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Significant Scots
Archibald Campbell-Tait,
Archbishop of Caterbury |
Archibald Campbell-Tait was the first Scottish
Archbishop of Canterbury. Here we provide the first chapter of a 2
volume book about him which tells of his growing up in Scotland. Below
you will find 2 links to the 2 volume set which can be downloaded in pdf
format.
HOME AND PARENTAGE—BOYHOOD—SCHOOL-DAYS.
I811-1827
On Thursday, February 11th, 1869, Archbishop Tait was presiding in the
Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster over a meeting of the Ritual Commission.
Dean Stanley was sitting by his side. In the course of certain works in the
adjacent Abbey a search had for some time been in progress to discover, if
possible, the unknown burial-place of King James I. Just as the meeting
closed, a messenger entered the Jerusalem Chamber, and whispered to Dean
Stanley that the coffin had been discovered in one of the vaults under Henry
VII.'s chapel. The excited Dean sprang up, and, inviting the other
Commissioners to accompany him, hastened to the spot. As they all drew near,
the Dean motioned them back. "It is fitting," he said, "that our first
Scottish Archbishop should lead the way into the tomb of our first Scottish
King."
Of pure Scottish blood both on his father's and his mothers side, Archibald
Campbell Tait, though he lived for more than half a century in England,
retained through life his Scottish characteristics, Scottish interests, and
Scottish friends; and some account of the facts and surroundings of his
earliest days is essential, in a more than ordinary degree, to the right
understanding of his busy life.
It is not often that the early history of a life of three-score years and
ten can, when the life is closed, be recorded in detail by a competent
witness still alive and strong. The biographers of Archbishop Tait have
gratefully to acknowledge the benefit of this unusual aid. The Archbishop's
sister, Charlotte, Lady Wake, who was twelve years his senior, and who
survived him for six years, has written in full and graphic detail her
reminiscences of his early life. Many of these reminiscences had in later
years the advantage of his personal correction, and such of them will be
quoted as are necessary to give a sufficient picture of his home and
boyhood.
"Two hundred years ago," says Lady Wake, "there dwelt in Aberdeenshire—transplanted,
however, from the south of Scotland—a family valued for their worth, the
Taits of Ludquharn, of the class
that used to be known in Scotland by the name of1 bonnet
lairds—honest men, living on their own farms, and wearing the broad blue
'bonnet' that marked the simplicity of rural and patriarchal lives far
removed from the fashions and customs of towns."
The family had many branches, and some of its members seem to have been
active in other work besides the cultivation of their farms. The ample
records which remain of Aberdeenshire life during the earlier Jacobite
strifes picture them as the leading builders and handicraftsmen, advancing
steadily in prosperity and social status in the country-side. William Tait
of Ludquharn was laid to rest, as the stone over his grave records, "in the
year of human salvation 1725, with Agnes Clerk his wife," and in the same
grave, in the parish churchyard of Longside, Aberdeenshire, rests his son
Thomas, whose merits are recorded in an elaborate Latin epitaph from the
ready pen of his friend and pastor,
[ "Tait
" is said to be an old Norse name, signifying affection. Some curious
legends connected with it are to be found in Ferguson's English
Surnames, chapter
viii.]
John Skinner, famous a hundred years ago as a controversialist, an
historian, a scholar, and, above all, as the author of TuIIochgorum and
other well-known Scottish songs. The district of Aberdeenshire to which
Longside belongs remained faithful to Episcopacy long after Presbyterianism
had been established throughout Scotland, and to this day a large proportion
even of its poorest inhabitants adhere with unswerving loyalty to the Church
system for which their grandfathers endured indignity and wrong. To the
Episcopalians of Longside John Skinner ministered, in sunshine and storm,
for no less than sixty-four years, from 1742 to 1807, and the registers and
other records of his eventful pastorate, which extended right through the
'persecution period,' show that neither the imprisonment of their
minister nor the burning of his chapel was able to detach any branch of the
Tait family from a faithful allegiance to their Church's cause. John Skinner
was no Jacobite, but he and his flock had to suffer for the Jacobite
sympathies of their co-religionists elsewhere, and for many years the scene
of his quaint sermons and his famous catechisings was the little yard of his
poverty-stricken cottage at Linshart near Longside. "There the
congregation," we are told, "were obliged to sit, sometimes under a heavy
rain, sometimes with their benches or stools planted in the snow, while he
officiated and addressed them from the window." Among these undaunted
worshippers was the large family of Thomas Tait, whose son John, on leaving
Aberdeenshire to settle in Edinburgh, must have carried with him stirring
memories of the Sundays of his early years. Small was the encouragement or
support which these sorely pressed and gallant Churchmen received from the
great sister Church of England, and it would have startled them indeed to
learn that the grandson of John Tait would be Archbishop of Canterbury.
