Tibbie Fowler (I)

DESCRIPTION: "Tibbie Fowler o the glen, There's o'er mony wooin' at her... Wooin' at her, pu'in at her, Courtin' at her, cannae get her, Silly elf, it's for her pelf (wealth) That a' the lads are wooin' at her." She has few charms, but the lads come seeking her money
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1803 (Scots Musical Museum)
KEYWORDS: courting money rejection
FOUND IN: Britain(Scotland) US(Ap)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Ford-SongHistories, pp. 248-251, "Tibbie Fowler" (1 text)
Wolfe/Boswell-FolkSongsOfMiddleTennessee 10, p. 22, "Tibby Fowler" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #5504
NOTES [2365 words]: Whitelaw, writing about the Herd/Chambers text: "In the Tea Table Miscellany, Ramsay has a song 'to the tune of Tibble fowler in the Glen,' which proves that the air, at least is old.... The authorship has been ascribed to a 'Rev. Dr. Strachan late minister of Carnwath; but David Laing says that there has been no minister of Carnevath of that name for at least the last three hundred years" (source: Whitelaw-BookOfScottishSong, pp. 61-62, "Tibbie Fowler") - BS
This is repeated almost verbatim in Ford-SongHistories, p. 248, which adds, "There is some reason for believing that 'Tibbie' was a real personage, and tradition at Leith points to the person in a certain Isobel Fowler, who was married to a son of Logan of Restalrig, the conspirator, in the seventeenth century. A house which is believed to have belonged to the pair, having the date 1636, is pointed out in the Sheriffbrae in Leith."
The "conspiracy" referred to is the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600, in which an attempt was allegedly made by John Ruthven, Earl of Gowrie, and his brother Alexander the Master of Gowrie to trap, and probably kill (hold hostage? assassinate? overthrow? demand the roughly £80,000 they were owed by?) King James VI of Scotland.
Wagner, p. 126: "A strong Presbyterian like his father and grandfather, Gowrie was 22 in 1600 when he traveled from Italy to England, where he was well received by Queen Elizabeth. After returning to Scotland, Gowrie made himself conspicuous for opposing the king's demand for money in the current parliament."
It was a feud that had lasted all of James's life. The grandfather of Gowrie was Patrick Ruthven, who as he was mortally ill took part in the conspiracy that murdered David Riccio in the presence of Mary Queen of Scots, at the time when she was pregnant (Davies, p. 88). Patrick;s son and heir William became Mary's gaoler when she was imprisoned in Lochleven castle; his job was to get her to abdicate (Davies, pp. 98-99; there is more on these events in the notes to "Mary Hamilton" (Child #173)). William spent many years as Treasurer of Scotland, which meant he sometimes had to cover the debts of the crown -- hence the crown's great debts to the family (Davies, p. 102. He was also James's cousin -- Davies, p. 246, says first cousin, but I believe this misses a generation. In any case, this was through the Douglas family, not the Stuarts; the Ruthvens were not in the line of succession to the throne).
In 1581, William Ruthven was awarded the Gowrie earldom (Davies, p. 104. This was at a time when James was old enough to be aware of what was going on but not able to influence things much, so he may have resented the situation). The next year, a conspiracy involving Ruthven set out to abduct James in the so-called "Raid of Ruthven" (Davies, pp. 108-110). Gowrie seems to have realized earlier than most that a cabal could not really hope to hold and control a 17-year-old king, so he asked and was granted forgiveness (Davies, p. 112) -- but James never forgot such attempts to circumvent him; Gowrie was later tried and executed (Davies, pp. 116-117).
Such were the vagaries of Scottish politics, however, that the faction that had convicted Gowrie was overthrown soon after. The Earl of Arran, who had attacked the Ruthvens, lost his earldom and was eventually murdered by members of the Douglas affinity (Davies, p. 122). (In one of those great examples of a prophecy that didn't mean what it was said to mean, there is a report that Arran's wife had been told she would be the greatest woman in Scotland. She thought that meant she would be powerful. In fact she came down with dropsy, and her body swelled enormously before she died.) In 1587, the 12-year-old James Ruthven was given his father's Earldom of Gowrie, becoming the Second Earl. He died in 1588 at age 14, and his younger brother John, then only ten years old, became the Third Earl (Davies, p 123). He would be the Gowrie of the Gowrie Conspiracy.
