Angus MacKay – Sovereign’s Piper
By Bruce Campbell
ANGUS Mackay was the son of John MacKay, the orphan Raasay herd boy who climbed from the poverty of his humble background to become the greatest piper in the world.
In turn, Angus took on that mantle. Perhaps he even eclipsed his famous father. As a music collector he certainly did, with the Piobaireachd he wrote into staff notational form being the cornerstone of the Piobaireachd Society’s great collection - and every other collector since he published his own book in 1838.
Angus MacKay was maybe the most important figure in the history of the bagpipe, certainly the most important in the last two hundred years. By the time he was twelve, MacKay was accepted as the major collector of Piobaireachd in Scotland - and at a time when few could read staff notation. But he not only read and wrote music, he also improved the recording of Piobaireachd in staff notation. He wasn't the first by any means but the standard which he set has been copied slavishly ever since.
Only in a few instances has the methods he used been superceded and his work was accepted to such an extent that it swept aside all other styles of piping to the point where even today, in an enlightened age of study and performance, few players will spend much time studying alternative styles of music, and fewer still would play them in open competition.
Had Angus MacKay lived a full and wholesome life then that almost reverence would be understandable, even applauded. But he didn't. He died before he reached his fiftieth birthday, drowned while attempting to escape from a lunatic asylum. The reason of his committal was a madness brought on by advanced syphilis. And in turn his wife and children turned their back on the piping world, spurning the art which had brought him to the drawing rooms of high society and also likely to the precipice of his own eventual self-destruction.
There is also a hint of other darker goings-on, maybe even from his early teenage years.
Is it possible that this dark-eyed and thoroughly handsome Highlander, who played better than the master players who were his senior and who was the acknowledged expert on writing the classics of piping, was ignored by the young ladies of the social elite who employed him?
Drummond Castle, where his father was employed as piper from 1824 onwards, must have been an amazing place for a young boy who had never traveled beyond the narrowness of the Isle of Raasay. To him, the-then small fishing village of Portree, which he probably only rarely ever saw, would have seemed like a metropolis. At Drummond, Angus also learned to read and write which was not common at that time amongst boys of his social standing.
Lord Gwydir, who had married Lady Sarah Drummond, was heavily involved in Highland Society politics and in 1819 had aided the start of the modern Highland Games movement by giving the St Fillans Society use of his land for their first gathering on the eastern shores of Loch Earn.
Gwydir was also on the social circuit and so the MacKays would have come in contact with the visiting aristocracy - and their pipers. On July 22, 1835 Angus MacKay won the ultimate accolade in piping, the Prize Pipe for Piobaireachd at the Highland Society of Edinburgh competition. In attendance were all the glitterati of Scottish high society. Piping competitions in those days were not dark halls with only a few of the most devout listening in attendance, instead they were very much part of the social calendar. That same year he also advertised his forthcoming book which he intended to have published by the following February.
Those last few years in Perthshire saw MacKay use the opportunity to collect even more music, to concentrate his efforts on writing and to delay the inevitable day when he would have to earn an independent income. He was still piper to Sarah Drummond, Lady Gwydir and fame and fortune would have not really interested him. His obsession was obviously still collecting music.
But it 1837 he was offered a position which despite its seeming remoteness would change his life totally. He was to become Piper to Walter Campbell of Islay, a remote place island the Kintyre peninsula. Just when it seemed that he would burst completely onto the national scene he chose the offer of full-time employment instead.
After a short time with the Laird of Islay (which he commemorated in his only known Piobaireachd composition, ‘Farewell to the Laird of Islay’) there followed an aborted attempt to establish a professional piping school in Edinburgh, then a spell as piper to Lord Ward (who had taken on the Glengarry estates) and, of course, more prizes.
In July 1843, at the height of his fame, he was recommended by the Marquis of Breadalbane to become the first ever Sovereign’s Piper. Angus MacKay served as Piper to Queen Victoria until 1854 when he suffered a mental breakdown. He was first admitted to London’s Bethlehem Mental Hospital (known as ‘Bedlam’) and then later to the Crichton Institute in Dumfries. At that time the Crichton was state-of-the-art. It had been opened only a few years before and its grounds were majestic. Rolling-lawns and well laid-out flower beds all gave the serenity which MacKay would have felt in his lucid moments.
It wasn’t dissimilar to the magnificent grounds of Drummond Castle where he spent his youth. As I walked the grounds of both places I thought of the dark thoughts which would have invaded the great piper’s mind. He was certainly troubled as his personal diaries clearly show. But he wasn’t a 100% madman either. He had many periods of calm and sanity. So what drove him to make his escape from the Crichton? In fact, was it really an escape?
