Rachel Chiesley, Lady Grange
Rachel Chiesley, usually known as Lady Grange, was the wife of Lord Grange, a Scottish lawyer with Jacobite sympathies. After 25 years of marriage and nine children, the Granges separated acrimoniously. When Lady Grange produced letters that she claimed were evidence of his treasonable plottings against the Hanoverian government in London, her husband had her kidnapped in 1732. She was incarcerated in various remote locations on the western seaboard of Scotland, including the Monach Isles, Skye and St Kilda.
Lady Grange's father was convicted of murder and she is known to have had a violent temper; initially her absence seems to have caused little comment. News of her plight eventually reached her home town of Edinburgh and an unsuccessful rescue attempt was undertaken by her lawyer, Thomas Hope of Rankeillor. She died in captivity, after being in effect imprisoned for over 13 years. Her life has been remembered in poetry, prose and plays.
Early years
Rachel Chiesley was one of ten children born to John Chiesley of Dalry and Margaret Nicholson. Her parents' marriage was unhappy and Margaret took her husband to court for aliment. She was awarded 1,700 merks by Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath, the Lord President of the Court of Session. Furious with the result, John Chiesley shot Lockhart dead on the High Street of Edinburgh as he walked home from church on Easter Sunday, 31 March 1689. He made no attempt to escape and confessed at his trial, held before the Lord Provost the next day. Two days later he was taken from the Tolbooth to the Mercat Cross on the High Street. His right hand was cut off before he was hanged, and the pistol he had used for the murder was placed around his neck. Rachel Chiesley was baptised on 4 February 1679 and would have been born not long before that date, making her about ten years old at the time of her father's execution.Marriage and children
The date of Chiesley's marriage to James Erskine is uncertain: based on the text of a letter she wrote much later in life, it may have been in 1707 when she was about 28. Erskine was the younger son of Charles Erskine, Earl of Mar and in 1689 his older brother John Erskine, became Earl of Mar on their father's death. These were politically troubled times; the Jacobite cause was still popular in many parts of Scotland, and the younger Earl was nicknamed "Bobbing John" for his varied manoeuverings. After playing a prominent role in the Jacobite rising of 1715 he was stripped of his title, sent into exile, and never returned to Scotland.The young Lady Grange has been described as a "wild beauty", and it is likely the marriage only took place after she became pregnant. This uncertain background notwithstanding, Lord and Lady Grange led a superficially uneventful domestic life. They divided their time between a town house at the foot of Niddry's Wynd off the High Street in Edinburgh and an estate at Preston, where Lady Grange was the factor for a time. Her husband was a successful lawyer, becoming Lord Justice Clerk in 1710, and the marriage produced nine children:
- Charlie, born August 1709.
- Johnie, born March 1711, died age two months.
- James, born March 1713. He married his uncle "Bobbing" John's daughter Frances. Their son John eventually became Earl of Mar after the title was restored.
- Mary, born July 1714, who married John Keith the 3rd Earl of Kintore in August 1729.
- Meggie, who died young in May 1717.
- Fannie, born December 1716.
- Jeannie, born in December 1717.
- Rachel.
- John.
Acrimony and separation
There was evidently an element of discord in the marriage that eventually became public knowledge. In late 1717 or early 1718, Erskine received warnings from a friend that he had enemies in the government. At about the same time one of the children's tutors recorded in his diary that Lady Grange was "imperious with an unreasonable temper". Her outbursts were evidently also capable of frightening her younger daughters and after Lady Grange's kidnapping, no action was ever taken on her behalf by any of her children, the eldest of whom would have been in their early twenties when she was abducted. Macaulay writes that "he calm acceptance by the family of their mother's disappearance would persuade many that it need not be a matter of concern to them either". This restraint may have been influenced by the fact their mother had previously disinherited all of them when the youngest were still infants, an outcome described as "unnatural" by the Sobieski Stuarts, two English brothers who claimed descent from Prince Charles Edward Stuart.As the Erskines' marriage trouble increased, Lady Grange's behaviour became increasingly unpredictable. In 1730, the factorship of the Preston estate was removed from her, further increasing her angst. Her discovery of an affair her husband was conducting with coffeehouse owner Fanny Lindsay can only have made matters worse. In April of that year, she threatened suicide and to run naked through the streets of Edinburgh. She may have kept a razor under her pillow and attempted to intimidate her husband by reminding him whose daughter she was. On 27 July, she signed a formal letter of separation from James Erskine but things did not improve. For example, she barracked her husband in the street and in church and he and one of their children were forced to hide from her in a tavern for two hours or more on one occasion. She intercepted one of his letters and took it to the authorities alleging it was evidence of treason. She is also said to have stood outside the house in Niddry's Wynd, waving the letter and shouting obscenities on at least two occasions. In January 1732 she booked a stagecoach to London and James Erskine and his friends, afraid her presence there would cause them further trouble, decided it was time to take decisive action.