Once settled in Edinburgh, John Tait was articled in the office of Ronald
Craufurd, a well-known Writer to the Signet, in whose hands lay the legal
business of many of the foremost Scottish families, and there John received
the legal training of which he made good use in after life when he
succeeded, on Mr. Craufurd's death, to the increasing business of the house.
There is a portrait of John Tait, by Raeburn, which well represents the calm
good sense and the spirit of manly enterprise which he inherited from the
'blue bonnets' of Aberdeen. He married, in 1763, a lady of the singular name
of Charles Murdoch, so called after Prince Charlie, the hero of Scottish
imagination, in whose cause her family had suffered much. "She was," we are
told, " well born, well educated, very pretty, and very poor, and so
independent was her spirit that, like many of the Stuart ladies of the day,
she supported her widowed mother by the work of her own hands." Charles
Murdoch, Jacobite though she was, was a Presbyterian, and drew her husband
to the Established Church of Scotland, into which their only son, Craufurd,
was baptized. Craufurd Tait's mother died when he was only sixteen.
"She had," says Lady Wake, "imparted to her son much of the poetry of her
own mind, and a love for the many traditions of her ancestry.3 Perhaps
it would have been better if his father's practical sense had rather been
the prevailing element in his character."
The family house in Edinburgh was in Park Place, close to 'The Meadows,' on
the outskirts of the Old Town. t was next door to the house of Sir Hay
Campbell, Lord President of the Court of Session, the highest judicial
office in Scotland. He was a man as much beloved for the straightforward
simplicity of his character as respected for his legal knowledge, and his
house was one of the most popular resorts in Edinburgh. Susan, a younger
daughter of Sir Hay Campbell, became, at the age of eighteen, the wife of
Craufurd Tait. In the year 1800, John Tait, the Archbishop's grandfather,
died at the age of seventy-three.
"He had been as happy in the tender care of the young wife of
his only son as if she had been his own child. His death, though it came in
the fulness of years, was a heavy misfortune to the young couple, for his
calm good sense was a safer guide to his son than his own erratic genius. He
left to him the estate of Harviestoun in Clackmannanshire, with a tolerably
good house, and in addition to this, and to the house in Edinburgh, a
beautiful property on the shores of Loch Fyne, which he had named Cumlodden,
after the family place of the Murdochs. This he had purchased with the
express intention of its being resold if ever the estate of Castle Campbell,
adjacent to Harviestoun, should be offered for sale by its owner, the Duke
of Argyll. The addition of this to Harviestoun would make a consolidated
instead of a divided property. The unfortunate result was, that when his son
became the proprietor, he did indeed purchase Castle Campbell, but he was so
attached to the romantic shores of Loch Fyne that he could not persuade
himself to part with Cumlodden, and kept the two, borrowing a large sum of
money to enable him to do so."
At Cumlodden he threw himself with enthusiasm into the improvements which
his imagination already saw transforming the habits and lives of the
Highlanders. He devised a new order of things, building model cottages, and
apportioning to each its garden and its four-acre field of arable land.
Immense sums of money were thus spent in vain. The whole scheme was foreign
alike to the desires and the capabilities of those whom he tried to benefit.
The soil and its inhabitants successfully united their efforts to baffle his
plans, and he retired discomfited and impoverished to Harviestoun. There, in
like manner, but on a more congenial soil, he lavished money on
'improvements' on the largest scale. The house was half rebuilt.
"The high-road," says Ladv Wake, "ran too near the house, so
it was lifted, as if by magic, half a mile lower down the glen. A garden was
laid out with Milton's description of Eden for the model. And surely no
garden ever was like it! Of immense extent, it enclosed the lower part of
the glen; a dell of green turf led right through it, while a bright and
noisy burn leaping from the rocks above danced merrily through its entire
length, speeding through ferns and wild-flowers till it suddenly
disappeared, to emerge with a bound from a cave many yards below. Our home
was a very happy one; our father, thoroughly enjoying the society of his
children, and seeing all his dreams of picturesque beauty assuming tangible
form, had no misgivings as to the expense which attended the gratification
of his tastes. It never crossed his wife's mind that he could err in
judgment, and thus the 'improvements' went on in rapid succession.
Inventions for farm and field, now in common use, were seen in their
earliest days at Harviestoun-—machinery for chopping and steaming all manner
of food for cattle, the kitchen spit turned by water-pressure from the
mountain burns, elaborate poultry-houses, the wonder of the
country-side,—these were among the least of the products of his active
brain, with which no thoughts about, expense were allowed to interfere.
