DIARY OF GENERAL PATRICK GORDON. : PASSAGES FKOM THE DIAET OF GENERAL PATRICK GORDON OF AUCHLEUCHEIES. A.D. 1635-A.D. 1699. ABERDEEN PRINTED FOR THE SPALDING CLUB. MDCCCLIX. )^ b^ S ^<? PRESENTED TO THE SPALDING CLUB BERIAH BOTFIELD NORTON HALL. -^3^G^3 CORRECTIONS. Page 21. line 21. for ' monastery' read ' College' „ 25. line 23. /or ' n' ~- read ' iu' „ 27. note. col. 2. /i'nc 9. for ' regimini scolonello' read ' rcgiminis colonello' „ 30. linen, for ^Grundenz' ^^read ' Gmudenz' „ 57. KnelS. ./or 'Alexander' rearf ' George' „ 184. line 5. /or ' rcsoh'cd' ^,^^,^^.^^read ' resolved' TABLE OF CONTENTS. Tee Officebeareks of the Club,, vi Portrait of General Patrick Gordon The Editor's Preface, , ix The Contents, xxvii Passages from the Diary of General Patrick Gordon, 1 Appendix, I95 Index of Names of Persons, 221 Index of Names of Places, 234 C]^e ^paltJing Club^ M.DCCC.LIX. HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCE CONSORT. THE EARL OF ABERDEEN, K.G., K.T. THE DUKE OF RICHMOND, K.G. THE DUKE OF SUTHERLAND, K.G. THE EARL OF KINTORE. THE EARL OF SEAFIELD. THE LORD SALTOUN. W^t €mml The Lord Provost of Aberdeen. Sir George Samuel. Abercromby of Birkenbog, Bart. John Angus, President of the Society of Advocates in Aberdeen. John Hill Burton, Advocate, Edinburgh. Charles Chalmers of Monkshill. Robert Chambers, Edinburgh. The Earl of Cawdor. Archibald Davidson, Sheriff of Aberdeenshire. Charles Elphinstone Dalrymple. Sir James Dalrymple Horne Elphinstone of Home and Logie- Elphinstone, Bart. viii OFFICEBEAEEHS OF THE CLUB. The Earl of Erroll. The Lord Forbes. Colonel Jonathan Forbes. James Giles, R.S.A., Aberdeen. John Gordon of Cairnbulg, Advocate. George Grdb, Advocate in Aberdeen. Cosmo Innes, Advocate, Professor of History in the University of Edinburgh. The Right Reverend James Kyle, D.D., Preshome. David Laing, Keeper of the Library of the Society of Writers to the Signet, Edinburgh. William Leslie of Wartle and Drumrossie. The Lord Lindsay. Hugh Lumsden of Pitcaple, Advocate. (Deceased.) Alexander Morison of Bognie. Mark Napier, Advocate, Sheriff of Dumfries-shire. The Earl of Northesk. John Ramsay of Barra. Alexander Henry Rhind of Sibster. Joseph Robertson, Superintendent of the Literary and Antiquarian Department of the General Register House, Edinburgh. James Yorston Simpson, M.D., Professor of Midwifery in the Uni- versity of Edinburgh. The Reverend Alexander Taylor, D.D., Leochel-Cushnie. Alexander Thomson of Banchory. George Tulloch, LL.D., Aberdeen. John Stuart, General Register House, Edinburgh. %xmmxm. John Blaikie, Advocate in Aberdeen. John Ligertwood, Advocate in Aberdeen. Wt tad ,a0baarulO solko ,IU ffl ^-glii r^wb 9i u ,-xo -St ossd evsd i«nurct> .voow^ oi atui 'A^^. itntda a-idn ,88d|^ !tf>3 oi iqio9lj« aiir^ — — PREFACE. The soldier of fortune, whose memoirs are now introduced to the Spalding Club, had been but a short while dead when public at- tention was turned to the eight or ten thick quartos,' in which, for forty years, he had recorded, day by day, the incidents of liis eventful life. So early as 1724, a translation of the Journal from its original English into the language of the thankless country in which the writer was condemned to breathe his last, was ' Gordon's manuscripts appear to have seems occasionally to have kept more formal been scattered after his death. Some found records of the public transactions in which their way into the archives of the Foreign he was engaged. Thus, during his mission Office at Moscow; others came somehow to England in 1666, he notes in his journal into the hands of the widow of a country- that he had conferences with Lord Chan- man and namesake, who was interpreter in cellor Clarendon, but refers for an account the Admiralty at St. Petersburg. In all, of what passed to ' my booke of relations,' SIX volumes ' of the Journal have been re- or, as he elsewhere calls it my other booke covered : of my relation.' — (p. 83.) This was doubt- Volume I. from 1635 to 1659. less the ' relation of my negotiation,' which „ II. from 1659 to 1667. he gave in to the Foreign Office on his „ III. from 1677 to 1678. return to Moscow.—(p. \0i.) bo, again, in „ IV. from 1G84 to 1690. 1686, when chronicling the incidents of his „ V. from 1690 to 1695. vain attempt to escape from Russia, he refers „ VI. from 1695 to 1699. for a copy of his letters to the Earl of Mid- No trace has been found of the tv^o, three dleton, to 'my other booke,' or, as he after- or four volumes containinuj the ten years wards terms it, ' my other copy book of between 1667 and ' 1677, and the six years letters.'