William Forbes of Disblair
By B. R. Forbes, Clan Historian & Storyteller
William Forbes of Disblair brought music, poetry, and political conviction together at a pivotal moment in Scottish history. He arranged traditional melodies, composed biting satires, and challenged the proposed union of Scotland and England. Although his poetry later languished in rare pamphlets, his musical legacy endured through the ballads preserved by his family.
William Forbes was baptised on November 17, 1661, the eldest son of the second marriage of John Forbes of Balfluig, near Alford in Aberdeenshire. Through his mother, a granddaughter of William, 11th Lord Forbes, he belonged to the extended network of Forbes families that shaped the social and political life of the region.
In 1689, William married Elizabeth Bateman of Tranthwaite Hall in Westmorland, northern England. The marriage brought him the lands of Rubislaw, west of Aberdeen, and he became known for a time as Baillie Forbes of Rubislaw. He subsequently acquired the estate of Disblair, on the north bank of the River Don near Newmachar, approximately ten miles north-west of Aberdeen. It was by this estate that he became best known.
Forbes also served as a baillie, or magistrate, of Aberdeen. His position within the landed gentry combined local influence with an engagement in the literary and political controversies of his age.
His marriage to Elizabeth was troubled. In 1704, she divorced him for infidelity, and contemporary pamphlets suggest that the dispute extended into ecclesiastical and public controversy. The couple eventually resumed their relationship and had two daughters, Lilias and Anne, both of whom would become important links in the transmission of Scottish balladry.
Forbes is remembered particularly for his arrangements of traditional Scottish airs, including “John Anderson, my jo,” “My Dearie an thou die,” and “Willie was a Wanton Wag.” His settings survive in important manuscript collections of eighteenth-century Scottish music.
Arranging melodies helped secure their survival beyond the circumstances in which they were performed. “John Anderson, my jo,” for example, continued to circulate and later acquired new words from Robert Burns, illustrating how a traditional air could be adapted by successive generations.
Forbes also combined music and verse in his own compositions. His 1705 single-sheet song “Bang the Brocker,” a satire directed at a political turncoat, appeared with its tune printed in musical notation. The format allowed the work to be performed as well as read, extending its reach beyond the printed page.
The opening years of the eighteenth century brought Scotland into a fierce debate over sovereignty, commerce, and national identity. The failure of the Darien colonial venture had inflicted heavy financial losses on Scottish investors, while the proposed incorporating union with England threatened the future of the Scottish Parliament and the kingdom’s constitutional independence.
Since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, Scotland and England had shared a monarch while retaining separate parliaments and legal institutions. To opponents of incorporating union, this arrangement had already left Scotland vulnerable to English influence. The proposed settlement threatened to remove its remaining constitutional safeguards.
Forbes became a forceful literary opponent of the union. He attributed Scotland’s economic difficulties and diminished influence partly to its unequal relationship with England, regarding sovereignty as essential to the nation’s future. His arguments found expression in two important works: The True Scots Genius, Reviving (1704) and A Pil for Pork-Eaters: or, A Scots Lancet for an English Swelling (1705).
Published in response to a parliamentary debate in 1704, The True Scots Genius, Reviving portrayed Scotland as a nation whose independence had been weakened by a century of political subordination. Forbes personified the country as Caledonia, recalling an earlier age when Scottish rulers and warriors defended their freedom against external powers. He lamented the country’s decline: “Under the crushing weight, tho’ not the Name,Of Bondage, Scotland groaning did remain.”
Forbes contrasted Scotland’s heroic past with its diminished present, calling upon the descendants of illustrious families—including the Hamiltons, Douglases, Grahams, Bruces, Humes, and Hays—to place liberty above material advantage.
Scholars have differed over whether the poem should be interpreted as specifically Jacobite or more broadly patriotic. Whatever its precise political alignment, it expressed a conviction that Scotland’s future depended upon recovering the authority to determine its own affairs.
Forbes’s best-known political satire appeared in 1705. Published by James Watson in Edinburgh, A Pil for Pork-Eaters: or, A Scots Lancet for an English Swelling went through several early editions.
The immediate controversy concerned the execution at Leith in April 1705 of the captain and two officers of the English ship Worcester, convicted of piracy against a vessel associated with the Darien enterprise. English pamphlets condemned the proceedings and questioned the independence of Scottish justice. Forbes responded by turning the dispute into a broader indictment of English interference in Scottish affairs.
The title supplied his central conceit: a mock medical treatment intended to cure England’s political “swelling.” His satire drew upon contemporary cultural distinctions between the two nations, including the associations surrounding the consumption of pork.
Forbes argued that England was ill placed to condemn Scottish justice when its own history included the execution of Charles I. He also attacked London as a centre of wealth and influence that drained Scotland’s resources while disparaging the northern kingdom. His conclusion was uncompromising: “Let England Bully, but let Scotland Fight.”
Forbes urged Scots to set aside internal divisions, recover their martial reputation, and resist what he regarded as an assault upon their national rights. His rhetoric could be extreme, even violent, but his poems also reveal how constitutional and economic arguments were translated into accessible, memorable verse.
