THE name of the Viscountess of Kenmure is one of the most familiar to the readers of Rutherford’s Letters. Those immortal letters have given an interest and a charm to her gifts and graces, which have made her one of the most interesting and familiar figures in Scottish Church history during the period in which she lived. She was the third daughter of Archibald, seventh Earl of Argyll. She thus belonged to a noble house, a house which had shown its deep interest in the Reformation struggle. Her great-grandfather, Archibald, fourth Earl of Argyll, was one of the Lords of the Congregation who subscribed the Bond of 1557. On his death-bed he left as his dying charge to his son, “That he should study to set forward the public and true preaching of the Evangel of Jesus Christ, and to suppress all superstition and idolatry to the uttermost of his power.”
In her early years the Countess was of a delicate constitution, and throughout life she suffered much from ill-health. It would appear from Rutherford’s and MacWard’s letters to her that it was during this period of languishing and failing health that the Lord showed His loving kindness to her. Rutherford, in one of his letters, says: “I knew and saw Him with you in the furnace of affliction; for there He wooed you to Himself, and chose you to be His.” MacWard has a similar reference in one of his letters: “He made you bear the yoke in your youth, and was it not in the wilderness that He first allured you and spoke to your heart? and when you come to greater age ye wanted not your domestic fires and house furnace.”
She was married to Sir John Gordon of Lochinvar, afterwards Viscount of Kenmure. Rosco, the place of his residence, was situated in the parish of Anwoth; he made an effort, which was ultimately successful, in getting Anwoth disjoined from the other two parishes with which it had been connected, so that it might have a minister exclusively for itself. Mr. John Livingstone was the first minister thought of, but during the length of time which elapsed while all the legal formalities in connection with the disjunction of Anwoth, he had accepted a call to Torphichen. The first minister settled over the new parish was Samuel Rutherford. Sir John and his pious lady attended his ministry, and there sprung up between the saintly minister and the lord and lady of the manor an intimacy, the record of which is embalmed in his imperishable Letters. Rutherford’s letters to Lady Kenmure indicate that he had formed a very high opinion of her spiritual attainments. None of her letters to Rutherford have been preserved, but from the references made to them in his letters, it is evident that they were characterised “by a strain of sincere and humble piety, by the confidence of genuine friendship, the warmth of Christian sympathy, and a spirit of active benevolence.” “She complained,” says Anderson, “that notwithstanding all the methods adopted by her Saviour to teach her, she was yet an ill scholar, lamented her deficiencies in the practice of holiness, and expressed her fears that she had little grace, yet encouraged herself from the consideration that God’s compassion failed not although her service to Him miscarried.” When the persecutor’s hand was laid upon Rutherford he found in her a true friend whose influence with many in authority stood him in good stead. In 1630, when summoned before the Court of High Commission, Rutherford informs her ladyship that Mr. Alexander Colville, one of the judges, “was my great friend, and wrote a most kind letter to me.” Through her influence, when Rutherford was summoned before the same Court in 1636, he was befriended by Lord Lorn.
In 1629 Lady Kenmure removed with her husband to London. Sir John, it would appear, had done so with the view of prosecuting his worldly ambitions. He had hopes that the Earldom of Gowrie, which had been attained for high treason, would be revived, and that he, through right of his mother, would fall heir to the earldom. Rutherford felt the separation keenly, as we can learn from his Letters. But their stay in England was not so long as had been anticipated, and in 1631 Sir John and his lady returned to Scotland, taking up their residence at Kenmure Castle, about twenty miles distance from Anwoth. In 1633 Sir John was raised to the peerage with the title Viscount Kenmure and Lord of Lochinvar. Charles was in Scotland in this year, and was endeavouring to establish Episcopacy on a firmer basis. Two Bills were brought before the Scottish Parliament with this object in view; one for ratifying the Acts of the Perth Assembly, the other asserting the King’s prerogative to impose the surplice and other Popish apparel upon ministers. Lord Kenmure objected to these measures, but instead of courageously opposing them he went home and feigned sickness. His conscience, however, as he afterwards told, did not allow him to do so with impunity, and when he came to die, his last hours were beclouded by his unfaithfulness to his Lord. This step of unfaithfulness led to others, as almost inevitably happens. This was perceived by the discerning judgment of Rutherford, and he writes Lady Kenmure asking her, as “a part of the truth of her profession, to drop words in the ears of her noble husband continually of eternity, judgment, death, hell, heaven, the honourable profession, the sins of his father’s house. He must reckon with God for his father’s debt; forgetting of accounts payeth no debt. Nay, the interest of a forgotten bond runneth up with God to interest upon interest. I know he looketh homeward, and loveth the truth; but I pity him with my soul because of his many temptations. Satan layeth upon men a burden of cares above a load, and maketh a pack-horse of men’s souls, when they are wholly set upon this world. We owe the devil no such service. It were wisdom to throw off that load into a mire and cast all our cares over upon God.”