The walls around the Crichton even today are more decorative that custodial so he wouldn’t have had to try too hard to make good his escape. On March 29, 1859 The Dumfries & Galloway Courier reported: “On the afternoon of March 21st Angus MacKay, a patient in the Crichton Institution, managed to escape from the grounds of the asylum, and proceeded down the bank of the Nith till near Glencaple, where he waded into the river, with the intention it is supposed, of crossing the estuary to Kirkconnel Wood, for concealment.
“The tide was running down at the time, and it is supposed that McKay had touched a quicksand, as he sank in the stream. “The occurrence was noticed by some persons working in a field near, who procured a boat, but no trace of the body could be seen.
“MacKay had been for three years a patient in the asylum, and had formerly been one of her Majesty’s pipers. “The body has not been recovered.”
Reading books and papers is one thing, going on site is another. As I walked the banks of the River Nith I wondered what possessed MacKay to go downstream to Glencaple Wood, some four or five miles away. Just over a mile upstream is the town of Dumfries, complete with roads and bridge. He would have been there in ten or twenty minutes, making his ‘escape’ easily in the process.
But if he did intend to cross the Nith why didn’t he do it before Glencaple where the quicksands are notorious? In the miles before the woods there are many easier places to cross the river and although the banks are muddy at low tide they are not as dangerous as the quicksands. Did Mackay not know, did he think he was heading for Dumfries and only realise his mistake when he imagined his pursuers were on him? And how did his ‘rescuers’ know it was him who drowned?
There was no body and no identification - it was only assumed it was Angus MacKay because he was missing at the same time. Then there is the legend that MacKay didn’t drown at all but lived out the remaining years as an itinerant piper. Is it too much to believe that such a great figure in the piping world could remain anonymous?
Piping, as has been said, is famous for its mysteries and characters. But standing on the banks of the River Nith that day close to the anniversary of his ‘death’ I found it hard to imagine that even someone as tormented as Angus MacKay would have waded into the quicksands
Box and Fiddle
January 2007
Was Queen Victoria Angus MacKay’s secret royal mistress?
by Bruce Campbell
THERE IS a legend in piping that the reason for the insanity of Angus MacKay, or at least part of it, was down to his personal anguish caused by sharing his ‘wife’, Queen Victoria, with Albert. MacKay was the mid 19th century genius who became Victoria’s piper and
seemed to have become something of a favourite of hers. But was there something more in the relationship?
Was there a deceitful layer of illicit love and sex which saw MacKay turned out of his position when he started to rant and rave about the affair? Since 1859, when he is said to have accidentally died while escaping from the Crichton Institute, the stories of his relationship with Queen Victoria have largely been dismissed as the ravings of a certified lunatic. That MacKay spent time in both Bethlehem Hospital in London (known notoriously as Bedlam) and then the Crichton Royal Institute in Dumfries only add to the grounds for the dismissal of his seemingly wild claims. Making it even more of a beer tent story is the modern case of a prominent Gold Medalist who just a few years back was turned away from the gates of Buckingham Palace.
He had turned up to marry his ‘sweetheart’, Princess Anne. Madness, piping, sex and strong drink have long had their pull - sometimes all four at the same time. The recent allegations that Princess Diane was murdered have provided a reason to look at the whole case of Angus MacKay in a new light. Diane’s sexual promiscuity is well documented even although she was far from the rager that is common place amongst the royal family.
Even Britain's most conservative of all TV soapies, ‘Coronation Street’, has Vera Duckworth cast as an illegitimate grand-daughter of King George. It isn’t that hard to believe because it happened down through history, not just in the Royal family but throughout the entire nation’s aristocracy. Scotland too is scored with bastard children of this duke and that earl,
sometimes running of the same braes as their legitimate siblings. Could MacKay really have been having an affair with Queen Victoria? While he certainly was not married to her, history has recorded that both her predecessors and descendants have all been largely promiscuous. If she wasn’t she would be one of the rare ones, an exception. Then there is the case of John Brown, the Highland servant she engaged after the death of Albert.
There was widespread suspicion throughout the court that Brown was having a conjugal relationship with the Queen. Victoria, was also a self-confessed lover of Highland life. Balmoral Castle is a glorious example of much she liked life in the Highlands. She was besotted with the scenery, the people and the culture so much so that she made her own children dress up in imitation of what she thought a Highlander should look like.
