The life and times of Robert McQueen – the real Weir of Hermiston

Scott’s son-in-law and biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, author of several lively works including Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, questioned himself repeatedly over what manner of man Braxfield was. He was never sure, and posterity has remained equally doubtful.

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James Boswell, a younger contemporary and fellow advocate, addressed public letters to Braxfield and recorded his doings, usually in favourable terms, in his journals and correspondence.

A different image emerges from the writings of Henry Cockburn, author of the Memorials Of His Time, the celebrated and indispensable portrait of Edinburgh in the age of the Edinburgh Review. He analysed the man in awed and horrified detail, and was so obsessed by him that the distinguished critic Karl Miller wondered if Braxfield was not a substitute father figure on whom Cockburn could commit, in a Freudian sense, patricide. And then there was Robert Louis Stevenson. When he had settled in Samoa, Andrew Lang sent him a copy of a portrait of Braxfield by Henry Raeburn. There are two versions of the original in Edinburgh, one in the National Portrait Gallery and one in the great hall of Parliament House, where he glowers down on today’s lawyers as they pace up and down.

The copy Stevenson he received still hangs in Vailima, Stevenson’s home in the Samoan island of Upolu. He wrote to Lang: “For the portrait of Braxfield, much thanks. It is engraved from the same Raeburn portrait that I saw in ’76 or ’77 with so extreme gusto that I have ever since been Braxfield’s humble servant, and am now, as you know, trying to stick him in a novel. Alas! One might as well try to stick in Napoleon.”

RLS initially planned to call the novel simply Braxfield, but then changed the title to The Lord Justice Clerk before finally plumping for Weir of Hermiston. He was working on the novel the day he died.

McQueen was that very Scottish phenomenon, the lad o’ pairts. Born near Lanark, he kept his connections with the town and took his title from the nearby estate of Braxfield. When still young, he came to the attention of the Dundas family, which virtually ran Scotland at that time, and was persuaded to move to Edinburgh and become an advocate. He was highly successful and astonished colleagues by the “prodigious fees” he charged, before accepting a drop in income by reluctantly accepting promotion as Law Lord, later becoming Lord Justice Clerk.

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He might have remained as a footnote in the history of Scots Law had he not lived, to use an ancient Chinese curse revived by Bertolt Brecht, in the “interesting times” which saw Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45, the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. Each of these cosmic events had some impact on his own life.

The courts were closed during the Jacobite emergency, and when they began operating again they were faced with a plethora of property cases affecting those who “were out” on the side of Stuarts. McQueen specialised in civil and feudal law, so his services were much in demand. The adherence of so many of Scotland’s landed gentry to the Jacobite cause led to the forfeiture of their estates, and in court all the issues which delight and enrich lawyers were debated: objections were raised, competence disputed, delays sought, writs, suits, actions and counter-actions moved. McQueen distinguished himself for his firm grasp of legal principle and his lucid intellect.

Apart from the law and the management of his private estate, he had no real interests and no connection with the contemporary writers and thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment whose works were making Edinburgh the Athens of the North.

As a cultural and philosophical centre it may not have been quite the equal of Paris, but it was of sufficient originality of thought to draw the respect of the denizens of the French capital, including Voltaire. This was the age of the philosopher David Hume, of the economist Adam Smith, of the geologist James Hutton, of the proto-sociologist Adam Ferguson, of the men of letters who produced the Encyclopedia Britannica, of Lord Kames who was viewed then as an eccentric but who has been considered more recently – a little generously – as a forerunner of Charles Darwin.

Braxfield did not mix in that company. He was no cosmopolitan, and if he was intelligent, he was decidedly anti-intellectual. In the social life of the taverns and howffs, where claret was the standard drink, he lorded it over all.

HIS humour was by all accounts bawdy and raw so, reversing normal order, he offended his younger contemporaries as the liberality of the 18th century gave way to the more tight-laced prudishness of the pre-Victorian age. His chroniclers shy away in maidenly blushes and coy whimpers from accurate reporting, so Cockburn wrote with prim dismay that “the staple of his conversation was indecency”.

Braxfiled especially loathed all that smacked of Anglified ways, above all in speech. He spoke broad Scots, and had no truck with those, including David Hume, who hired tutors or editors to eliminate Scotticisms from their speech or writing. His accent was too much for the Englishman Margarot when he appeared before him. Declining Braxfield’s offer to appoint a counsel, he added: “I only wish for an interpreter to make me understand what your Lordship says.”

Braxfield was on the sidelines as he observed the American War of Independence, but had little sympathy for the cause of the American colonists. By the time of the French Revolution he was already a senior judge, and it was for the attitudes he expressed and the sentences he passed on those who appeared before him for allegedly encouraging the spread of revolutionary ideas that he acquired his posthumous notoriety as “Scotland’s Jeffreys” or even as the hanging judge. “His very name makes people start yet,” wrote Cockburn 30 years after Braxfield’s death. Later still, Stevenson added: “...his name smacks of the gallows.”

A group calling themselves the Friends of the People, not all of them Scots, had made the ill-advised decision to hold their convention in Edinburgh, thereby bringing themselves under the jurisdiction of Scots Law.

Looked at nowadays, they look like a group of innocuous liberals, who advocated universal suffrage and annual parliaments and who disclaimed all sympathy with violence, although most did have some sympathy with the principles of the French Revolution. The charge brought against them was sedition, and when peace and rationality were restored, the five men sent to Botany Bay were identified as the Scots Martyrs. There is an obelisk in their honour in the Calton Hill cemetery in Edinburgh.

THE atmosphere in the years 1793-94, when Britain was at war with revolutionary France, can be compared to that of the anti-communist fervour of the US in the McCarthyite era, with Braxfield in the role of McCarthy. “I was never an admirer of the French, but now I can only consider them as monsters of human nature,” he declared in his charge to the jury in the case of Thomas Muir of Huntershill.

The trial of Muir aroused most indignation, even at the time. Braxfield made himself the spokesman of reaction, declaring patriotically during his judicial summing up to the jury, which he had himself chosen, that “the British Constitution is the best that ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it better” and that “government in this country is made up of the landed interests which alone have a right to be represented. As for the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation on them? They may pack up all their property on their back and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye”.

It was Muir who had to leave the country when sentenced to 14 years in Botany Bay, although he escaped and made his way to France where he was greeted as a hero.

The gentlest assessment of Braxfield was Stevenson’s “inhumane but intrepid”.