There were many stirring and exciting stories associated with the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46, and not a few odd tales, and this is a strange one indeed. There are a few different versions of the story, but
Alexander Bower of Meathie and Kincaldrum was from an old Catholic family and naturally inclined to have Jacobite sympathies. He was travelling in Europe when news of the Jacobite insurrection filtered through to him and he rushed back to his home county and raised some of his tenantry and joined Lord Ogilvy's regiment. Following the defeat at Culloden, Ogilvy's regiment disbanded in Glen Clova, and the men were left to secure their own safety as best they could. The Angus Glens were teeming with fugitive Jacobites, including Rattray of Ranagulzion, Sir James Kinloch and his two brothers, Lord Ogilvy himself, a French engineer named Count Mirobel, and Chevalier Johnstone, who was hiding out in a shepherd's bothy in Glen Prosen.
Bower joined with his cousin Colonel Ker of Graden in the Borders, and they skulked in the countryside by day, avoiding British army patrols, and went to Kincaldrum House in the nighttime. Bower's wife Margaret St Clair of Roslin was in charge of the household; her son was then eight years old. Also living there was Margaret's sister Miss Sarah St Clair, the child's nurse Betty Maxwell, plus other servants.
Both Bower and Ker had served with the King of Spain's army, and there is a suggestion that Bower had actually returned to Scotland as early as 1744. By that time he was well advanced in years.
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| The Second Kincaldrum House, now in ruins. Photo: Anne Burgess, Wikimedia Commons |
The two men had apparently been hiding for around three weeks, but this was about to change. One night after dinner a party of Hessian Dragoons surrounded the house on the night of 6th May 1746. They had been informed about the two men by a disgruntled servant named Proctor. Some of the soldiers stayed outside, while their office and some other troops entered the mansion. They had hamstrung all the cattle and horses on the estate. On entering the house, a witness said, 'they amused themselves slashing the family pictures with their sabres'. Colonel Ker attempted to escape through a ground floor window, but he was captured by two soldiers.
having a fine head of hair, the Dragoons knotted it to one of their horse’s tails, and dragged him in this way for about two miles, to a place called Cothiewards (Cuttywards), near Findrick, where a poor man, of the name of Saunders Kinear, was holling (digging up) Broom, who, on his bended knees, interceded for his master, saying, 'If you will only put the gentleman on a horse, I will gi’e you a’ the siller I hae,' which amounted to ten Pounds. The relief seems to have come too late, however. He was then mounted behind a trooper, carried to Dundee, from there to Perth Prison, where it soon pleased God to relieve him from his tormentors, having expited from the brutal treatment he had received.Mrs. Bower, although in poor health, followed her husband to Perth, where learning that the Duke of Cumberland was at Stirling Castle, she went thither and interceded for her husband’s life. At last the Duke consented to grant it, on condition that he would leave the country and never return; and he gave her passes for her husband, herself, and their only child, a boy about six years of age. Mrs. Bower immediately returned to Perth, but only to find her husband had meantime died of his wounds and cruel treatment. The sight of the dead body so terribly shocked her that she fell forward overt the corpse and expired. The two bodies were placed in one coffin and brought to Kincaldrum House, where they lay some days previous to interment.
A strange story is told in connection with this part of the tragedy. James Bower, a relative, being anxious to secure the property of the deceased insurgent, bribed the soldiers stationed in the district to kill the infant son, he being then the next-of-kin; but the nurse, when she heard them coming, hid the boy in the coffin containing his dead parents, covering him with the pall, and so escaped detection. The bodies were buried in the Chapel-yard on the farm of Easter Meathie, which then belonged to the Bowers of Kincaldrum.
Lieutenant Bower married in 1736 Margaret St. Clair of Rosslyn, the last of the real St. Clairs of that estate near Edinburgh, and their only child and heir was Alexander St. Clair Bower, who so narrowly escaped. For better safety he was sent to France in the custody of Miss St. Clair, an aunt, where, on the advice and influence of Lord Ogilvy, he was placed in the Scots College in Paris.
There is a variant of the tale which states that a patrol of English dragoons first came to the house one eveing while Bower and Ker were inside. The two fugitives were hidden, while the Englishman - 'a most gentlemanly young officer' (according to the account of Graham Bower - entered and inferred that he knew the two men were there but said he had no intention of searching the house. The ladies were so impressed by his chivalry that they invited him to dinner, and when he left he warned them that foreign troops in Hanoverian service were scouring the area, and he could not answer for their conduct.
This tale then has Mrs Bower set out without delay to intercede for her husband with the Duke of Cumberland who was at Traquair House in Peebleshire. 'The only charge that could be brought against him was that he had worn a white cockade in his bonnet, and that he had been seen shaking hands with Prince charles Edward at the Salutation Inn in Perth.'
Graham Bower's narrative continues:
While all his business [Bower getting detained] was going on there was a lady's corpse laid out in one of the bedrooms. Betty Maxwell who kept my father (then a little boy), got him in her arms and secreted herself - with her charge behind the bed containing the dead body to prevent his being taken hold by the Hessian soldiers. The faithful nurse's ruse was successful; and though the Hessians appear to have entered the death-chamber, they did not discover Betty Maxwell and her charge.
