MISS ISABELLA CLERK, of 3 Hobart Place, London, has kindly furnished me with the following statement, to which I have added some annotations. These are chiefly derived from a book of autograph letters, which was long kept at Glenlair, and is now in the possession of Mrs. Maxwell.
“The Clerks of Penicuik are descended from John Clerk, of Kilhuntly, in Badenoch, Aberdeenshire, who attached himself to the party of Queen Mary, and had to leave that part of the country in 1568 during the troubles. His son, William Clerk, was a merchant in Montrose; he lived in the reigns of Mary and James the Sixth, and died in 1620.
“John Clerk, his son, was a man of great ability. He went to Paris in 1634, and having acquired a large fortune there in commerce, returned to Scotland in 1646, and bought the barony of Penicuik, and also the lands of Wright’s Houses. He married Mary, daughter of Sir William Gray, of Pittendrum. This lady brought the necklace of Mary Queen of Scots into the family, through her mother, Mary Gillies, to whom it was given by Queen Mary before her execution. He died in 1674. His eldest son John was created a Baronet of Nova Scotia in 1679.”
This Sir John Clerk (the first baronet) records a singular affray with sixteen robbers who attacked the house of Penicuik in 1692. He kept them at bay until the neighbouring tenants came to his relief. His pluck, sagacity, presence of mind, good feeling, and piety, are conspicuous in the narrative.
“He served in the Parliament of Scotland, and acquired the lands and barony of Lasswade. He married Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Henderson, Esq., of Elvington, and grand-daughter of Sir William Drummond, of Hawthornden, the poet. Sir William Drummond had only two daughters, the younger of whom married W. Henderson. Their daughter Elizabeth was wonderfully talented and accomplished, and had a special gift for music. Sir John died in 1722. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Sir John Clerk, a man of great learning, who was appointed in 1707 one of the Barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, which judicial employment he retained during the remainder of his life. He was also one of the Commissioners of the Union.”
The Baron’s precepts to his son George when at school in Cumberland are worthy of Polonius. He advises him to be kind to his companions, as he could not tell what they might be able to do for him thereafter, and to be sure to take the opportunity of “learning the English language,” in which the Baron himself regrets his own deficiency. “You have nothing else to depend on but your being a scholar and behaving well.” He is described in the autumn of his days as “humming along and stuffing his pipe in order to whiff it away for half an hour,” while “my lady is engaged reading over some newspaper. Miss Clerk is labouring with great industry at a very pretty open muffler. Mrs. Dean is winding three fine white clews upon a fourth one,” etc. “My lady’s” letters to her son George dwell much on family matters, and are full of old-fashioned piety.
“He was highly accomplished in music, painting, and languages. At the age of nineteen he went abroad for three years to finish his education. He studied one year under the celebrated Dr. Boerhaave at Leyden, where he was a pupil of William Mieris in drawing. He afterwards went to Florence and Borne, where he had lessons in music from Antonio Corelli, and in painting from Imperiale. He wrote an opera which was performed in Borne. His brother, William Clerk, married Agnes Maxwell, heiress of Middlebie, in Dumfriesshire.”
William also was at Leyden before going into business as a lawyer, and kept a journal of his tour in Holland, which, like other writings of the Clerk family, is furnished with pen and ink sketches of what he saw. His letters are interesting from the combination of earnest, Covenanting piety, with a gay and chivalrous bearing in what was evidently the one serious love-passage of his life. His letters to his wife in the years after their marriage are as full of tenderness as that in which he makes his first proposal is instinct with old-world gallantry.
“They left an only daughter, Dorothea, who married her first cousin, afterwards Sir George Clerk Maxwell.”
This George Clerk Maxwell probably suffered a little from the world being made too easy for him in early life. Such a misfortune was all but inevitable, and the Baron seems to have done his best to obviate it by good counsel; but the current of circumstances was too strong. George was in the habit of preserving letters, and from those received by him before succeeding to Penicuik it is possible to form a tolerably full impression of the man. In some respects he resembled John Clerk Maxwell, but certainly not in the quality of phlegmatic caution. His imagination seems to have been dangerously fired by the “little knowledge” of contemporary science which he may have picked up when at Leyden with his elder brother James (see p. 19, II. 18, 25). We find him, while laird of Dumcrieff, near Moffat, practically interested in the discovery of a new “Spaw,” and humoured in this by his friend Allan Ramsay, the poet:—by and by he is deeply engaged in prospecting about the Lead Hills, and receiving humorous letters on the subject from his friend Dr. James Hutton, one of the founders of geological science, and author of the Theory of the Earth.[11] After a while he has commenced active operations, and is found making fresh proposals to the Duke of Queensberry. Then to the mines there is added some talk of a paper manufactory, and the Duchess playfully “congratulates” his “good self on every new sprouting up manufacture by means of so good a planter and planner.” But by this time it has been found advisable to add to his studies some more certain source of income, and he applies for the Postmastership, and (through the Duke of Q.) obtains an office in the Customs. In this, as in all relations of life, he seems to have won golden opinions. And ere he succeeded to Penicuik, the loss of Middlebie proper and Dumcrieff had doubtless taught the lesson of prudence which his father the Baron had vainly tried to impress upon his youth. The friendship of Allan Ramsay and the affectionate confidence of the “good Duke and Duchess of Queensberry,” sufficiently indicate the charm which there must have been about this man.
