~dy Anne ~dsay (1750-1825)

Lady Anne Lindsay, said to be the child "of a hundred earls," was the author of the single most popular contemporary ballad of the English romantic period, ''Auld Robin Gray." Her mother, Anne Dalrymple, was an aristocrat, as was her father, James Lindsay, fifth earl of Balcarras. Born on 8 December 1750, Lady Anne was the eldest of their eleven children. She grew up in Fife, making winter visits to Edinburgh. The extensive family library was hers to use as she liked, and she and her father, who died when she was seventeen, shared a literary camaraderie. Later she remarked that in her youth she would often "scribble away poetically and in prose, till I made myself an artificial happiness, which did very well 'pour passer le temps.' " 1 Another member of the household was Sophy Johnstone, a relative who came for a visit and stayed thirteen years. She wore men's clothes, walked with a masculine stride, took up blacksmithing, and occasionally swore. She played the fiddle and sang, in a deep voice, a wealth of old Scots ballads, in­ cluding the ancient air "The Bridegroom Greits When the Sun Gaes Doun." Lady Anne was especially fond of the melody and longed herself to sing it but considered the traditional words too coarse. In early 1772, feeling sad just after her sister Margaret had married and moved to , Lady Anne composed new words for the old song, trying, as she said, to "give to its plaintive tones some little history of virtuous distress in humble life, such as might suit it.'' 2 Mischievously she named the lyric after Robin Gray, an old shepherd the children disliked. More than fifty years later, she recounted circumstances of its composition, including the following incident:

I. Lives of the Lind says; or a memoir of the houses of Crawford and Balcarres by Lord Lindsay . . . together with personal narratives by his brothers ... and his sister, Lady Anne Barnard, 3 vols. (London, 1849), 2:332. 2. Lindsay to , 8 July 1823, quoted in Walter Scott's introduction to Auld Robin Gray; A Ballad by the Right Honourable Lady Anne Barnard, Born Lady Anne Lindsay of Ba/carras, ed. Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1825). Lady Anne Lindsay

I called to my little sister [Elizabeth, twelve or thirteen years Anne's junior, later] Lady Hardwicke, ... "I have been writing a ballad, my dear; I am op­ pressing my heroine with many misfortunes. I have already sent her Jamie to sea-and broken her father's arm-and made her mother fall sick-and given her Auld Robin Gray for her lover; but I wish to load her with a fifth sorrow within the four lines, poor thing! Help me to one." - "Steal the cow, sister Anne," said the little Elizabeth. The cow was immediately lifted by me, and the song completed. At our fire-side, and amongst our neighbours, ''Auld Robin Gray" was always called for. I was pleased in secret with the approbation it met with; but such was my dread of being suspected of writing any thing, perceiving the shyness it created in those who could write nothing, that I carefully kept my own secret.3 Evidently Lady Anne kept her secret for other reasons as well. Her nar­ rative about a loveless marriage of convenience too closely paralleled the actual fates of her mother and her sister Margaret, both forced into marriages with substantially older, wealthy men. Her father had been nearly sixty and her mother only twenty-three when they married. The young woman had refused the near-deaf Lord Balcarras, but after he developed a serious fever, made her heir to half his estate, and resolved to die out of"grief and despair," she married him. Then the earl recovered.4 The life of Lady Anne's sister Margaret was similar in this respect. She fell in love with James Burgess, a man of ambition and intelligence but no fortune, but she was made to give him up, and James left the country. Just before the composition of the ballad, Margaret married Alexander Fordyce of Roehampton, a middle-aged banker, said to be one of the richest in the country.5 Lady Anne's narrative probably gave voice as well to her anxieties about her own future in a world where women, whether aristocratic or working-class, were still legally treated as property. "Auld Robin Gray" struck a chord in many people and enjoyed great popu­ larity. Not only was it sung throughout Scotland but it was carried into England by ballad-mongers and strolling players, translated into French, sung by a lunatic in Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or The Wrongs ef Woman and by a milkmaid in Susanna Blamire's "Stoklewath," and printed in every anthology of Scottish verse and song; it even lent its name to the newest fashions, in­ cluding, one season, the Robin Gray hat. It found its way into print in many versions, with several people, including a clergyman, claiming authorship. Antiquarians debated whether ''Auld Robin Gray" was an ancient ballad

