Elsebeth Buchan

Background

She was born in 1738, the daughter of John Simpson and Margaret Gordon, who kept a wayside inn at Fatmacken, between Banff and Portsoy.

Career

Early In early life she was employed in herding cows, and afterwards entered the house of a relation, by whom she was taught reading and sewing. They quarrelled and separated, and in 1781 she removed with the children to Glasgow. Having heard Hugh White, of the Relief church at Irvine, preach in Glasgow at the April sacrament of 1783, she wrote him a letter expressing her high approval of his sermons, and stating that no preacher she had ever previously listened to had so fully satisfaction her spiritual needs.

On account of his proclamation of these peculiar doctrines, White was deposed from thc ministry by the presbytery.

In May 1784, the magistrates banished the sect from the burgh, and following the supposed guidance of the star which led the wise men to Bethlehem, they settled on the farm of New Cample, in the parish of Closeburn, Dumfriesshire. They were joined here by one of two persons in good positions in life, and their numbers ultimately reached forty-six.

Mistress Buchan, whom they named their ‘spiritual mother,’ professed to have the power of conferring the Holy Ghost by breathing, and also laid claim to certain prophetic gifts.

They believed in the millennium as close at hand, and were persuaded that they would not taste of death, but would be taken up to meet Christ in the air. The following account of them by Robert Burns, the poet, may be accepted as strictly accurate: ‘Their tenets are a strange jumble of enthusiastic jargon.

Among others she pretends to give them the Holy Ghost by breathing on them, which she does with postures and gestures that are scandalously indecent. They have likewise a community of goods, and live nearly an idle life, carrying on a great farce of pretended devotion in hams and woods, where they lodge and lie together, and hold likewise a community of women, as it is another of their tenets that they can commit no mortal sin".

lieutenant is affirmed that Robert Burns had an attachment to a young woman, Jean Gardner, who joined the Buchanites, and that he spent a whole night and day in vainly endeavouring to persuade her to return.

His song ‘As I was a walking’ was set to an air to which, according to him, the ‘Buchanites had set some of their nonsensical rhymes,’ for the composition of hymns was one of the gifts of Buchan. White pretended that she was only in a trance, and had her buried clandestinely, but he afterwards renounced his belief in her promise to retum and conduct them to the New Jerusalem. The last survivor of the sect was Andrew Innes, who died in 1846.

Robert Burns makes reference to the Buchanites in some of his personal letters and the following passage is thought to be attributed to him in relation to Elspeth Buchan:

"The wicked ane frae Glasgow came,

In April auchty-three,

An" lodged her spawn among the saun,

An" noo her fry we see.".

Connections

followers:

Elspeth Simpson