"Our father commanded the Clackmannanshire Yeomanry, and I
well remember our enthusiasm at the warlike feats of that gallant corps as
they performed a sham fight at Harviestoun on the occasion of the jubilee of
George III. in 1809. Our father, mounted on one of the grey carriage-horses,
was most magnificent in our eyes, with his helmet adorned with a silver
thistle, and the motto, translated for us, 'For our country and our
firesides.' The whole land had been excited to a frenzy of patriotism by
Buonaparte's threatened invasion, and real as was our loyalty to the King,
our hatred for the French was more real still. Besides the military ardour
of the yeomanry, there was a quieter witness close at hand that the French
were expected, in the shape of an immense 'caravan,' as it was then called, which
had been built by our father's orders, for the purpose of carrying us all to
the other side of the hills when the French fleet should appear in
"I remember them well. Story upon story of comfortable
chambers rose one above the other, reached by a series of little ladders, up
which the various inhabitants ascended with the utmost decorum, the cocks
conducting their hens to the highest story, the turkey-cocks and their
ladies taking possession of their apartment on the second floor, while the
geese and ducks waddled, well satisfied, into the lowest room. Once in the
midst of one of the absorbing and interminable arguments of which our father
was so fond, he was astonished by his brother-in-law, Lord Succoth, starting
off in a race towards the poultry-house, where he stood agape watching the
ascent of a large old turkey-cock. 'Well, if I had not seen him, I never
could have believed that Bubbly-jock [the usual name in Scotland for a
turkey-cock] would have done such a thing,' was his speech, as he quietly
turned back, and took up the broken thread of his argument.
"It was in 1811 that a heavy trouble came into our home. We
were now eight children in all, the youngest being a little black-eyed boy,
Hay Campbell by name, who was just two years old. He was the plaything of
the house. One night he was restless and ill; in the morning it was found
that in the course of that night one limb had been completely paralysed. The
medical men said it was in consequence of cutting his teeth. Our poor mother
was grievously distressed. She could not bear to think of the child's
blighted life, for to her mind the restoration of the withered limb seemed
impossible; the misfortune made too deep an impression on her, and cast a
shadow forwards.
"Shortly after this we were enjoined to be very still, for
that our mother was ill. The cause was soon made clear to us by the arrival
of the old nurse, in whose presence we always took a mysterious pleasure.
She had visited us about every two years, telling us that she had brought a
new little brother or sister. Sometimes she had found it among the
cabbage-beds, sometimes below a rose-bush. Whatever she chose to say we
believed, for while her short reign lasted her power was absolute. By her
permission alone we could see our mother, or make whispering visits to the
new baby's apartment, close to her. Accordingly on the night of the 21st, or
rather on the morning of the 22d, of December 1811, we perfectly understood
why we were to have a holiday on the usual condition of being very quiet;
but we observed in the days that immediately followed that something unusual
had happened. There was some mystery in the house, for there were grave
looks and shakings of the head, not only among the servants, but among the
lady friends who came and went. There was not the usual gladsome tone in all
that was said, though we were kept at too great a distance to hear the words
spoken. At length, after some days, with the connivance of the old nurse, I
crept into my mother's room, and through the darkened light saw her in
earnest conversation with the family doctor, George Bell. She had been
crying; he was comforting her with hopeful words. He said: 'You have been
thinking too much of poor little Campbell's leg; but I hope we shall be able
to set all to rights.' Catching sight of me, as though glad of a diversion,
he lifted me up, and placed me on the bed. My mother gently kissed me, but
told me not to stay; so I passed at once into her dressing-room, from which
was heard the wailing voice of the new-born baby, and for the first time I
saw my little brother. He lay on the old nurse's lap, making a complaining
noise—and no wonder; for, poor little thing! instead of the lovely little
feet that it had always been our delight to kiss when a new baby, was
brought among us, the nurse showed me a mass of bandages. He was born
club-footed!
