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It
is not often that a coronet passes over sixteen or seventeen intervening
heads to light upon that of a person eighteenth in remainder. Yet such an
event happened in the middle of last century in the noble Scottish house
of Erskine, which enjoys, among other honors, the earldom of Kellie. If
anybody will be at the pains of turning to the pages of Sharpe's Peerage,
he will see that, while Mr. Methven Erskine was married to Joanna,
daughter of Gordon of Ardoch, in Rosshire, his brother Thomas was also
married to that lady's sister Anne. He will also see that both of these
gentlemen outlived their seniors, and became Earls of Kellie, and that
their respective ladies also lived to become countesses. ‘Marriages,' they
say, ‘are made in heaven,' but, as these two unions came about through a
shipwreck, the truth of the statement may be doubted.
The Castle of Ardoch stands perched on a rock high above the waves of
the German Ocean, on a headland somewhere between Turbat and Fortrose. The
owner of this domain (Mr. Adam Gordon) in one of the last years of the
reign of George II, or soon after the accession of George III., was
walking late one evening in his grounds, when he heard a gun fired as a
signal of distress by a vessel in the offing. It was a very stormy night,
and he knew that there was little chance for a good ship which got near
the rocks of that headland when a strong east wind was blowing. He called
his servants and tenants, however, and hastened down a cleft in the rocks
to the beach; but no traces of the ill-fated vessel were to be found,
except a few broken spars and some small fragments of timber floating
hither and thither upon the waves. These they tried to collect as they
came to the shore, and among other wreckage was a sort of tiny crib of
wicker-work, inside of which was a female infant, alive, in spite of the
cold and wet to which she had been exposed. It was the work of a few
moments to rescue the little stranger, thrown, like a second Undine, upon
a strange shore.
‘--The waves have hither brought
The helpless little one.'
From the clothes wrapped round its tiny body it was clear to Mr.
Gordon that she was a child of parents of no low condition; but there was
in her clothing no clue as to who or what her parents might be, nor was
there anything to show the name of vessel thus lost and swallowed up by
the waves.
It was a matter of course to a hospitable .Scottish heart
like that of Mr. Gordon to take the little foundling home and have her
wants attended to by his wife and daughters. He doubtless supposed, and at
first probably hoped, that ere long the little waif of the sea foam would
be claimed; and in the meantime the latter was reared with his own
children, who were young and who came soon to regard her as a sister.
Years passed by, and the little foundling was growing up to
womanhood, and was endearing herself more and more to all the members of
the Ardoch family, when one wintry and stormy evening another alarm gun
was fired by a vessel in distress off the same cliffs. ' History,' they
say, ‘repeats itself,' and it would seem occasionally in trifling as well
as in important matters. Mr. Gordon hastened down to the beach, as he had
done some sixteen years before, just in time to witness another shipwreck.
The vessel went to pieces on the rocks, but some, at all events, of the
crew and a single passenger were saved. These were invited to rest and dry
themselves at the ‘great house,' where every hospitality and refreshment
was offered them. The passenger was evidently a gentleman, and the next
morning at breakfast he took particular notice of the daughters of his
host, and of the other young lady whom I have already introduced to my
readers. The stranger was evidently much struck with her appearance, and,
finding that she was not like the other girls, he made some inquiries
about her, when he heard the story of her having come to Ardoch as a
‘foundling,' and having been saved from the jaws of the ocean as by a
miracle. The stranger listened with great interest and emotion and said
that at the date corresponding with her infancy his own sister, with a
little infant, was lost in a vessel off the eastern coast of Scotland,
which foundered in a storm.
As is often the case, the unexpected not only is probable, but often
does happen in reality. And so it was here. The cot or cradle in which the
foundling came ashore, on being shown to the new-comer, was pronounced to
be singularly like that which his sister had made for her before she left
India. The features of the young lady, too, corresponded with those of his
own relatives. Further inquiries brought out other points of similarity,
and a mark on the little lady's coverlet bore the initial letter of her
father's and mother's name. The foundling orphan, there could be little
doubt, was his own sister's child.
The gentleman was a merchant, and the shipwreck which he had suffered
had not ruined him. He bad a home at Gottenberg, in Sweden. It was open
for the reception of his niece, and there was a little fortune ready for
the young lady there in case she should ever be found. Twenty years,
however, had endeared her to her sisters, as she called the Misses Gordon,
and she was unwilling to go to Sweden with her newly-discovered uncle,
unless one of the Misses Gordon would accompany her, and the other
promised to come and stay with her upon her sister's return to Scotland.
Accordingly, Miss Anne Gordon sailed with her adopted sister from the
port of Leith for Sweden, where, in 1771, only a few weeks after landing
at Gotenberg, she became the wife of Mr. Thomas Erskine, a younger
brother of Sir William Erskine, of Cambo, in In Fifeshire, who had long
been settled there as a merchant, and was a man of wealth. Not long
afterwards the young lady, whom I can only describe as the
foundling of Ardoch, followed her example; but I do not know the
name of the man who offered her his hand and his heart, so I can only hope
that , she lived happy ever afterwards.'
But, whether this was the case or not, at all events the sea offered
no obstacle to the intimacy which existed between the good people of
Ardoch and those in Gottenberg. And so it came to pass that, some nine or
ten years later, Miss Joanna Gordon was married to Mr. Methven Erskine,
the younger brother of her sister's husband. Deaths followed in rapid
succession in the family of Lord Kellie, and in 1797 the earldom devolved
on Charles Erskine. He lived, however, to enjoy the title little more than
two years, for in 1799 he followed his ancestors to the grave, and the
earldom of Kellie passed to his uncle and heir, Thomas Erskine, who had
been for some time a consul in Sweden. And so it came to pass that the
incident of a shipwreck twenty or thirty years before resulted in
bestowing the coronet of a countess first on one and then on the other of
the two Misses Gordon of Ardoch.
One kinsman of the last of
these two noblemen is the present Earl of Kellie, the same to whom the
House of Lords in 1875 adjudged an earldom of Mar, created, or supposed to
have been created, in 1565, whilst the old historic earldom of Mar, whose
origin, according to Lord Hailes, is ‘lost in the mists of antiquity,' is
still borne by the heir of line of the house of Erskine, John Francis
Erskine Goodeve-Erskine, as son of Lady Frances Jemima, sister of the last
earl, and grandson of John Thomas, thirty-second holder of the ancient
earldom of Mar, and also tenth Earl of Kellie.
Chapters From the Family Chests, 1887
Chapters From the Family Chest |
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