Angus MacKay was indeed devoted to his sovereign. Queen Victoria's own journals also record faithfully the kind of work she expected her pipers to do. Paintings and sketches are plentiful showing them playing for dancing at balls but also doing more strenuous tasks such as playing for them while out on hunting parties.
One such painting shows the two pipers playing while the party crossed a river - with the pipers waist deep in water and still playing. Another shows MacKay playing at the top of Craig Gowan while the Queen and her guests built a cairn. She wrote: “... it was nearly eleven o’clock before we could go up to the top of Craig Gowan, to see the cairn built, which was to commemorate us taking possession of this dear place; the old cairn having been pulled down. “We set off with all the children, ladies, gentlemen, and a few of the servants, including MacDonald and Grant, who had not already gone up; and at the Moss House, which is half way, MacKay met us, and preceded us, playing, Duncan and Donald Stewart going before him, to the highest point of Craig Gowan where were assembled all the servants and tenants, with their wives and children and old relations.
“All our little friends were there; Mary Symons and Lizzie Stewart, the four Grants and several others. “I then placed the first stone, after which Albert laid one, then the children, according to their ages. “All the ladies and gentlemen placed one; and then everyone came forward at once, each person carrying a stone and placing it on the cairn. “Mr and Mrs Anderson were there; MacKay played; and whisky was given to all. “It took, I am sure, an hour building; and whilst it was going on some merry Reels were danced on a stone opposite.” That was in October 1852.
Angus MacKay was at the height of his fame, the greatest piper in the world and acknowledged by his peers as a genius. By Victoria’s own writing he not only played the party half way up a steep Scottish mountain but then played for well over an hour while the cairn was built and the party danced. The cairn is over eight feet in height and the likelihood is that it took a lot longer than an hour to build. MacKay would have been playing almost non-stop for most of the day. That is neither the action of someone who values himself as a top class musician nor of an employer who has any consideration for her piper. The poor man would have been exhausted. Why did he do it? Why did he do jobs which were little short of humiliating? Stranger things have been done by men in pursuit of the love and affection of a woman. Maybe it isn’t so unrealistic to think that Victoria was more of a Royal mistress than the term suggests. The palace worked hard to suppress the stories about Victoria and John Brown - and failed; maybe they were a bit more successful with the suggested relationship with Angus MacKay.
In turn, Angus took on that mantle. Perhaps he even eclipsed his famous father. As a music collector he certainly did, with the Piobaireachd he wrote into staff notational form being the cornerstone of the Piobaireachd Society’s great collection - and every other collector since he published his own book in 1838.
Angus MacKay was maybe the most important figure in the history of the bagpipe, certainly the most important in the last two hundred years. By the time he was twelve, MacKay was accepted as the major collector of Piobaireachd in Scotland - and at a time when few could read staff notation. But he not only read and wrote music, he also improved the recording of Piobaireachd in staff notation. He wasn't the first by any means but the standard which he set has been copied slavishly ever since.
Only in a few instances has the methods he used been superceded and his work was accepted to such an extent that it swept aside all other styles of piping to the point where even today, in an enlightened age of study and performance, few players will spend much time studying alternative styles of music, and fewer still would play them in open competition.
Had Angus MacKay lived a full and wholesome life then that almost reverence would be understandable, even applauded. But he didn't. He died before he reached his fiftieth birthday, drowned while attempting to escape from a lunatic asylum. The reason of his committal was a madness brought on by advanced syphilis. And in turn his wife and children turned their back on the piping world, spurning the art which had brought him to the drawing rooms of high society and also likely to the precipice of his own eventual self-destruction.
There is also a hint of other darker goings-on, maybe even from his early teenage years.
Is it possible that this dark-eyed and thoroughly handsome Highlander, who played better than the master players who were his senior and who was the acknowledged expert on writing the classics of piping, was ignored by the young ladies of the social elite who employed him?
Drummond Castle, where his father was employed as piper from 1824 onwards, must have been an amazing place for a young boy who had never traveled beyond the narrowness of the Isle of Raasay. To him, the-then small fishing village of Portree, which he probably only rarely ever saw, would have seemed like a metropolis. At Drummond, Angus also learned to read and write which was not common at that time amongst boys of his social standing.
Lord Gwydir, who had married Lady Sarah Drummond, was heavily involved in Highland Society politics and in 1819 had aided the start of the modern Highland Games movement by giving the St Fillans Society use of his land for their first gathering on the eastern shores of Loch Earn.