“Sir John Clerk (the Baron of Exchequer) married Janet Inglis of Cramond, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Sir James Clerk, in 1755. Sir James died without children in 1782, and was succeeded by his next brother, Sir George Clerk, who had married his cousin, Dorothea Maxwell, heiress of Middlebie.”
The betrothal of George Clerk and Dorothea Clerk Maxwell is said by the Baron (in a special memorandum) to have been in accordance with her mother’s dying wish. (Dorothea was seven years old when Agnes Maxwell died!) They were married privately when he was twenty and she was seventeen, but “as they were too young to live together,” he was sent to join his brother James at Leyden. After a short interval the marriage was declared, and they lived very happily at Dumcrieff.
“Sir George Clerk Maxwell was a Commissioner of Customs, and a trustee for the improvement of the fisheries and manufactures of Scotland. His brother, John Clerk of Eldin, was the author of the well-known work on Naval Tactics. He was the father of John Clerk, a distinguished lawyer in Edinburgh, afterwards Lord Eldin, a Lord of Session.”
The following account of Mr. Clerk of Eldin is from the above-mentioned biographical notice of Dr. James Hutton:—[12]
“Mr. Clerk of Eldin was another friend with whom, in the formation of his theory, Dr. Hutton maintained a constant communication. Mr. Clerk, perhaps from the extensive property which his family had in the coal-mines near Edinburgh, was early interested in the pursuit of mineralogy. His inquiries, however, were never confined to the objects which mere situation might point out, and through his whole life has been much more directed by the irresistible impulse of genius, than by the action of external circumstances. Though not bred to the sea, he is well known to have studied the principles of naval war with unexampled success; and, though not exercising the profession of arms, he has viewed every country through which he has passed with the eye of a soldier as well as a geologist. The interest he took in studying the surface no less than the interior of the earth; his extensive information in most branches of natural history; a mind of great resource and great readiness of invention; made him to Dr. Hutton an invaluable friend and coadjutor. It cannot be doubted that, in many parts, the system of the latter has had great obligations to the ingenuity of the former, though the unreserved intercourse of friendship, and the adjustments produced by mutual suggestion, might render those parts undistinguishable, even by the authors themselves. Mr. Clerk’s pencil was ever at the command of his friend, and has certainly rendered him most essential service.”
In another place the same writer says:—
“Some excellent drawings were made by Mr. Clerk, whose pencil is not less valuable in the sciences than in the arts.”[13]
John Clerk, Esq., of Eldin, fifth son of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, and brother of Sir George, the grand-father of John Clerk Maxwell, was the author of certain suggestions on Naval Tactics, which had the credit of contributing to the victory gained over the French by Lord Rodney’s fleet off Dominique in 1782. It is fair to add that Sir C. Douglas claimed to have independently hit on the new method of “breaking the enemy’s line.” But John Clerk never relinquished his pretensions to the merit of the discovery, and his book on Naval Tactics in the edition of 1804[14] is a thick octavo volume, with many woodcut illustrations and diagrams. He used to sail his mimic navies, trying various combinations with them, on the fish-ponds at Penicuik.[15] His eldest son, John Clerk, afterwards Lord Eldin of the Court of Session, made a vivid and lasting impression on his contemporaries, and many anecdotes of legal shrewdness and caustic wit still live about his name.[16] A graphic description of him as the Coryphæus of the Scottish Bar occurs in Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk, Letter xxxii.[17] Quite recently he has appeared again in Carlyle’s Reminiscences,[18] as the one figure in the Edinburgh law-courts, which remained clearly imprinted on the historian’s imagination.
Lord Eldin’s younger brother, William Clerk, was the trusted friend and comrade of young Walter Scott. And it may be observed here, by the way, that the friend of both, John Irving, was half-brother to Mrs. Clerk, John Clerk Maxwell’s mother.[19]
“Sir George Clerk Maxwell died in 1784, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Sir John, who married Mary Dacre, but died without children in 1798. His brother James was a lieutenant in the East Indian Navy, and married Janet Irving of Newton. He died in 1793, leaving two sons and a daughter. The elder son, afterwards the Right Honourable Sir George Clerk,[20] succeeded to Penicuik on the death of his uncle. Sir John Clerk, in 1798; and the younger son John succeeded to the property of Middlebie, which descended to him from his grand-mother, Dorothea, Lady Clerk Maxwell, and took the name of Maxwell. He married in 1826 Prances, daughter of Robert Cay of Charlton, and had one son, James Clerk Maxwell, born in July 1831, and died in Nov. 1879.”
