The Romance of Dumfries

Levin Daily Chronicle, 31 March 1917, Page 3

The Romance of Dumfries

ORIGINALS IN SCOTT'S NOVELS. The romance of Dumfries and its neighbourhood was turned to account with signal success by Sir Walter Scott in some of his most famous creations. He himself had visited the neiglibourj hood when, as a young advocate, lie was getting up his first case, the defence of a certain minister of Girtlioii named MacXiauglvt against charges of lewd behaviour. Caerlaverock Castle, which he no doubt visited on that occasion, is said to the the model of Ellengowan in "Guy Mannering," while a certain Yawkins, whose smuggling exploits were well known along the coast, as the original of Dirk Hatteraick in the same story.

An incident,again, of the second Jacobite rising at Dumfries furnished Scott with the chief idea for the plot of this romance. This was the story of Sir Robert Maxwell of Orcliardston. This young man's father had left his estate to be managed by a brother, and that (brother had formed a plan to secure it for himself. To get rid of the heir 'he sent him -when a child to a Jesuit College in France, with instructions to make him a monk, and at the 'same time gjave out that the boy was dead. The latter, however, escaped, at the age of sixteen, arid joined a French regiment. After fighting at the 'battles of Dettingen and Foutenoy, he was with the French troops who came to Scotland to help , the cause of Prince Charles Edward in 1745.

Wonndied at Culloden, he slowly made his way ragged and starving, to Dumfries, where he hope to (find a ship to carry him to France. Falling sick however, he was made prisoner, and would probably have been 'hanged had not his commission af a French officer • been discovered in the lining of his coat. His case attracted much interest in the town, and the excitement was doubted when a woman who had been his nurse as an infant indentified f him by a birthmark. His uncle, with all the means at his disposal, was preparing to resist his claim, when he suddenly died an the lad foundihimself self in unquestioned possession of his father's baronetcy and estates, with a rent roll of £10,000 a year. Scott's "Heart of Midlothian," too, was founded on an incident associated with the town—the trial in May, 1739, of a young girl. Tilbby Walker, for child murder. Tibby Walker is the Effie Deans of the novel. Caerlaverock figures in another of Scott's romances. The siege of the stronghold by Edward 1., in which a garrison of a handful of Scotsmen held out fo rthree while days against the entire might of England and Wales, afforded the model fo rthe graphic description of the siege in "Ivanhoe." Scottish Country Life. 1