3. Ibid. 4. Madeleine Masson, Lady Anne Barnard (London, 1949), 18-19. 5. Ibid., 2 . Lady Anne Lindsay

or of modern origin. Even though they advertised a twenty-guinea reward to anyone who could prove its origin, Lady Anne and Sophy Johnstone re­ mained silent. Eventually the Antiquarian Society dispatched its secretary to visit Lady Anne in an effort to discover the truth. Offended by his "imper­ tinent" questioning, Lady Anne closed the interview with the remark, "The ballad in question has in my opinion met with attentions beyond its deserts. It set off with having a very fine tune put to it by a doctor of music, was sung by youth and beauty for five years and more, had a romance composed from it by a man of eminence, was the subject of a play, of an opera, and of a pantomime, was sung by the united armies in America, acted by Punch, and afterwards danced by dogs in the street-but never more honored than by the present investigation." 6 Some guessed the poem's origin early on. "Happening to sing it one day at Dalkeith-House, with more feeling perhaps than belonged to a common ballad," Lady Anne recounts, "our friend Lady Frances Scott smiled, and fixing her eyes on me, said, 'You wrote this song yourself.' The blush that followed confirmed my guilt. Perhaps I blushed the more (being then very young) from the recollection of the coarse words from which I borrowed the tune, and was afraid of the raillery which might have taken place if it had been discovered I had ever heard such.'' 7 The laird of Dalziel also was not deceived. He advised Lady Anne to make the lyrics more authentic. "Instead of sing­ ing, 'To make the crown a pound, my Jamie gaed to sea,'" he told her, "say, to make it twenty merks, for a Scottish pund is but twenty pence, and Jamie was na such a gowk as to leave Jenny and gang to sea to lessen his gear. It is that line ... that tells me that sang was written by some bonnie lassie that didna ken the value of the Scots money quite so well as an auld writer in the town of Edinburgh would have kent it." 8 Not until half a century after its composition did its author confess the truth to anyone outside her family circle. In the Pirate (r82r), Walter Scott compares the situation of his character Minna to that of Jennie Gray "the village-heroine in Lady Anne Lindsay's beautiful ballad." He then quotes four lines from an unpublished sequel to the ballad, composed by Lady Anne at her mother's request many years after the original. Curious to know how he could have learned lines she never so much as wrote in manuscript and how he could attribute them to her, Lady Anne wrote to Scott. (His aunt Christy Rutherford, it turned out, was a mutual friend.) Thus began a lively corre-

6. Lives of the Lindsays, 2:333. The doctor of music was the Reverend William Leeves, of Wrington, Somerset, who had written a new melody. 7. Lindsay to Walter Scott, 8 July 1823. 8. Ibid. Lady Anne Lindsay

