334 Some Traditions about Traquair. 



said, people said Lord Traquair would not allow it to he 

 opened after his father's funeral went out by it, but it was 

 shut before that. She would, no doubt, have told the story 

 if pressed, but I thought all the time she was merely 

 defending her late master's memory from the imputation of 

 an absurd caprice. 



However, what is probably the real tradition has survived 

 in Peeblesshire, and it is that Prince Charles Edward, who 

 had great and deserved confidence in his own personal 

 influence and powers of persuasion, had come to Traquair in 

 person to try to persuade the Lord Traquair of the time to 

 come "out." This must have been during his six weeks' 

 reign in Edinburgh, for when they did make up their minds 

 to march south, he commanded the division of the army 

 which went by Kelso. 



Whether Lord Traquair saw that he had lost his chance 

 by staying in Edinburgh instead of marching on London, 

 or whether he considered the expedition altogether hopeless, 

 he refused to come out, but said, no doubt when seeing the 

 Prince off at the gate, that it should never be opened until 

 he returned as King of Great Britain. 



Since the above was written, talking to the daughter of 

 a former forester at Traquair, she said that when they first 

 came there, in her childhood. Lord Traquair was still able 

 to walk about the place. That he used to talk to the 

 children and run after them, but with great difficulty, for 

 he had an extraordinarily bad stammer. His calling the 

 children Tobies, in default of further information, has the 

 sound of an old family joke, "What's your name, Toby?" 

 with a pull of the hair. And what was curious, considering 

 the family history, she had a vivid recollection of his extreme 

 and incomprehensible anger on hearing the children singing 

 a song about Prince Charlie. 



Considering that he had been born and brought up under 

 the tolerant reign of George III., and not born till some 

 forty years after the "civil war," as Ramsay of Ochtertyre 

 calls the '45, this shows rather strangely how it must have 

 been impressed on the older generation that it was as Tnucli 

 as their lives were worth, or, at all events, their place in 

 the world, to be suspected of Jacobitism. 



The speaker had no theory about tho LM-<Nit gito b-in- 



