WHA’S LIKE US? - THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY
‘It’s never far from wherever you are
And when you go it never leaves you
You sit alone and thoughts of home
Come and stand around your chair.’
Garrison Keillor
This history of Scotland began nine chapters ago with a description of the way the land was formed in the first place. On the journey to this point it has been easy to become distracted by the stories of people living on the rock, and in so doing to forget the rock itself. That is always a mistake. The geology of Scotland has been a constant crucial character in the story, whether we always noticed it or not; and, if this country had been made even slightly differently all those millions and billions of years ago, then our history would have followed another path entirely.
On the north-west coast of Ireland near Ballyconnell, in County Sligo, there is a place the locals have always called ‘Serpent Rock’. After a few minutes’ walk along a beach of coarsely grained, grey-black sand, you reach an array of great slabs of limestone. They seem almost deliberately placed, edges overlapping like slates on a gently sloping roof - or the corners of a hand of giant cards placed face-downwards onto the sand.
As you stroll from one great, tipped runway to the next, glancing now and then at the Atlantic waves rolling and booming, off to the right you cannot help but notice that you are stepping upon countless fossils standing proud of the rock. The limestone is grey-black, like the sand of the beach, but these ancient inclusions are much paler, almost white, and sometimes flecked with what looks like gold dust. Every one is more or less the same shape, croissant-curved but ranging from a few inches to maybe a couple of feet in length. Some people have said these oddities resemble cabbage stalks (and they do, or maybe rams’ horns, it all depends on your point of view). But to most observers through the centuries they have suggested the ancient remains of snakes or sea serpents turned to stone - and they give the place its name.
But snakes in Ireland … the land where there are no snakes? The myth of petrified serpents by the sea near Ballyconnell began long before James Hutton, scion of the Scottish Enlightenment, laid the foundations of modern geology. Back in the days when people still believed the planet to be just a little over 4,000 years old, all sorts of explanations had had to be concocted for the many strange marks spotted from time to time in the rocks. Some said they had been put there by God himself, or maybe the devil, to confound the minds of men. It would take clear-thinking men like Hutton and later Charles Darwin (as well as fossil-hunter extraordinaire Mary Anning, of Lyme Regis) to begin to undermine the age-old misconceptions about the date of birth of planet earth.
From his home in East Lothian Hutton set out to investigate just how the landscape around him had been formed, what unstoppable forces and unimaginably long periods of time had been involved in its creation. Hutton’s work, and that of others, made possible our modern understanding of enigmatic forms like those in the limestone of Serpent Rock.
They are the fossilised remains of animals - not snakes, but a kind of coral that lived around 340 million years ago. When some of the rock that would be Scotland formed part of the bed of a warm, shallow tropical sea near the equator, so too did some of the rock that would be Ireland. On that seabed lived animals related to modern-day sea anemones. While they existed they slowly extruded calcium as a by-product of their existence. Over time the deposited mineral formed a tower that raised the animals above whatever other life forms were growing beside them, like the scoop of ice cream on top of a wafer cone. They thrived only in warm water shallow enough to permit the sunlight that sustained other creatures upon which they depended for food.
During the passing of countless years, changes elsewhere affected the temperature and depth of that long-lost sea so that sediment formed, smothering and burying the coral. Yet more changes, spread over dizzying periods of time, made the water shallow again. Now mangroves and other plants began to grow in the sludge. Yet more changes came and went with years and centuries and millennia, until the plant life of the mangrove swamps died as well and became submerged beneath yet more sediment sometime after 280 million years ago.
Gradually, subject to the slow magic of geological forces, the calcium in the long-buried coral was replaced by much harder silica. Iron pyrites might form, alongside the silica, giving the golden sparkles some of the fossils have today. Above them in the layer cake of deposits, the combined juggernauts of pressure and time also had their effect upon what had once been the mangrove swamps and other plant life. As these were plunged to greater and greater depths beneath seas - then new rock and further sediment - they began the long, lazy transformation into coal.
