Duke James, who throve at the expense of his brothers, did not play a very heroic part at this time, appearing on the scene only in the Duke of Cumberland’s tail, to find his castle half ruined by that siege; then, perhaps at a hint from Government, he dismantled its fortifications, turning it into a _château_. But that second duke cuts a misty figure as possible hero of romance, the heroine, in real life, being a rich Hammersmith widow whom he married. To this couple’s wooing is attributed the well-known song of “Huntingtower,” a Scottish variant of the “Nut Brown Maid” and of Prior’s “Henry and Emma,” in which, after representing himself as poor, a married man with three children, and a gay deceiver, the lover declares that he has been only trying the lady’s heart--“And all that’s mine is thine, lassie.”
Except “St. Johnston’s Bower,” thrown in for rhyme, the properties enumerated in the song did belong to the Duke of Atholl; this Duke seems the only “Jamie” of the race; and his first bride was a Jean. But this must in any case be a much idealised account of a courtship, probably carried on more by means of lawyers’ settlements than of sentimental duets. A more clear case of romance, turned the other way out, seems to be that the Duke’s second wife, Jean Drummond, had jilted a less eligible lover, Dr. Austin, who revenged himself by the song, “For lack of gold she left me O!” but eventually, in marrying another lady of rank, found consolation for the heart-breaking of what is also an old story:
She me forsook for a great Duke, And to endless woe she has left me O! A star and garter have more art Than youth, a true and faithful heart; For empty titles we must part-- For glittering show she has left me O!
Murray, the Atholl duke’s family name, on to which have been grafted two of Perthshire’s proudest titles, is an exotic here, like the larches that, the earliest on British soil, were transplanted from Tirol to Dunkeld; and, indeed, the same thing may be said of several great Highland families, no more autochthonous in their present habitat than a brick suburb on a chalky soil. The presumed Murray ancestor is said to have been a Flemish knight, who, like other foreign adventurers, set up a Scottish house in the service of feudalising kings. If he took his name from Moray, it was not in this region that his family struck deep root. The historical earls of Moray bore other names, while in the upsetting time of Bruce and Baliol, the Murrays are seen gaining charters on the Forth and the Clyde; then presently they have crept northwards into Strathearn, and under the James reigns came to be firmly seated in the Perthshire Highlands, overlaying there the royal name of Stewart, that also had spread from the south. The Atholl earldom they got by marriage with a Stewart. Their dukedom dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the Government sought to bind in strawberry leaves several of those Highland Samsons.