The Maxwells of Middlebie are descendants of the seventh Lord Maxwell, and, in the female line, of the Maxwells of Spedoch in Dumfriesshire. Their early history, like that of many Scottish families, is marked with strong lights and shadows,[21] and John, the third laird, on coming into his inheritance, found it considerably burdened. He made a great effort to liberate the estate from encumbrances, and in 1722 was able to entail his landed property, and make it inseparable from the name of Maxwell. But he was by no means ultimately freed from debts, and he transmitted these, together with the estate, to his daughter Agnes, who married William Clerk. (See p. 17.) Their daughter, Dorothea, was left an orphan at the age of seven, and became the ward of Baron Clerk of Penicuik, who (in accordance, as he declares, with her mother’s wish), betrothed her to his second son George. They were married, privately at first, in 1735; and, in order to simplify their affairs, the Baron obtained a decree of the Court of Session, followed by an Act of Parliament, by which (notwithstanding the entail of 1722) Middlebie proper was sold to liquidate the Maxwell debts, and was bought in for George Clerk, whose title was thus freed from burdens, and, so far, from the conditions of the entail. At the same time it was arranged that Middlebie should not be held together with Penicuik. Whatever crafty views the Baron may have had in this curious transaction were frustrated by the imprudence of George Clerk Maxwell. His mining and manufacturing speculations involved him so deeply that Middlebie proper, which, by his father’s act, was now at his individual disposal, was sold in lots to various purchasers (of whom the Duke of Queensberry was chief), and the hereditary estate was reduced to something like its present limited area. This accounts for the fact that Glenlair, the present seat of this branch of the Maxwell family, is so far distant from the well-known town of Middlebie, in Dumfriesshire.
[11] See “Biographical Account of the late Dr. James Hutton, F.R.S., Edinburgh,” read by Mr. Playfair, in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. V. He made a tour in the north of Scotland in 17 64, “in company with Commissioner, afterwards Sir George, Clerk, in which Dr. Hutton’s chief object was mineralogy, or rather geology, which he was now studying with close attention.”
[12] Edinburgh Royal Society’s Transactions, vol. V., part iii., p. 97.
[13] See the collection of his etchings printed for the Bannatyne Club in 1855, with a striking portrait of him.
[14] There were in all five issues, viz., in 1781, 1790, 1797, 1804, and (with notes by Lord Rodney) in 1827.
[15] Miss Isabella Clerk is my authority for this.
[16] It has been often told how John Clerk, in an appeal before the House of Lords, when twitted for his pronunciation by Lord Mansfield,—“Mr. Clerk, do you spell water with a double t?”—replied, “Na, my laird, we spell wăter wi’ yae t, and we spell manners wi’ twa n’s.” The following is less known:—A young advocate in the Court of Session had ventured, in the vehemence of pleading, to exclaim against some deliverance of the Court, “My lords, I am astonished,” whereupon my lords contracted their judicial brows. But Clerk, who by this time was one of them, is reported to have said, “Dinna be ill at the laddie! it’s just his inexperience. Gin he had kenned ye, my lairds, as lang as I hae, he wad no been astonished at onything ye might dae.” It was his father who, on the occasion of Johnson’s visit to the Parliament House, clapped a shilling in Boswell’s hand with “Here’s till ye for the sight o’ your Bear!”
[17] “The very essence of his character is scorn of ornament.”
[18] Vol. ii. p. 7. “The only figure I distinctly recollect and got printed on my brain that night was John Clerk, there veritably hitching about, whose grim, strong countenance, with its black, far-projecting brows and look of great sagacity, fixed him in my memory.... Except Clerk, I carried no figure away with me.”
[19] Many notices both of William Clerk and of John Irving occur in Mr. John C. Maxwell’s Diary. The following are of some interest:— “1846, Sa., Nov. 5.—Called on William Clerk, and sat a good while with him. He was in bed, and not able to raise himself, but spoke freely and well, though very weak and thin. His appetite quite good, and eats plenty, but gains no strength. Dec. 12, Sa.—Called on W. Clerk, and sat 45 minutes with him. Weak, but hearty to talk. 1847, Jan. 7.—Wm. Clerk died early this morning.”
[20] For many years Member for Midlothian, and one of the most prominent politicians of his day. He held office under Sir Robert Peel, who had great confidence in the breadth and soberness of his judgment. He was noted for his command of statistics, and of questions of weights and measures, etc. He had also considerable skill in music, and was a good judge of pictures.
[21] The famous feud between the Maxwells and Johnstones is celebrated in the old ballad, entitled “Lord Maxwell’s Good-night.”