In Niddrie House there are to be seen full-length portraits of Charles I. and his queen; four small half-lengths of the Chevalier and his consort, and their two sons, Prince Charles Edward and the Cardinal York, as boys. These are understood to have been forwarded direct from the Chevalier himself to the Niddrie family as an acknowledgment of their loyalty, and the assistance--pecuniary and otherwise--which the royal line of Stuart had received at their hands. [Sidenote: A 'Minden' hero] To come to more recent times, we find that Andrew Wauchope of Niddrie--the great-grandfather of the subject {21} of our sketch, born about the year 1736--was a captain in the First Regiment of Dragoon Guards, and fought at the battle of Minden in Westphalia, where in 1759 the French were defeated by an army of Anglo-Hanoverian troops. He lived to a good old age, for it was he who was alluded to by Sir Walter Scott in the ballad written on the occasion of the visit of George IV. to Scotland in 1822:-- Come, stately Niddrie, auld and true, Girt with the sword that Minden knew; We have owre few sic lairds as you, Carle, now the King's come. This Andrew Wauchope married, in 1786, Alicia, daughter of William Baird, Newbyth, and sister of the celebrated Sir David Baird, the hero of Seringapatam, who a few years afterwards--in 1805--commanded the expedition to the Cape of Good Hope which, after a decisive victory over the Dutch, received, on 6th January 1806, the surrender of the colony to Great Britain. There were nine children of this marriage, five boys and four girls. The eldest, Andrew, was killed in 1813 at the battle of the Pyrenees while in command of the 20th Regiment of Foot, and so the second son, William, succeeded to the property, old Andrew Wauchope having resigned it in his favour in 1817, retaining for himself the liferent. William Wauchope, who had the year before married Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Robert Baird of Newbyth, and niece of the then Marchioness of Breadalbane, was a lieutenant-colonel in the army. Curiously enough, William's younger brother, Admiral Robert Wauchope, was stationed at Cape Town at the beginning of the century, where he resided for many years with his wife. They knew the Dutch well, and were on the most friendly terms with both Dutch and English settlers in the colony. {22}