~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 London, 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 Walter Scott, 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 Cape of Good Hope.