In 1634, her husband, Lord Kenmure, was seized with the fever, which was ultimately to take him away. It was a solemn death-bed, where remorse for his past infidelity to his God visited him; but he had a triumphant outgate. Godly sorrow and heartfelt contrition were followed by a joyful sense of the forgiveness of God. Anderson’s account is interesting and instructive, and we cannot do better than quote it. “Having as, we have just now said,” he writes, “been for some time past less careful in cultivating personal piety and less zealous in promoting the public interests of the Church than in former days, he was painfully conscious of his want of preparation for death; and at first the most poignant remorse took possession of his conscience, causing many a pang of anguish and many a bitter tear to flow. Among the sins which at that solemn period came crowding into his memory, that which occasioned him the greatest agony was his deserting the Parliament the preceding year. ‘Since I did lie down on this bed,’ said he to Mr. Andrew Lamb, the Bishop of Galloway, who visited him, ‘the sin that lay heaviest on my soul and hath burdened my conscience most, was my withdrawing of myself from the Parliament, and not giving my voice for the truth against those things which they call indifferent; for in so doing I have denied the Lord my God.’ But by the judicious counsels of Rutherford, who continued with him at the Castle, almost from the commencement of his illness to his death, he was led to improve the peace-speaking blood of Christ; and thus attaining to the full assurance that God in His abounding mercy had pardoned his sins, he enjoyed much comfort in passing through the dark valley of the shadow of death.” A full account of Lord Kenmure’s last hours will be found in Samuel Rutherford’s “The Last and Heavenly Speeches and Glorious Departure of John, Viscount of Kenmure,” published by the Woodrow Society in Select Biographies, vol. i.
Lady Kenmure was afterwards married to Sir Henry Montgomery of Giffen, second son of Alexander, sixth Earl of Eglinton. Sir Henry was an excellent man and the marriage proved very happy, but the happiness did not last long, for Sir Henry was soon removed by death. In Rutherford’s Letters there are continual references to the many visitations death made to her home, but all these seemed to be weaning her more and more from earth and preparing her for heaven. But the cup of her sorrows was not yet filled. She had to pass through trials and anxieties that were hard for flesh and blood to bear, but throughout it all her constancy to her religious principles remained.
When the Covenanters were divided into two sections—Protesters and Resolutioners—Lady Kenmure supported the former. Like so many of the most pious and most discerning people of her day she regarded the policy of the Resolutioners as inconsistent with the obligations of the Solemn League and Covenant. It was a time of much searching of heart among the Lord’s people, but time proved what a fatal mistake the Resolutioners had made. It required deep conviction to take a stand with the Protesters, for though the people as a rule were on their side, the cause was regarded as very narrow-minded, and had very little favour from those in high places. In a letter addressed to her, and dated 28th September, 1651, Rutherford writes:—”We are fallen in winnowing and trying times. I am glad that your breath serveth you to run to the end, in the same condition and way wherein ye have walked these twenty years past. It is either the way of peace, or we are yet in our sins, and have missed the way. The Lord, it is true, hath stained the pride of all our glory; and now, last of all the sun hath gone down upon many of the prophets. But stumble not; men are but men, and God appeareth more and more to be God, and Christ is still Christ. Madam, a stronger than I am had almost stumbled and cast me down. But oh, what mercy is it to discern between what is Christ’s and what is man’s, and what way the line, colour, and lustre of gifts of grace dazzle and deceive our weak eyes. . . . I hear that your Ladyship hath the same esteem of the despised cause and covenant of our Lord that ye had before. Madam, hold you there. I dare and would gladly breathe out my spirit in that way, with a nearer communion and fellowship with the Father and the Son, and would seek no more but that I might die believing.”