"Certainly the circumstances of his birth did not promise the
noble career of usefulness with which God blessed him. Had he been born in
poorer circumstances, or had his parents been either careless or
faint-hearted, he must have remained a cripple all his days, for his poor
little feet were found to be completely doubled inwards. However, the
assurance was given that there was good hope; they could in time be brought
to a proper shape. 'In time!' Alas! it was over those words that my poor
mother wept, for she knew that they expressed a suffering infancy, and a
childhood debarred from childhood's active enjoyment. She was full of faith
and love, and perhaps God whispered to her heart that by those very means He
would best form her child for the work He destined for him; for when she
left her room to rejoin the little circle, which never felt right when she
was absent, she brought with her the usual gentle cheerfulness; and the only
outward sign of the misfortune was that the baby Archie was fondled and
spoken of with an inexpressible tenderness. She was the most submissive of
women, and so she found rest to the disquietude of her heart. She knew her
husband to be the most energetic of men, and, thoroughly believing in him,
she felt sure that all that could be done would be done. Many were the
visits the baby received before he was a month old in the little apartment
in which the old nurse held her court; but his first appearance in public—
that is to say, his christening—was the event to which we, the younger
branches of the family, looked forward with the greatest interest. At length
the day appointed arrived—the 10th of February 1812. Our mother was
sufficiently recovered to receive her friends, and the usual little circle
was gathered round her, while all her children, except the eldest, who had
gone to Harrow after the Christmas holidays, dressed in their best, gazed
with a little more than the usual amount of watchfulness on the
well-remembered ceremony which added a new member to the visible Church of
Christ and a new name to the chorus which already filled the nursery. The
mysterious large china bowl occupied once again its conspicuous place in the
drawing-room, making the centre of the solemn group, where the father held
up his infant, Archibald Campbell, to receive his baptism from the hands of
the friendly minister of the Old Church of St. Giles', Dr. Thomas MacKnight,
who had come once more to perform his loving office. The gentle mother and
the seven brothers and sisters encircled him. The newly named Archibald
Campbell was a lovely baby: his long robes hid the poor little feet; and if
there was any difference in the welcome given to him from that which greeted
his predecessors, it was only that it was more tender and loving; and as our
mother passed her treasure from friend to friend, admiring smiles saluted
him, and soothed the distress she had hid away in her heart.
"And thus she returned to the daily duties of her life,
bringing back with her the quiet influence that had on the family all the
effect of an absolute rule. On looking back to her character, there shines
out this remarkable difference between her and other women,—that no one ever
saw her in the slightest bustle or fuss of any kind, nor can any one
remember her voice raised in anger. Her memory comes back with a sort of
moonlight radiance. Clouds in her daily life there must have been; but she
passed through them all, brightening them to others, and by them herself
undimmed.
"I love to remember her kneeling in the large white
old-fashioned chair which belonged to her bedroom. She often retired thither
for private prayer; and among the memories of earliest childhood her figure
shines out as in a picture, kneeling upon the cushion of the high-backed
chair, her earnest face lifted up to God; but she never prayed aloud. It was
only when we were very little children that she did not mind the presence of
one of us when she carried her distresses to the Comforter. Everything she
did was so quietly done that though we saw, when we were at Harviestoun,
that she always kept in her bedroom a little bunch of daisies, carefully
tended in a glass of water, not one of us knew until long afterwards that
she gathered them from our little brother Willie's grave, and thus treasured
them for his sake; yet he had died so long ago that few of us had the
slightest recollection of his birth, and he had lived but for six months.
She must have gone to the grave quite alone in the early morning, for no one
ever saw her there.
"Dear mother! She was so purely and innocently good. The
modern language of what is called the religious world was unknown to her,
but the true spirit of religion dwelt in her, and her right hand did not
know what her left hand had done. Of her self-denying deeds of charity few
were known until her death caused them to be missed, and I cannot remember
ever to have heard her speak unkindly of a single human being. I remember
her sympathising in the remark made to her by a poor woman, to whom she had
lent a volume of Blair's Sermons, To my mother's inquiry whether she liked
them, the reply was: "Deed, leddy, no that weel; for in a' that reading
[turning over a number of pages] there's neither God nor Jesus Christ. Her
good-natured charity was so well understood by the poor around her country
home that some of them did not hesitate to encroach on it. I remember her
amusement at the answer made to her by a pensioner, as to whether she would
like to have money or oatmeal. 'Weel, leddy,' she replied, with a curtsey, 'baith's
best.'
"The birth of Archibald was followed by two bright and happy
years in the family circle. The two eldest boys came and went between Harrow
and Harviestoun, the eldest daughter was growing into womanhood, and the
nursery was full of cheery little faces.
