Memoirs of the lives of Robert Haldane of Airthrey, and of his brother, James Alexander Haldane

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Preface

On the death of Mr. Kobert Haldane in December, 1842, a very strong desire was in many quarters expressed for a memoir of his remarkable career. There were, however, several objections to an immediate publication. It appeared that if a record of his life were calculated to be generally useful, and not merely designed to attract an ephemeral interest, it would be better, in regard to some of the scenes in which he had been engaged, to await, at least for a few years, the mellowing influence of time. Besides, it would have been impossible to record his life without blending with it that of his then surviving brother, as they had been uniformly associated together in nearly all of their plans and operations for the diffusion of the Gospel. The death of Mr. J. A. Haldane, in February, 1851, and the lapse of more than nine years, have removed the chief of these objections. The desire for a Memoir has been renewed, and it is now committed to the Christian public.

The compiler is not insensible to the delicacy of his position, as the biographer of relatives so greatly beloved and revered. But if his position has its disadvantages, these are not without compensation. No stranger could so well delineate their character, or, at all events, detail the facts of their lives, as one who from childhood enjoyed their intimacy and confidence ; whilst a close and continuous correspondence for nearly thirty years, in connection with all their plans, works, and writings, together witli the possession of numerous other letters and documents, extending over a period embracing the whole of their career, must afford

IV PREFACE.

more than ordinary means for illustrating their motives, their opinions, and their acts.

It will require no recondite skill in criticism to detect in these Memoirs many imperfections, some of which will be attributed by the candid reader to the circumstances under which they have been written, at intervals snatched from the continuous engagements of professional pursuits. Amongst these imperfections will be found two or three unimportant repetitions in the use of documents available for different parts of the narrative.

If, however, the work shall in any measure present the two brothers such as they were in faith and love and zeal, it will have answered its design, and may, it is hoped, tend to promote the glory of God by stimulating others to follow their example in so far as they followed Christ.

Contents

CHAPTEE I.

Page

Their Biri>— Gleneagles — Anecdotes and Early Characteristics . .13

Chapter I

Robert Haldane was born on the 28th of February, 1764, in his father's house, on the north side of Queen Ann-street, Cavendish-square, London. His younger brother, James Alexander Haldane, was born at Dundee, on the 14th of July, 1768, within a fortnight after his father's death.

Both on their father's and their mother's side, they were descended from an ancient Perthshire family, for many centuries possessors of the free barony of Gleneagles, a valley in the Ochill hills, opening upon the moor of Tullibardine, and the fertile plains of Strathearn, towards the distant Grampians, whose towering summits bound the prospect. In old charters, in the rolls of Parliament, and in other public documents, by the caprice of orthography, the family name is variously written Halden, Haldane, Hadden, or Hauden. There is no doubt that it is of Norse origin. It is still common in Denmark, and from Haldan Hill, near Exeter, to Halden Rig, near Kelso, the Danish chiefs, who were driven beyond the Humber by King Alfred, have indented many local and unmistakable traces of their leader's name, as recorded by the Saxon chroniclers. There is no doubt that the lands of Halden Rig were called after the Northern warrior. But, passing by the mist-enveloped traditionary legends of a barbarous age, and approaching the light of modern records, when surnames became hereditary, it is on record that, three

14 SIR JOHN HALDANE.

centuries later, a younger son of the border family of Halden, near Kelso, migrated into Perthshire, and married the heiress of Gleneagles, adopting the armorial bearings of that family, instead of his own, but retaining his surname, as derived from his paternal lands. In Scotland, oral tradition runs into the deep and far recesses of legendary antiquity. Its written documents are of comparatively modern date. "Nowhere," says a great Scotch legal antiquarian, Mr. Biddell, — "nowhere is ancestry more prized or paraded than with us, and yet in no country are the means of elucidating it so scanty." In proof of this, a charter of the lands of Frandie, forming part of the Gleneagles estate, granted in the twelfth century to Koger de Halden, by King William the Lyon, and still in possession of the family, is noticed by Sir James Dairy mple, in his Collections (page 392), as amongst the earliest extant.

