1811 – 1872

Sorcerer or not, (and should we care?) MacGregor was a consummate conjuror of words.

Kate Ferne, author of Minotaur

Tamburlaine Bryce MacGregor was born in Leith in February 1811. The seventh son of a Guildsman of the Edenborough Merchant Adventurers, he was destined to enter his father’s profession until, aged eleven, a near-fatal bout of polio left him permanently lame and dogged by ill health. Forced to abandon his apprenticeship with the guild and encouraged by his mother, MacGregor developed his natural gift with words and turned to poetry, finding success in his early twenties with publication in the Edenborough Review and other literary periodicals.

Two works in particular, The Whale’s Road and Roy of the Reivers established MacGregor within the ‘minstrel’ tradition, however, his success as a poet proved short-lived. The publication of Lord Tyrone’s groundbreaking The Harrow and the Child in 1840 heralded a new form of poetry: dramatic realism, and not for the last time Tamburlaine Bryce MacGregor found himself out of step with public taste. Realising his limitations as a poet, he turned to prose.

Published in 1841, MacGregor’s first novel, The Old Man and the Mountain, showed considerable promise and over the next four years he wrote The Barra Bride, Maid of Norway, Camberwick and The Saxon Trilogy, each receiving good notices and increasing sales. His five volume Arthurian Cycle (1848–1851) brought him lasting success and fame and soon after came Wyvenhoe, Willoughby Chaste and King Stephen, among other works. By 1855 MacGregor was recognised as Scotland’s foremost novelist with King Charles VII and the First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Wells, among his admirers, with the former having appointed MacGregor as Master of the King’s Revels in June 1853. Edmund Pevensie, the tale of a hard-done-by Scottish nobleman who finds redemption and love in Napoleonic France, published in 1857, won MacGregor acclaim overseas and at New Year 1858 King Charles granted him the Baronetcy of Tweeddale and the Order of the Thistle in recognition of his services to Scotland. Lauded at home and abroad, the Fates seemed to have smiled upon MacGregor, not least in his private life.

In the June of 1857 MacGregor had met Miss Madeleine Nicholson, a lady-in-waiting at Holyrood Palace and the daughter of Sir Henry Hawkins Nicholson. King Charles, always keen to impress foreign dignitaries with Scotland’s culture and learning, frequently called on MacGregor to provide literary entertainments at Holyrood. MacGregor’s journals show he found these duties onerous and undignified, but he could scarcely refuse the king. MacGregor met Madeleine Nicholson at a function for the Rajah of Shantipore, and despite the age difference—he was then forty-six, an old man by the standards of his times, she twenty-one—the attraction was immediate, and courtship and marriage followed in December the same year. Immediately after their wedding, Madeleine (now Lady Madeleine) joined MacGregor at Arbinger Abbey in Tweeddale, but frequent and lengthy visits to her friends and relatives back in Edenborough suggest life at Arbinger did not wholly agree with her. Even today, Tweeddale is a rural backwater and with her new husband chained to his writing desk, or away promoting his latest publication, it is not surprising Lady Madeleine found it difficult to adjust to Arbinger’s isolation.

Nevertheless, she was soon with child. MacGregor wrote in his journal of his joy at becoming a father, but alas his hopes were dashed when Lady Madeleine died in childbirth, along with the son she was carrying.

Following Madeleine’s death in October 1858 MacGregor left Edenborough and the Royal Court and spurning all but his most trusted friends retreated to Arbinger. Abandoning a part-written novel, The Young Man of Lochnagar, for two years he wrote only his personal journals and what he later called ‘Black Books’, all of which he subsequently destroyed and whose content can only be guessed at from the vague, cryptic notes in his journals. To friends and admirers, the ‘Bard of Tweeddale’ seemed permanently silenced.In Tempus Fugit, MacGregor wrote,

There is nothing as enduring as hope, or as mutable as the spirit. Only belief is frail.

He was describing events at New Year 1861 when, at the instigation of a close friend, he met Mrs Helena Northwood. She was recently widowed, and it seems each found in the other a perfect understanding of their situation. Following a brief courtship, they married in June 1861 and soon after MacGregor broke his two-year silence with ‘Lays of Brigadoon’. At Christmas the same year Helena discovered she was with child and soon after MacGregor began work on This Iron Race.The birth of Lorcan, MacGregor’s son, passed without difficulty in August 1862, but publication of the first volume of This Iron Race proved troublesome. Although completed in December 1862, MacGregor’s publishers objected to its content and style and he had to rewrite it several times before its eventual publication, as three volumes, in 1864 and 1865. Works of the Master (1866) and Devices & Executions (1868) completed This Iron Race while his family increased to eight as Lady Helena bore six more sons, including two pairs of twins, and a daughter.

MacGregor had found happiness in his private life, but the first volume of This Iron Race and its sequels sold poorly, and he never regained his status as Scotland’s foremost novelist. In Tempus Fugit, he claimed This Iron Race was intended to take magick out of the past and set it among the steamships and railways of the contemporary world, “for iron need not, and should not, be the death of magick. We must decide what we want from magick, what role it is to play in our lives.” Alas, for MacGregor, public opinion determined magick, along with the divine right of kings and knights in armour, had no place in the modern world.

This Iron Race was MacGregor’s final major work. Soon after publication of Devices & Executions, his health failed and he spent his final years working on A History of Scottish Magick, revising early poetical works and editing his memoirs. He died on All Hallows Eve, 1872 aged 62.

Few writers did as much to show the unjust treatment of the people of Highland Scotland and none did more.

Patrick Merryweather Boyd, Scots Herald

The Alban Church has much to be proud of, but its vilification of Sir Tamburlaine Bryce MacGregor must be deplored. It remains the case that This Iron Race is not a Godly book, but we can at least now agree that it is, in the very best sense of the word, a good book.

Prester MacKendrick, President of the Alban Church

THE PUBLISHED WORKS

POETRY COLLECTIONS

The Border Minstrel
The Whale’s Road
Roy of the Reivers
Lays of Brigadoon
A Perthshire Lass (published posthumously)

THE NOVELS

The Old Man and the Mountain
The Barra Bride
Maid of Norway
Camberwick
Wyvenhoe
There and Back Again (written for children)
Willoughby Chaste
Vortigern
Under The Pirate’s Flag (written for children)
King Stephen
Edmund Pevensie

 The Saxon Trilogy

Edwin and Morcar • Kingmaker • Dragonships

 The Scottish Trilogy

Last of the Free • House of Alpin • Brunanburh

The Arthurian Cycle

Lady of the Lake • Sir Gawain • Launcelot du Lac • Modred • Merlin of the Woods

This Iron Race

Acts of the Servant • Works of the Master • Devices & Executions

NON-FICTION

The Merchant Adventurers Company of Edenborough
Canongate Chronicles
A Basket of Balladry (as compiler and editor)
Rough Harbour: Observations of Highland Life
A History of Scottish Magick (unfinished at time of death)
Tempus Fugit (memoirs, published posthumously)