Between 280 million years ago and much more recently the landforms of Ireland, Scotland and the rest of the British Isles drifted northwards to their present locations. In the case of the rocks of Ireland, something happened during that time to scour away almost all of the coal-bearing layers, and any sandstone and ironstone that might have been associated with them. No one, geologists included, offers any definite explanation of how or why this happened. It is possible the coal and sandstone were never there in the first place, although there is a tiny scattering of impoverished seams of coal of such poor quality as to be next to useless; but it seems more likely that geological forces did once make them and then removed them almost entirely later on.
Whatever the forces that undertook that particular work they seemingly left Scotland untouched - or at least touched her differently. Deep beneath the surface of southern Scotland - and of the north of England and southern Wales, the treasure houses of coal remained, a promise of future prosperity.
Stand on Serpent’s Rock today and look back along the grey-black beach. The Atlantic waves are breaking on another headland made of more of the same limestone. Sat upon those slabs like stodgy cake on a plate, is a thick layer of glacial deposits - mud, gravels and boulders left no more than 15,000 years ago during the retreat of the ice. It is a powerful image, simplifying and symbolising one of the key geological and therefore economic facts about Ireland: while Scotland, England and Wales were gifted the fuel for industrial revolution, Ireland was denied that blessing (or curse).
Ireland had her agricultural revolution right enough. The same ‘improvers’ who radically altered farming practices in the rest of the British Isles in the eighteenth century got to work changing ancient lifestyles all over Ireland as well. But there never was, nor ever could be, any industrial revolution there. Without the ironstone from which iron might be won, without the coal to fuel the necessary furnaces and steam engines, Ireland was set upon a different destiny from the rest. There exists there today a rural character to both the people and the land that marks the Irish out as separate. The stuff of industry was missing as completely and irreparably as part of the sequence of an animal’s DNA . It meant the Irish experience of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries - the experience of the Irish poor in particular - was always going to be a singular one.
The Scots marched to the beat of a different drum, however. The presence of coal was identified there at least as early as the Middle Ages and mined thereafter until the industry’s final demise in the 1980s.
For those souls condemned by birth to burrow underground and hack and haul it into the light, it meant little more than a living death. For the first centuries of coal extraction in Fife, miners were treated as little more than slaves. The owners controlled every aspect of their employees’ existence; even being able to refuse them permission to seek any other kind of work or to move to another’s mine. Right up until the turn of the nineteenth century the industry went unchanged, with men, women and even children enduring shaming misery below ground to ensure the enrichment of a few above. Only when the appetite of the Industrial Revolution necessitated a huge increase in the labour force to meet ravenous demand were the owners forced to loosen the leashes and offer decent wages. Even then the working conditions of the miners, free or bond, remained as wretched as before.
Just as it is vital to remember the rock of Scotland and its power to predestine the lives lived upon it, so we must not forget the plight of most of the ordinary people, of whom the mining communities were only a part. For the vast majority of the country’s population, life in the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries remained desperately hard and utterly thankless.
Perhaps it is fitting, or maybe just ironic, that it is in a chapter dedicated to ‘identity’ that we pause to pay brief attention to those anonymous souls who stood silent witness to all this history of Scotland. Nameless and forgotten, their individual identities failed to register. Barring a few exceptions - like those who scrawled their initials on the National Covenant in the seventeenth century - the lives of most of Scotland’s people have been as ephemeral as raindrops in a storm.
The Scottish Enlightenment might well have been in full flower during the 1700s; innovations in trade, farming and industry lined the pockets of a handful of oligarchs and improved the lot of some entrepreneurs. But the mass of Scots continued to live inescapably rural lives, tough lives shackled to the simple need to grow enough food for themselves and their families. When change came to the countryside during the middle years of the eighteenth century, it did not improve the lot of the many.
The trouble to come was rooted in a fundamental alteration in the way the landowning aristocracy viewed the land itself. Since time immemorial the land had been seen as a natural resource, a gift from God set down to provide the food, clothing and shelter required by all the people living on it - rich and poor alike. No one had bothered much with thinking about who actually owned the land, in terms of property. If it was owned at all, it was held communally. This was no longer the case as the 1700s progressed. Scottish landowners were spending more and more time rubbing shoulders with their English counterparts and increasingly shared the southerners’ opinion that land existed to make a profit for those who could demonstrate their ownership of it. From the moment that thought first lit up in the first Scottish landowning brain, the fate of the country’s rural poor was sealed.
