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There is a touch of romance
in the broken history of the handful of Scots—mostly lowlanders and
dissidents, as the Poles called them—who once sought shelter and
livelihood, sometimes a competence, in the Polish Republic. For nothing
could be wider than the difference between the plodding, matter-of-fact
temperaments of the Chalmers, Davidsons, Tamsens, Thors, Gerns, and Rosses,
and the people they came to live with, people who despised trade, and kept
their rich, corn-bearing country by the strength of their swords alone. Of
the more adventurous spirits, the Gordons, Stuarts, and the Murrays, who
fought, as soldiers of fortune, now for the Poles against the Swedes, now
for the Swedes against the Poles, then, as often as not, with the
Muscovite against both their former companions in arms, little, alas, is
known. So many were the wars that devastated Poland, so rich the booty her
foes took away, that only a chance line here and there, left to us in some
dry municipal deed, hints at the good tales they would tell, could their
spirits rise again upon the battle-fields of Esthonia, Livland, and
Muscovy. That these men, who died fighting, were of very different mettle
from those who have left their records in the Green Book of the Lublin
Brotherhood there can be no doubt. Living, as they did, by their swords,
they looked down on the traders of Lublin, Cracow, and Warsaw, as did the
Polish nobility. Their religion formed another link with the people by
whose sides they fought, so that Gordons, Leslies, and Murrays seem to
have assimilated and did not go back to Scotland. The Scottish traders
were more in touch with the Germans, who had long since settled in Polish
cities, since a Pole who left his arms to trade was punished with the loss
of those privileges which nobility gave him. True, Prince Janusz Radziwill,
himself a Protestant, became a patron of the dissidents; but the Scots who
served him were soldiers. The Suchodolskis helped the Scottish brethren of
Lublin and Belzyce; but the bulk of the nation looked on them as
strangers, and despised them as merchants. So there is little wonder that
they looked forward to returning to Scotland when they had made their
fortunes. Many must have realised this hope, for there are so few traces
of the Scottish merchants having left a mark upon the town population. A
curious point about the Green Book of the Lublin Brotherhood is that the
first part only is written in English. Afterwards, Polish and a little
German is used. Did the ‘Scottish Gentlemen’ forget English, or did they
write in Polish just because many Poles and Germans had joined them? The
scantiness of the material to hand makes a continuous historical sketch of
their lot in Poland impossible. Perhaps papers which would clear away the
mist are still lying hidden away in the manors and presbyteries of Poland
and Lithuania. Perhaps that wonderful library of the Zaluskis, which the
Cossacks carried off from Warsaw to St. Petersburg, still hold tales of
the adventurous Scots. But, though the cases where these volumes and
manuscripts, so rudely packed that many priceless ones were shaved off to
make them fit in, still lie in the Petersburg libraries, their present
holders refuse to give them up, so that all research in that direction is
impossible. There was a colony of Scots at Kejdany, who were in the
service of Prince Janusz Radziwill. Most of the Kejdany archives were
destroyed by fire in the seventeenth century. The few fragments saved were
put into the archives of the Reformed Church at Vilna; but they have no
reference to the Scots who lived there, though, in some complaints lodged
by the Kejdany townspeople in 1628 against pedlars who came to take their
trade from them, Scots are included in the list of peoples who do them
harm. One Kejdany name occurs in the registers of the Protestant Assembly
at Cracow: Jacob Inglis is entered as pastor at Kejdany in 1756, and
superintendent of the Lithuanian Assembly; but Janusz Radziwill and his
Scottish guards had long before passed away.
And so, whether they
bartered, or tramped the country with packs on their backs, or fought, the
Scots in Poland have only left their mark on a few charters, a few old
letters, some pages of Protestant registers, and the Green Book of the
Lublin Brotherhood. That is all. But their traditions still live: here and
there, in Polish farms and manors, you can still meet a ‘Duglas,’ a ‘Lendze,’
or an ‘Ogilvy,’ who, though he has no papers to prove it, says he knows
his forebears came from Caledonia. In notes to the transcripts in this
little book the reader will find some of the scanty facts I have been able
to find after ransacking hundreds of registers and records. Of others,
whose names appear in no deeds, or other documents, I can but give the
following account:--
Amongst the earliest
Scottish names are those of Andrew and Henry Auchterlang (Auchterlony?),
described in a record, now in the archives of Warsaw, as ‘Filii Alexandri
Burgen dicti Burgi et Isabellae Lisiae et ex Cornitibus procedentum.’ The
register states that they lived in the town of Sieradz, in the Province of
Kalisz, from about 1617. Andrew had a son, Albert, whose name is mentioned
in a Sieradz record of 1685, and again in 1649, as being an inhabitant of
that town. The register of 1630 says that a relation of the Auchterlangs,
one Alexander Lin Aberbrodek (of Aberbrothock?), returned to Scotland in
1680. For nearly a century after that we hear no more of the family; but
in 1724, from a list of troops quartered at the garrison of Czenstochowa,
which was a fortress as well as a monastery of the Pauline monks, we learn
that a Casimir Achterlang was Captain of the garrison. Note the Polish
Christian name—Casimir. After that all traces of the name disappear. I can
find nothing like it in any street directory, or on any list of landowners
in Poland. One ‘Eremis Englis,’ lived in Sieradz between the years 1622
and 1656.