Kidnap
Lady Grange was abducted from her temporary home of lodgings on Niddrys Wynd off the Royal Mile on the night of 22 January 1732 by two Highland lairds, Roderick MacLeod of Berneray and Macdonald of Morar, and several of their men. After a bloody struggle, in which they knocked out several of her teeth, she was blindfolded and taken out of the city in a waiting sedan chair occupied by Alexander Foster of Carsebonny. Going northwards they transferred out of the sedan chair near Multres Hill and then taken on horseback westward to the house of John Macleod, advocate at Muiravonside, west of Linlithgow for a night. She was next taken northwards to Wester Polmaise near Falkirk, where she was held until 15 August on the ground floor of an uninhabited tower. She was by then over fifty years old.From there she was taken west by Peter Fraser and his men through Perthshire. At Balquhidder, according to MacGregor tradition, she was entertained in the great hall, provided with a meal of venison, and slept on a heather bed covered with deerskins. The existence of St Fillan's Pool on the River Fillan near Tyndrum would have provided useful cover for her captors: it was regularly used as a cure for insanity, which would have helped to explain her presence to the curious. The details of the onward route from there are not clear but it is likely she was taken through Glen Coe to Loch Ness and then through Glen Garry to Loch Hourn on the west coast. After a short delay she was then put on board ship to Heisker the main isle of the Monach Isles. The difficulty of her position must have quickly become evident. She was in the company of men whose loyalty was to clan chieftains rather than the law, and few of them spoke any English at all. Their native Gaelic would have been incomprehensible to her, although as her years of captivity wore on she slowly learned something of the language. She complained that young members of the local aristocracy visited her as she waited by the shores of Loch Hourn, but that "they came with design to see me, but not to relieve me".
Monach Isles
The Monach Isles, also known as Heisker, lie west of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, an archipelago itself lying off the western coast of Scotland. The main islands are Ceann Ear, Ceann Iar and Shivinish, which are all linked at low tide and have a combined area of. The islands are low-lying and fertile, and their population in the 18th century may have been about 100. At the time they were owned by Sir Alexander MacDonald of Sleat, and Lady Grange was housed with his tacksman, another Alexander MacDonald, and his wife. When she complained about her condition, she was told by her host that he had no orders to provide her with either clothes, or food other than the normal fare he and his wife were used to. She lived in isolation for two years, not even being told the name of the island where she was living, and it took her some time to find out who her landlord was. She was there until June 1734, when John and Norman MacLeod from North Uist arrived to move her on. They told her they were taking her to Orkney, but instead set sail for the Atlantic outliers of St Kilda.St Kilda
One of the more poignant ruins on the island of Hirta in the St Kilda archipelago is the site of Lady Grange's House. The "house" is in fact a large cleit or stone storage hut in the Village meadows that is said to resemble "a giant Christmas pudding". Some authorities believe it was rebuilt on the site of a larger blackhouse where she lived during her incarceration, although in 1838 the grandson of a St Kildan who had assisted her quoted the dimensions as being "20 feet by 10 feet", which is roughly the size of the cleit.File:Village Bay St Kilda10.jpg|left|thumb|upright=1.3|A cleit or storage hut on Hirta
Hirta is more remote than the Monach Isles, lying west-northwest of Benbecula in the North Atlantic Ocean and the predominant theme of life on St Kilda was isolation. When Martin Martin visited the islands in 1697, the only means of making the journey was by open longboat, which could take several days and nights of rowing and sailing across the open ocean and was next to impossible in autumn and winter. In all seasons, waves up to 12 metres high lash the beach of Village Bay, and even on calmer days landing on the slippery rocks can be hazardous. Cut off by distance and weather, the natives knew little of the rest of the world.
Lady Grange's circumstances were correspondingly more uncomfortable and no one on the island spoke English. She described Hirta as "a viled neasty, stinking poor Isle" and insisted that "I was in great miserie in the Husker but I'm ten times worse and worse here". Her lodgings were very primitive. They had an earthen floor, rain ran down the walls, and in winter snow had to be scooped out in handfuls from behind the bed. She spent her days asleep, drank as much whisky as was available to her, and wandered the shore at night bemoaning her fate. During her sojourn on Hirta she wrote two letters relating her story, which eventually reached Edinburgh. One, dated 20 January 1738, found its way to Thomas Hope of Rankeillor, her lawyer, in December 1740. Some sources state that the first letter had been hidden in some yarn that was collected as part of a rent payment and taken to Inverness and thence to Edinburgh. The idea of the letter's concealment in yarn is also mentioned by James Boswell in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. However, Macaulay states that this method for the delivery of the letter has "no basis in reality" and that both letters were smuggled off Hirta by Roderick MacLennan, the island's minister. Whatever its route, the letter caused a sensation in Edinburgh although James Erskine's friends managed to block attempts by Hope to obtain a warrant to search St Kilda.
In the second letter, addressed to Dr Carlyle, minister of Inveresk, Lady Grange writes bitterly of the roles of Lord Lovat and Roderick MacLeod in her capture and bemoans being described by Sir Alexander MacDonald as "the cargo". Hope had known of Lady Grange's removal from Edinburgh but had assumed she would be well cared for. Appalled by her condition, he paid for a sloop with twenty armed men on board to go to St Kilda at his own expense. It had already set sail by 14 February 1741, but it arrived too late. Lady Grange had been removed from the island, probably in the summer of 1740.
After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, it was rumoured that Prince Charles Edward Stuart and some of his senior Jacobite aides had escaped to St Kilda. An expedition was launched, and in due course British soldiers were ferried ashore to Hirta. They found a deserted village, as the St Kildans, fearing pirates, had fled to caves to the west. When they were persuaded to come down, the soldiers discovered that the isolated natives knew nothing of the Prince and had never heard of King George II either. Paradoxically, Lady Grange's letters and her resultant evacuation from the island may have prevented her being found by this expedition.