Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland : $b or, The traditional history of Cromarty — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland : $b or, The traditional history of Cromarty
John Stuart Mill · en
[Sidenote: PATERHEMON.]
There lived in the succeeding reign a proprietor of Cromarty, who,
from the number of his children, received, says the genealogist, the
title, or agname, of Paterhemon. He had twenty-five sons who arrived
at manhood, and eleven daughters who ripened into women, and were
married. Seven of the sons lost their lives at the battle of Pinkie;
and there were some of the survivors who, settling in England, became
the founders of families which, in the days of the Commonwealth,
were possessed of considerable property and influence in Devonshire
and Cumberland. Tradition tells the story of Paterhemon somewhat
differently. His children, whom it diminishes to twenty, are described
as robust and very handsome men; and he is said to have lived in the
reign of Mary. On the visit of that princess to Inverness, and when,
according to Buchanan, the Frasers and Munros, two of the most warlike
clans of the country, were raised by their respective chieftains to
defend her against the designs of Huntly, the Urquhart is said also
to have marched to her assistance with a strong body of his vassals,
and accompanied by all his sons, mounted on white horses. At the
moment of his arrival Mary was engaged in reviewing the clans, and
surrounded by the chiefs and her officers. The venerable chieftain
rode up to her, and, dismounting with all the ease of a galliard of
five-and-twenty, presented to her, as his best gift, his little troup
of children. There is yet a third edition of the story:--About the
year 1652, one Richard Franck, a native of the sister kingdom, and as
devoted an angler as Isaac Walton himself, made the tour of Scotland,
and then published a book descriptive of what he had seen. His notice
of Cromarty is mostly summed up in a curious little anecdote of the
patriarch, which he probably derived from some tradition current at
the time of his visit. Sir Thomas he describes as his eldest son; and
the number of his children who arrived at maturity he has increased
to forty. “He had thirty sons and ten daughters,” says the tourist,
“standing at once before him, and not one natural child amongst them.”
Having attained the extreme verge of human life, he began to consider
himself as already dead; and in the exercise of an imagination, which
the genealogist seems to have inherited with his lands, he derived
comfort from the daily repetition of a kind of ceremony, ingenious
enough to challenge comparison with any rite of the Romish Church. For
every evening about sunset, being brought out in his couch to the base
of a tower of the castle, he was raised by pulleys, slowly and gently,
to the battlements; and the ascent he deemed emblematical of the
resurrection. Or to employ the graphic language of the tourist--“The
declining age of this venerable laird of Urquhart, for he had now
reached the utmost limit of life, invited him to contemplate mortality,
and to cruciate himself by fancying his cradle his sepulchre; therein,