All at once the ‘improving’ landowners looked anew at their land - and particularly the people living on it - and did not like what they saw. Why, they thought, had they never before noticed how messy was the unbounded sprawl of infield and outfield, with meandering rig and furrow cultivation dotted around the former, and scrawny cattle wandering unchecked across the latter? Instead of unstructured ‘touns’ of low houses and shielings scattered higgledy-piggledy as though at random, those modernising landlords now fancied neat rows of stone cottages, ordered square fields bounded by straight stone walls. More worrying still, they cast fresh eyes upon their erstwhile tenants - notably the ‘cottars’, poorest of the poor and yet the labour force behind much of the day-to-day drudgery. Surely they could be put to better use? Surely there were ways in which their efforts at subsistence might be remodelled to turn a profit?
In England, ancient contracts of leasing and rental of land gave individual farmers at least some protection in the face of landowners bent on reform. The manner and form in which they held their rights to the land their families had farmed for generations were protected by law, and put the brakes on any sudden imposition of new ideas. Lengthy leases in particular meant would-be reformers had to take their time.
In Scotland, however, it was a different story. Here the custom was for leases as short as a year. Furthermore, communal access to grazing land was a tradition rather than a legal right. No one had ever questioned any of it before and so no one had bothered to make it ‘legal’. When landlords decided to shake things up and sort out what they now saw as lazy, uneconomic, untidy practices, it was simply a matter of waiting a year or so until all leases ran out. New rules were laid down, new rents set and those without the money to pay them or the ability to meet the challenges of a fast-moving future suddenly found themselves evicted from their homes. There were thousands of people, ordinary everyday people, who did not fit the new picture - who were suddenly surplus to the requirements of modern, ‘improved’ farming and were powerless to do anything about it.
This wave of change is best remembered in terms of the ‘Highland Clearances’ that wrought such havoc upon the ancient society of the north-west. But the same forces washed over the whole of Scotland, the Lowlands included. In fact it started earlier in the south of the country, lasted for longer and displaced more people in the end; but by being gradual in comparison to what happened further north the ‘Lowland Clearances’ are recalled with far less emotion, if any at all.
Born in Alloway, in Ayrshire, on 25 January 1759, Robert Burns learned the hard way what it meant to be a tenant farmer in southern Scotland. Farming was to be his occupation for most of his life and his inability to make a success of it made him sensitive to the plight of those around him experiencing the same difficulties. Much of his thinking - and therefore his poetry - was inspired by watching so many of his neighbours forced from the land by improvement-obsessed landowners. In ‘Tae A Moose’ - a seemingly simple apology to a fieldmouse tipped from its nest by his plough, yet in truth an analogy for his own struggles against capricious fate - he wrote:
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ wast,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past,
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble,
Now thou’s turn’ d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld !
The geology of Scotland dictated that Burns’s Lowlanders occupied more fertile farmland, capable of supporting more people. While the improvers got to work with as much gusto as they would later lavish upon the Highlands, the Bard’s displaced neighbours were living in a zone where there were alternatives to the subsistence lifestyle. There were relatively sizeable towns nearby, and the wider raft of changes brought about by Enlightenment thought and action meant those no longer employed in the fields had other paths to follow when they left, or were driven from them.
It is worth bearing in mind that the planned and deliberate removal of people from the inland valleys of the north and west - most notoriously to make way for flocks of sheep deemed more profitable than subsistence farmers - was not intended to drive them away completely. On the contrary, the landowners had imagined they could be relocated on the coastal fringes of their estates. There they were to be encouraged to take up new endeavours - notably fishing and the collection of seaweed for preparation as fertilizer - that would pour yet more coins into the pockets of the chiefs. It was only when these hastily established communities began to fail - when the bottom fell out of the kelp market at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, for instance - that folk felt they had no alternative but to board ships for passage to the New World.