Gwydir was also on the social circuit and so the MacKays would have come in contact with the visiting aristocracy - and their pipers. On July 22, 1835 Angus MacKay won the ultimate accolade in piping, the Prize Pipe for Piobaireachd at the Highland Society of Edinburgh competition. In attendance were all the glitterati of Scottish high society. Piping competitions in those days were not dark halls with only a few of the most devout listening in attendance, instead they were very much part of the social calendar. That same year he also advertised his forthcoming book which he intended to have published by the following February.
Those last few years in Perthshire saw MacKay use the opportunity to collect even more music, to concentrate his efforts on writing and to delay the inevitable day when he would have to earn an independent income. He was still piper to Sarah Drummond, Lady Gwydir and fame and fortune would have not really interested him. His obsession was obviously still collecting music.
But it 1837 he was offered a position which despite its seeming remoteness would change his life totally. He was to become Piper to Walter Campbell of Islay, a remote place island the Kintyre peninsula. Just when it seemed that he would burst completely onto the national scene he chose the offer of full-time employment instead.
After a short time with the Laird of Islay (which he commemorated in his only known Piobaireachd composition, ‘Farewell to the Laird of Islay’) there followed an aborted attempt to establish a professional piping school in Edinburgh, then a spell as piper to Lord Ward (who had taken on the Glengarry estates) and, of course, more prizes.
In July 1843, at the height of his fame, he was recommended by the Marquis of Breadalbane to become the first ever Sovereign’s Piper. Angus MacKay served as Piper to Queen Victoria until 1854 when he suffered a mental breakdown. He was first admitted to London’s Bethlehem Mental Hospital (known as ‘Bedlam’) and then later to the Crichton Institute in Dumfries. At that time the Crichton was state-of-the-art. It had been opened only a few years before and its grounds were majestic. Rolling-lawns and well laid-out flower beds all gave the serenity which MacKay would have felt in his lucid moments.
It wasn’t dissimilar to the magnificent grounds of Drummond Castle where he spent his youth. As I walked the grounds of both places I thought of the dark thoughts which would have invaded the great piper’s mind. He was certainly troubled as his personal diaries clearly show. But he wasn’t a 100% madman either. He had many periods of calm and sanity. So what drove him to make his escape from the Crichton? In fact, was it really an escape?
The walls around the Crichton even today are more decorative that custodial so he wouldn’t have had to try too hard to make good his escape. On March 29, 1859 The Dumfries & Galloway Courier reported: “On the afternoon of March 21st Angus MacKay, a patient in the Crichton Institution, managed to escape from the grounds of the asylum, and proceeded down the bank of the Nith till near Glencaple, where he waded into the river, with the intention it is supposed, of crossing the estuary to Kirkconnel Wood, for concealment.
“The tide was running down at the time, and it is supposed that McKay had touched a quicksand, as he sank in the stream. “The occurrence was noticed by some persons working in a field near, who procured a boat, but no trace of the body could be seen.
“MacKay had been for three years a patient in the asylum, and had formerly been one of her Majesty’s pipers. “The body has not been recovered.”
Reading books and papers is one thing, going on site is another. As I walked the banks of the River Nith I wondered what possessed MacKay to go downstream to Glencaple Wood, some four or five miles away. Just over a mile upstream is the town of Dumfries, complete with roads and bridge. He would have been there in ten or twenty minutes, making his ‘escape’ easily in the process.
But if he did intend to cross the Nith why didn’t he do it before Glencaple where the quicksands are notorious? In the miles before the woods there are many easier places to cross the river and although the banks are muddy at low tide they are not as dangerous as the quicksands. Did Mackay not know, did he think he was heading for Dumfries and only realise his mistake when he imagined his pursuers were on him? And how did his ‘rescuers’ know it was him who drowned?
There was no body and no identification - it was only assumed it was Angus MacKay because he was missing at the same time. Then there is the legend that MacKay didn’t drown at all but lived out the remaining years as an itinerant piper. Is it too much to believe that such a great figure in the piping world could remain anonymous?
Piping, as has been said, is famous for its mysteries and characters. But standing on the banks of the River Nith that day close to the anniversary of his ‘death’ I found it hard to imagine that even someone as tormented as Angus MacKay would have waded into the quicksands
Box and Fiddle
January 2007
Was Queen Victoria Angus MacKay’s secret royal mistress?
by Bruce Campbell
THERE IS a legend in piping that the reason for the insanity of Angus MacKay, or at least part of it, was down to his personal anguish caused by sharing his ‘wife’, Queen Victoria, with Albert. MacKay was the mid 19th century genius who became Victoria’s piper and
seemed to have become something of a favourite of hers. But was there something more in the relationship?
