Comments in refutation of pretensions advanced for the first time, and statements in a recent work "The Stirlings of Keir and their family papers"

140 COMMENTS ON KEIR PERFORMANCE,
early date in the history of Scotch heraldiy — which gives them the |9as and
Absurd preference over every other Scotch bearers of the buckle ; yet, notwithstanding
and unsup-
ported this, the Keir partisans, who on most occasions support the claims and aspi-
derivations _
of the rations of their principal in the most gratuitous manner, and whose zeal and
Stirling -^ -^ ^
the Keir" ^irdour frequently amount almost to bigotry, seem to think it impossible that
work. ^Yns chivalrous emblem can really be indigenous to the Stirlings, and conse-
quently feel themselves bound to discover from whence the exotic may have
been transported. It has already been shown how futile was the attempt to
bring forward the Cawdors of the north as competitors for the honour of
having iirst borne the buckles ; and now, lest the editor should fall back and
seek support from his other equally hollow theory, we propose to examine it,
and to deal with it according to its merits. The passage runs thus —
1 See Keir " Buukle, of that Ilk, an old family in Berwickshire, carried on a bend three
ance, p. 14. bucklcs.' Tlirougli intermarriage, the Darnley or Lennox Stuarts quartered
those buckles with their own arms. It is possible that one of the early
Stirlings who settled in the Border counties may have intermarried with
the Bunkles, and thus acquired the buckles in the same manner as the
Stewarts.''
It is believed that this page in the Keir Performance contains within its
. limited compass more hallucination and error than is comprised in the same
space, or gi-eater, in any other work of the kind. To the paragi-aph just quoted
we may reply, in the first place, that the Bunkles (rather Boukills) did not
bear the buckles on a hend, as the Stirlings did ; they carried them of old 2
and 1, and afterwards with a chevron hehveen* as is proved by the subjoined
evidence. Secondly, before we can admit that the Stirlings derived their arms
from this family, it must be proved that the latter had the prior right to
bear the buckles ; this, however, the Keir work, according to its usual care-
less and reprehensible practice, does not condescend to do, but gratuitously
and de piano, upon no discoverable ground at all, gives the Bonkills the pre-
ference. And thirdly, the Darnley or Lennox Stuarts never did either inter-
marry with tlie Bunkles or quarter their arms ; the editor's statement is
entirely fabulous. These Stuarts may be held to be sprung — contrary to the
assertions of our older genealogists— from Sir Alan Stuart, first acquirer of
* And in an original index, autograph of subsequently burnt, the arms of " Bonkill " are
" Robert Porteous Snaddon, herald, Septem- thus given : " argent, a chiflfron vert, betwixt
ber 1661," to the then existing Lyon Eecords, three buckles azure."