"The winters were spent, as usual, in the Edinburgh home, the
summer and autumn at Harviestoun. Suddenly, on January 3, 1814, our mother
died, almost in a moment. The overstrained heart had given way. We were
summoned to her room, where she lay dead upon the sofa, on the very spot
where I can first remember her. My earliest recollection is that of sitting,
some ten or eleven years before, upon a little stool beside that sofa,
pricking upon paper the outline of the chintz flowers on her dress, while
she laid her hand upon my head, and repeated in a low voice Cowper's lines
to his mother's picture. The two scenes—the beginning and the end—are, even
now, inextricably blended in my mind. Dark and dreary were the clouds that
now-fell upon the happy home in Park Place. While we children crept about
the house, and remarked to each other that the snow was falling upon
mother's grave, relations and friends were anxiously discussing up-stairs
what could be done for the best with the nine children thus thrown suddenly
upon our father's care. Our fatherI O how well I remember his constant
pacing up and down, care and grief altogether changing his countenance! For
now, at this very crisis, he had come to know that to this crowning sorrow
of his life were added other causes of perplexity and trouble. While she was
by his side there had been sunshine, and one difficulty after another had
seemed to melt. But now he had to face the fact that, misled by his sanguine
temperament, he had embarked in, and even carried through, enterprises
which, while benefiting many, had ruined himself. The children soon came to
understand that heavy trials lay ahead. The establishment was to be broken
up, the servants whom we loved must go, including the dear old coachman whom
we had known all our lives; his grey carriage-horses were now to work upon
the farm. The schoolroom life came to an end. My younger sister and I were
sent to school, and household cares of every sort devolved upon our eldest
sister, Susan, who was barely seventeen years old. The constant care that
little Archie required endeared him specially to us all. He soon became a
well-grown child, with a touching look of appeal that went straight to the
heart. He was naturally more lame than Campbell, who had only one limb
affected, but both boys were unable for climbing or games, and became all in
all to each other, while yet a complete contrast—the one with bright black
eyes and hair, his face all rippling with fun; the other—Archie—blue-eyed
and fair-haired, watching the quicker movements of his brother as though
they were necessary parts of his own existence."
The nurse, Betty Morton by name, was a person so remarkable that she became
almost the centre of the family life. She ruled her nursery with a
strictness only equalled by her loyal devotion to the young mistress at its
head. But little Archie was of course her special charge, and she was
destined to take no unimportant part in his education for the work of life.
She was a strict Sabbatarian, and the Sunday amusements were confined mainly
to a study of the absorbing pictures in an ancient Family Bible, "dedicated
to Catherine Parr, and full of such illustrations as that of a man with a
beam as large as a rafter sticking straight out of his eye." To the
systematic nursery study of this Bible, however, both the Archbishop and his
sisters attributed in after years their unusually thorough acquaintance with
the details of Scripture history. In the first three autumns after their
mother's death the younger boys were taken by Betty-Morton to Garscadden, a
strange, weird old house, three miles from Sir Hay Campbells home at
Garscube near Glasgow. The Archbishop frequently declared that this quaint
old house, with its wonderful turreted gateway, its hideous carved faces
grinning from every corner, and its trim old-fashioned garden, was the very
first recollection of his life. His early reading-lessons were under the
charge, not only of his eldest sister Susan, whose hands must have been more
than full, but of Betty Morton, no despicable instructress, and one rigidly
accurate in exacting the daily quota of lessons.
In the autumn of 1818 Susan Tait was married to Sir George Sitwell of
Renishaw, near Chesterfield, and Archie began a few months later to make
acquaintance with the beautiful Derbyshire home which was to be the scene of
many of his holidays for thirty years to come. Soon after her marriage Lady
Sitwell invited her four youngest brothers to pay a long visit to Renishaw.
Slow was their method of conveyance thither. Under the faithful charge of
Betty Morton they were put on board a smack at Leith. A dead calm soon came
on, and seven days and eight nights were passed upon the sea before the
travellers in hungry plight reached Hull, whence they had to journey up the
Humber to Gainsborough, and thence post. When the visit came to an end, a
plan was carried out, at Lady Sitwell's instigation, which materially
affected the whole life of the future Archbishop. Time and skill had
hitherto done nothing towards curing the lameness of the two little boys.
Campbell's right leg was shrunk and feeble, while Archie's feet were, to all
appearance, hopelessly deformed. Sir George and Lady Sitwell were bent on
sending the two children to Whitworth, in Lancashire, where dwelt two
doctors, famous for their general skill, but especially for their cures
effected upon twisted or broken limbs. The father's consent was obtained,
and to Whitworth the little boys were sent, under the guardianship of the
faithful Betty.
Whitworth was then a small village—it is now a very large one—three miles
from Rochdale, in a wild and hilly region. More than a century ago John
Taylor, farrier and blacksmith, carried on his profession in this village,
and was so successful therein that he began to practise, as he expressed it,
on 'humans.' Here also he succceded so well that his fame soon sounded
throughout the neighbouring country, and his biped patients began to exceed
the quadrupeds in number, though he is said always to have given the
preference to the latter. His reputation in the new branch of his profession
was due mainly to his real or supposed cure of cancers, and his skill in the
setting of broken bones, and in straightening twisted or contracted joints.