Was there a deceitful layer of illicit love and sex which saw MacKay turned out of his position when he started to rant and rave about the affair? Since 1859, when he is said to have accidentally died while escaping from the Crichton Institute, the stories of his relationship with Queen Victoria have largely been dismissed as the ravings of a certified lunatic. That MacKay spent time in both Bethlehem Hospital in London (known notoriously as Bedlam) and then the Crichton Royal Institute in Dumfries only add to the grounds for the dismissal of his seemingly wild claims. Making it even more of a beer tent story is the modern case of a prominent Gold Medalist who just a few years back was turned away from the gates of Buckingham Palace.
He had turned up to marry his ‘sweetheart’, Princess Anne. Madness, piping, sex and strong drink have long had their pull - sometimes all four at the same time. The recent allegations that Princess Diane was murdered have provided a reason to look at the whole case of Angus MacKay in a new light. Diane’s sexual promiscuity is well documented even although she was far from the rager that is common place amongst the royal family.
Even Britain's most conservative of all TV soapies, ‘Coronation Street’, has Vera Duckworth cast as an illegitimate grand-daughter of King George. It isn’t that hard to believe because it happened down through history, not just in the Royal family but throughout the entire nation’s aristocracy. Scotland too is scored with bastard children of this duke and that earl,
sometimes running of the same braes as their legitimate siblings. Could MacKay really have been having an affair with Queen Victoria? While he certainly was not married to her, history has recorded that both her predecessors and descendants have all been largely promiscuous. If she wasn’t she would be one of the rare ones, an exception. Then there is the case of John Brown, the Highland servant she engaged after the death of Albert.
There was widespread suspicion throughout the court that Brown was having a conjugal relationship with the Queen. Victoria, was also a self-confessed lover of Highland life. Balmoral Castle is a glorious example of much she liked life in the Highlands. She was besotted with the scenery, the people and the culture so much so that she made her own children dress up in imitation of what she thought a Highlander should look like.
Angus MacKay was indeed devoted to his sovereign. Queen Victoria's own journals also record faithfully the kind of work she expected her pipers to do. Paintings and sketches are plentiful showing them playing for dancing at balls but also doing more strenuous tasks such as playing for them while out on hunting parties.
One such painting shows the two pipers playing while the party crossed a river - with the pipers waist deep in water and still playing. Another shows MacKay playing at the top of Craig Gowan while the Queen and her guests built a cairn. She wrote: “... it was nearly eleven o’clock before we could go up to the top of Craig Gowan, to see the cairn built, which was to commemorate us taking possession of this dear place; the old cairn having been pulled down. “We set off with all the children, ladies, gentlemen, and a few of the servants, including MacDonald and Grant, who had not already gone up; and at the Moss House, which is half way, MacKay met us, and preceded us, playing, Duncan and Donald Stewart going before him, to the highest point of Craig Gowan where were assembled all the servants and tenants, with their wives and children and old relations.
“All our little friends were there; Mary Symons and Lizzie Stewart, the four Grants and several others. “I then placed the first stone, after which Albert laid one, then the children, according to their ages. “All the ladies and gentlemen placed one; and then everyone came forward at once, each person carrying a stone and placing it on the cairn. “Mr and Mrs Anderson were there; MacKay played; and whisky was given to all. “It took, I am sure, an hour building; and whilst it was going on some merry Reels were danced on a stone opposite.” That was in October 1852.
Angus MacKay was at the height of his fame, the greatest piper in the world and acknowledged by his peers as a genius. By Victoria’s own writing he not only played the party half way up a steep Scottish mountain but then played for well over an hour while the cairn was built and the party danced. The cairn is over eight feet in height and the likelihood is that it took a lot longer than an hour to build. MacKay would have been playing almost non-stop for most of the day. That is neither the action of someone who values himself as a top class musician nor of an employer who has any consideration for her piper. The poor man would have been exhausted. Why did he do it? Why did he do jobs which were little short of humiliating? Stranger things have been done by men in pursuit of the love and affection of a woman. Maybe it isn’t so unrealistic to think that Victoria was more of a Royal mistress than the term suggests. The palace worked hard to suppress the stories about Victoria and John Brown - and failed; maybe they were a bit more successful with the suggested relationship with Angus MacKay.