What is undoubtedly true, however, is that many enlightened landowners indulged a desire to improve their tenants as well as their land. When they allocated plots of land - of ‘crofts’ - in the coastal villages, they were careful to ensure that each was too small to enable a family to grow enough crops or keep enough animals to feed itself. It was a practice known as ‘pinching’ and by its application the chiefs sought to force their people to diversify - and, more particularly, to work harder. The thinking was that subsistence farmers simply spent too much time sitting around their peat fires telling stories and drinking whisky. Enlightened landowners believed generations of experience had taught their tenants to expend minimal effort and yet still keep themselves in sufficient food - and were determined to force them into a more industrious existence. Worked and occupied in this way, they would surely improve themselves. This ‘pinching’ approach was unique to the Highlands, and ensured crofting became a hated system.
There is also no denying that some landowners - notably the Countess of Sutherland and her husband Lord Stafford - were brutal in the way they went about the Clearances. Many of their tenants, those who waited too long after their eviction notices were served, endured the horror of having their homes put to the torch by over-zealous estate managers, or factors. As many 10,000 people were cleared from Sutherland lands in just fifteen years at the start of the nineteenth century.
Before the time of the Highland Clearances, which did not really take effect until the end of the eighteenth century, the rise of the linen industry was already changing lives, lining a few pockets and fundamentally altering the relationship between land and people in Scotland. Even before industrialisation transformed the production of the textile, it was employing thousands of Scots up and down the country - perhaps as many as 10 per cent of the whole. At first it was a cottage industry, with the bulk of the work being carried out by men and women in their own homes. Even so, since the raw flax from which the linen was made was almost all imported from abroad, it was another part of the insidious process by which Scots were gradually divorced from the land.
Not until the 1830s at least were large numbers drawn into the towns and cities to work in the new factories; but in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, linen workers became dependent not upon the fields surrounding their homes but on the towns that finished the cloth and saw to its sale. A connection had been broken, making it easier for people to drift, or to be pushed away from the land.
What linen began, cotton soon completed. Quickly accepted as a superior product, it replaced - and was soon more industrialised than - its coarser predecessor. There was a time, although that time is not now, when every school pupil in Scotland could reel off the details of Richard Arkwright’s ‘Water-frame’, Samuel Compton’s ‘Mule’ and James Hargreaves’ ‘Spinning Jenny’. These were the innovations, all of them by Englishmen, that revolutionised and speeded up the manufacture of cotton. Once James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine were added into the mix, the Industrial Revolution moved smoothly out of first gear and really began to put its foot down. All these changes were quickly imported by Scottish entrepreneurs desperate and determined to be part of something they knew was going to be big.
This was all part of the remaking of Old Scotland. The union of 1707 had made the country a fully paid-up partner in the British Empire. The doors to possible riches were opened and the most opportunist Scots dashed through them into the New World.
Hiccups like the Jacobite rebellions notwithstanding, Scots set aside their enmity for their southern neighbours and instead set about the business of making money. Trade with the American colonies - for tobacco, for sugar, for cotton - had enabled a handful of merchants to stand out and establish themselves as captains of commerce. The vast sums of money they made provided the finances for revolutionising the fabric of Scottish life. By the 1740s the Tobacco Lords were the embodiment of the new money. Their need for an infrastructure capable of processing and containing their wares would eventually create Glasgow’s Merchant City of vast warehouses, and the urge to display their wealth prompted them to build ever-grander private homes. Their presence on the Broomielaw let people know who they were and their building projects showed they had changed their world for ever. The face they put on Glasgow during the eighteenth century provided the bone structure for the place to this day.
It was actually Edinburgh, however, that was first to experience the effects of a new, modern society growing within its cramped, malodorous confines behind the fourteenth-century Flodden Wall that defined its boundaries. They called the place ‘Auld Reekie’ on account of the haze of smoke from countless coal fires and the reek of the accumulated, discarded waste of countless human beings. (When pedestrians on the city’s pavements heard the cry of ‘Gardyloo!’ - ‘Watch out for water!’ - from a tenement window above their heads, they knew water was about to be the least of their worries.) And yet for all that the place stank to high heaven and was filled to bursting with the great and the good, the rich and the poor, the bad and the ugly, it hummed with something else entirely - with the excitement and buzz you only get when an assembled population know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are living in the right place at the right time.
