On January 22nd 1732, Rachel Chiesley, Lady Grange was taken from her Edinburgh lodgings, ending up being “imprisoned” on the remote Scottish archipelago of St Kilda.
This is quite an extraordinary tale, of a privileged strong woman being spirited away from her home in Niddry Street in the Old Town, Cassells Old and New has a wee bit about it stating she was “seized her with violence, knocking out some of her teeth, and, tying a cloth over her head, bore her forth, as if she had been a corpse.”
The bit about the corpse relates to the fact that later a funeral, attended by her children, was faked by her husband with Lady Grange dispatched first to Polmaise and eventually on to the Western Isles, where she lived in a primitive stone cleit, a stone storage hut or bothy, uniquely found on the remote isles.
A bit of background on the Lady herself, she was born the child of John Chiesley of Dalry (Edinburgh, not Ayrshire) who was convicted of murder and publicly hanged for his crime in the city when she was just ten years old.
Raised as one of many children, Rachel Chiesley met her future husband James Erskine – just six months her junior – in the early 1700s, marrying him in 1707 as the Act of Union formally bound Scotland and England, becoming Lord and Lady Grange. I covered Lord Erskine on the anniversary of his death in a post Here
The marriage was not a happy one, the term “unlikely bedfellows" has been used, and that she allegedly keeping a razor blade under her pillow to remind him of her volatile nature and that she was the daughter of a murderer; he was apparently forced to marry her at the point of a gun owing to a pregnancy out of wedlock, your actual shotgun wedding!
The household was a hotbed of intrigue, Erskine may have been at the beck and call of the Westminster Government, but his brother was a more complex creature who became known as “Bobbin John” a man of contraries, he voted for the Union of the countries, but The Earl of Mar, to call him by his title, by 1715, was at the head of the Jacobite Uprising of that year.
Lord Grange was in favour of the Jacobite rebellion, but kept it quiet in public circles due to his esteemed public position. As his marriage descended into trouble due in no small part to his infidelity, he became convinced that Lady Grange would expose his traitorous views.
As manager of his affairs, Lady Grange was regularly privy to secrets relating to her husband’s affairs, including the reality that Preston House was being used as a meeting place for those interested in Jacobitism.
Although her husband frequently wrote her flattering letters from London, as her frustration grew over his infidelity and political activity, suspicion mounted she would try to put a stop to one by blowing the whistle on the other.
Lord Grange roped in colleagues to deal with his wife, enraging her further by making sure the lock to his study was changed to prevent her gaining access to his papers – and she wasn’t the sort of woman to give in quietly.
In a daring and elaborate plan, Lord Grange and his co-conspirators planned a ruthless attack, kidnapping Lady Grange from her home in the middle of the night and whisking her away to North Uist.
Here she stayed for a few days before making the journey to Hirta in St Kilda - over 40 miles away from the Western Isles.
She would never see him or her children again, with friends and neighbours left mystified by her disappearance.
Lady Grange was firstly taken to the island of Heskeir, then to St Kilda and later to Skye where she would eventually die in 1745 – although her husband had previously held a “funeral” at the city’s Greyfriars Kirk for her many years before.
On the islands she lived in virtual solitude, except for the company of at least one of her husband’s colleagues, instructed to watch her at all times, and a Gaelic-speaking maid from whom she learned to speak the language of the islands.
Despite the bafflement caused by island life and the Gaelic language, Lady Grange lived amongst the fishermen and local tradespeople of the island.
She spent nearly ten years in exile before dying in Skye in 1745 - and all the while still married to her husband of 25 years.
Despite her being “dead” there are letters held by Edinburgh University, describes in brutal detail how she was beaten and seized from her home by a group of men including Roderick McLeod, writer to the signet and several servants of another leading Jacobite. Lord Lovat, aye The Old Fox himself!
One letter, written on January 20th 1738 and marked St Kilda, said: “They threw me down upon the floor in a barbarous manner. I cried murther, murther (murder), they stopped my mouth. I pulled out the cloth and told Rod McLeod I knew him.”
Lady Grange claimed in the letter that her hair and her teeth were “torn out” by the mob.
She lived in isolation for two years on the Monach Isles before being moved in June 1734 to St Kilda. Here she lived in a tiny stone cleit, now recorded as Cleit 85, on Hirta. Lady Grange, in a further letter, described Hirta as a “vile, neasty (sic), stinking poor isle" where she was unable to communicate, given she did not know Gaelic. As always there are conflicting versions of this story, I can't really see how Lady Grange would have survived in a cleat and knowing the Highlands (and Islands) hospitality, she would have been invited into a home on Hirta. The structure that Rachel was held on St Kilda is seen in the second pic, the Ambaille website say, there is no evidence to support this. For much of her time on the Archipelago she was said to " have drunk all the whisky she could get her hands on and wandered the shores"
Later, she she was moved to Skye in 1742 where she died four years later, aged 64.
She was “decently interred” shortly after her death at a churchyard at Waternish but for some unknown reason, a second funeral was held at Duirnish some time thereafter, where a crowd gathered the watch a coffin filled with turf and stones put to rest in the ground. History records her grave is at Trumpan Churchyard the headstone reads:
RIP
Rachel
wife of
The Hon James Erskine
Lord Grange
Died AD 1746
Nobody knows why three funerals for Lady Grange were found to be necessary.
The story of Lady Grange is a complex tale and if you want to find out more their is a full book about it The Unreliable Death of Lady Grange is available on Amazon, only £2.89 on kindle or £7.13 in paperback, it has many great reviews and 4 and half stars over 37 reviews, one stating it is “A must for Outlander fans”
