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Updated: June 23, 2025
Here the former Lord of Carlaverock and of Nithisdale met his wife. Lady Nithisdale hurries over the meeting, but her simple account has its own powers of description. The good woman of the house had, it seems, but one small room up a pair of stairs, and a very small bed in it. "We threw ourselves on the bed that we might not be heard walking up and down.
Having formed her resolution, Lady Nithisdale decided to communicate it to no one, except to her "dear Evans," a maid, or companion, who was of paramount assistance to her in the whole affair. Meantime, public indications of compassion for the condemned lords, seemed to offer better hopes than the dangerous enterprise of effecting an escape.
During the previous year the Jacobite gentry had met at Lochmaben, under pretence of a horse-racing; and, although it does not appear that the Earl of Nithisdale was among those who assembled on that occasion, yet several of his kinsmen attended.
Lord Nithisdale went to Rome, and never revisited his native country; indeed, the project of the Rebellion of 1745, and the unceasing efforts and hopes by which it was preceded on the part of the Jacobites, must have rendered such a step impracticable to one who seems to have been especially obnoxious to the house of Hanover.
On being further asked by the Lord High Steward whether he had anything to say "why judgment should not pass upon him according to law," Lord Nithisdale recapitulated the points in his answer in so weak a voice, that the Lord Steward reiterated the former question: "Have you pleaded anything in arrest of judgment?" "No, my Lord, I have not," was the reply.
After a brief interview, Lady Nithisdale, sending for a fresh chair, hurried away to a house which her faithful attendant Evans had found for her, and where she was to learn tidings of Lord Nithisdale. Here she learned that Lord Nithisdale had been removed from the lodging to which he had at first been conducted, to the mean abode of a poor woman just opposite the guard-house.
Lady Nithisdale then made a request calculated to alarm a woman of an ordinary character; but she seems to have understood the disposition of the person whom she thus addressed. "I told her that I had every thing in readiness, and that I trusted she would not refuse to accompany me, that my lord might pass for her. I pressed her to come immediately, as we had no time to lose."
It is not improbable, however, that, before his marriage, Lord Nithisdale visited Paris and Rome, since the practice of making what was called "the grand tour" not only prevailed among the higher classes, but especially among the Jacobite nobility, many of whom, as in the case of Lord Derwentwater, were educated abroad; and this is more especially likely to have been the case in the instance of Lord Nithisdale, since, as Lady Nithisdale remarks in her narrative, her husband was a Roman Catholic in a part of Scotland peculiarly adverse to that faith, "the only support," as she calls him, "of the Catholics against the inveteracy of the Whigs, who were very numerous in that part of Scotland."
It is evident that she joined Lord Nithisdale at Rome, whither he had retired; for the statement which she has left concludes in a manner which shows that the devoted and heroic wife had been enabled to rejoin the husband for whom she had encountered so much anxiety, contumely, and peril.
She said that she really was old fashioned, and hoped God would preserve her always sense and duty enough to continue so; on which she took a glass and said "God preserve our King, and grant him long life, and a happy reign over us!" Lady Kenmure died on the 16th of August, 1776, at Terregles, in Dumfriesshire, the seat of the Nithisdale family. Patten. Reay.
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