Made literate by the legacy of Knox, forced into one another’s company by the growth of towns and cities thriving like mushrooms on the rich manure of business and toil, the enlightened thinkers had whipped themselves up into a froth of excitement about who they were and what they were capable of. They not only understood the workings of the world now, or so they thought, they were also hard at work filling in the gaps in creation, tidying up the loose ends and making it even better than God and nature had intended.
Hutcheson, Kames, Hume, Robertson, Black, Smith, Raeburn, Ramsay, Adam - the list of names goes on and on and every one of them adds to the lustre of the constellation. By 1766 the city fathers in Edinburgh were feeling good enough to award themselves a whole new city, or at least a new town. The overcrowding of the buildings of the old town - not to mention the unspeakably unsanitary conditions and therefore the ever-present threat of disease - were the inspiration for a competition to design a place that better suited the self-image of men and women on the make.
Beyond the Nor’ Loch (subsequently drained and reborn as Princes Street Gardens) lay hundreds of acres of prime building land overlooking the Firth of Forth. The competition to develop the site was won by a then unknown but suitably ambitious twenty-one-year-old called James Craig. His design was simple: elegant squares connected by a grid of streets running east to west and north to south. Beyond the sheer simplicity, what really won the judges over was the properly patriotic, Hanoverian slant of the names Craig proposed for the squares - St Andrew’s and St George’s - and some of the streets - Hanover and George; Thistle and Rose; Queen and Princes.
Enlightened Scots of the sort seeking to live in the New Town had long since accepted they were ‘North Britons’, self-consciously and studiously mimicking the ways and mores of their British, English opposite numbers, and nothing would please them more than to build elegant, spacious town houses with addresses that underlined their loyalty to the union and to the empire.
The New Town itself was decades in the building and not actually completed until 1820, when the finishing touches were put to Charlotte Square at the western extreme of the whole grand design. It was a masterwork by Scotland’s most famous architect, Robert Adam, yet it was not completed until nearly thirty years after his death in 1792. By then, something fundamental had happened to Edinburgh: all those who had the wealth to do so had moved far away from the foul-smelling, narrow winding alleyways, wynds and lanes of the Old Town. While they promenaded past their fine homes on wide, tree-lined streets and through the neatly manicured parks of the New Town, the higgly-piggledy tenements towering above the old High Street were home now only to the working poor.
There had always been class divisions in Edinburgh, of course. Previously the richest had occupied the middle floors, high enough to be clear of the reek of the streets but not demanding too high a climb. At ground level and in the highest floors was the rest of humanity. But in old Edinburgh everyone had co-existed, so that folk of all kinds had mixed together into a rich soup. Along the cobbled streets walked advocates and artisans, judges and journeymen, lairds and layabouts. Whatever its shortcomings, the old city had created an atmosphere from which world-changing creativity and productivity had sprung like ice-cold water from an underground spring.
With the completion of the New Town, a highly visible fault line had opened up between rich and poor. The North Bridge was opened to traffic in 1772, linking Old and New; but the separation of the city into two different parts was irrevocable by then, and symbolised the way Scotland’s ruling class viewed their country’s past until at least the early years of the nineteenth century: as an embarrassing litany of barbarity and strife, populated by characters utterly foreign to them. The past was a place from which they wanted only to distance themselves.
This move into the new also revealed how they regarded those they sought to rule: as a species necessary for one’s day-to-day chores but best kept at arm’s length whenever possible. And therein lies the edge of a darkness in Scotland’s soul, that ability of her ruling class to live well and clean and comfortably, while others - indeed those upon whose naked backs that comfortable life had been built - lived another sort of life entirely. Given the kind of lives those others endured, it was best the whole sordid business of it was carried on somewhere just out of sight.
There had always been the poor of Scotland. The great, unwashed mass of them, scraping an existence from whatever patches of thin soil their masters had vouchsafed them this year. There were serfs, near-slaves in the mines, their humanity all but crushed out of them not by the great weight of rock above their bent backs but by the degrading conditions in which they were forced to work.
There still existed the rural poor - those eking a living from black cattle or tough crops wherever the landowners told them to. Lately there had grown the populations of weavers and spinners, severed from the land but still living on it. Poorest of all, notionally free and yet most vulnerable to the vagaries of fortune or more lately ‘the market’, were the Highlanders with their subsistence crofts, herds of scrawny cattle and ill-starred recent attempts at making a living from seaweed.