Calamitous and distressing years were now fast approaching, and the powers of persecution were about to be let loose upon a helpless people. Rutherford was marked out as one of the victims. He had received a summons to appear before the Privy Council, but, like Mr. Standfast, another summons had come telling him that “his Master was not willing that he should be so far from Him any longer,” and with his eye upon this summons Rutherford sent back the answer to his persecutors, “tell them that I have a summons already from a superior Judge and Judicatory, and I behove to answer my first summons; and ere your day arrives I will be where few kings and great folks come.” He had seen much trouble, but his Lord had mercifully taken him to his everlasting rest ere the persecution of God’s hunted remnant in Scotland became so bitter. It was not so with his noble-hearted and gracious correspondent, Lady Kenmure. Her brother, the Marquis of Argyll, who had been a staunch supporter of Charles II. and had set the crown upon his head at Scone, had fallen under the king’s displeasure. At the Restoration, when many of the Scottish noblemen went up to London to congratulate Charles upon his restoration to the throne of his fathers, the Marquis sent his son, Lord Lorn, but did not proceed to London himself until he found out what kind of reception had been accorded to his son. From this it would appear that the Marquis was apprehensive of the treatment he might receive from the king. Those fears were too well-founded, for no sooner had Argyll appeared in Charles’s presence than the king, with a stamp of his foot, gave orders for his imprisonment. He was immediately sent to the Tower. He was put through a form of trial and sentenced to death for high treason. James Guthrie had also been sentenced to death about the same time. On the morning of his death he asked to have an interview with Guthrie. The two condemned men embraced each other tenderly, and at parting Guthrie said:—”My Lord God hath been with you; and such is my respect for your lordship that if I were not under sentence of death myself, I could cheerfully die for your lordship.” The Marquis behaved himself with Christian courage as he met the terrible ordeal. “I could die like a Roman,” he said, “but choose rather to die as a Christian.”
Nobly as these heroes of the faith got off the stage of time, and inspiring as their conduct and behaviour must have been to thousands, yet who can tell the sorrows that pierced the hearts of those who saw their own flesh and blood taken from their midst by such cruel deaths? Rutherford was not unmindful of the Scripture exhortation, “Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them, and them that suffer adversity as being yourselves also in the body.” And though he did not live to see the issue, the moment he heard of the Marquis’s apprehension he sent a letter of condolence to Lady Kenmure. “Be not afflicted for your brother,” he writes, “the Marquis of Argyll. As to the main, in my weak apprehension, the seed of God being in him, and love to the people of God and His cause, it shall be well.” Hands were also laid upon Lord Lorn, the Marquis’s son, who had given free expression of his opinions concerning his father’s cruel treatment in a confidential letter sent to Lord Duffus. This letter had been intercepted, and Middleton brought the matter before the authorities, with the result that Lord Lorn was condemned to death. On Middleton’s downfall, however, he was liberated, and Lady Kenmure was spared a new sorrow.
Under the policy of Charles, Presbyterianism was now abolished, and it would appear from expressions in letters from Robert MacWard to Lady Kenmure, that she felt this calamity most of all. “You have now known,” he writes, “of a long time what it is to live and almost languish in a dry and thirsty land where no water is, where all the streams of creature contentments have been dried up and diverted by the scorching heat of fiery trials. But this I know, is the hardest and heaviest of all, that the streams of the sanctuary which did refresh the city of God are dried up, and that these ordinances of life in the use whereof God doth ordinarily set forth and impart much of His loving kindness, which is better than life, are taken away from you.”
Lady Kenmure was a succourer of many; her means, which were greatly diminished after her second husband’s death, were freely used to help the outed Presbyterian ministers, and there are many letters extant from these sufferers gratefully acknowledging her ladyship’s kindness.
The exact date of Lady Kenmure’s death is not known. Hers was a life full of sorrow. She had witnessed the Church of Scotland pass through glorious days of revival when the banner of the Covenant was unfurled. She had witnessed those triumphs wrenched from her as if the Lord had altogether forsaken Scotland, but better days were in store though Lady Kenmure did not live to see them. She finished her course honourably, keeping the faith through cloud and storm and sunshine. Robert MacWard in writing her, says:—”How great a mercy is this when the breath of most men, the breath of most professors, nay, alas, the breath of most ministers, who by their fervour should warm the soul of others, is so cold that it doth plainly discover a falling from first love, and a want of divine zeal for him, and fervent desire for the coming of His kingdom in the world! This which he hath given you is a pearl of great price, a jewel of more value than the whole universe, nay, this is something above the reality of grace, and beyond every exercise of real grace. This is to carry like your Father’s child when the coming of His kingdom is the inward echo of your soul.”
(To be Continued.)