The Dicksons, or Dixons,
were well known in the city of Dantzig. But we also find traces of them in
the Cracow registers. For instance, Alexander ‘Dikson’ was an elder of the
Cracow Protestant Congregation in 1644 and again in 1651. Wengierski, the
old annalist whose pages read like a romance, has two stories about them.
The first, dated 1597, serves him as an instance of the annoyances to
which the Cracow Dissidents were exposed at the hands of certain elements
of the population, chiefly students. Wengierski writes in Polish, and this
is a translation of what he says: ‘In the year 1597, on the twenty-first
day of February, during Lent, Miss Sophia More, of godly, evangelical
parents, being betrothed to marry Mr. Alexander Diksone, died two days
before her marriage, to the great grief of her parents and bridegroom, and
not without the astonishment of many people. And she was laid to rest in
the Burial Garden. On the next day she was found dug up, bereft of
everything in which she had been dressed, plundered and stripped and then
left lying naked, by some villains, just near the wall. But God, who is
just, did not will that their wicked deeds should remain a mystery; for,
soon afterwards, the graveclothes of the dead one were sold in the
market-place, from which, they found out who were the authors and
perpetrators of the crime, so that two of them were sentenced to death to
be beheaded in front of the Town Hall.’ In 1625 Alexander Diksone married
Justine Dugert, a Frenchwoman, who died in 1633. An Alexander Diksone
married Elisabeth Krause in the same year, but the register does not say
whether both entries refer to the same man. Who were the Mores? Where did
they come from? I cannot say. There is no more trace of them in the
annals, or the registers. Alexander’s daughter died of the plague, as
Wengierski tells us in an entry headed, ‘The Plague in Cracow.’ He says:
‘In the year 1653, when the terrible plague had scarcely abated and those
who had fled from Cracow began to return to the city, then again, in
October and November of that year, that is, in 1653, came again a smaller
plague, in which Mistress Magdalene Kesler, daughter of Mr. Alexander
Dixon and wife of Mr. Benedict Kesler, merchants of Cracow, did notice,
during her husband’s absence, that a serving-maid in the house in which
she lived had caught the plague, and left Cracow as soon as possible,
together with certain of her household, with the idea of living with some
of her kinsfolk at Podgora whilst this second suspicious period should
last, not yet knowing that they themselves were plague-stricken. But when
they were scarcely two miles from Cracow, going towards Bechna, on the
road to Rydwan, the twelve-year-old daughter of worthy parents from
Breslau did suddenly die and was at once buried by that same roadside.
Seeing, with fear, that they were already plague-stricken, she went no
further towards Podgora, but turned back to Cracow, and lived there in a
garden, where she herself did die of the plague, being scarcely twenty
years old; and a few weeks later, her children also died. She was quietly
laid to rest in the Burial Garden by the Shooters’ Field.’
The Davidsons, prosperous
merchants, and much respected, belong rather to Dantsig than to Cracow or
Warsaw. But they migrated to Dantzig from Zamosc, a town which arose under
the castle of the magnates, the Counts Zamoyski, and where various
Scottish merchants are said to have lived. Unfortunately their records are
lost, for the town was burned in 1633, and besieged and taken several
times to boot. But a ‘Davidus Scotus de Zamoscie’ lent money to a citizen
of Warta between the years 1561 and 1577. In 1691, a William Lindsay, a
Zamosc merchant, went to Dr. Aram’s funeral and to the synodical meeting
which was held in Lublin afterwards. In 1692 a report of the Lublin Synod
mentions Andrew Davidson, Jan Akenhine, and Jacob Lendze as elders of the
Zamosc Assembly. In 1775, when the town had suffered from the ravages of
war—the Austrians captured it early in the eighteenth century—the Assembly
there wrote to ask the Synod for some church plate. The letter is signed
with several names, these being Scottish—John Lindsay, Daniel Walter
Ogilvie (Postmaster), and Daniel George Ogilvie. A Francis de Ogilvie was
student of the Academy in 1805. In 1755 a Jacob Ross writes from Zamosc on
church business. To-day, Zamosc is a squalid little place, sixty-five per
cent. of its inhabitants being Jews. As late as 1807, one Anthony Makay
was studying at the Zamosc Academy. Transcripts about the Davidson family
and their fund will be found in this book.
