Dance The Ninety-second 4195

(or “Marquis of Huntly’s Highlanders”)

Three generations of Gordons raised regiments for the King’s service. In 1759 Catherine, Dowager Duchess of Gordon, widow of Cosmo George, 3rd Duke, raised the 89th Highland Regiment, the Duke of Gordon’s Own Highlanders, which was disbanded in 1765 at the end of the Seven Years’ War. Between 1778 and 1783 Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon (1743–1827), raised two regiments of Gordon Fencibles for service in the American War. In 1790, George Gordon, Marquess of Huntly and eldest son and heir of the fourth duke, raised a company of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment). Huntly servedin both the Black Watch and the 3rd Regiment of Foot Guards (The Scots Guards).

In 1794 the 100th Highland Regiment was raised by the fourth duke and was commanded by his son. The regiment became the 92nd in 1798. The 92nd was amalgamated with the 75th (Stirlingshire) Regiment of Foot to become the 1st and 2nd Battalions, The Gordon Highlanders, in 1881. The nickname for the regiment was the Gay Gordons.

As the old 100th the regiment was in Ireland and between 1799 and 1815 it fought valiantly from the battle of Egmont-op-Zee to the great victory at Waterloo. The Marquess of Huntly was colonel and then general and he commanded the regiment in Ireland, The Netherlands, Spain and Corsica. From 1803 until 1806 Huntly was commander of the forces in Scotland.

George Gordon, Marquess of Huntly and 5th and last Duke of Gordon (1770–1836) was an extraordinary man. Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus in her Memoirs of a Highland Lady described him in 1804: “We were often over at Kinrara, the Duchess having perpetual dances, either in the drawing-room or the servants’ hall … We children sometimes displayed our accomplishments on these occasions in a prominent manner, to the delight, at any rate, of our dancing-master. Lady Jane was really clever in the Gillie Callum and the Shean Trews, I little behind her in the single and double fling, the shuffle and heel-and-toe step. The boys were more blundering, and had to bear the good-natured laugh of many a hard-working lass and lad who, after the toil of the day, footed it neatly and lightly in the ball-room till near midnight. Lord Huntly was the life of all these meetings; he was young, gay, handsome, fond of his mother, and often with her, and so general a favourite, that all the people seemed to wake up when he came amongst them.” Another entry in her memoirs describes the Marquess’ “peculiar laugh” and his “queer hats”, but perhaps the most intriguing was the recollection of the soldier-hero and one of her first dinner parties at Kinrara as a young lady recently come out into society. “I was thoroughly uncomfortable during an evening that might have afforded me pleasure. Lord Huntly, too, increased this agitation by calling attention to me most unpleasantly. It was during dinner, that great long table filled with guests, covered with plate, brilliantly lighted, and a servant behind every chair. He was the greatest fidget on earth. He had a set of rules for his household, any infringement of which was visited by rigorous punishment. He used to be up himself to call the maids in the morning, in the kitchen at odd times to see what was doing; at no hour of the day, or the night indeed, was the family safe from the bright – very bright – eyes of my lord, peering here, there, and everywhere. So during the dinner he was glancing about all round the room, talking, laughing, apparently only intent on being agreeable; yet he knew all that was going on at the sideboard behind him better than Wagstaffe who presided there. The gentlemen-sportsmen between whom I was placed found very little to interest them in the shy replies made by a young girl, hardly beyond childhood, to their few civil speeches. They busied themselves elsewhere and left me to the use of my eyes, and for them there was abundant amusement. I was accustomed to long dinners with all their tiresome courses, therefore bore the tedium of this very patiently. At last we reached the ‘sweets,’ and I took some jelly; not finding a fork beside my plate I asked my attendant for one, very gently too – I hardly heard my own voice. But Lord Huntly heard it right well – out he burst: ‘No fork for Miss Grant! A fork for Miss Grant Rothiemurhcus directly! Wagstaffe, pray who attends to these things? Who sees the covers laid? Great inattention somewhere! This must not happen again. Lizzy, have you got your fork? Now for the jelly, ha! ha! ha!’ How I wished I had made shift with the spoon. I would gladly have sunk under the table, for the storm had hushed every voice and turned every eye on poor me. I hardly ever remember feeling more miserable.”

The marquess remained a bachelor until he was in his mid-forties. On 11 December, 1813, he married Elizabeth Brodie, daughter of Alexander Brodie of Arnhall. Elizabeth Grant comments: “Lord Huntly, now in the decline of his rackety life, overwhelmed with debts, sated with pleasure, tired of fashion, the last male heir of the Gordon line – married … His bride was young, and good, and rich, but neither clever nor handsome. She made him very happy, and paid his most pressing debts, that is her father did, odl Mr Brodie of the Burn, brother to Brodie of Brodie, who either himself or somebody for him had had the good sense to send him with a pen to a counting house instead of with a sword to the battle-field.”

