Little Jock Elliot at Hermitage Water

History does not always turn on the man with the title. Sometimes it turns on the man on the path: a rider of no rank, no estate, no portrait, who in the space of one shot puts a queen on the road to her bed of fever, and from that bed onto the road to Fotheringhay. The Borders knew this. The Borders had a word for it. The word was reiver, and it covered a great deal of ground.

THE NAME ON THE PATH

Liddesdale in the autumn of 1566 was not a county so much as a condition. The Crown's writ ran as far as the last hill the Sheriff would ride to, and no further. Between Hermitage Water and the Cheviot the riding-clans, Armstrong and Elliot and Nixon and Croser, held the ground their grandfathers had held: by horse, by lance, by the watch-fire on the peel-tower roof, by the readiness to be up and away in the saddle inside the time it took a cooking-pot to boil. The Elliot of Park were one branch of that name, seated at Larriston, in the upper Liddel above Newcastleton. Little Jock was the by-name the country had given him to tell him from the other Jocks: the Borders, having only six surnames to share among five thousand souls, ran on by-names the way a town runs on street-signs. He was, by the best reckoning of the family annals, about thirty. He had ridden in the cattle-raid of the previous week. He had taken about sixty head off the Crown tenants at Newcastleton. He was, by the law as the law was written in Edinburgh, a thief; by the law as the law was understood between Hermitage and the Tyne, a working man at his trade.

THE LIEUTENANT IN PURSUIT

James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, was the Crown's answer to Liddesdale. Thirty years old, Lord Lieutenant of the Marches, a Hepburn of Hailes, a soldier who had been in France and the Low Countries and back again, he had been sent south by Mary with a free hand to break the riding-clans by hanging or by sword. He had been in the saddle for a week already, sleeping in the tower-rooms of Hermitage Castle, the squat black keep on the bank of the burn, half a mile from where the bridle-path narrowed between two whin-banks. On the morning of Monday the seventh of October he was riding the path westward with a small escort of Hepburn men. The light was the pale light of an October that had not yet committed to winter. The burn was running high from the rain of the weekend. There was a smell of wet bracken and horse.

TWENTY PAST NINE

At about a hundred yards Little Jock saw the Lieutenant and the Lieutenant saw him. There was no question of turning. The path was a single horse wide between the whins. He knew the man on the horse opposite by the cut of the coat and the colour of the escort's livery: the Crown officer for the March, the man with the commission. If he was taken alive he would be at the end of a Jedburgh rope inside three weeks; the Borders had a name for that too, Jeddart justice, the hanging first and the trial after. The path was the path. The fight would be the horse-pistol at thirty yards, and after that, if either of them was still in the saddle, the broadsword at the close. He had a single-barrel matchlock loaded with two balls in the Border fashion, for the finishing-shot at five yards. Bothwell, by the look of the holster at his saddle-bow, had the new Crown wheel-lock, double-barrelled, the weapon a man in Edinburgh paid forty pounds Scots for. He thought, as the two horses began to move toward one another at the half-canter, that Bothwell would fire first and Bothwell would probably hit. The question was whether the hit was the killing one. The question, beyond that, was whether a man with a broken thigh on the ground could put a ball through a helmet at five yards. He had seen it done at Carlisle the summer before, by an Armstrong against a Graham, and the Armstrong had lived. So the calculation, the cold quick calculation of a man whose trade was the saddle and the powder, came down to two seconds and one shot, and he set his weight forward in the stirrups and let the horse go.

THE EXCHANGE

At thirty yards Bothwell's first ball took him in the left thigh, broke the femur clean, and put him on the path. The horse went on without him. He came down on his right shoulder, kept his grip on the second pistol, and rolled onto his back. Bothwell, by the convention of the finishing-shot at a fallen man, walked his horse up to about five yards. Little Jock, lying with the leg already filling his breeches with blood, lifted the matchlock with both hands and fired. The first ball took Bothwell in the side under the left armpit, a flesh-wound by the Hermitage chaplain's evening report. The second ball, fired in the same charge by the Border practice, struck the forehead of the Earl's helmet, ricocheted under the rim, and opened a three-inch gash in his scalp. A fragment, the chaplain wrote, came off the helmet and broke a piece of bone in the left arm above the elbow. Bothwell went sideways from the saddle and was caught by the two Hepburn riders before he hit the ground.

THE TOWER-ROOM AT HERMITAGE

They carried him back along the path to the keep. Father Andrew Sinclair, the Hermitage chaplain, set him on a board in the upper tower-room and wrote in the castle register that evening that the three wounds were, in his judgement, possibly mortal. The Earl did not speak for the first two days. The escort sent a rider north to Edinburgh and a second rider east to Jedburgh, where the Queen was holding the autumn Assize. Out on the path, by the time the chaplain put down his pen, Little Jock Elliot was already an hour dead, the femoral having let go inside the first ten minutes. His clansmen came down off Larriston at dusk, lifted him onto a garron, and rode him home up the burn. He was buried the next day in the small chapel-yard at Larriston, with the broken pistol laid across his chest, by the family custom. The cattle from Newcastleton, by the same custom, were not given back.

THE QUEEN AT JEDBURGH

Mary was twenty-three. The news from Hermitage reached her at Jedburgh on the evening of the fifteenth of October. She set out at first light on the sixteenth with an escort of six, rode the twenty-five miles south to the keep in heavy rain that did not lift, sat three hours by the board in the tower-room, set the chaplain to a watching prayer through the night, and rode the twenty-five miles back to Jedburgh in the dark. Fifty miles in a day in October rain, for a woman who had not been well that summer. She took to her bed at Jedburgh the next morning with a fever that, by the attendance of Dr Bourgoyne, came within an hour or two of carrying her off. She was ten days at the edge. When she rose again she was, by every later reading of her reign, no longer the Queen who had ridden out: she was the woman who had ridden to Hermitage. The Darnley murder followed in February. The marriage to Bothwell followed in May. Carberry Hill followed in June, Loch Leven in July, the long English captivity after that, and at the last, twenty-one Februaries on from the day on the path, the block at Fotheringhay. A line can be drawn from each of those rooms back to the tower-room above Hermitage Water, and from the tower-room back to the whin-bank where Little Jock Elliot, with a broken thigh and a single shot, fired.

THE CAIRN

The Borders is a country that keeps its accounts in stone. The Hermitage Castle still stands above the water, a black keep in the care of Historic Environment Scotland on the A6088, the roof gone but the walls square. The bridle-path is still walkable; the South Liddesdale Way runs along it. In 1966, four hundred years after the morning of the seventh of October, the Elliot Clan Society of Scotland put up a cairn at the spot, with an inscription in Borders Scots: 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. The cairn is small, waist-high, mortared field-stone. There is no plaque to the Queen. There does not need to be. The country reads the cairn and the keep together, and knows what the path did.