One cannot help wishing
that Wengierski had told us more of the Scots in Cracow. There are the ‘Karmichels,’
as their Polish neighbours called them. Jacob Karmichel was elected elder
of the Cracow Congregation in 1642 and again in 1644. In the register of
the Cracow Assembly is this entry, in Polish: ‘Anno 1655. May 8th. I
buried Mr. Jacob Karrnichel, seventy years old, merchant and citizen of
Warsaw, who, during the siege of Cracow (by the Swedes), on going up on
the roof to see what was happening, fell down two or three steps. Then he
was taken ill and died during the siege, just when Cracow surrendered. He
was a godly man’ Amongst the list of burials which took place in the
cemetery of Wielkenae, near Cracow, is this entry, in Polish ‘July 17th,
1665 Jacob Carmichael’s daughter was buried’ The same volume has ‘Anno
1678 March 28th Jacob Carmichael, Elder of the Cracow Assembly, a
God-fearing man, who, during the plague, fell ill on Christmas Day and
departed this life. He was buried here, with a great crowd of persons
attending.’ In the Grzymala register is this, ‘Circa 1642, Jacob
Carmichel was married to Anne Dixon.’
The Stuarts, of course, were closely
connected with Poland at one time of her history. Maria Clementine
Sobieska, grand-daughter of Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, married James,
son of James the Seventh of Scotland, and thereby became the mother of
Prince Charles Edward and Henry, Cardinal of York. But there were other
Stuarts who became quite Polish, though I do not know when they first went
to Poland. The name does not occur in any of the city registers. One John
Stuart lived in Warsaw towards the end of the eighteenth century, for he
is cited as a witness in a lawsuit. He married Fredericka Gerard, the
daughter of a merchant of French extraction, and had a son, Cajetan, born
in Warsaw on 17th January 1774. Cajetan became Captain of the Fifth Polish
Regiment: his portrait still hangs in the Prior’s room at Czenstochowa,
for he successfully defended that monastery-fortress against the Russians
in May 1806. A Paul Stuart was cornet in the Polish artillery in 1792. Mr.
Krasicki, who owns an estate in the Province of Piotrkoff, and whose
mother was a Stuart of the same line as Captain Cajetan, assures me that
the family has died out, the last representative being his mother’s
brother, John, who was at one time captain of the Warsaw fire brigade. Mr.
Krasicki says he had another uncle, who went to France many years ago, and
was never heard of again. In 1822 was published at Warsaw the copy of a
speech made by John Dickenson, sent, in 1615, as special envoy to Zygmund
the Third, King of Poland, by James the Sixth of Scotland, to protest
against a book published in Poland containing libels on the Stuarts.
Dickenson is reported to have said: ‘We are much astonished that a
secretary working in your Majesty’s closet and familiar with affairs of
import, should not know how a Christian king must be treated.’ Dickenson
then referred to chapters 2 and 7
volume three of the book, saying ‘It
is a collection of the blackest and most shameful libels; besides curses
laid upon Queen Elizabeth, on His Gracious Majesty my king and master, and
on the whole line of Stuarts, especially upon his grandfather as a father,
giving them such names as Phalarides, Antichrist, Domician, and Nero, I
cannot hide from you that he calls those criminals who were so justly
condemned for putting gunpowder under Westminster "exemplary men." He even
denies the king his right to the Scottish kingdom. What do I say? He
openly advertises that he is not acknowledged as a king nor counted as
amongst Christian monarchs, but that verily he is called an apostate,
Tyrant, and deserving everybody’s ill-will.’ He then demanded that the
book, written by Canon Cichowski, should be burned in the market-place.
A branch of the St. Clair
family still lives in Poland. The first to settle there, Mr. Alexander
Bower St. Clair, of the Angus line, was grandson of that Bower of
Kincaldrum who, implicated in the rebellion of ‘Forty-five, escaped to
France and became attached to the court of Louis the Fifteenth. Alexander
Bower St. Clair entered the Indian Naval Service, but settled in Lithuania
on his marriage with Countess Kossakowska. Letters he wrote to his
sister-in-law between 1845-1872 are filled with lively descriptions of his
Lithuanian home and the neighbourhood. They are, as yet, unpublished, and
in the hands of his grandson, E. Bower St. Clair, of our Consular Service.
Like the Davidsons, the
Gibsons settled in Dantzig, though in 1783 and 1784, a Mr., Mrs., and Miss
Louisa Gibsone were communicants of the Evangelical Assembly at Wiekle
Tursk. Mr. John Gibsone, great-nephew of the British Consul, Alexander
Gibsone, died in Dantzig, in February 1907. Up till 1909, his widow, a
Polish lady, was still living there.