Kather more than a hundred years later, Aylmer de Haldane, of Gleneagles, in Strathearn, is found amongst the barons, who, in 1296, swore fealty to Edward I. of England ; and Nisbet, in his " Critical and Historical Kemarks" upon the Kagman Koll, observes that the Haldanes were " even then barons of considerable consequence," adding, "the house of Gleneagles have vouchers for instructing their antiquity beyond most families in Perthshire." It would be alike tedious and unprofitable to trace their descent, from that period to the beginning of the last century, through seventeen successive marriages, with the noble or baronial families of Graham, Arnott, Mar, Seton, Menteith, Montrose, Lawson, Mar (2), Perth, Glencairn, Hume, Marchmont, Tullibardine, "Wemyss, Grant, Strathallan, and Erskine of Alva. In fact, there would be nothing very remarkable to arrest attention, for they have left behind them little more than the record of their names, their knighthood, or their offices ; and in this, as in most other genealogies, we are reminded of what the celebrated Sir Thomas Brown quaintly observes : " There is no antidote against the oblivion of time, * * generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. * * * The greater part of men must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of men."

It will be sufficient to state, that the most eminent of the mediaeval Barons of Gleneagles was Sir John Haldane, who held, in very troublous times, several of the highest offices in the kingdom,

SIR JOHN HALDANE. 15

and became successively Ambassador of James the Third to the Court of Denmark, Master of the King's Household, Sheriff Principal of Edinburgh, until, finally, as "Lord Justice-General of Scotland beyond the Forth," he attained a dignity next to that of the Lord Chancellor. In 1460 he married Agnes Menteith, of Ruskie, a descendant of the old Earls of Menteith, and one of the two co-heiresses of the half of the lands and honors of her maternal great-grandsire, Duncan, last of the ancient Saxon Earls of Levenax or Lennox, who was beheaded on Stirling Castle, in 1424, with his son-in-law, the late Regent Albany, and his own three sons.

This marriage entailed upon the Gleneagles family long and arduous litigation with Lord Darnley, who finally established his claim to the peerage and one half of the lands, in right of his grandmother, the Duchess of Albany, whose priority in age, as the elder daughter of the Earl of Lennox, had been disputed by Sir John Haldane.*

In 1482, when the Duke of Gloucester, afterwards Richard the Third, invaded Scotland, Sir John Haldane was appointed, with George Lord Seton, Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie, ancestor of the Marquis, and Robert Logan of Restalrig, "joint Captains, Chieftains, Keepers, and Governors of the town of Berwick, and to defend it against the invasion of our old enemies of England." The campaign was speedily decided by the defection of Douglas (Bell the Cat) Earl of Angus, and the other rebellious Barons, at the Bridge of Lauder ; and Berwick, left unprotected, was forced to capitulate to the Plantagenet, never more to be retaken or restored. Sir John died in 1493, and was succeeded by his son, Sir James, who, shortly before his death in 1505, was, at a time of national alarm, nominated by King James IY. to be keeper of the King's Castle of Dunbar. His successor, another Sir John, had scarcely won his gilded spurs when he fell, in early manhood, on the fatal field of Flodden, along with a great part of the chivalry of Scotland, rallying round their rash but gallant monarch.

It was soon after these times of turbulence and war that the

* See the History of the Partition of the Lennox, by Mark Napier, Esq., a descendant of the celebrated inventor of Logarithms, and as such from the other co-heiress of Menteith, who divided with Agnes Haldane the other half of the Lennox. See also the learned Reply of John Riddell, Esq., the celebrated Scottish legal antiquary.

