SIR THOMAS MUDIE (d. 1660) AND THE SIEGE OF DUNDEE

I’m descended in one branch of my family from the Mudies of Dundee. Their most prominent ancestor is Sir Thomas Mudie, who was Provost of the city from 1648 to 1653 (some sources say 1650-1658).

The Provost is the Scottish equivalent of the Mayor in English towns and cities. The title is a legacy of the so-called auld alliance, the traditionally close relationship between Scotland and France. In France, the prévôt was (before the French Revolution) the man in charge of the administrative and legal affairs of a burgh. The title was adopted in Scotland, where the office-bearer was normally the senior magistrate and leader of a town council.

The present Provost of Dundee, Bob Duncan. The present chain of office dates from 1872; the previous one (perhaps the one worn by Sir Thomas Mudie) was long enough to be coiled several times around the shoulders of the Provost

The Provost was the highest civil authority in the town; the Governor was senior to the Provost, responsible for the town’s military defence. In 1651, during Sir Thomas’s provostship, the Governor was Sir Robert Lumsden. It was Lumsden therefore, and not Mudie, whose duty it was to negotiate with the armies of Oliver Cromwell when they laid siege to Dundee in August that year.

Since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland succeeded Queen Elizabeth and became James I of England, England and Scotland had shared a monarch from a Scottish royal house. The parliaments of the two countries however remained separate and independent.

The House of Stuart: L-R, James VI/I, Charles I, and Charles II – Scottish kings of England

James VI/I was succeeded by his son Charles I; and when the English parliamentarians fought a civil war against King Charles, the Scottish parliament remained royalist in sympathy. When Oliver Cromwell beheaded Charles I, the Scots put their weight behind his son Charles II.

Cromwell was not a man to tolerate dissent. He dispatched the New Model Army under General George Monck, which advanced through Scotland occupying town after town until it reached Dundee in August 1651. In the sweltering heat of a high Scottish summer, they laid siege to the town in an attempt to starve its population into submission.

General Sir George Monck (1608-1670)

Dundee was one of the most securely fortified towns in Scotland. Its walls were so thick that nobles from all over Scotland, and the Scottish parliament itself, kept their money in Dundee rather than in their own castles or towns. So when after two weeks of siege General Monck called on Sir Robert Lumsden to surrender, Sir Robert felt confident enough of his military position to reject the demand outright. Instead he called on Monck to surrender to him, a cheeky move which may have goaded Monck into the ensuing action.

On the morning of the 1^st September Monck breached the city walls after a three-hour long bombardment. The New Model Army swarmed in and captured the town within thirty minutes of entering it. Lumsden and his officers were surrounded in the tower of St Mary’s Church and offered honourable terms on which to surrender. They did so and were promptly killed.

The Siege of Dundee, by Charles Gustav Louise Phillips (1924), depicts Sir Robert Lumsden’s last stand in the tower of St Mary’s Church

Monck gave his troops license to rape, loot and murder for twenty four hours, but such was the killing frenzy which possessed them that it took the general three days to bring them back under control. Figures are hard to estimate, but it is said that between a fifth and a third of the population was slaughtered. To this day, excavations in the city centre throw up newly discovered bones.

The town's treasury was loaded onto ships and lost at sea in a storm. The English army remained in Dundee for nine years. Lumsden’s head, still wearing its helmet, was displayed on the church steeple, and according to legend only fell from its perch in 1660 – the year the English soldiers left, the year the monarchy was restored in England and the year Sir Thomas Mudie died.

How did Thomas survive the massacre? Did he hide in his Provost’s mansion in Gray’s Close? Did he collaborate? He remained in office for two, perhaps seven years after Dundee fell. Did his religion save him? Monck had every single Catholic in Dundee put to the sword or stoned to death. But Sir Thomas was a devout Protestant in a town now controlled by a nation in the grip of protestant, puritan zeal. An anti-Catholic pamphlet, probably published in the 1650s, was dedicated to him by its author, the theologian William Guild of Aberdeen:

An ANSWER to a

Popish Pamphlet

called

‘The TOUCHSTONE

of the REFORMED GOSPEL,’

made especially out of themselves.

DEDICATED to

SIR THOMAS MUDIE,

the provost

and other magistrates of Dundee.

With that sort of testimonial, perhaps not even Butcher Monck was confident enough to slay Sir Thomas Mudie.

Gray’s Close, Dundee, in which Thomas Mudie’s Provost’s Mansion once stood (pictured c1925); mansion, close and city walls have all disappeared completely now

CHARLES EDWARD MUDIE (1818-1890) AND THE THREE-VOLUME NOVEL

There is circumstantial evidence that my 5x great grandmother Jean Mudie (c1764-1842) is descended from the Mudies of Dundee, prominent merchants and guildsmen of that city. At this distance in time I may never be able to prove or disprove it. But if it’s true, I have in Charles Edward Mudie a cousin worth honouring.

Charles Edward Mudie (1818-1890)

Charles’s father was a stationer and bookseller in Dundee, a burgess of the city. But in 1810 at the age of twenty-nine he moved with his wife to London, opening new premises in Cheyne Row, just off the Chelsea Embankment. The shop prospered, selling newspapers and secondhand books, and the couple raised a family – Charles was born there in 1818 and in time entered the family business.

At the age of twenty-two Charles opened a new branch in Bloomsbury and began to publish books himself. In 1842 he started lending books to the impecunious students of the University of London nearby, charging them a guinea a year (£1.05) to borrow one book at a time. Thus Mudie’s Subscription Library was born.

