CHAPTER I HOME AT HOUSTOUN JOHN CAMPBELL SHAIRP was born at Houstoun, Linlithgowshire, on the 30th July 1819. He was the third son of Major Norman Shairp of Houstoun, and of Elizabeth Binning, daughter of John Campbell of Kildalloig, Argyleshire. The property of Houstoun was acquired by the Shairps in the sixteenth century. The first of the family who held it was Sir John Shairp, through whom the cabinet and gloves, that once belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, and are now at Houstoun, came there.1 Shairp was a lineal descendant of Mary Scott, "The Flower of Yarrow." His great-grandmother, Anne Scott of Harden, who married Shairp of Houstoun, was the eldest daughter of John Scott of Harden, whose great-grandfather, Sir Gideon Scott of High Chester, was grandson of "The Flower of Yarrow." She was a Scott of Dryhope, and her romantic wooing is referred to in Shairp's poem Three Friends in Yarrow, in the volume edited by Mr. Palgrave. His maternal ancestry had a great interest for Shairp; and an inheritance of goodness, reaching him from a distant 1 It is probable that he was employed as an advocate for the Queen in one of the investigations into her conduct. When he bought Houstoun, in the year 1560, it was not a barony, but he purchased other neighbouring lands, and got the whole erected into a barony at a later date. His great-grandmother's only sister, Mary Lilias Scott, called the second "Flower of Yarrow," died at Edinburgh in 1790. |