I find it ironic that he was one of the few Scottish nobles who could compete with James in erudition; the University of Edinburgh had awarded him a Master of Arts degree at fifteen, after which he spent a couple of years at the University of Padua -- at a time when Galileo was a lecturer there (Davies, p. 133).
On top of all that, there were rumors the Ruthvens engaged in the black arts, which would surely get the attention of James, who was demon-obsessed -- Davies, p. 126, reports "King James was a convert. Witches were real, witchcraft was endemic in Scotland, and his own cousin, Francis Steward, Earl of Bothwell, was Satan's lieutenant on earth." Bothwell and the Ruthvens were political allies. The Ruthvens also seem to have, at minimum, been interested in alchemy, and very possibly gone beyond that. There is little doubt that James would happily have been rid of the Ruthven family and the Gowrie earldom.
The details of the Gowrie conspiracy are murky, especially since the Ruthven brothers ended up dead and were convicted posthumously of treason; we have only James's side. Every source I checked agrees that we don't really know what happened. Willson, p. 126, puts it most explicitly: "the King was involved in that strange mystery known as the Gowrie Plot. Over many episodes in his life James drew a veil of judicious uncertainty, but the Gowrie Plot was his masterpiece, for here the mystery remains inscrutable to the present day."
Basically James claimed that Alexander "Sandy" Ruthven, Gowrie's brother, lured James aside with a story of an unclaimed pot of gold, brought him into a tower room where there was a man in armor just standing around, then attempted to murder the king. James fought him off, and others eventually intervened, with the Ruthvens ending up dead. It's a story with a lot of mystery and missing details.
It was mysterious at the time, too. Stewart, pp. 150-153) gives the account of what James claimed happened. The one possible witness was the armored man who James claimed was present, who inexplicably did nothing in particular when Ruthven and the king arrived (thus letting James survive), yet within a week, four different people were identified as the witness! (Stewart, p. 154). Ultimately, it was little more than the king's word against dead bodies which could not give their side.
Davies devotes much of his book to the matter: did the Ruthvens conspire against James and muff the plot -- or did James conspire against the Ruthvens and just assume the people would accept the absurd story he told about it? An alternate hypothesis is that it arose out of some form of jealousy or other: That James's wife Anne of Denmark, presumably dissatisfied with her less-than-vigorous husband, was taken with one or the other of the handsome young Ruthven brothers -- or that James himself had one of his crushes on one or the other Ruthven, and attacked them when they would not yield? (Davies, pp. 150-151). We can't answer that. As James himself suggested, the best argument for the truth of James's claims is that he had many ways to rid himself of the Ruthvens; had that been his intent, could he have not come up with something better (and safer)? (Davies, pp. 161-162). (The one thought that does come to me is that, perhaps, James did make a pass at Sandy Ruthven, who then attacked him in response -- this was 1600, after all, and homosexuality was a capital crime -- and James's lame, lame story arose because he couldn't say, "I wanted to have sex with this guy.")
After much consideration, Davies, pp. 213-215, very tentatively concludes that the whole thing was a power struggle between Anne and James over who would have custody of their son Henry, the crown prince. Anne had almost no contact with the boy, and repeatedly tried to regain contact. The goal of the Gowrie Conspiracy was to push James into turning over the boy. But it all went horribly wrong. Others have drawn different conclusions; to repeat, we just don't know.
It worked out amazingly well for James, though: he called on the clergy to tell his side of the story from the pulpit, and when some resisted, he forced them to obedience, thus increasing his control over the church (Stewart, pp. 254-157). Davies, p. 224, observes, "Sir William Bowes was undoubtedly correct in suggesting that even if there had never been a 'Gowrie Conspiracy' at all, it rapidly became politically expedient to invent one and reinforce the story through all available political, spiritual and legal channels."
