
house, one time among others, when it was full of
chairs, chairmen, and footmen, who attended the
company that were with himself, or his sister Lady
Jane Paterson (wife of Sir Hugh Paterson of Bannockburn),
then keeping house together, she came
into this court, and among that mob shamelessly
cried up to the windows injurious reproaches, and
would not go away, though h e a t e d , till hearing
the late Lord Lovat?s voice? she would seem
then to have retired. He also asserts that one
day she assailed him in church ; on another, she
compelled him to take refuge in a tavern, and
threatened even to assault him on the Bench.
Tradition asserts that Lord Grange was dissipated,
restless, intriguing, and was concerned in
some Jacobite plots subsequently to the battle of
Sheriffmuir ; that in revenge his wife threatened to
inform the Government; and there is proof, from
one of his own letters, that she had actually taken
her seat in one of the occasional stages which then
ran between Edinburgh and London, and he bribed
her to give her seat to another traveller, after which
he would seem to have resolved upon ?sequestrating
her,? as he phrased it ; and in a long Ietter written
by herself, and dated January 26th, 1741, she gives
an ample detail of how this was effected.
The plot was concerted between Lord Grange
and some west Highland chiefs, among whom was
the unscrupulous old Lord Lovat. A party of
Highlanders, wearing the livery of the latter, made
their way into her lodgings in Niddry?s Wynd on
the evening of the zznd January, 1730, seized her
with violence, knocking out some of her teeth, and,
tying a cloth over her head, bore her forth, as if she
had been a corpse.
?I heard voices about me,? .she relates ; ? but
being blindfolded I could not discover who they
were. They had a [sedan] chair at the stair-foot,
which they put me in ; and there was a man in the
chair who took me on his knee, and I made all the
32
struggle I could; but he held me fast in his arms,
and hindered me to put my hands to my mouth,
which I attempted to do, being tied down. The
chair carried me off very fast, and took me without
the ports; and when they had opened the chair
and taken the cloth OK my head to let me get air,
I perceived, it being clear moonlight, that I was a
little way from the Multer?s Hill,* and the man on
whose knee I sat was Alexander Foster, of Carsebonny,
who had there six or seven horses and men
with him, who said all these were his servants,
though I knew some of them to be my Lord
Lovat?s servants, who rode along. One of them
was called Alexander Frazer, and the other James
Frazer, and his groom, whose name I know not.?
From that night Niddry?s Wynd knew her no
more. She had two sons grown to manhood at
the time she was so mysteriously spirited away;
her daughter was married to John Earl of Kintore;
yet none of her relations ever made the slightest
stir in the matter, though the Aberdeenshire seat
of the Earl was once suggested as a place of residence
for her.
Leaving the vicinity of Edinburgh by the Lang
Gate, a ride of twenty miles brought her, with her
captors, to Muiravonside, where she was secured,
under guard, in the house of John hfacleod, advocate;
but a man being posted near her bed, she
could neither enter it nor take repose. Next night
she was secured farther 0% in an old solitary tower,
at Wester Polmaise, where for fourteen weeks she
was kept in a room, the windows of which were
boarded over, access to the garden even being
denied her.
On the 12th of August a Highlander named
Alexander Grant suddenly appeared, and announced
that she must prepare for the road again ;
and by her captors, who gave out that she was
insane, she was conveyed by rough and secluded
ways, where she could neither ride nor walk, but
had to be borne in their arms, sleeping at night in
bothy, till she found herself on the shore of Loch
Hourn, an arm of the sea, in the land of Glengarry.
Then ?bitterly did she weep and implore compassion,
but the Highlanders understood not her
language, and though they had done so, a departure
kom the orders which had been given them was
lot to be expected from men of their character,?
tnd she was hurried on board of a ship.
There she learned that she was now in the cus-
:ody of Alexander Macdonald, tacksman of Heiskar,
t small island three leagues westward of North
Uist, belonging to Sir Alexander Macdonald of
__I.-
* Where now the Register House stands,