Mudie’s Select Library

It was a huge success, and after ten years Mudie’s Select Library (as it was known) moved to larger premises at 509-511 New Oxford Street. Eight years later in 1860 those premises were themselves enlarged, and over time the company opened branches in the industrial centres of Northern England – in Birmingham, York and Manchester – although never as far north as his roots in Scotland.

Mudie’s buying power was immense. Emerging at the same time as WH Smith, he had a comparable influence on the publishing industry. He would not stock novels of what he considered dubious morality, which in turn influenced Victorian literary taste. On the other hand in 1859 he bought five hundred copies of Charles Darwin's newly published On the Origin of Species, thereby greatly contributing to the dissemination of Darwin’s theories.

First edition of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (Chapman & Hall, London, 1861) in three volumes

In 1861 he bought almost the entire first edition, and most of the second, of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. The purchase illustrates another aspect of his influence on publishing practice. Novels were expensive, and generally beyond the financial reach of even the new middle classes. It was one of the reasons for the success of Mudie’s lending libraries - readers borrowed instead of buying. The publishing industry responded by issuing longer novels in parts, usually in three volumes which could be bought separately over time, as Great Expectations was. As well as increasing sales for the publisher, the three-volume novel or triple decker was also good for subscription libraries who could charge for three loans instead of one.

The triple decker disappeared almost overnight in 1894 when both WH Smiths and Mudie’s stopped stocking them. By then cheaper single volume editions of many works had begun to appear. Private subscription libraries were also under attack by then, from the rise of the public lending libraries of many town and county councils. As I wrote here recently, that’s what did for the Lewes Library Society in 1897.

Readers with armfuls of books outside Mudie’s Select Library Limited, in an illustration in London Society, 1869

Mudie’s, which had become a limited company in 1864, soldiered on until the 1930s before different reading habits, cheaper books and free public libraries finally killed off Charles Edward Mudie’s influential library model. Today, local libraries are closing at an alarming rate across Britain because of deep government cuts to council funding. Who’s to say we won’t see a return of private subscription libraries such as Mudie’s in the near future? Proud as I am of my possible cousin, I hope not.

JEAN MUDIE (c1764-1842) AND THE HOWFF GRAVEYARD

Where are you, Jean Mudie? I know your name, your years of birth and death, your mother’s and father’s names (Ann, and James who died in 1776). I know your husband and your descendants for seven generations ending in me. I go back to you, but I can’t see where you came from.

Jean Mudie is one of my sixty-four 5x great grandmothers. I couldn’t put a name to most of the other sixty-three, so I suppose I should be quite pleased even to know hers. Hers was not a high family; and that far back, information is scarce. She was most probably a weaver like her husband John Gavine. He was born in Forfar, a weaving town in the county of Angus in Scotland, but moved to the nearby city of Dundee as a young man, perhaps in search of work. There he met and married Jean in 1792 at the age of 26, and there their four children were born.

A weaver and spinner in Dundee, with a loom and wheel of the sort in use at the end of the eighteenth century (photo: Dundee HeritageTrust)

John did well to catch a Mudie. The Mudie family were prominent merchants in the city for centuries – Sir Thomas Mudie was Provost (the Scottish equivalent of mayor) of Dundee from 1648 to 1653, and there’s a large Mudie population with its own plot in Dundee’s ancient burial ground, The Howff.

The Howff is considered one of the most important historical cemeteries in Scotland, some say second only to Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. Like Greyfriars, the Howff sits on land once occupied by a Franciscan monastery, whose monks were known as grey friars from the colour of their habits. Both institutions were abolished by the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the Reformation in the late 1550s, and both were designated as new burial grounds for their respective cities in the early 1560s because the old ones were full.

The Howff, Dundee (picture by K.A. Laity from her splendid blog)

In Dundee the Franciscan church had been used by the city’s craft and trade guilds for assemblies. When the church was pulled down, they continued to meet on the site, and so the Greyfriars’ Yard became known as the Howff (the Scots word for a meeting place). One of the earliest references to such gatherings in the graveyard is for Dundee’s weavers. According to an article by the late Colin Gibson, the weavers are recorded as having "convenit within ye Holff and comowne burriall” on 13th June, 1585. (Holff is a variant spelling, Gibson notes, in the same way that Golf and Gowff are variants.) The now-demolished north wall of the yard used to carry the inscription “This is the braboners’ head roum.” Braboner is the old Scots word for a weaver.

The Howff was in use as a burial ground for three hundred years, from its designation by Mary Queen of Scots in 1564 to the last interment there in 1857. From early on the Mudies had their own "place" or plot there. Provost Sr Thomas Mudie was buried there in 1660, beneath the mortcloth. This "cloth of death" was available for rent from the city's Guildry to be draped over the coffins of its favourite sons and daughters, and the records still exist for its hire from 1655 to 1817. Each trade within the Guildry had its own mortcloth, although unfortunately the records don't show which cloth covered Sir Thomas. Ten other Mudies were similarly honoured.

The burial records for the Howff survive from the late seventeenth century onwards and in their transcribed form the entries for Mudies alone cover fourteen pages (compared to less than two for Gavines, for example). Amongst them there are some fifty references to Mudie weavers including, in 1772, the burial of Robert, son of James Mudie, weaver. Could this be an infant brother to Jean?

My head is full of Mudies and weavers and Howff burials. But the truth is, I don’t know what James Mudie did for work, or how or whether he and his daughter are related to the rest of the large extended Mudie family in Dundee. All I know is what I’ve told you, and in addition that both Jean and John Gavine are also buried in the Howff. There must be a connection somewhere!