His work challenges the assumption that opposition to the Union was confined to popular or less-educated circles. As a member of the landed gentry, Forbes participated in a sophisticated political culture in which pamphlets, songs, and poems carried arguments about sovereignty to a wider audience.
Forbes’s literary interests extended beyond politics. His surviving works include satires on personal disputes, marriage, fashionable dress, and contemporary political figures. They reveal a combative temperament and a willingness to turn private grievances into public literary exchanges.
His An Essay upon Marriage, dating from around 1704, provoked a hostile response. Forbes answered with The Renegado Whip’t, and the quarrel continued through further pamphlets. The exchange illustrates the personal and often vindictive character of contemporary satirical writing.
Fashion also attracted his attention. The Farthingale Reviv’d: or, More Work for the Cooper, published in 1711, offered a mock panegyric on the fashionable hoop petticoat. A further poem on the subject, The Hoop-Petticoat, appeared in Dublin in 1736. Both placed Forbes within a satirical tradition that used humour and exaggeration to expose contemporary fashions and manners.
His most substantial non-political work was Xantippe, or the Scolding Wife, published in Edinburgh in 1724. Extending to approximately 660 lines, the poem reworked Coniugium, a Latin dialogue by the Renaissance scholar Erasmus.
The original explored the difficulties of marriage through a discussion between two women. Forbes transformed it into a more vigorous exchange between Xantippe and Phebe, giving the outspoken Xantippe considerable dramatic authority.
Xantippe denounces a husband portrayed as unfaithful, wasteful, drunken, and abusive. She protests the indignities imposed upon her and challenges the expectation that a wife should endure mistreatment in silence. Phebe, by contrast, counsels a more cautious accommodation with patriarchal authority.
Literary scholar William Donaldson argues that Forbes did more than translate his source: he reshaped it to give the women greater agency and voice. The result is striking for its period. Xantippe appropriates the aggressive language of male satire to challenge the privileges traditionally accorded to husbands, while Phebe exposes the limited choices available to women within an unequal social order.
Forbes’s poetry could be coarse and uneven, but its verbal energy, originality, and engagement with contentious questions make it a noteworthy contribution to early eighteenth-century Scottish literature.
Forbes’s most enduring legacy emerged from the musical traditions of his household. His daughters, Lilias and Anne, became known as the “Ladies of Disblair,” and their knowledge of traditional songs and ballads passed to the next generation.
Lilias married Thomas Gordon, a professor at King’s College, Aberdeen. Their daughter, Anna Gordon, later became celebrated as Mrs. Brown of Falkland and one of the most important named sources for traditional ballads in eighteenth-century Britain.
The Ladies of Disblair were Anna’s principal informants. The songs they transmitted, and which Anna subsequently recorded, became important sources for Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published in the late nineteenth century. Child held Mrs. Brown’s ballads in particularly high regard.
This family connection demonstrates the importance of oral tradition within an educated household. The ballads were not merely remnants of an isolated rural past; they formed part of a living repertoire sustained through memory, performance, and family relationships. Their eventual appearance in written collections gave scholars access to material that might otherwise have disappeared.
Forbes’s own musical arrangements and the ballad tradition maintained by his daughters represent complementary forms of preservation: one committed melodies to notation, while the other transmitted songs through successive generations.
William Forbes died in 1740, leaving a body of writing whose full extent remains uncertain. His papers were dispersed after his death, and many poems survived only in rare pamphlets and broadsides. Several works attributed to him remain disputed, while others may have disappeared altogether.
His literary reputation proved less durable than his musical legacy. William Donaldson’s 2019 study, “The Poetry of William Forbes of Disblair (1661–1740),” brought together and reassessed a substantial group of his surviving writings. It demonstrated the range of his interests, from political polemic and personal satire to social commentary and the adaptation of earlier literature.
Donaldson also emphasised the value of studying Forbes’s poetry alongside his music. Both belonged to a Scottish literary culture in which written and oral forms frequently intersected, and in which song could carry political arguments as well as preserve traditional melodies.
William Forbes of Disblair was a landowner, civic magistrate, musical arranger, and satirist whose work reflected the political tensions and artistic vitality of early eighteenth-century Scotland.
His anti-Union poems remain striking expressions of Scottish political grievance, while Xantippe reveals a more unexpected interest in the inequalities of marriage. Yet his legacy reaches beyond his own publications. Through the musical traditions of his household, his daughters Lilias and Anne helped preserve a ballad repertoire that their daughter and niece, Anna Gordon, would bring to the attention of later scholars.
Forbes’s life illustrates how an individual’s creative work can outlast its immediate circumstances. His political pamphlets preserve the arguments of a divided age; his arrangements document the melodies of his time; and the family tradition associated with Disblair helped secure an important body of Scottish balladry for posterity.
Sources and other reading:
Donaldson, William. “The Poetry of William Forbes of Disblair (1661–1740).” Studies in Scottish Literature 45, no. 2 (2019): 121–137. Read the scholarly article.
Tayler, Alistair, and Henrietta Tayler. House of Forbes. Edinburgh: Third Spalding Club, 1937.
From the Clan Forbes Resource Library (Members Only):
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