~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ spondence between the two, resulting in the publication in 1825 of "Auld Robin Gray" with its two inferior sequels and an introduction by Walter Scott in a thin quarto volume for the members of the Bannatyne Club, a society for the preservation of Scottish literature and history. At Scott's request, she also gathered together and prepared for the press a volume entitled Lays ef the Lindsays, containing more of her poems as well as works by other members of her family. Although she suppressed this book, three copies are known to have survived.9 Lady Anne never met Scott, but she did meet and record her conversation with Samuel Johnson when he visited Edinburgh in 1773. She was a friend of David Hume, Henry Mackenzie, William Pitt, Horace Mann, Edmund Burke, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the prince of Wales, and probably Horace Walpole and Joanna Baillie. For some years she lived in London with her sister Margaret, but in 1793, at the age of forty-three, she married Andrew Barnard, son of the bishop of Limerick. Though not wealthy, he was an ac­ complished man, somewhat younger than his bride. When he was appointed colonial secretary under Lord MacCartney in 1797, the couple moved to the . There Lady Anne entertained for the unmarried gover­ nor and documented her experience in a journal and a sketchbook, both later published. Her husband died in 1807, and Lady Anne lived once again with her sister Margaret in Berkeley Square, London, where their home became a literary salon. It was said that she "could change a disagreeable party into an agreeable one; she could make the dullest speak, the shiest feel happy, and the witty flash fire." 10 When Margaret married a second time in 1812, Lady Anne stayed on alone at Berkeley Square, continuing her father's work by adding her reminiscences to The Lives ef the Lindsays. She died in London on 6 May 1825, at the age of seventy-four, remem­ bered most for the lyric she wrote at twenty-one, a work Leigh Hunt called "the most pathetic ballad that ever was written";11 in 1856 Blackwood's Edin­ burgh Magazine called it "one of those perfect and unimprovable works of genius which ... the whole world receives into its heart" and noted, "There are lines in Lady Anne's ballad unparalleled, so far as we are aware, in depth of insight and perfect simplicity of expression." 12 William Wordsworth con-

9. See Walter Scott's letter of 3 October [1824] concerning the recall of Lays of the Lindsays in The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H.]. C. Grierson, vol. 8 (London, 1935), 386. One copy is now at Abbotsford, Scott's home, and another, imperfect copy is at the National Library of Scotland. IO. Catherine]. Hamilton, Women Writers: Their Works and IMiys, 1st ser. (London, 1892). rr. Leigh Hunt, "Specimens of British Poetesses," in Men, Women, and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs from his Uncollected Prose, new ed. (London, 1891), 284. 12. "Family History," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 80 (October 1856): 466. Lady Anne Lindsay sidered it one of "the two best Ballads, perhaps of modern times." 13 As late as 1876, in The Poets and Poetry of Scotland, James Grant Wilson called it "per­ haps the most perfect, tender, and affecting of modern Scottish ballads." 14 William Hazlitt remarked, "The effect of reading this old ballad is as if all our hopes and fears hung upon the last fibre of the heart, and we felt that giving way. What silence, what loneliness, what leisure for grief and despair!" 15 And Walter Scott called it a "real pastoral, which is worth all the dialogues Cory­ don and Phillis have had together from the days of Theocritus downwards." 16 None of her contemporary commentators, except perhaps Scott, and he only in an oblique way, remarks on the subversive character of a narrative show­ ing how duty and virtue as defined by conventional morality lead to human nusery.

MAJOR WORKS: Lays of the Lindsays; being Poems by the Ladies of the House of Bal­ carres (Edinburgh, 1824); Auld Robin Gray; A Ballad by the Right Honourable Lady Anne Barnard, Born Lady Anne Lindsay of Balcarras, ed. Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1825); Lives of the Lindsays; or, A Memoir of the Houses of Crawford and Balcarres by Lord Lindsay .. . together with Personal Narratives by His Brothers . . . and His Sister, Lady Anne Barnard, 3 vols. (London, 1849); a Century Ago. Letters written from the Cape of Good Hope, 1797-1801, ed. with a memoir (of Lady Anne Lindsay] and brief notes byW. H. Wilkins (London, 1901); The Letters of Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas to the Cape and Elsewhere/ 1793-1803 Together with her journal of a Tour into the Interior and Certain Other Letters, ed. A. M. Lewin Robinson (, 1973).

TEXTS USED: Text of ''Auld Robin Gray" from Auld Robin Gray; A Ballad. Text of"The Highland Storm" frotn Lays of the Lindsays, which also contained the first authorized printed version of ''Auld Robin Gray."