16 ANECDOTES.

translation of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue was preparing, both for Scotland and England, a moral and religious revolution more complete and decisive than any which had yet occurred. It was on the 4th February, 1526, that the first copy of the New Testament, translated and printed abroad in English, arrived in Britain. From that day may be traced the increasing progress of the Protestant Keformation, and in no country did it take a deeper or firmer root than in Scotland. In the vain attempt of Rome to arrest the circulation of the Bible, to stop the preaching and crush the truths of the Gospel, the whole nation was convnlsed. In that long and arduous struggle the Haldanes seem to have taken a consistent part, on the side of religious freedom. The name of Gleneagles appears amongst the Lords of the Congregation, and during the reign of James VI. they stood by the Protestant cause, both in its prosperity and adversity. In 1585, when the Earl of Angus and the other banished Lords returned from England, to take advantage of the popular indignation roused by the persecuting acts of the Earl of Arran, the Laird of Gleneagles is mentioned by Calderwood as prominent in what was called " the raid of Stirling." He was a prisoner in the town when it was attacked, but was enabled to join the assailants, and assisted in the armed remonstrance with the King, which brought back the exiled ministers, and drove Arran and his abettors into disgrace and banishment. It is mentioned, that when Sir William Stewart, Colonel of the Royal Guard, and brother of the obnoxious Earl, was repulsed from the west port of Stirling, he was so hotly followed, " that Mr. James Haldane, brother-german to the Laird of Gleneagles, overtook him ; and as he was laying hands on him, was shot by the Colonel's servant, Joshua Henderson."*

In the following century another Knight of the family was, in 1650, a leader in the Presbyterian army of the congregation opposed to Cromwell, and fell in the rout at Dunbar. His lady received from one who alleged that he was his messenger his own ring (which is still preserved), with an assurance that he was safe, but detained with other prisoners of rank in the castle of a nobleman near the battle-field. The chiefs said to be his companions in captivity were found as described, but Sir John had never been amongst them, and returned no more.

He was succeeded by Sir John Haldane, the last of the Knights of Gleneagles in the male line. In truth, the country was becom-

* 4 Calderwood, 390.

ANECDOTES. 17

ing more civilized and less turbulent, so that war ceased to be the chief occupation of those not compelled to till the soil. The change in the times was also manifested in the family arrangements, by which he transgressed the feudal notions of the exclusive rights of primogeniture, and in order to favor a mother's partialit}^ for a younger son, occasioned the separation of a large section of the Menteith or Lanrick estates from those of Gleneagles.*

His successor, Mungo Haldane, who derived his not very euphonious Christian name from the noble house of Murray, was a Member of the Scottish Parliament; obtained a charter of his lands from Charles II., reciting his own services to the Crown and those of his progenitors ; and is mentioned by Nisbet, in his account of the gorgeous procession of the Lord Chancellor the Duke of Eothes' public funeral in 1681, as bearing the banner of his relative, the Earl of Tullibardine, afterwards Marquis of Athol.

He died in 1685, and was succeeded by his son, John Haldane, who served in the Scottish and British Parliaments for nearly forty years, and occupied a conspicuous place in public affairs, both at the Revolution and at the Union.

From the time of Cromwell the change in the history of Scotland becomes more decided. The Reformation had been the grand crisis of the nation, but, during its glorious progress, there was a long and deadly struggle between the despotic tendencies of the

* This offshoot of the Gleneagles stock only remained at Lanrick for two generations. Patrick, the first proprietor, died young, having married Miss Dundas of Newliston, who was. through her mother, one of the younger co-heiresses of the original stock of Halden of Haldenrig, in the South. The eldest co-heiress of that family was married to John, first Earl of Stair, who in her right acquired the lands of Newliston. Patrick Haldane left two younger sons, one of whom was a Professor at St. Andrew's, and was burned to death whilst reading in bed. John, his eldest, took part in the rebellion of 1745, but contrived to escape forfeiture, and returned after many years of exile, to die at Lanrick, in 1765, at the age of 85. He survived his two sons, but left six daughters, of whom five were married and have numerous descendants. Some of the male heirs of Lanrick are said to be still found in the north of Scotland. James Oswald, Esq., of Auchencruive, is the male representative of the eldest daughter of John Haldane. The Rev. James Haldane Stewart, Vicar of Limpsfield, is descended from the Lanrick family, his grandfather, Stewart of Ardshiel. who commanded the right wing of the rebel army at Culloden, having married a grand-daughter of Patrick. Mr. Stewart of Ardshiel on one occasion fought with and disarmed Rob Roy. Sir Walter Scott has borrowed the incidents of this adventure in his tale, giving the catastrophe a turn more suited to the dignity of his hero. It is the scene at the clachan of Aberfoyle. The warlike ancestry of the Vicar of Limpsfield strikingly contrasts with the gentleness of his own beautiful Christian character.

