This lecture presents a personal and richly detailed account of the friendship and correspondence between Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) and his fourth cousin Hugh Scott of Harden (1758–1841), ancestor of the author, James Hepburne Scott. It blends family history with extracts from Scott’s letters, offering insights into social customs, political sentiments, and daily life in the Scottish Borders during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
8. Scott as a Connector of People
He helped his son Walter with introductions and social placement, always mindful of reputation and propriety—especially through the aid of Mrs Scott of Harden.
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Abbotsford
Mertoun
Sir Walter
Charlotte
Hugh Scott of Mertoun
Harriet his wife
Pat Hepburne Scott, my great uncle, who collected the letters
Sir Walter
Harriet
Two of the Mertoun children
The Thomas Lawrence portrait. Hangs in Windsor Castle
I’m especially delighted to introduce today’s speaker James Hepburne Scott, who is presently President of the Royal Scottish Forestry Society, a position which coincides fittingly with the Club’s honouring of Scott’s own lifelong interest in afforestation as part of this year’s events. He is proud to call himself a kinsman of Sir Walter Scott, his ancestor and Sir Walter being third cousins. More recently his parents were on good terms with Patricia and Dame Jean Maxwell-Scott. Through the Royal Scottish Forestry Society, he himself was an early adviser to the Abbotsford Trust on the management of the woods on the estate. His wife, Christian, also worked for two years in a voluntary capacity on the re-design and furnishing of the Hope Scott Wing at Abbotsford.
His talk today will focus on Scott’s relationship with the Scotts of Harden at Mertoun House. Much has been made by biographers of Scott’s feelings of clan loyalty to the Scotts of Buccleuch, but if anything he had a closer and more intimate sense of kinship with the family branch of Harden. He took especial delight in his lineal descent from Walter Scott, 3rd Laird of Harden (‘Auld Wat’), married to the legendary ‘Flower of Yarrow’, and renowned for his border exploits as recounted to Scott by his grandmother. Scott’s grandfather held the lease of Sandyknowe, and of course Smailholm Tower with it, from ‘his Chief and relative’ (Scott’s words) the then laird. And he was on intimate terns throughout his adult life with current laird, Hugh Scott and his Saxon wife Harriet Bruhl, daughter of a famous chess-player, and herself a supplier of German books to Scott at the onset of his literary career. In researching materials for a forthcoming edition of Scott’s Shorter Verse, we were able to locate two original Scott poems in the Scott of Harden papers now lodged in the Register House, the first swearing loyalty the Scott of Hardens’ first-born son Charles Walter who sadly died in 1806, another providing at Harriet’s request an epitaph for another son, George who died prematurely in 1830 while rector of a parish in Devonshire. An earlier Journal entry by Scott in 1827 gives a sense of how joyous the relationship between the two families, enhanced by Scott’s move to Abbotsford in 1812, could be in more favourable circumstances: ‘We arrived at Mertoun yesterday and heard with some surprize that George had gone up in an Air balloon and ascended two miles and a half above this sublunary earth. … Honest George, I certainly did not suspect him of being so flighty’. I’m sure I’m not alone in being eager to hear more of such happenings from someone so closely connected with the Hardens of Mertoun.