Clan Elliot · 1566
Little Jock Elliot at Hermitage Water
On the morning of the seventh of October 1566, on a bridle-path running west of the Hermitage Castle keep above Hermitage Water in Liddesdale on the central Scottish Border, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, then thirty years old, the Lord Lieutenant of the Marches under Mary, Queen of Scots, met in single combat a Liddesdale reiver known by the Borders by-name *Little Jock Elliot of the Park*, of the Elliot of Park branch of the Elliot riding-clan family. Bothwell, riding the March in pursuit of the Elliot raid-band of the previous week, came on Little Jock Elliot on the path; the two men charged each other with horse-pistols. Bothwell fired first and hit Elliot in the thigh; Elliot, falling, fired his second pistol at point-blank range and hit Bothwell three times (in the head, the left arm, and the side). Bothwell was lifted from the saddle by his escort and carried bleeding to the Hermitage keep, where he was held in a tower-room for the next eight days, not expected to recover. Mary, Queen of Scots, on the news from Jedburgh on the fifteenth of October, rode the fifty miles from Jedburgh to Hermitage and back in a single day to attend to him, and contracted, on the return ride home in heavy rain, the near-fatal fever that nearly killed her at Jedburgh through the next ten days. The Mary-Bothwell political-and-personal entanglement that began at Hermitage in October 1566 would, by the Darnley murder of February 1567 and the Mary-Bothwell marriage of May 1567, run through to Mary's deposition in July 1567 and the eventual execution at Fotheringhay in 1587.
It is twenty past nine on the morning of Monday the seventh of October 1566, on a bridle-path on the west side of the burn that runs from Hermitage Water past the Hermitage Castle keep in central Liddesdale, in pale autumn light off the Border hills. He is, by the best estimate of the Borders annals, of an unrecorded age (probably about thirty; the Elliot-of-Park family register of the period has not survived). He is Little Jock Elliot of the Park, of the Elliot of Park branch of the Elliot riding-clan family of Liddesdale. He is in Liddesdale-Borders riding-dress: a buff leather doublet over a mail-shirt, a steel sallet helmet, a broadsword at the belt, two horse-pistols in a double holster at the saddle-bow.
On the path coming the other way, at about a hundred yards' distance, is James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, thirty, the Lord Lieutenant of the Borders under Mary, Queen of Scots. Bothwell has been on the Borders since the Liddesdale raid of the previous week, in pursuit of the Elliot raid-band that had taken about sixty head of cattle from the tenants of the Crown lands at Newcastleton.
Little Jock thinks: Bothwell is the Crown officer for the March. Bothwell is on the Crown commission. If Bothwell takes me alive I will be hanged at Jedburgh inside three weeks.
He thinks: the path is narrow. The fight will be the horse-pistol exchange at thirty yards and then, if either of us survives that, the broadsword at the close. The Park Elliot family will, by the Borders convention, take the feud against the Hepburn line for the next two generations.
He thinks: Bothwell will fire first. Bothwell has the Crown double-barrel new-pattern wheel-lock pistol. I have a single-shot Border matchlock. Bothwell will probably hit. The question is whether the hit is the killing one.
The two men charged each other along the bridle-path at about a half-canter. At about thirty yards Bothwell fired his first pistol; the ball took Little Jock Elliot in the left thigh, broke the femur, and dropped him from the saddle to the path. He lay on the ground with the second matchlock-pistol in his right hand. Bothwell, by the Borders convention of the finishing-shot at a fallen opponent, rode up to about five yards' distance.
Little Jock, lying on the path, fired his second pistol. The ball, by the Hermitage-Castle medical report of the evening, took Bothwell in the side under the left armpit (a flesh-wound, by the report); a second ball (the pistol had been loaded with two balls in the single barrel by the Borders practice of the final-shot at close range) struck the forehead of Bothwell's helmet and ricocheted into his scalp, opening a three-inch wound. A third ricochet (the second ball off the helmet, by the report) struck Bothwell's left arm above the elbow, breaking a bone-fragment of the radius.
Bothwell was lifted from the saddle by his escort of two Hepburn riders and carried back to the Hermitage keep, half a mile north on the path. The Hermitage chaplain Father Andrew Sinclair pronounced the three-wound combination possibly mortal in the Hermitage Castle evening register-entry of the seventh. Little Jock Elliot, on the path, was dead within the hour, of the thigh wound's femoral-artery haemorrhage. His body was carried back to the Elliot of Park family-seat at Larriston by his clansmen and buried in the Larriston small chapel-yard the next day.
Mary, Queen of Scots, then twenty-three, was at Jedburgh holding the Border Assize-Court of the autumn 1566 circuit. The news of Bothwell's wounds reached Jedburgh on the evening of the fifteenth of October. Mary set out the next morning, the sixteenth, with a escort of six Hepburn-and-Erskine retainers, rode the twenty-five miles from Jedburgh to Hermitage Castle in heavy autumn rain, was at the Hermitage by the mid-afternoon. She attended Bothwell in the tower-room for about three hours, set the Hermitage chaplain to a watching prayer-vigil through the night, and rode the twenty-five miles back to Jedburgh the same evening, arriving at Jedburgh after dark in heavy rain.
Mary contracted, by the twenty-fifty-mile-round in October rain, a near-fatal fever at Jedburgh the next morning. She was, by the Jedburgh medical attendance of Dr Bourgoyne, near death for about ten days. The fever became, in the popular tradition of the Borders, the Riding-to-Hermitage fever; the Mary-Bothwell political-and-personal entanglement, by every later Mary-historian (Antonia Fraser, John Guy), dates from the Hermitage visit. The Darnley murder of February 1567, the Mary-Bothwell marriage of the fifteenth of May 1567, the Carberry Hill surrender of the fifteenth of June, the Loch Leven abdication of the twenty-fourth of July, all follow on the Hermitage Castle path-ambush of the seventh of October 1566.
The Hermitage Castle is, in 2025, a ruin in the care of Historic Environment Scotland on the A6088 Liddesdale road. The Hermitage Water bridle-path where Little Jock Elliot was killed is still walkable; the modern footpath, the South Liddesdale Way, runs along it. The spot is marked by a cairn put up by the Elliot Clan Society of Scotland in 1966, the four-hundredth anniversary. The cairn-inscription, in Borders Scots, reads: here at Hermitage Water on the seventh of October, fifteen sixty-six, Little Jock Elliot of the Park took James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, and on his way fell himself.