Until the end of the sixteenth century these ‘last of the free’ had had something at least in common with those south and east of the Great Glen, even if it was just hardship. By the end of the seventeenth century they had come to be no more than aliens at best, feared bogeymen at worst, unloved and unwanted. The Scottish Diaspora was already under way and thousands of Scots, from Highlands and Lowlands alike, were risking their lives to cross the Atlantic Ocean in search of opportunities in the west. But the lot of the varied mass of Scotland’s common folk in the eighteenth century - even those choosing to leave the old country behind and seek out new lives in the Americas and in the Caribbean - was as nothing to that of the hundreds of thousands taken from Africa’s Guinea Coast during the same period.
Many of the history books, especially those written ten or more years ago, have it that Scots merchants did not benefit directly from slavery. However, it is widely acknowledged that the great fortunes made by Scots from commodities such as tobacco, sugar and cotton depended upon the labour of African slaves. Without the mark-up made possible by having access to free labour, the profit margins would never have been as attractive and exciting as they surely were. But the conclusion to be drawn from the books was that this morally reprehensible trade was practised by others, by Englishmen or other Europeans, but not by Scots. That Scots profited at one remove at least from the trade was deemed better, somehow, than if they had bought and sold souls themselves.
All these assumptions are false. While it is correct to say that Scottish ports like Greenock and Port Glasgow never witnessed the loading and unloading of slaves, the great Scots families of eighteenth-century commerce were in the slave trade up to their necks. Cunninghames and Bogles; Houstons and Ogilvies; McDowells and Millikens; John Gladstone, the Leith-born father of Prime Minister William Gladstone and James Ewing of Strathleven, founder of the Glasgow Necropolis - all of these and many more profited directly from the labour of slaves.
Recent research by Scots historians like Eric J. Graham has revealed that during the first half of the eighteenth century several Glasgow merchants tried their hand at dealing directly with African chiefs keen to sell their neighbours’ people, or indeed their own, into slavery. But it was a tricky, sensitive business dependent upon knowledge of and access to very specific types of trade goods like copper bars of precise length, beads of a specific material, shape and colour, swords of a certain style. After a few abortive attempts, Scots merchants settled for using middlemen to secure the human cargoes on their behalf and then reaped the rewards. Everyone who counted in eighteenth-century Scotland knew the trade was going on, but perhaps the most that can be said in the national defence is that fewer understood that the finest Scots families were growing rich from it as well.
Burns himself very nearly emigrated to Jamaica, in 1786. Offered a job as a book-keeper on a plantation owned by his friend Dr Patrick Douglas, he had planned to escape his poverty - and the responsibilities presented by his pregnant girlfriend, Jean Armour - by heading to the New World. Never one to go it alone, he had taken up with yet another woman - ‘Highland Mary’ Campbell - and had promised to take her with him. In the event, Highland Mary died of fever before they could board a ship and Burns found, to his surprise, that Jean Armour had given birth to twins. Even more importantly to the then aspiring bard, his newly published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect had proved an overnight hit with polite Edinburgh society. With thoughts of emigration to a land of slaves cast aside, he stayed at home to become an legend instead.
Genius? Undoubtedly. Loveable? Definitely. Naïve? Absolutely. The man who came so close to helping manage a slave plantation in 1786 would write ‘A Man’s A Man For A’ That’ in 1795.
Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a’ that),
That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear thee gree an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s comin’ yet for a’ that,
That man to man, the world o’er,
Shall brithers be for a’ that.
Burns was hardly alone among eighteenth-century Scots in failing to understand, or perhaps to acknowledge, just what was bringing all the money into his homeland. But on the other side of the Atlantic many of his countrymen knew the whole shameful truth of it, and cared not a jot. Emigrant Scots like John Wedderburn worked their plantations with slaves - and even brought some home with them as symbols of their status when they returned to impress their former neighbours. But still the pretence has been maintained, down to the present, that Scots were not really slavers.
