Man-Midwife, Male Feminist: The Life and Times of George Macaulay, M.D., Ph.D. (1716-1766)

The Last Laird of Clan Aulay

The financial fortunes of the last two Lairds of Clan Aulay had increasingly fallen into disarray. As we earlier noted, Laird Archibald Macaulay had found it necessary to sell off a portion of his estate in the 1740s. Apparently, he and his father had been notable spendthrifts and had wasted a good deal of the wealth of their branch of the family. Early in the century the Laird had sold the site where the City of Helensburgh now stands. Cadet branches of the family, however, had a stake in the affairs of the clan's hereditary leaders, and it may well be that the Edinburgh Macaulays would have inherited that role in the event of the prior failure of the direct male line. As it happened, the male line of the cadet branch failed first. Until that time, Lord Provost Archibald and Dr. George Macaulay nevertheless retained an interest and remained involved in the disposition of the lands associated with Ardincaple castle. Archibald served as advisor to both the penultimate and the last Lairds of Clan Aulay.

The nineteenth and last Laird, Aulay Macaulay, worked hard at unsuccessful attempts to remedy his financial distress. Something of an eccentric scholar and a pious individual, he invented, as the most notable of his attempts to remedy his fortune, a system of universal shorthand. The preface to Polygraphy or Shorthand Made Easy To the Meanest Capacity Being an Universal Character Fitted to All Languages Which may be learnt by this Book without the help of a Master (London: 1747) makes clear that he hoped it would be an international and popular best-seller as a do-it-yourself book. Its frontispiece is faced by a plate depicting a preacher in a pulpit surrounded by ladies and gentlemen furiously preserving his words in Aulay's script.

Anticipating notable success and fearing that pirated editions would dilute his interest in the book's profits, Laird Aulay employed an idiosyncratic technique to ward off literary marauders. "In order to preserve my property in this Book as well as to prevent the Publick from being imposed upon by spurious Editions; I hereby declare that I shall sign my Name to all that are genuine," and, he threatens, "whoever presumes to pirate my Book, will be prosecuted with the utmost Rigour."[1] A certificate attesting that a seven-year-old boy has learned to use the system perfectly after four lessons follows this caveat.

Judging from the number of copies that survive in libraries, Aulay's Shorthand did enjoy some modest success. Among the books in George Macaulay's library was a handsomely bound presentation copy—the same one that we think is now preserved in the British Library. The proceeds from the volume's sale, however, proved far too slender to meet Aulay's need for capital. Too few seven-year-olds and pious preservers of sermons perceived their need for Aulay's system and came forward to buy. The ill success of this venture sealed Aulay's financial fate. The rambling pile of Ardincaple Castle was in ruinous condition. By the early 1750s its roof had fallen in, and it was virtually uninhabitable. Finally, deeply in debt and virtually bankrupt, Aulay had to sell Ardincaple and its lands. The castle itself and most of the property went to John Campbell, the fourth Duke of Argyll, who later sold it to a Ewan.[2] Apparently, a significant portion of the sale price went to settle Aulay's debts. A part of the deal may have included employment for Aulay to preserve him from utter penury, for he became Commissioner of Supply for Dumbartonshire—a post he held as late as 1764.

In 1753, at the time of Ardincaple's sale, however, Dr. George Macaulay relieved a part his cousin's emotional and financial distress by buying from among the ancestral properties two adjacent farms, Lagarrie and Blairvadden. [3] These properties, named for the creeks that water them, lie north of the site of Ardincaple Castle on Roseneath Bay along the shores of Gareloch. Page  183They command a scenic view of the loch itself and the hills and mountains, including the 2557 foot-high peak of Beinn Bheula rising across the Mare's Head peninsula and above the waters of Long Loch to the northwest.

These land sales left Laird Aulay with a single remaining property, Faslane, where he had already lived for a time since Ardincaple Castle had become uninhabitable. The exigencies of his financial plight, however, eventually forced him to sell even that. Fortunately, in buying the properties at Blairvadden and Laggarie, George gave Aulay the lifetime right to reside at Laggarie. The last Laird of Clan Aulay survived his philanthropic cousin, George, for hardly a year, dying in 1767, virtually penniless, and according to Welles, "childless, landless, and friendless" (Welles 148). Had it not been for George Macaulay, Aulay would have been even worse off.

As an interesting sidelight, in the early twentieth century, Ardincaple Castle itself again came into the hands of a cadet-branch, Macaulay descendant. Mrs. H. Macaulay-Stromberg, a wealthy American, who bought and restored the castle, inhabited it until her death in the 1930s. A painting of the castle was done in 1924 by David Severide, and Edward Randolph Welles, the chronicler of the castle's history, reports his own encounter at the castle on 18 September 1928, with a ghostly presence who disturbed his sleep with a knocking that continued for the better part of an hour, but ceased on the stroke of midnight (Welles 167). The castle has since been demolished, and on the hill where it stood only a single tower remains at the edge of a neighborhood playground to mark its former location.[4] [See Plate 12: Ardincaple Castle, early 20th century, and Plate 13: Ardincaple clock tower today.]

Little changed, Laggarie today is the site of a nursery school. Occupying Blairvadden one finds the surviving nineteenth-century house of Madeline Smith, heiress to a Glasgow distiller's fortune and the notorious empoisoner of her husband.

When he bought the two ancestral properties, George Macaulay must have been moved not only by the desire to relieve his cousin's distress but also to preserve a modicum of a centuries-old family heritage. Perhaps he had happy childhood memories of time spent there away from Edinburgh. Page  184Perhaps he imagined retiring there as a country gentleman. He was still in possession of both estates at his death in 1766.