ROMANCE OF A SCOTTISH CLAN.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3380, 27 June 1927, Page 7

ROMANCE OF A SCOTTISH CLAN.

THE COUNTESS OF SEAFIELD GOMES OF AGE.

The story of the Overseas Dominions, young as they are, is full of romantic episodes strange recovery of lost heirs, unexpected succession to title and honours. But no story can equal in romance that of the young Countess of Seafield, Nina Caroline Ogilvie-Grant, now in residence at Castle Grant, her chief ancestral seat, who comes of age to-day, and the fortuitous chance by which she has inherited great Scottish estates, and how a girl whose father and mother were born and brought up in New Zealand, some of whose forbears held all but kingly power in Scotland in ancient times, comes to be a countess in her own right, and is now one of the twenty-two peeresses who seek to obtain the privilege of their brother peers, to sit in the House of Lords, and make and revise laws as they do. It is the story of how in the ’eighties of last century an Earl of Seafield succeeded his father while he was in the first flush of manhood. Within a few years' he, too, died, and his title descended in quick succession to an uncle, to a cousin in New Zealand, and a twelve-year-old boy, who in his turn became 11th Earl of Seafield, gave his life on the stricken fields of France, leaving only a nine-year-old daughter, who is to-day attaining ner majority. While the young Countess is holding her birthday privately to-day the official celebrating on the estate will not take place till June, when the tenants of “the” Castle, at Cullen House, Banffshire and at Balmacaan, Glen Urquhart on Loch Ness, will all in turn welcome the youthful head of the estates, cratic a» Scotland, whose national poet sang the creed “A man’s a'man for a’ that,” there should still persist real feeling for the holders of old titles and for the heads of the old clans. The history of the Clan Grant, the headship of which was so long vested in Earls of Seafield, shows us a family with a proud record. There are Grants who declare that that version of the book of Genesis which records “there were GIANTS in those days,” should be “there were GRANTS.” Biblical origin or no, the Clan Grant records are lost in the dust of ages till seven centuries ago a Sir Laurence Le Grant, Sheriff of Inverness, was head of the clan, the eleventh Earl of Seafield being twenty-fifth generation in male descent from that Sir Laurence. They were a proud race, for there was a John Grant who in 1610, on being offered a peerage by that James VI. of Scotland who became James I. of England, looked scornfully on King Jamie’s proposal, for said he, “Wha’ll be Laird of Grant?”

There was that Ludovick Grant known as the Highland King. The Duke of York, afterwards James 11., presiding on one occasion over the Scots Parliament, said in reply to some demand of Sir Ludovick, “The wishes of His Highland Majesty would be attended to.” But in the youthful Countess of Seafield there are represented two families of great antiquity the Findlater branch of the Ogilivies as well as the Grants, The Ogilvies derive from the Mormaers of Angus, one of the seven hereditary chiefs of Scotland, who in the eleventh century changed their title to Earl, when a Norman immigrant into Scotland, a St. Clair, fought for Robert the Brace and to the family of Sinclair fell the lordships of Deskford and Findlater. It was the fifth Earl of Findlater who, taking a large part in public affairs, was made first Viscount Seafield, and later first Earl of Seafield. Ho it was who figures in Scott’s “Tales of a Grandfather,” for the part he took in securing the union of England and Scotland, and Sir Walter Scott tells how this first Earl of Seafield on signing the Act of Union said cynically, “There’s the end of an auld sang.” The second Earl of Seafield, having in his more ardent, excitable youth been imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle for his Jacobite leanings, later turned to the Hanoverian side and indeed helped the “Butcher” Cumberland by provisioning his troops at Culloden. But from that time on we see the Earldom held by men devoted to the arts of peace, for the third Earl played the part in the North of Scotland which Coke of Norfolk did in England introduced the turnip and rotation of crops. An enthusiast in agriculture, he took several farms into his own hands and made them models, and, too, granted long leases on condition that within a certain period the tenants should enclose their lands and adopt improved methods of cropping, for farming was as primitive as in Biblical times.