18 ANECDOTES.

Crown, the turbulence of the old feudal Barons, and the civilizing influences of advancing Christianity. The strong bond of Protestantism, with its common dangers and common blessings, had been gradually drawing together the great mass of the Christianity, the intelligence, and the respectability of the English and Scottish nations, for more than a century before its consummation in the act of Union of 1707.

At this period, John Haldane, of Gleneagles, sat as one of the four Barons for the county of Perth in the last Scottish Parliament. He had been previously representative for Dumbartonshire, and, in 1688, a Member of the Convention Parliament. He was also the first Member for the county of Perth in the first British House of Commons, and one of the Commissioners for settling the equivalents at the Union. He was a man of great energy and ability, a good speaker,* and much occupied with public affairs. One of his sisters was married to Sir William Murray, of Ochtertyre, and another to Mr. Smythe, of Methven. He was himself twice married, first to Mary, third daughter of David Drummond Lord Maderty, elder brother of the first Viscount Strathallan ; secondly, to Helen, only daughter of Sir Charles Erskine, of Alva, ancestor of the Earls of Rosslyn, and grandson of John, Earl of Mar. He had a numerous family by both marriages. His eldest son, Mungo Haldane, was successively M. P. for the counties of Perth and Stirling, and died in 1757, at the age of seventy-three, unmarried. He was well remembered by a tenant of the Gleneagles estate, who lived to be more than a hundred years old, and was known to many of the present generation. He used to tell how the Laird put an end to Sunday trading in the neighborhood, by means not very consonant with the modern voluntary principle. It seems that Sunday trafficking was then prevalent in Scotland, in consequence of the packmen,

* In " Wodrow's Correspondence" we find the following anecdote: — : 'The Sep- •' tennial Bill is passed the Commons by a vast plurality.. There is a story here of "Mr. Haldane, of Gleneagles, and one Snell, an English gentleman. Mr. Haldane " had a very handsome speech in favor of the Bill. Mr. Snell said he did not " much wonder to hear that gentleman and others of his nation speak after that •' fashion, for their nation was sold and enslaved,— they would have their neighbors " so dealt with ; whereon were great heats. Sir David Dalrymple (of Hailes, and " grandfather of the celebrated Sir D. Dalrymple, Lord Hailes) said the gentleman " who spoke (Mr. Snell) knew well where he spoke, and that the House was his "sanctuary. Others said, more plainly, that he durst not speak so without doors. "Mr. Snell was brought to the bar, and to crave pardon, May 1st, 1716."— From th ■ '• Wodrow Correspondence," vol. ii. p. 165.

ANECDOTES. 19

or itinerant hawkers, bringing their goods for sale to the churchdoors on the Lord's da}'. As chief magistrate in the neighborhood, the Baron of Gleneagles issued an order prohibiting the practice. On the following Sunday he did not happen himself to go to Blackford Church, but, meeting his servants returning, he inquired whether the packmen had obeyed his mandate. Being informed that they had not, the old tenant used to tell, with great emphasis, how "the Laird clapped his hand on his sword," and declared that, if he lived over another Sabbath, he would make the packmen repent of their perverseness. Accordingly, on the following Sunday, he himself went to the church, and, finding the packmen assembled as usual and spreading out their goods for sale, he drew out his sword and scattered them in an instant. Having pursued them down the hill, as they fled in trepidation before the irate and portly Baron, he returned to the church-gates and tossed their wares into the adjoining lake. This exercise of a" rigor beyond the law," which in those days was not very nicely weighed, had the desired effect, and Sunday trading has never been again attempted near Gleneagles, from that day to the present. Mungo Haldane was succeeded by his next brother, Patrick, an able, active and bustling politician, who, in his youth, was Professor of History at St. Andrew's; then M. P. for the St. Andrew's Burghs ; then Solicitor-General ; a Koyal Commissioner for selling the forfeited estates ; and at one time appointed a Lord of Session.* He survived for ten years his only son, Brigadier-General George Haldane, of the Guards, who was also Member of Parliament for the Dundee and Forfar Burghs, and died, in 1759, Governor of Jamaica.

