Series 2 > Household book of Lady Grisell Baillie

xvi HOUSE-BOOK OF LADY GRISELL BAILLIE
escape to Holland, and of the heroic part therein played
by his daughter Grisell, is too well known to need repetition
here. Suffice it to say he lay hid first for a month in the
family vault under Polwarth Church, where ‘ he had only
for light an open slit at one end through which nobody
could see,’ and where ‘ his great comfort and constant
entertainment [for he had no light to read by] was
repeating Buchanan’s Psalms, which he had by heart
from beginning to end, and retained them to his dying
day.’ When this place of concealment could be endured
no longer, he was brought to the house and shut up in
a room of the ground floor, of which his daughter kept the
key. Under the floor of this room his wife, daughter,
and Jamie Winter, a carpenter who used to work in the
house and who alone shared the secret, ‘ scratched ’ a
hole in the earth, fitting into it a box with bed
and bedclothes, whither Sir Patrick could retreat in
the event of an alarm, then the flooring having been
screwed down and the bed placed over the top it was
hoped he would escape detection. ‘ After being at home
a week or two, the bed daily examined as usual, one day,
in lifting the boards, the bed bounced to the top, the
box being full of water.’ This and the news of Jervis-
wood’s execution convinced him and his wife and daughter
that safety must be sought elsewhere. Disguised and
passing as a surgeon, he made his way through London
to Bordeaux and from thence to Utrecht in Holland,
where, settling under the name of ‘ Dr. Wallace,’ his
family soon joined him. Thither also fled George Baillie,
a circumstance which does not surprise us with our know¬
ledge of after events.
The estates of both exiles had been forfeited, that of
Baillie having been given to the Duke of Gordon, while
that of Sir Patrick Hume passed to the Earl of Seaforth,
thus leaving both in nearly destitute circumstances.