13. Letter to Alexander Dyce, 4 December 1833, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Words­ worth: The Later Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1939), 678. r4. The Poets and Poetry of Scotland; from the earliest to the present time, 2 vols. (London, 1876), I, pt. 2: 334. 15. The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, eds. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover, r2 vols. (London, 1902), 5:14r. 16. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H.]. C. Grierson, r3 vols. (London, 1935), 8:J7. 420 Lady Anne Lindsay

Auld Robin Gray

When the sheep are in the fauld, when the cows come hame, When a' the weary world to quiet rest are gane, The woes of my heart fa' in showers frae my ee, Unken'd by my gudeman, who soundly sleeps by me.

Young Jamie loo'd me weel, and sought me for his bride; But saving ae crown-piece, he'd naething else beside. To make the crown a pound, my Jamie gaed to sea; And the crown and the pound, oh! they were baith for me!

Before he had been gane a twelvemonth and a day, IO My father brak his arm, our cow was stown away; My mither she fell sick-my Jamie was at sea­ And Auld Robin Gray, oh! he came a-courting me.

My father cou'dna work-my mother cou'dna spin; I toil'd day and night, but their bread I cou'dna win; Auld Rob maintain'd them baith, and, wi' tears in his ee, Said, "Jenny, oh! for their sakes, will you marry me?"

My heart it said na, and I look'd for Jamie back; But hard blew the winds, and his ship was a wrack: His ship it was a wrack! Why didna Jenny dee? 20 Or, wherefore am I spared to cry out, Woe is me!

My father argued sair-my mother didna speak, But she look'd in my face till my heart was like to break: They gied him my hand, but my heart was in the sea; And so Auld Robin Gray, he was gudeman to me.

I hadna been his wife, a week but only four, When mournful' as I sat on the stane at my door,

I fauld) Fold. 4 Unken'd ... gudeman] Unknown by my husband. 6 ae] One. 23 gied] Gave. 21 sair] Sore. 26 stane] Stone. Lady Anne Lindsay 421

I saw my Jamie's ghaist-I cou'dna think it he, Till he said, 'Tm come hame, my love, to marry thee!"

0 sair, sair did we greet, and mickle say of a' ; Ae kiss we took, nae mair-I bad him gang awa. 30 I wish that I were dead, but I'm no like to dee; For 0, I am but young to cry out, Woe is me!

I gang like a ghaist, and I carena much to spin; I darena think o' Jamie, for that wad be a sin. But I will do my best a gude wife aye to be, For auld Robin Gray, oh! he is sae kind to me. (wr. 1772; pub. 1824)

The Highland Storm·

l Where, my love, where art thou going? Cruven Elin, Evin Oge; Far's thy home, and late 'tis growing, Cruven Elin, Evin Oge. See the angry sky is scowling, Hark! the hollow winds are howling, To their sheds run beast and fowl in, Cruven Elin, Evin Oge.

2 Draw not back, my love, I pray thee, Cruven Elin, Evin Oge; IO Do not let the storm dismay thee, Cruven Elin, Evin Oge. Lean on me, I'll keep thee steady; How it rains! you're wet already, Creep into my tartan plaidy, Cruven Elin, Evin Oge.

29 rnickle] Much. 422 Lady Anne Lindsay

3 Yonder stands a cot forsaken, Cruven Elin, Evin Oge; Let's bide there till morn awaken, 20 Cruven Elin, Evin Oge. Would you then go there without me? Oh, my love, how can you doubt me! Dearest arm! 'tis thrown about me, Cruven Elin, Evin Oge.

4 Soft as violets, fresh as roses, Cruven Elin, Evin Oge; Who on Donald's breast reposes, Cruven Elin, Evin Oge. One sweet kiss might I but take it?­ 30 No! my love for her is sacred, Till her

•This tune, with words appropriate to it in the Erse language, was sung to me by Sir John M'Pherson, brother to the compiler of the Poems of Ossian. I noted down the tune and its burthen at the time, as he sang it. He promised to translate and versify the words, but died ere he had fulfilled his intentions. I have put a few simple verses to the ditty, and preserve it for the sake of the chieftain, who, had he lived, would have given me the song in Oscar's own words. Lindsay.