Like his younger brother Alexander, John Ruthven, Earl of Gowrie ended up dead -- another convenience for James, because he could confiscate the Gowrie lands. The two younger Ruthven brothers, William (who should therefore have become Earl of Gowrie) and Patrick, had to flee for their lives, and their mother, the Dowager Countess of Gowrie, died without being able to pass on her dower property to her sons; it went to a family enemy, Sir Thomas Erskine (Davies, pp. 72-73). The younger Ruthvens managed to survive for a few years as fugitives (and, in Patrick's case, as a prisoner after 1603), but they were not to be safe or comfortable, even though they were teenagers at the time of the conspiracy and surely not involved even if James's strange account was true. According to Davies, p. 76, they were the only exceptions to the general pardon James offered when he became King of England. (Davies, pp. 232-233, says that James, a few weeks after the Gowrie Affair, ceased to be so harsh to those he thought involved; Davies's suggestion is that James finally learned the real nature of the Conspiracy. If so, he never revealed it publicly -- and, of course, he retained the Gowrie lands)
It is surely ironic that the son of one of Gowrie's sisters was none other than James Graham, first Marquis of Montrose, the single strongest defenders of James I's son Charles I in the 1640s (Davies, p. 127). It is also ironic that both the Presbyterian Kirk and the Catholic Church apparently tried to use the memory of the Ruthvens to attack James (Davies, pp. 189-192) -- who, as a Protestant but one committed to episcopacy was regarded by both sides as being too close to the other extreme. The death of the Ruthvens also caused a rift between James and his wife, since two sisters of the Ruthvens were in her entourage (Davies, pp. 199-205). Furthermore, Davies, p. 206, reports that Barbara Ruthven slept with Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I's minister who was responsible for making sure James succeeded Elizabeth; this may have gotten the surviving Ruthvens some mercy after 1603. Gradually the Ruthvens were rehabilitated; apparently Ruthven descendants are still trying to regain some of their titles (Davies, p. 213).
In one last irony, the very dagger used to kill the two Ruthven brothers is believed to have been the one used in 1610 to kill King Henry IV of France (Davies, pp. 250-251).
None of that is in any way relevant to this song; it's just background. If the details of what happened at Gowrie are uncertain (and have no direct connection with this song), the connection of Robert Logan of Restalrig with all this is even more murky. He died in 1606 with no shadow on his name. But in 1609 his body was exhumed and put on trial (something that the Scots were in the habit of doing, e.g. they did it to the corpse of the Earl of Huntly in the reign of Mary Queen of Scots, and the Ruthvens themselves had also been put on trial posthumously). It being difficult for a dead man to defend himself, Logan's corpse was convicted and its properties seized. Given the nature of the evidence, one is inclined to suspect that the government simply wanted the money of a man who had committed no crime. But it might explain why Logan's son would be especially interested in marrying for money, given that his family fortune had been impounded.
According to Davies, p. 165, Robert Logan was a "drunkard, bandit, pirate, inveterate plotter, and one of the inner circle of conspirators around both the Earl of Bothwell and another arch-schemer, Patrick Master of Gray." In other words, your standard Scots nobleman. (Though he was associated with James VI's enemies.) He may have had some regrets about his life, because in the early 1600s he sold off all his properties for ready cash -- and then, in July 1606, he died of a fever at age 51 (Davies, p. 166). Nothing particularly unusual about that. But a notary who had sometimes worked for him, George Sprot, in 1608 claimed that Restalrig had been involved in the Gowrie Conspiracy. He claimed to have letters to that effect. Subjected to torture, he admitted to forging the letters, but kept coming up with more stories (Davies, pp. 166-167). The strange thing is, every time he changed his story, it made his part in it worse; he almost forced them to execute him (Davies, pp. 168-169). He went to the gallows in August 1608 (Davies, pp. 167-168).
But even though he was executed for forgery, and was patently guilty of perjury, the letters were accepted as evidence against Logan (Davies, p, 169). Logan's body was exhumed and put on trial in June 1609 (Davies, p. 170). It was about as absurd as a trial could get: evidence forged by a dead man being used as evidence against another dead man! It couldn't hurt Logan, obviously, but it could deprive his son and heir of his inheritance. Davies, p. 171, "The whole affair was a breathtaking piece of self-interested illegality on the part of the Earl of Dunbar, who stood to benefit directly if Logan's son and heir lost his inheritance." There are genuine hints that Logan was involved with the Gowrie conspirators -- he seems to have been working with Peregrine Bertie, the Lord Willoughby of "Lord Willoughby," to secure a ship to perhaps help in the plot (Davies, pp. 182-185), but was that really enough proof to take the estate away from his son?
Fair or not, the younger Logan would obviously have wanted to restore his fortune, so it would be no surprise if he sought a woman with a "pelf." Hence, perhaps, his marriage. But I can't see any real reason to connect that marriage with this song. On the other hand, I can't see anything that proves the connection impossible. - RBW
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