Alexander Kennedy,
described as a Scot, appears in Warsaw city registers in 1621, for forty
florins of a charitable fund having been invested on mortgage in his
house, he paid no interest till 1639, when the whole sum owing had grown
to one hundred and twenty florins. After a protest and threats of a
lawsuit, he paid back the amount on 11th July of that year. Captain
Walter, living in Warsaw in 1655, was taxed by the Swedes. He paid fifty
florins to Gustavus.
Two Scots studied in Cracow
university in the fifteenth century. They are entered in the ‘Album
Studiosorum Universitatis Cracoviensis,’ for 1438 and 1453. Under 1438 we
have this note: ‘Johannis Petri Tamer de Cracovia’; and under 1453 the
entry, Laurencius Mathie Machaly (Macualay).’ One George Morton, described
as ‘a merchant dealing in Eastern Merchandise,’ is mentioned in the
Sieradz books in the years 1657, 1662, and 1669. He married the widow of
Thomas Hamilton, who appears to have been a merchant of Sieradz, for he
was described in a deed dated 1665, where his name is just mentioned.
There remain a few names
yet. One Mistress Anna Tamson died at Opatow on 4th October 1726. She is
buried near the church of Wielko Tursk. On 26th February 1727 Andrew
Tamson died at Opatow and was buried in the same place as his wife. There
was not a Protestant church at Opatow, so Protestants living there were
obliged to go long distances for religious services, and Andrew was a
member of the Wielko Tursk Assembly in 1708. But, at the same time, the
trading importance of Opatow, which was a link between east and west,
exporting goods both to Hungary and to Russia, and being in constant
communication with Breslau and Posen, made it an excellent centre for
merchants of all nationalities, who went there in large numbers.
In the library of the
Leszne Reformed Church is a small English Bible, published by R Norton in
1652 On the flyleaf is this inscription:—
‘This book pertains to me,
William Livingstone. William’s my name.’
Ex
‘Bono Guliemy Livingstony Anno 1688
die
‘They Byble pertains to me Patrick
Fraser. Anno 1688
die 9 bris in Lowisc.’ [Lowisc means
Lowicz, a very old Polish town in the Province of Warsaw, Opatow, in the
Province of Kalisz, exists since the thirteenth century.]
And on the back page:--
‘Gulwlmus Livingstone Est
hujus libri posessor. Anno Domino Milliesimo sexcentissimo Octuagesimo
Octavo 1688 in Opatowia die mensis 3 Septembris Gulwlmus venit ad dominum.
. . . Polonia suum 26 juny 1689.’
My meagre list of Scottish
names is almost at an end. A John Malcom was senior of the Cracow district
in about 1664. The name is used in connection with a pastor; but no
details of the Malcolms are to be found. In 1653 Jacob Hogreff married
Catherine Hensler, both of Cracow. A George ‘Kruikshank’ was elder of the
Cracow Assembly in 1647. In 1641 he married a Mistress Juger. In 1782
Alexander Watson writes to the Synod of Little Poland on church matters.
In 1780 he sent money to Claudian, a theological student, who enjoyed part
of the proceeds of the Davidson Fund, which see. Robert and John Watson,
citizens of Leszno, were ennobled in 1790. The family still lives in
Warsaw, where they carry on a printer’s and stationer’s business.
The Scots began to emigrate into
Poland during the sixteenth century: some of them went straight from
Scotland, others from Prussia, where new and severe regulations checked
their progress. Many began as mere pedlars, carrying packs on their backs;
others put their wares on a pony, or a horse, for which they paid a
special tax. Though religious toleration was one of Poland’s greatest
prides, the new-comers were not warmly welcomed, as the burghers feared
their competition. Therefore, various royal charters, of which transcripts
appear in this little book, were issued. Their business-like qualities in
the market place and their valour in the field seem to have been
acknowledged by the kings, who kept on giving the organisation of their
army supply to Scottish merchants, and often formed regiments of Scots,
who fought in the wars in Poland, and in Russia. Like other purveyors, the
Scots were supposed to follow the court, and had the right to open booths
in the cities where the Diets were held, besides having their permanent
shops in one bigger city, like Warsaw, or Cracow. Zygmund the Third, who
disliked ‘Dissidents,’ tried to curtail their privileges. In 1595 he
forbade them to build or open shops. They met with fresh oppositions from
the Polish and German townspeople, but were able to hold their own. When
Warsaw replaced Cracow as Poland’s capital, several Scottish traders
settled there, and Chalmers, who became one of the king’s secretaries, was
made Mayor of Warsaw three times. In 1649 the new king, Jan Casimir, gave
them the right to sell wine throughout the country. The troubles brought
by the plague and the Swedish wars must have affected the Scots as well.
In 1688 Scottish names are lacking among the lists of court purveyors.
From that time onward they are rarely mentioned in the deeds of the
period.
BEATRICE BASKERVILLE. |