During the Seven Years War, as one Caribbean island after another fell to Great Britain, opportunist Scots poured ashore onto each in turn, like carpet-baggers, to begin the business of making money. Jamaica was a prize among prizes, providing the raw material for vast fortunes in sugar, coffee, rum and spices. Though less than 150 miles long by 50 miles wide, by the turn of the nineteenth century the island was awash with approximately 20,000 British entrepreneurs, half of them Scots. Working for them, enduring lives that were nasty, brutal and short, were a third of a million Africans.
The Scottish connection to the slave trade in the Caribbean, so unfamiliar here at home, is made painfully obvious by the surnames of modern-day descendants both of slaves and slave masters: Campbell, Douglas, Farquharson, Ferguson, Frazer, Grant, Gordon, Graham, Lewis, MacDonald, MacFarlane, MacKenzie, Morrison, Reid, Robinson, Russell, Scott, Simpson … the list goes on. Telling, too, are the place names, relics of the plantations that once bore them: Argyle, Dumbarton, Dundee, Fort William, Glasgow, Glen Islay, Hampden, Hermitage, Montrose, Mount Stewart, Old Monklands, St Andrews.
While such cruel, avaricious behaviour might almost be expected of canny businessmen bent on squeezing every last penny of profit from their enterprises, it might be more surprising to learn that the brightest thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were ready to shore up the foundations of people-trafficking. The same philosopher who could contend that ‘there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages’ was also capable of contradicting himself when it came to considering slavery and, more particularly, the value, as human beings, of its victims. He was David Hume and in his 1753 essay ‘Of National Characters’ he concluded:
I am apt to suspect the negroes … to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences.
On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TARTARS, still have something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular.
Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men.
Hume knew well that African slaves were scattered across the colonies and felt moved to excuse their use and abuse: ‘there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity … In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.’ Blithely overlooking the fact that a slave in the American colonies who did as much as hold his master or mistress’s gaze for more than a few seconds risked severe punishment for insolence, still the most revered of Scottish philosophers felt moved to blame their lack of ‘accomplishments’ on a supposed natural failing of an entire race of people.
The freeing of Joseph Knight in 1777 had followed the landmark case of another African slave. Somerset had been given his freedom in England in 1772 on the judgment of another Scot, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. In both cases, advocates employed by the slave owners raised the spectre of what would happen to polite, civilised society if fundamental principles of ‘property’ were no longer respected and upheld. Property, after all - natural desire to acquire it and the duty of society to protect it - had underpinned the thinking of Enlightenment philosophers from Lord Kames onwards. It was the bedrock of the Georgian world and certainly a preoccupation of Adam Smith. But somehow the burning white light of progress had blinded the best of them to the thinking of a founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment, Francis Hutcheson. He had written: ‘That Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest numbers; and that, worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery.’
Hutcheson had taught that all human beings were born knowing right from wrong - and also that the surest path to happiness lay in seeking and labouring towards the happiness of others. By writing that black Africans were ‘naturally inferior to the whites’ - indeed, that they had no more intellect than that of caged birds taught to mimic speech - Hume was laying down the framework for a model of abuse that distorts the world to this day. And if Hutcheson was right about all beings having an internal moral compass, then Hume and everyone else must have known instinctively that the buying and selling of their fellow human beings was morally suspect at the very least. Their forced labour in the colonies, where their average life expectancy was five years, might have seemed sensible from an economic point of view - but it cannot have appeared right to a humanist.
Lords Mansfield and Kames had caused sensations by freeing Somerset and Joseph Knight - and had sounded the right note of high-minded, moral indignation as they did so; but by then slavery had done its job for Scotland. Half a century before William Wilberforce’s Slavery Abolition Act signalled the death knell of the practice in most of the British Empire in 1833, the suffering, sweat and shortened lives of black men, women and children had already laid the foundations of Scotland’s future prosperity. Slavery had been fine, it seemed, as long as Scots abroad had depended upon it - and as long as the realities of the trade had not sullied Scottish soil. By bringing Joseph Knight into Scotland, by forcing polite society to consider the bigger moral picture when the slave began to demand the rights of any man, Wedderburn sowed the seeds of change. Despite the Knight case, it was a Scot who stubbornly and effectively hindered the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. Henry Dundas is remembered as ‘Harry the ninth, the uncrowned king of Scotland’ on account of his huge influence on Scottish affairs.
