Note 50 — STORY OF THE COUNTESS OF STAIR.

This story loses its point by the discovery made in St Peter’s upon Cornhill, London, of the marriage register of the second Earl of Stair with Lady Primrose, 27th March 1708. Thus they were married persons several years before the presumed date of this story. Miss Rosaline Masson announced the discovery in an article in Chambers’s Journal for 1912, entitled, ‘The Secret Marriage of Lady Primrose and John, Second Earl of Stair.’ She makes this comment: ‘The testimony of John Waugh, Parson, has lain buried for over two hundred years in the old Register in the city; but the tale, whispered one day, some time about the year 1714, in the High Street of Edinburgh, first among the strutting gallants and loungers at the Cross at noon, and later on, over the delicate tea-cups, in the gossipy gatherings of the fair sex—that tale was nowise buried. It has never died. Did not Kirkpatrick Sharpe repeat it, sixty years after Lady Stair’s death, to young Robert Chambers, at that time collecting material for his inimitable book, Traditions of Edinburgh?’ The article further tries to answer the question why the Earl of Stair and the young widow made this clandestine marriage, which gave opportunity for the story.