Patients came to him from all parts of England, and innumerable anecdotes
testify, at the least, to his shrewd common sense, his homely skill, his
rough independence, and his kindly heart. His charge was eighteenpence a
week for medicine and attendance. Any further payment from his richer
patients served to replenish the boxes from which the fees of those unable
to pay for his help were drawn. His fame advanced so rapidly that before
many years had passed he was sent for by George III. to
prescribe for the Princess Elizabeth, whom he is said to have cured of some
ailment which had baffled all ordinary skill.
John Taylor had died before the two little brothers were taken to Whitworth,
but the business was carried on by his son James and two nephews. James
Taylor, who is described as "a stout man in a blue coat, about fifty years
of age, having much the appearance of a' well-to-do farrier," seems to have
inherited his father's eccentricities as well as his skill. "He was often to
be seen walking about before the house with an old hat slung before him by a
cord over his shoulders. In this hat he had a large lump of some compound,
which he rolled into pills as he walked about. The hat was fairly saturated
through and through with the drug, and appeared to have been used for that
purpose for years."
His surgery is thus described by an eye-witness, who visited Whitworth in
this very year, 1819 :—
"There were more than a hundred patients in the village. . . . Wretched
invalids were to be seen on every side, some with patched faces, some with
an arm or a leg bound fast to a board, some with splints on their arms,
others moving slowly along like spectres, in the lowest stage of physical
exhaustion. . . . The doctor's house was sufficiently pointed out by its
large size, and by the wooden machine standing in the street before it, for
fixing immovably horse patients when under their hands. In the 'surgery'
were some fifty patients waiting to be dressed or examined. They were
arranged in a row round the room, and in one corner sat James Taylor, with
his surgical apparatus, consisting of the old shoeing-box of the blacksmith.
In this were a few bottles and pots of the invariable remedies —'keen,' a
caustic ointment to which the Taylors had given this name, 'green salve,'
'red-bottle,' some blisters and plasters ready spread, a large wooden skewer
or two, and some hurds.
The patients came in succession before the doctor, and he rapidly examined
and dismissed them, 'flirting' off the blisters when necessary with the
wooden skewers, or roughly dressing with the 'keen.' Among his patients that
morning was a stalwart blacksmith, whose ill-set arm was in a primitive but
effectual fashion re-broken and re-set in the space of a few moments."
To John Taylor's care the little boys were now committed, and the following
account of his experiences was dictated by Archbishop Tait himself fifty-two
years afterwards :—
"No one but myself can give you the history of my life at
Whitworth in 1819. Camie and I, with dear old Betty, lived in the Red Lion,
a common public-house, but the best in the place. Our sitting-room was the
best parlour in the house, with a sanded floor, adjoining the bar; our
bedroom, a garret up-stairs. In one large bed I slept with Betty, Camie in a
smaller one close to it. We soon made acquaintance with the men who
habitually frequented the house,—Jim o'Dick's and Tom o'Simon's (their names
being simply their Christian names attached to their fathers')—the manners
and customs of the district being too simple to admit of a universal use of
family names amongst the working classes. The skittle-ground and the
tap-room were our places of conversation, yet 1 do not remember much evil;
probably we were too young to understand or observe it, and certainly Betty
kept a watchful look-out on us. One great object of interest was, I
remember, the courtship carried on by young Lomax, the son of a farmer in
the neighbourhood, who was paying his addresses to Betty Lord, the daughter
of the fat old landlady of the Red Lion. This was full of interest to us. We
went to the doctor's every day early to have the tin boots in which he kept
our legs encased properly arranged, and the progress of the cure attended
to. These tin boots hurt us very much, and I have often marvelled how we
were able to hobble about in them as we did all day long, except the short
time Carne had lessons from the village schoolmaster, or read Latin with the
clergyman of the parish, Mr. Porter. I cannot recollect ever doing anything
in the way of lessons during the nine months I was there. I have since been
told I had writing lessons from this schoolmaster, but either I have
forgotten it, or he has confused me with my brother. I do not remember ever
reading story-books, but I used to wander about with all sorts of mysterious
thoughts, making plays to myself out of them, and fighting all sorts of
imaginary enemies with my stick or whatever I could lay my hands upon.
Carnie and I amused ourselves very well, and dear old Betty was very kind to
us, helping us in every way she could think of. During the nights we were
distressed by the tin boots, in which we were obliged to sleep, but by
degrees we got accustomed to them. There was scarcely any one approaching to
lady or gentleman in the place, which was full of invalids of the lower
middle classes, ^chiefly with real or supposed cases of cancer, or stiffened
limbs, for the management of which the Whitworth doctors
were famous. One of the brothers kept what he called a pack of hounds, which
were of course a continual source of amusement. He went out with them after
he had seen his patients in the early morning, and in the evening, when the
sport was over, spent the hours in the midst of an admiring circle in the
tap-room of the Red Lion. This was the mode of life of both the Taylors, yet
to these men, under Providence, we owed our restoration to the perfect use
of our limbs. Probably my brother's—dear Camie's—case was more difficult
than mine, for, though much deformed in shape, my feet were possessed, I
imagine, of each bone and muscle in full vigour; therefore they had only, as
it were, to be formed into their proper natural shape by continual gentle
force, the force that comes from constant pressure, while Campbell's limb
had, from paralysis while yet a baby, been weakened to that degree that its
growth had never kept pace with the rest of his body. Yet by the strange
treatment of these men it was perfectly restored, and at the end of a year
his lameness gradually wore off."