There was that sixth Earl of Seafield who was a notable planter of trees in the nineteenth century, for in 1847, the Highland Society records that he had afforested 8223 acres, with thirty-two million trees, for which labour the Society awarded the Earl their gold medal. The seventh Earl was an equally ardent agriculturist, for within a period of eleven years he had planted fourteen million trees, and this afforestation of Stratspey was so well done as to compel the admiration of even the Germans, whose State forests are probably the best in the world. With this seventh Earl we come within hail of the present generation, for it was his widow, the Dowager Countess Caroline, who, dying in 1911, created that great Seafield Trust so extraordinary as to evoke a leader in “The Times” (London) under which the estates in Moray, Banff and Inverness-shire were devised to “the eleventh Earl of Seafield and his successors to the title.” This Countess Caroline, born at Blantyre, was the grande dame of the North of Scotland. She kept up a stately and formal way of life within her own domains, which she seldom left, comparable only to that of Queen Victoria, whom she greatly resembled in character. Herself a model in every way, she had little sympathy for those whose lives were not attuned to her severe code of life. She di’ove in state from one residence to the other as the seasons came round from Castle Grant in Speyside to Cullen House by the Moray Firth, and to Balmacaan in Glen Urquhart. She lived a long, lonely, embittered widowhood after losing within a few years her husband and her son, lan Charles, the eighth Earl. Left by him with absolute power over the Seafield estates, she saw in turn her husband’s brother, Sir James Ogilvio Grant of Mayne, Elgin, hold the title for four years, and his son James, who had been in the Navy, leaving which he had settled in New Zealand and married there his cousin, a daughter of Major George Thomas Evans of Otago, held it for six months, after which it went to the eleventh Earl, who was then a school boy in Christchurch. This young Earl, refusing offers of Eton and Oxford, preferred to stay in the adopted country of his father, where he married Mary Elizabeth Nina, eldest daughter of Joseph Henry Townend, M.D. of Christchurch. But the young couple came to England after their marriage, the Earl joined the 3rd Bedfordshire Regiment, but not until 1912, after the death of the Dowager Caroline did they come to Speyside, where they were welcomed to their place at the head of the Clan Grant. They settled down to what promised to be a life of usefulness as a landowner ready to follow his forbears as an enlightened landlord.

But war came. The Earl of Seafield ioined the Camerons, giving active help to Cameron of Lochiel in raising a new regiment, thus following in the footsteps of “the Good Sir James” Grant who distinguished himself by his activity in recruiting Grants for service in the Napoleonic wars In May, 1915, ho went to the front as a Captain in the sth Camerons. He was one of the six offi-

cers who came unscathed through Loos, where Lochiel’s men suffered severely, but in November he was killed in action, dying thus in his 39th year, before he had time to show his quality as ruler of his family estates. The Seafield title descending to heirs feneral fell to his daughter, while the trathspey barony descending to heirs male only came to his younger brother, Trevor Ogilvie-Grant, who inherits, too, the chieftainship of the Clan Grant, In Castle Grant, then, the Countess of Seafield and her mother are now in residence, being, but lately back from an extensive tour of India, Burmah and Malaya. It is fitting that on the threshold of her life as the holder of so historic a title the young Countess should attain her majority here. It is a stately building of Scottish baronial style, set in the midst of a fertile and wooded demesne commanding beautiful prospects of Strathspey and the snow-capped Cairngorms which separate it from Deeside. While the Castle has been built and rebuilt at various times, there still remains part of Comyn’s Tower, a memento of the time, more than five centuries ago, when the Comyns ruled from Lochaber to Craigellachie, the Comyns, who were to the North what the Douglases were to the South of Scotland in that rude age when might was right among the turbulent nobles who had the power of life and death over their retainers and defied the Kings of Scotland with impunity. The Castle contains valuable pictures examples of Vandyke, Rubens, Guido and Poussin maong them. Its entrance hall is an armoury glittering with broadswords and targes and the weapons worn by Lairds of Grant from Wallace’s day downward, and in it there is a growing pine the badge of the dan Grant. Here is the chief home of the Countess of Seafield, who is now at the head of a very modern estate, regarded as being the most carefully managed in Scotland, An enlightened and progressive policy has been pursued in dealing with tenants whose claims have been generously dealt with. A tenant on the Seafield estates has practically fixity of tenure and the rents are not high. The condition of crofters is indeed more favourable to them as tenants than if they owned their holdings, for improvements are carried out on the crofts which it would be beyond the means of the crofters to provide themselves.