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"The place can hardly be taken by a sudden attack, even by all the forces the Bairds could bring against it; and we could get help from Jedburgh, long before they could gain even the outside wall. My father and I are going, in a fortnight, to fetch the girls.
Came over to Jedburgh this morning, to breakfast with my good old friend Mr. Shortreed, and had my usual warm reception. Lord Gillies held the Circuit Court, and there was no criminal trial for any offence whatsoever.
In any event, if one may judge from the evidence given later at an inquiry held in Jedburgh, throughout the affair with Colonel Stewart, Sir Gilbert Eliott was the aggressor. Possibly, after the fashion of the day, both were more or less tipsy; certainly, without any doubt, Sir Gilbert was greatly the worse of liquor, and did not carry that liquor as a gentleman was expected to carry it.
Sir Walter did what he could to soothe her distracted mind, and get her wasted frame recruited. But after some time he deemed it advisable to exercise his judicial power and put her in a place of security, until definite intelligence could be procured of her friends and relations. Jedburgh is the county town of Roxburgh; and thither all wanderers of this and a less gentle race are sent.
I thought of Pringle's beautiful farewell: "Our native land, our native vale, A long, a last adieu, farewell to bonny Teviot-dale, And Cheviot's mountains blue!" The poet was born in the valley below, and one that looks upon its beauty cannot wonder how his heart clung to the scenes he was leaving. We saw Jedburgh and its majestic old Abbey, and ascended the valley of the Jed towards the Cheviots.
Before the wars between England and Scotland had become so common and of such long duration, that the buildings along both sides of the Border were chiefly dedicated to warlike purposes, there had been a small settlement of monks at Ellieslaw, a dependency, it is believed by antiquaries, on the rich Abbey of Jedburgh.
He returned instead to his hawking and his hunting, and was seldom seen at Court thereafter. Even when in the following October, Mary lay at the point of death at Jedburgh, Darnley came but to stay a day, and left her again without any assurance that she would recover.
It was, even putting failing health and obscured mental powers aside, not free from 'browner shades'; for the Reform agitation naturally grieved Sir Walter deeply, while on two occasions he was the object of popular insult and on one of popular violence. Both were at Jedburgh; but the blame is put upon intrusive weavers from Hawick.
This was touching a theme which found a responsive chord in the bosom of every man present. "Our commerce is destroyed," hollowed old John Rewcastle, a Jedburgh smuggler, from the lower end of the table. "Our agriculture is ruined," said the Laird of Broken-girth-flow, a territory which, since the days of Adam, had borne nothing but ling and whortle-berries.
As my mother knew that my father would be absent for some years, she accompanied him to London, though so near her confinement that in returning home she had just time to arrive at the manse of Jedburgh, her sister Martha Somerville's house, when I was born, on the 26th December, 1780.
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