Returning to Edinburgh in amended health, Archibald Tait was admitted in
October 1821 to the celebrated
High School of the city. Up to the time of which we write, and for many
years afterwards, it was the habit of most of the best-known families in
Scotland to spend the winter half of the year in Edinburgh, or, if not
themselves living there, to send their sons thither for education. It is
scarcely an exaggeration to say that almost every Scotchman of literary or
political eminence during the previous century and a half had received his
education within the walls of the High School of Edinburgh. Of men then
living it may suffice to name Walter Scott, Henry Brougham, Francis Jeffrey,
and Henry Cockburn. At the banquet given to Brougham on April 25th, 1825,
the future Lord Chancellor thus characteristically described his former
school:—
"A school like the old High School of Edinburgh is
invaluable. And for what is it so? It is because men of the highest and
lowest rank of society send their children to be educated together. The
oldest friend I have in the world, your worthy Vice-President, [Lord
Douglas Gordon Hallyburton.]
and myself were at the High School of Edinburgh together, and in the same
class, along with others who still possess our friendship. One of them was a
nobleman, now in the House of Peers, and some of them were the sons of
shopkeepers in the lowest part of the Cowgate of Edinburgh—shops of the most
inferior description—and one or two of them were sons of menial servants in
the town. There they were, sitting side by side, giving and taking places
from each other, without the slightest impression on the part of my noble
friends of any superiority, on their parts, over the other boys, or any
ideas of inferiority, on the part of the other boys, to them; and this is my
reason for preferring the old High School of Edinburgh to other, and what
may be termed more patrician, schools, however well regulated or conducted."
It was here, and under these conditions, that Archibald Tait received his
first systematic education between the years of nine and twelve. The
Head-master, or Rector, was Dr. Carson, and the number of boys in the school
was about 700. His education until his return from Whitworth had been, as
may be supposed, of the most desultory and fragmentary sort
But his progress, once begun, was very rapid. An extant poetical
translation of some lines from the second Eneid, done by him in Dr. Pyper's
class in the early months of 1824, would do credit to a much older boy.
It was during his early school days that Archie experienced his first great
sorrow. Never, to the very end of his life, was he able even to allude to it
without tears. His brother Campbell, who had been from earliest childhood
his inseparable companion, had always longed to be a sailor. But his
lameness had been such as to render the fulfilment of the wish impossible.
Now— thanks to the Whitworth 'doctors'—the lameness was gone, and the boy,
to his unspeakable delight, was passed as fit for service. He was to go to
Portsmouth for the usual training, and his departure was only delayed for a
few weeks because the attention of the household was taken up by little
Archie, who was sharply attacked with scarlet fever. He rapidly recovered,
however, and a farewell party was given by Campbell to his school-fellows
before starting for Portsmouth. That evening, when the party broke up,
Campbell complained of feeling ill. Scarlet fever in its most malignant form
was upon him, and after two days' illness he died. The shock to Archie,
still weak after his fever, was terrible, and he used himself to say in
later years that it had affected his whole life. The two boys, whose strange
experiences together at Whitworth had forged a link between them of no
ordinary strength, had become wholly dependent on one another. The loss of
his bright-eyed active brother was therefore the more irreparable to Archie,
who, unable for the rough games of his school-fellows, was now more than
ever thrown in upon himself and his books for amusement and occupation.
In October 1824 Mr. Tait removed his son from the High School to the newly
founded 'Edinburgh Academy,' where he took his place in the highest class.
With this important school he maintained through life so close a connection
that a few sentences seem desirable to explain its origin and character.
Lord Cockburn, in the sparkling Memorials
of his Time, writes
of it as follows:—
"Leonard Horner and I had often discussed the causes and the
remedies of the decline of classical education in Scotland. . . . So one day
on the top of the Pentlands—emblematic of the solidity of our foundation and
the extent of our prospects —we two resolved to set about the establishment
of a new school. , . . [Sir Walter] Scott took it up eagerly. . . . We were
fiercely opposed, as we expected, by the Town Council, and (but not
fiercely) by a few of the friends of the institution we were going to
encroach upon. In 1823 the building was begun. It was opened, under the
title of 'The Edinburgh Academy,' on October 1st, 1824, amid a great
assemblage of proprietors, pupils, and the public. We had a good prayer by
Sir Harry Moncreiff, and speeches by Scott and old Henry Mackenzie, and an
important day for education in Scotland, in reference to the middle and
upper classes."
