The unfortunate Baldoon recovered from his wounds, but sternly prohibited all inquiries respecting the manner in which he had received them.  “If a lady,” he said, “asked him any question upon the subject, he would neither answer her nor speak to her again while he lived; if a gentleman, he would consider it as a mortal affront, and demand satisfaction as having received such.”  He did not very long survive the dreadful catastrophe, having met with a fatal injury by a fall from his horse, as he rode between Leith and Holyrood House, of which he died the next day, 28th March 1682.  Thus a few years removed all the principal actors in this frightful tragedy.

Various reports went abroad on this mysterious affair, many of them very inaccurate, though they could hardly be said to be exaggerated.  It was difficult at that time to become acquainted with the history of a Scottish family above the lower rank; and strange things sometimes took place there, into which even the law did not scrupulously inquire.

The credulous Mr. Law says, generally, that the Lord President Stair had a daughter, who, “being married, the night she was bride in, was taken from her bridegroom and harled through the house (by spirits, we are given to understand) and afterward died.  Another daughter,” he says, “was supposed to be possessed with an evil spirit.”

My friend, Mr. Sharpe, gives another edition of the tale.  According to his information, ti was the bridegroom who wounded the bride.  The marriage, according to this account, had been against her mother’s inclination, who had given her consent in these ominous words:  “Weel, you may marry him, but sair shall you repent it.”

I find still another account darkly insinuated in some highly scurrilous and abusive verses, of which I have an original copy.  They are docketed as being written “Upon the late Viscount Stair and his family, by Sir William Hamilton of Whitelaw.  The marginals by William Dunlop, writer in Edinburgh, a son of the Laird of Househill, and nephew to the said Sir William Hamilton.”  There was a bitter and personal quarrel and rivalry betwixt the author of this libel, a name which it richly deserves, and Lord President Stair; and the lampoon, which is written with much more malice than art, bears the following motto: 

Stair’s neck, mind, wife, songs, grandson, and the rest, Are wry, false, witch, pests, parricide, possessed.

This malignant satirist, who calls up all the misfortunes of the family, does not forget the fatal bridal of Baldoon.  He seems, though his verses are as obscure as unpoetical, to intimate that the violence done to the bridegroom was by the intervention of the foul fiend, to whom the young lady had resigned herself, in case she should break her contract with her first lover.  His hypothesis is inconsistent with the account given in the note upon Law’s Memorials, but easily reconcilable to the family tradition.