Many ancient Scottish families were ruined by the change in their style of living and expenditure, consequent on being called

* This appointment was made in 1721, during his father's life-time, and gave rise to a curious law-suit as to the right of the Crown to appoint a Judge or Senator of the College of Justice, " without the concurrence of the College itself." The matter was carried by appeal to the House of Lords (See •'' Robertson's Appeal Cases," 422), and decided in favor of the Crown ; but Patrick Haldane's right was not insisted on, and he received another appointment. He was objected to as not being a practising advocate, but the pamphlets which appeared on the occasion, one of them attributed to the celebrated Duncan Forbes, of Culloden, indicate strong political and personal rancor. Mr. Patrick Haldane is, amongst other things, not only charged with bribery at his elections, but with having induced his younger brother, James Haldane, then under age, the grandfather of the subjects of this memoir, to assist in carrying off and imprisoning hostile voters, on pretended charges of high treason and Jacobitism.

20 THEIR FATHER.

to attend a Parliament, sitting in London instead of Edinburgh. Patrick Haldane's electioneering expenses, and those of his son, had not been compensated by their public appointments. When, in the same year he succeeded his elder brother, and survived his son, he found himself encumbered with debt and unable to retain his estates with comfort. Under these circumstances Gleneagles, being unentailed, might have passed, like Lanrick, entirely out of the family, had it not been purchased by a younger brother of the half-blood, who had just returned from India with a large fortune, being the first Scotchman who ever commanded an East India Company's ship. This Captain Kobert Haldane married a daughter of Sir John Oglander, of Nunwells, in the Isle of Wight, and becoming himself M. P. for the Stirling Burghs, is referred to in the letters of Junius. He died at Airthrey, on the 1st of January, 1768, without leaving any surviving issue, and was buried at Gleneagles, by his own desire, under the shade of four majestic spruce-firs, which he had himself planted in front of the old chapel near the ruins of the castle. His elder brother was still living at his death, as well as his nephew, Captain James Haldane, the only son of another brother. But Captain Eobert having acquired both the estates of Airthrey and Gleneagles by purchase, unfettered by any entail, they were entirely at his own disposal, and he determined to divide them. To Captain James Haldane, who had acquired a fortune of his own, and was averse to a residence on the northern side of the Ochils, he left the estate of Airthrey, with its southern exposure, beautifully sloping down into the Carse of Stirling, charged with a debt of 14,000?. ; whilst the lands of Gleneagles and of Trinity Gask, charged with the remainder of his debts, were, in the first instance, entailed on the male descendants of his two sisters of the full blood, with remainder "to my Nephew, Captain James Haldane, of the Duke of Albany East Indiaman." It was thus upon condition of merging his own name and arms, and assuming those of Haldane, that George Cockburn, only son of Mrs. Margaret Cockburn, of the family of Ormistown, in East Lothian, succeeded to Gleneagles, but on his death and the failure of his male issue, in 1799, it devolved on the celebrated Admiral Viscount Duncan, as being then the eldest surviving son of the entailer's other sister of the full blood, Helen Haldane, wife of Alexander Duncan, of Lundie, and also the maternal grandmother of the subjects of these Memoirs.

THEIR MOTHER. 21

Their father was the only son of Colonel James Haldane, who married Margaret Pye, a lady belonging to a well-connected family then resident in the county of Durham, some of whom held considerable preferment in the Church of England.

Colonel James Haldane, like the rest of his generation, was a man of great stature and physical strength, and served from 1715 to 1741 in that squadron of the Royal Horse now known as the 2d Regiment of Life Guards. He died at sea on the 9th December, 1742, near Jamaica, on the Carthagena expedition, in command of General Guise's regiment of Infantry.

On the 15th December, 1762, their only son, Captain James Haldane, married his first cousin, Katherine, daughter of Alexander Duncan, of Lundie, and Helen Haldane, commonly called Lady Lundie, by the courtesy of Scotland then allowed to the wife of a minor baron. Of this marriage there were three children ; namely — 1, Robert, who succeeded his father in the estate of Airthrey; 2, Helen, born in 1765, who died in childhood; and, 3, James Alexander Haldane, his youngest and posthumous son.

FROM THEIR BIRTH TO THE DEATH OF THEIR MOTHER.

