The Hon. George Elliot pointed out this fact in his
Border Elliots and the Family of Minto: Colonel Elliot rightly insists
on this point.
The Scott version is therefore as hopelessly false as the Elliot
version. The Elliot version, with the Buccleuch incident, is "too
absurd to be believed," and could not have been written (except in
banter of Buccleuch), while men remembered the customs of the sixteenth
century. The Scott version, again, could not be composed before the
tradition arose that Gilbert Elliot WAS laird of Stobs before the Union
of the Crowns in 1603. Now that tradition was in full force on the
Border before 1688. We know that (see chapter on Kinmont Willie,
infra), for, in 1688, a man born in 1613, Captain Walter Scott of
Satchells, in his Metrical History of the Honourable Families of the
Names of Scott and Elliot, represents Gilbert Elliot of Stobs as riding
with Buccleuch in the rescue of Kinmont Willie, in 1596. {95a} Now
Satchells's own father rode in that fray, he says, {95b} and he gives a
minute genealogy of the Elliots of Stobs.
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