Patrick Gordon - Passages from the Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries: In the Years 1635-1699

RUSSIA THROUGH EUROPEAN EYES

No. 3

General Editor: Dr. A. G. CROSS, University of East Anglia

THE DIARY

OF

GENERAL PATRICK GORDON

PASSAGES

FROM

THE DIARY

OF

GENERAL PATRICK GORDON

OF AUCHLEUCHRIES

IN THE YEARS

1635 1699

Published by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

First edition 1859

New impression 1968

Transferred to Digital Printing 2006

ISBN 0714615358 (hbk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

PRESENTED

TO

THE SPALDING CLUB

BY

BERIAH BOTFIELD

OF

NORTON HALL.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

The Spalding Club.

M.DCCC.LIX.

Patron.

HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCE CONSORT.

President.

THE EARL OF ABERDEEN, K.G., K.T.

Vice-Presidents.

THE DUKE OF RICHMOND, K.G.

THE DUKE OF SUTHERLAND, K.G.

THE EARL OF KINTORE.

THE EARL OF SEAFIELD.

THE LORD SALTOUN.

The Council.

The LORD PROVOST of Aberdeen.

Sir GEORGE SAMUEL ABERCROMBY of Birkenbog, Bart.

JOHN ANGUS, President of the Society of Advocates in Aberdeen.

JOHN HILL BURTON, Advocate, Edinburgh.

CHARLES CHALMERS of Monkshill.

ROBERT CHAMBERS, Edinburgh.

The EARL of CAWDOR.

ARCHIBALD DAVIDSON, Sheriff of Aberdeenshire.

CHARLES ELPHINSTONE DALRYMPLE.

Sir JAMES DALRYMPLE HORNE ELPHINSTONE of Horne and Logie-Elphinstone, Bart.

The EARL of ERROLL.

The LORD FORBES.

Colonel JONATHAN FORBES.

JAMES GILES, R.S.A., Aberdeen.

JOHN GORDON of Cairnbulg, Advocate.

GEORGE GRUB, Advocate in Aberdeen.

COSMO INNES, Advocate, Professor of History in the University of Edinburgh.

The Right Reverend JAMES KYLE, D.D., Preshome.

DAVID LAING, Keeper of the Library of the Society of Writers to the Signet, Edinburgh.

WILLIAM LESLIE of Wartle and Drumrossie.

The LORD LINDSAY.

HUGH LUMSDEN of Pitcaple, Advocate. (Deceased.)

ALEXANDER MORISON of Bognie.

MARK NAPIER, Advocate, Sheriff of Dumfries-shire.

The EARL of NORTHESK.

JOHN RAMSAY of Barra.

ALEXANDER HENRY RHIND of Sibster.

JOSEPH ROBERTSON, Superintendent of the Literary and Antiquarian Department of the General Register House, Edinburgh.

JAMES YORSTON SIMPSON, M.D., Professor of Midwifery in the University of Edinburgh.

The Reverend ALEXANDER TAYLOR, D.D., Leochel-Cushnie.

ALEXANDER THOMSON of Banchory.

GEORGE TULLOCH, LL.D., Aberdeen.

Sectetary.

JOHN STUART, General Register House, Edinburgh.

Treasurers.

JOHN BLAIKIE, Advocate in Aberdeen.

JOHN LIGERTWOOD, Advocate in Aberdeen.

PREFACE.

THE soldier of fortune, whose memoirs are now introduced to the SPALDING CLUB, had been but a short while dead when public attention was turned to the eight or ten thick quartos, in which, for forty years, he had recorded, day by day, the incidents of his eventful life.

So early as 1724, a translation of the Journal from its original English into the language of the thankless country in which the writer was condemned to breathe his last, was

Forty years passed before the first work which professed to give any adequate outline of the contents of General Gordons Diary, as a whole, began to issue from the press of Moscow. It followed Stritters ill-planned version, so far as that went. But the editor, Dr. Posselt, carefully collated the original, restored many passages which Stritter had curtailed or omitted, illustrated the text by valuable notes, and supplied the two great chasms in the Journal by information gleaned from other sources. From June, 1692, where his own translation began, he allowed the narrative to run, as in the original, in the first person.

Dr. Posselts work could scarcely fail to awaken interest in the land of the adventurer whose story it told. It was reviewed, in terms of just praise, in our two chief critical journals, and both urged the publication of at least portions of the Diary in the language in which it was written. The earlier of these reviews was from the lively and accomplished pen of the late Earl of Ellesmere, and it was published in the avowed hope that it might induce one of the Scotch clubs, or two or three of them in friendly alliance, to undertake an edition of selections from the original text. The SPALDING CLUB was specially referred to, and it lost no time in taking measures for accomplishing an object so desirable in itself, and so much in accordance with the purposes of the Association. Its President, the Earl of Aberdeen, then First Lord of the Treasury, made application to the Court of St. Petersburg for a transcript of all the passages of General Gordons Diary which related to his native country. The request was granted with a prompt and liberal courtesy for which the warmest acknowledgements are due; and the selections which fill most of the following sheets were placed at the disposal of the Club in a careful copy made from the original, in the Imperial Archives of Russia, by the hand of all others best qualified for the task, that of the excellent editor of the German translation. Dr. Posselt accompanied his transcript by a note explaining that while he had been at pains to preserve Gordons orthography, he had not thought it necessary to retain the many abbreviations which obscure or perplex the original. He adds that it is so faulty in the names of persons and places, especially in Russia, that not a few of them are disguised beyond his power of recognition.

The passages transcribed by Dr. Posselt, and now printed from his copy, are six in number.

The first gives Gordons account of his birth, parentage, education, and travels, till the summer of 1655, when, at the age of twenty, he took service at Hamburg as a trooper in the army which King Charles Gustavus of Sweden was mustering for the invasion of Poland.

The next, a single leaf from the Journal of the winter of 1658, tells how the writer and fourteen of his Cavalier fellow-countrymen, then lying with the Swedish army on the banks of the Vistula, were baffled in an attempt to assassinate the Ambassador from the English Commonwealth to the Court of Moscow, in the mistaken belief that he was the President of the Court which sat in judgment on King Charles the First.