The school thus auspiciously founded rose at a bound to the first rank of
importance. Among its earliest governors, or, as they were called,
directors, were Sir Walter Scott, Lord Cockburn, Francis Jeffrey, and
Leonard Horner. Its first Head-master, or Rector, was the Rev. John
Williams, Vicar of Lampeter, and afterwards, while retaining his Scotch
head-mastership, Archdeacon of Cardigan. The character and work of the
school are thus described in a speech delivered by Principal Shairp on the
occasion of its 'Jubilee,' celebrated under the Archbishop's presidency in
1874.
"Our founders," he said, "kept their eye on utility—little or
nothing on amenity. The situation they chose, the building they created, the
six hours' continuous work by day, with nearly as many more by night,
required from the boys who stood near the top, made the existence of most
boys of my time somewhat too unrejoicing. In vain you would look there for
the green 'Playing-fields' of Eton by the shining Thames, or even for the
green Close of Rugby with its venerable elm-trees, and all the pleasant
associations that gather round these. These things the Academy did not
affect. But it aimed at and affected careful grounding, sound learning, and
a most laborious work. And the
result has been that no Academy boy ever learned any part of scholarship
there which he had afterwards to unlearn, go where he might. Ten continuous
months of as faithful teaching and as hard a grind as any school in Britain
ever knew,—this is my impression in looking
back to four years spent within the Academy walls."
It was a day-school only. The boys lived at home or boarded with Edinburgh
families, their preparation-work being carried on, in most cases, with the
help of a private tutor. But Archie had no such assistance. His father's
affairs were becoming more and more embarrassed, and it was thought
necessary to practise the most rigid economy.
"In his earlier school-days," says Lady Wake, "the faithful
Betty was his only help in learning his lessons. She used to hold the Latin
books close to her eyes, diligently following each word as he repeated page
after page. 'Ay, it maun be richt; it's just word for word, and it sounds
like it,' was his encouragement, or else a sudden lowering of the book, with
'Na, na, it's no that ava',' would warn him that he was wrong. Of one
principal part of his education she was absolute mistress, and none could
have been better. She took care that he was out of bed early in the morning,
and allowed no relaxation on this point. This was no unimportant help, for
had he been left to himself, delicate as he was, the little fellow would
hardly have had the resolution required."
The school-year lasted from the beginning of October to the end of July, and
at its close the results of the year's work and examination were announced,
and the prizes given by some public man, in the presence of an immense
assemblage of parents and friends. It is difficult for those unacquainted
with Scottish life, and especially the Scottish life of fifty years ago, to
realise the importance attached, not in Edinburgh alone, but throughout
Scotland, to the doings and the speeches of. this annual Exhibition Day.
At the close of his first year the name of Archibald Tait stood third in
order in the school, although the average age of the upper boys was much
higher than his own. In his second and third years he obtained in each case
the gold medal as 'Dux' of the whole school, besides carrying off prizes
innumerable for Latin, Greek, English, and French. The prize poems and
essays, which were published at the time, attest alike the high efficiency
of the school and the vigour of the boy's own powers. In particular, an
English poem on the 'Conversion of St. Paul,' and a set of Latin hexameters
on American Independence, are worthy of a more than ordinary prize-poem
immortality. On the 'Exhibition Day,' August 1st, 1827, the prizes were
given by Lord Cockburn, whose
speech of earnest eloquence, addressed to the youthful 'Dux,' was long
remembered by all who listened to it. Tait's success on this occasion was
remarkable. He had secured no less than six of the foremost prizes in what
was already a school of the first order, and Lord Cockburn was justified
when he concluded his address in these words: "Go forth, young man, and
remember that where-ever you go, the eyes of your country are upon you."
The pale-faced boy who stood forward as 'Dux' and prizeman in 1827 was
called upon, as Dean of Carlisle, on an 'Exhibition Day,' twenty-five years
later, to give away the prizes in the same room. His speech, too, in
addressing the 'Dux' of the school, was one long remembered, but probably no
one present, except the speaker, connected together at the time the speeches
of the two men, alike in earnestness of purpose, but characteristically
different in tone. "I hope and believe that you are going forth into life,
not to seek the applause which depends on the fleeting breath of your
fellow-men, nor that success which ends only in this life, but that you will
remember that another Eye besides that of man is upon you, and that a higher
approbation is to be won than that of your fellow-creatures."
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