[1764—1774.]

The family history of six centuries and more than twenty generations, has been compressed into a very narrow space in the foregoing pages. Such matters have in them more of private curiosity than public interest. The quality or exploits of a remote ancestry belong to the passing things of time, and are but bubbles on its rapid stream, rolling down into the gulfs of oblivion. But the character, the instructions, the example, and the prayers of Christian parents, belong to the things that are immortal, on which God himself has been often pleased to suspend the destinies of children. The means as well as the end are under the control of Him who gives no account of his matters, but determines all things by the council of his own will. Occasionally He sees fit, in a wonderful and unexpected manner, to assert the sovereignty of his electing grace ; yet for the most part it will be found, that He works by instruments, and puts especial honor on the use of his own appointed ordinances. It was the privilege of the two brothers to be enabled, practically to

22 THEIR FATHER'S CHARACTER.

sympathize with the sentiments expressed in the noble lines of Cowper, when he exclaims —

" My boast is not, that I deduce my birth From loins enthroned, or rulers of the earth, But higher far my proud pretensions rise, The son of parents passed into the skies !"

Of their father, Captain James Haldane, his elder son knew but little, and the younger nothing, except from the testimony of others. He is reported to have been a man of much worth, of popular manners, good sense, and ability, who was generally respected and beloved. It is related of him, that at sea he was remarkable for his attention to moral discipline, and particularly for putting down profane swearing in his ship. The late Mr. Scrimgeour, of Tealing, and a son of Mr. Callender, of Craigforth, who both sailed with him, used to tell how he cured his midshipmen of this profane and, as it has been justly termed, " profitless vice," by compelling any one who thus transgressed to carry a clog fastened around his ankle for the remainder of the watch. He was also more particular than was then common at sea, in accustoming the young men to act like gentlemen, and when inculcating the duty of politeness, would jocularly remark, that he had himself spoiled a laced hat in taking it off to two French officers, whom he had brought home as prisoners from India, during Lord Olive's wars. He completed his last voyage at the close of 1767, and was on the eve of being elected an East India Director, when an inflammatory sore-throat, said to have been improperly treated, and ending in violent fever, carried him off, after a few days' illness, on the 30th June, 1768. He died whilst on a visit to his father-in-law, at the old house of Lundie (now Camperdown), near Dundee, where he had arrived a few days before. When asked, shortly before his death, as to his hopes for eternity, his reply, "I have full confidence in Jesus," indicated the simplicity as well as the sincerity of his faith. His attached and afflicted widow was not, therefore, left to sorrow as those without hope, but it was a severe shock to her health, and brought on her confinement nearly two months before it was expected. It took place at Dundee, on the 14th of July, just a fortnight after her bereavement, and, combining the name of the husband whom she had lost, with that of her father, who survived, she called her infant son James Alexander.

THEIR MOTHER'S CHARACTER. 23

In order to be near her parents, Mrs. Haldane took up her residence at Dundee, in a house which belonged to the celebrated rge Dempster, so well known as a leading Member of Parliament, and the friend of Mr. Fox, who had named him as one of the Commissioners of his famous India Bill. It was a large, old baronial mansion, now pulled down, pleasantly situated in a garden sloping down to the Tay. An ancient and well-remembered pear-tree, which still remains, was visited by her younger son not many years before his death.

Mrs. Haldane belonged to a family in which there had been much true relisrion.* Her father was distinguished as a strenuous supporter of the Protestant succession, and, as Provost of Dundee, did good service to the Government during the rebellion in 1745. Towards the close of his life he left the fine old family residence at Lundie Castle, to reside nearer the town, at Gourdie House, a name for which his eldest son substituted that of Lundie, but which was destined to be again changed to Camperdown upon the erection of a new and splendid edifice by his grandson. His second daughter, Mrs. Haldane, was herself a decided Christian. "She lived," said her eldest son, "very near to God, and much grace was given to her." When left a widow, it became her chief concern to bring up her children in "the nurture and admonition of the Lord." From their infancy she labored to instil into their minds a sense of the importance of eternity, particularly impressing upon them the necessity of prayer, and teaching them to commit to memory and understand psalms, portions of the shorter catechism, and of Scripture.