—(pp. 1 62, 1 63.) The copyes of all between 1678 and 1684. my remonstrances,' he adds, 'arc apart.' Betides his voluminous Journal, Gordon (p. 163.) X PREFACE. beffun by Count Ostermann, but abandoned, as it would seem, under the burden of state aflfairs which gradually pressed upon one who already a Councillor was soon to be Chancellor of Russia. A few years afterwards, Professor Baier drew from the Diary almost everything of value in his relation of the Muscovite campaigns against the Crim Tartars in 1688-89. and of the siege and capture of Asof in 1696. The work was next to fall under the eye of the learned author of the Origines gentis et nominis Russorum^ Gerard Frederic Muller. This laborious scholar was anxious that the Journal should be translated into German, then much more than now the literary language of St. Peteisburg. The task was too much for himself, but it was undertaken by his assistant, John Stritter, upon a plan which cannot be called a happy one. Regarding the work as important chiefly for the military history of Russia, he cut down or expunged almost everything which did not seem to him to bear upon that subject. The Diary, stripped in this way of many of its most interesting and characteristic details, was still farther disfigured by being recast into a narrative in the third per- son—the ' I marched,' ' I did write,' ' I was at the Czars' hands' of the original being rendered ' He marched,' ' Gordon wrote,' ' He was admitted to the presence of the Emperors.' Such as his version or adaptation was, Stritter did not live to complete it, nor did he print any part of what he had finished. Still, in some shape more or less defective, information derived from the Journal continued to find its way to the public, as many as six books built upon its foundations having appeared in Russia between 1766 and 1834. A seventh was projected in England, but was never published, and that it was even contemplated, is now known only by the allusion — PREFACE. xi of Lord Byron in a rhyming letter to his London bookseller, written from Venice in the summer of 1818. '^ Forty years passed before the first work which professed to give any adequate outline of the contents of General Gordon's Diary, as a whole, began to issue from the press of Moscow.^ It followed Stritter's ill-planned version, so far as that went. But the editor, Dr. Posselt, carefully collated the original, re- stored many passages which Stritter had curtailed or omitted, illustrated the text by valuable notes, and supplied the two great chasms in the Journal by information gleaned from other sources. From June, 1692, where his own translation began, he allowed the narrative to run, as in the original, in the first person. Dr. Posselt's work could scarcely fail to awaken interest in the land of the adventurer whose story it told. It was reviewed, in terms of just praise, in our two chief critical journals,^ and both urged the publication of at least portions of the Diary in the language in which it was written. The earlier of these reviews was from the lively and accomplished pen of the late Earl of ^ In a bantering excuse for the delay of don, wahrend seiner Kriegsdienste unter den the fourth canto of Childe Harold, Lord Schweden und Polen vom Jahre lGo5 bis Byron enumerates other works which Mr, 1661, und seines Aufenthaltes in Russland Murray is preparing to publish : vom Jahre 1661 bis 16G9, zum ersten 'Then you've General Gordon, vollstandig veroffentlicht durch Furst M. A. Who girded his sword on, Obolenski und Dr. phil. M. C. Posselt. To serve with a Muscovite master, Erster band : Moskau, 1849. Zwciter band : And help him to polish St. Petersburg, 1851. Dritter band: St. A nation so owlish Petersburg, 183.3. They thought shaving their beards a The name of Prince Obolenski is dropped disaster.' from the title pages of the second and third (Byron's Poetical Works, vol. ii., pp. 394, volumes, for which we are indebted to Dr. 395, edit. Lond. 1855.) It was, no doubt, Posselt alone. That gentleman bore also the an advertisement of this intended work that chief share in editing the first volume, led to the belief in Russia that a Life of * In the Quarterly Review for ALirch, General Patrick Gordon had been published 1852, (no. clxxx., vol. xc, pp. 314-332); at London. in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1856, ' Tagebuch des Generals Patrick Gor- (no. ccxi., vol. civ., pp. 24-51.) xil PREFACE. Ellesmere, and it was published in the avowed hope that it might ' induce one of the Scotch clubs, or two or three of them in friendly alliance, to undertake an edition of selections from the original text.' The Spalding Club was specially referred to, and it lost no time in taking measures for accomplishing an object so desirable in itself, and so much in accordance with the purposes of the As- sociation.