The boy's aunt soon hurried the boy out of the house and found sanctuary overnight at the house of Graham of Fintry then took him to Broughty Ferry. There he played with Margaret Graham, daughter of the house, and Betty Maxwell suggested the two might be ideally suited for marriage in due course, which actually happened many years later. Miss St Clair took the boy to Broughty Ferry and they boarded a ship for Hull, and then went over the North Sea to Holland and then Paris. In that city Lord Ogilvy advised that the boy be placed in the Scots College, which she did. On the way back home she was attacked in the Forest of Crecy and never heard of again.
Graham Bower, writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, told the remainder of the tale:
My grandmother, finding she could do nothing in favour of her husband from the Duke of Cumberland, returned home. On her arrival in Dundee she, of course, asked the news. On being informed of her husband's fate and the disasters at Kincaldrum - her boy being obliged to fly with his aunt - on entering the Red Lion she requested the landlady to show her into a bedroom; the moment after entering it she complained of being a little sick, dropped down, and never spoke more. The hearse that brought the remains of my grandfather from Perth took up the body of my grandmother in Dundee, carrying them to the burying-ground at Meathie, where they were laid side by side.
Young Alexander Bower in France found service with the French king, although he nearly died there from smallpox, which deeply marked his face. When he returned to Scotland in 1764 he found that a relative named James Bower had taken over the estate, and this man claimed that the returning son and true heir was an imposter. Nobody knew the returning Bower, but in court a man was brought in and the judge asked the stranger from France if he knew who this man was, and he rightly identified him as William Maxwell, the miller of Kincaldrum. To make sure, another local man wa brought in and the returning heir greeted him warmly by shaking his hand and saying, 'Jamie, man, dinna you mind when you and I langsyne took puddocks wi' a girn in the Bark Hill Dub?' The memory was correct; the court was satisfied, and the heir retrieved his inheritance.
The exiled laird in due course passed the estate on to his son Graham, who died in 1844. It was said that he lost his lands 'through misplaced confidence in a friend'. Graham Bower's son Colonel John Bower died at Droxford, Hampshire, 10th October 1910, aged one hundred and one. Four years before his death he wrote a letter to the The Standard, stating:
In my boyhood I knew a man named Sandy Both, who hailed from Douglas Town (a village in Forfarshire), and when between nine and ten years old was an eye-witness of some of the tragic events at my paternal home (Kincaldrum) in the cause of Prince Charles Edward in 1745, and in after years he often recurred to the subject... He was born in 1737.
Another of Graham's sons was Alexander Bower St Clair who migrated to live in Lithuania, marrying Countess Kossakowska, after previously serving in the Indian Naval Service.
On 31st July, 1750, a petition was made to the Court of Session by Alexander Bower of Kinnettles, tutor dative to Alexander Bower, eldest son of Alexander Bower of Easter Meathie, to whom, and the heir male of his body, the now deceased Alexander Bower of Kincaldrum had disponed his estate for love and favour, setting forth that Alexander Bower, an infant, while under the petitioner's tutorage, had been carried to France by his aunt, and settled in the Scots College at Paris. The Lords appointed the petitioner curator, and James Hay, W.S., agent. On 8th December following they found the conduct of James Hay in carrying out the matter censurable, and suspended him from the office of W.S., and as agent or solicitor before the Court for a year, and fined him £5 to the poor. His offence is not stated.
Kincaldrum House
Kincaldrum House i was originally a home belonging to the Guthrie family of nearby Guthrie Castle. We know they held the estate in 1457 and it later passed to the Bower family, who were staunchly Catholic into the eighteenth century. At least one of the Bower family was a burgess of Dundee. In the seventeenth century brothers from this kindred acquired Easter and Wester Meathie, and the family also held the estate of Kinnettles.
The Kinnetles Kist local history booklet details the Bower family connection with that parish (p. 20):
A Roman Catholic chapel was built about 1659, by the Bower family of Kincaldrum, at theIn 1802 John Aberdein Harvey, a schoolmaster’s son who had become rich from his work in the plantations of the West Indies, purchased Kinnettles from the Trustees of Alexander Bower.
margin of a small den on Kincaldrum Hill. This was within the detached parish of Foffarty
(alternatively spelt Fofarty or Faferdie) which had been transferred to the tenant, Alexander
Pyott, by the Bishop of Dunkeld, “for his zeal in resisting the Reformation”. This chapel was burnt down by a party of Royal Dragoons in 1745 and stood roofless for many years. After the fire, the stone which held the holy water was moved to Kincaldrum where a chapel was set up in the mansion house. The Roman Catholics in the area, including some from Kinnettles, worshipped there for a number of years. The owners , the Bowers, were eventually forced by poverty, probably induced by the widespread persecution of ‘Papists’, to sell the land to the Earl of Strathmore in 1758. The remaining walls and foundations were removed about 1815 and are believed to have been used in land drains.
Some Sources
https://landedfamilies.blogspot.com/2021/07/463-baxter-of-kilmaron-castle-and.html