In 1827 Lord Huntly succeeded his father as fifth Duke of Gordon and he died on 28 May, 1836, childless. The chiefship of the Clan Gordon and the Huntly titles passed to his cousin, George Gordon, as fifth Lord Aboyne and ninth Marquess of Huntly. The estates went to his nephew, Charles Gordon Lennox, 5th Duke of Richmond and Lennox. In 1876 the Dukedom of Gordon was revived in the Lennox line.

One cannot leave the Gordons without realling the Duchess of Gordon, the mother of the Marquess of Huntly.

Jane, Duchess of Gordon, was born in 1749 in a second floor flat in Hyndford’s Close off Edinburgh’s High Street, the second of the three daughters of Sir William Maxwell of Monreith, Wigtownshire, and his wife Magdalen Blair of Blair. She died in 1812 at Pulteney’s Hotel in London, completely estranged from her husband. During the intervening years, she lived on an eccentric and very grand scale, a colourful leader of society, a lavish patroness of the arts, a beautiful and rather coarse woman whose years were filled with great personal triumphs and personal tragedies.

In 1767, at the age of eighteen, she married Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon. (See also “Cauld Kail”) She bore him seven children, two sons, George and Alexander who died young, and five daughters. Her daughters and the marriages she arranged for them were her great glory and society’s amusement. Charlotte married Charles Lennox, 4th Duke of Richmond. Susan became the wife of William, 5th Duke of Manchester. Georgina married John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford. Louisa married Charles, 2nd Marquess of Cornwallis, while Madeline was the wife for a time of Sir Robert Sinclair of Murkle, a Gordon cousin, and later Charles Fysche Palmer of Luckley Park.

In her happier days the duchess lived at Gordon Castle near Fochabers in Morayshire and during the London season she held a Tory salon at her house in Pall Mall. After she and the duke became estranged she took up residence in a cottage at Kinrara in Inverness-shire where she lived the simple life most magnificently. Of her Elizabeth Grant wrote in an entry for 1804: “This beautiful and very cultivated woman had never, I fancy, lived happily with her duke. His habits and her temper not suiting, they found it a wise plan to separate, and she had for the last few years spent her summers at a little farm on the Badenoch property … and here I have heard my mother say that the Duchess was happier and more agreeable and the society she gathered around her far pleasanter, than it ever was afterwards in the new cottage villa she built about a mile nearer to us. It was a sort of backwoods life, charming to young people amid such scenery, a dramatic emancipation form the forms of society that for a little while every season was delightful, particularly as there was no real roughing in it … Her favourite footman, Long James, a very handsome, impudent person, but an excellent servant for that sort of wild life, able to put his hand to any work, played the violin remarkably well, and as every tenth Highlander at least plays on the same instrument tolerably, there was no difficulty in getting up a highly satisfactory band on any evening that the guests were disposed for dancing. Half the London world of fashion, all the clever people that could be hunted out from all parts, all the north country, all of the neighborhood from far and near without regard to wealth and station, and all the kith and kin of both Gordons and Maxwells, flocked to this encampment in the wilderness during the fine autumns to enjoy the free life, the pure air, and the wit and fun the Duchess brought with her to the mountains.”

There are three outstanding pictures that bring to vivid life the Duchess of Gordon. The first is the famous beauty painted in 1775 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The second is a legendary portrayal of the duchess in the regimental jacket and bonnet of the Gordon Highlanders, mounted on a grey horse, pipers in attendance, offering the bounty of a guinea and a kiss to all able-bodied men willing to enlist for King George and the Duke of Gordon. The third picture is that of the patroness of the arts in her Edinburgh drawing-room, surrounded by the gifted and the wealthy, giving rapt attention to the newly discovered genius of the Scottish literary world, Robert Burns.

The Duchess of Gordon was also an enthusiastic patroness of Niel Gow and it was to her that he dedicated Part First of the Complete Repository of Original Scots Slow Strathspeys and Dances of 1799. Another admirer was Robert Couper, poet, surgeon and physician to the Duke of Gordon, who wrote the charming “Kinrara”.

Red gleams the sun on yon hill tap,
  The dew sits on the gowan;
Deep murmurs thro’ her glens the Spey,
  Around Kinrara rowan.
Where art thou, fairest, kindest lass?
  Alas! wert thou but near me,
Thy gentle soul, thy melting eye
  Would ever, ever cheer me.

The lav’rock sings amang the clouds,
  The lambs they sport sae cheerie,
And I sit weeping by the birk,
  O where art thou, my dearie?
Aft may I meet the morning dew,
  Lang greet till I be weary;
Thou canna, winna, gentle maid,
  Thou canna be my dearie.