Lawyer, politician and arch-manipulator, Dundas was also a close friend of William Pitt the Younger. While Secretary of State for the Home Department in Pitt’s government, Dundas used his influence over many Scots MPs to prevent them voting against the slave trade. Before William Wilberforce’s Slave Trade Act went to the House of Commons in 1807, Dundas succeeded in forcing him to place the word ‘gradually’ before ‘abolished’. This addition ensured the continuation of slavery in the empire for another quarter of a century.
Scots talk a lot about national identity, about knowing who they are. Historian Tom Devine has railed long and hard against what he describes as the ‘Wha’s like us?’ school of Scottish history. He has said Scots’ view of themselves has for too long been skewed by the picture painted by writers like Sir Walter Scott and J.M. Barrie and by poets like Robert Burns - of victimhood and suffering at the hands of the English; of stubborn commitment to independence; of descent from a noble, heroic warrior class; of Highland Clearances and the sad Diaspora, of lost causes and thwarted dreams. If Devine is right then part of accepting the Scots national identity is a requirement to face the fact that in the eighteenth century Scotland rode into the front rank of world powers at least in part upon the scarred backs of slaves.
The American War of Independence that briefly interrupted trans-Atlantic trade and forced the Scots traders to diversify, to be even more cunning, also shaped some of Scotland’s destiny in unexpected ways. Before the war, all the Scottish-owned ships that transported the slaves, cotton, tobacco and sugar across the Atlantic were built in North America, of North American timber. It was by far the cheapest alternative, in a land where virgin forests grew down to the ocean’s edge. When war broke out - and then when the colonists emerged triumphant and independent at the end of it - the Tobacco Lords and other merchants were forced to find alternatives. It was then that the shipbuilding industry was relocated, in its entirety, to the banks of the River Clyde in Glasgow. Suitable timber from the Baltic was desired as never before, reinvigorating trade across the North Sea. It was the first time an international war had brought such work to the Clyde - but it certainly would not be the last.
As the eighteenth century drew towards its close it was developments on the European mainland that began to preoccupy British and therefore Scottish minds. On 14 July 1789 a mob of around 1,000 people had stormed the Bastille prison in Paris and in so doing had triggered the French Revolution.
King Louis XVI had, ironically, supported the colonists during the American War of Independence; but in doing so he had added to the financial woes of his country and his people at a time when famine and disease already stalked the land. He paid for the oversight with his head. The Americans had won their independence and had set out to create a society that declared ‘the pursuit of happiness’ among the noblest of ambitions. In the first heady weeks and months of 1789 the French appeared to be following a similar path. It seemed to many in Scotland’s enlightened cities that the same road might be open to them as well.
In terms of her people’s entitlement to elect Members of Parliament, Scotland was just one big ‘Rotten Borough’. At best, something like one man in every 120 had the vote. Powerful aristocrats and rich landowners controlled the operation, manipulated the votes, sat in parliament themselves and shoehorned their own friends and relatives into whatever seats they pleased. Elections were considered so meaningless in terms of changing anything they were seldom even held.
With nations east and west finding ways to empower their ‘citizens’, it seemed inevitable to some that Scotland could and should do likewise. But as the years passed, the atmosphere drifting across from France changed swiftly from one of optimism to one of fear. What had begun as a movement determined radically to change France’s government from an absolute monarchy to one based on freedom, equality and brotherhood evolved with terrifying speed into just another kind of tyranny. A dream of replacing a sovereign king with the sovereignty of the people - of equal rights for all citizens regardless of race, class, wealth or religion - turned into a nightmare.
The extremist ‘Jacobin’ group of politicians gained control of the country and between September 1793 and July 1794 unleashed the bloodletting remembered as ‘The Terror’. During those months, tens of thousands of ‘enemies of the revolution’ were put to death on the guillotine. Thereafter events steadily acquired momentum until the emergence of Napoleon Bonaparte, who installed himself as First Consul in 1799 and then, five years later, as Emperor of France.
This, then, was the birth of ‘democracy’ in Europe - and it had all but led to the death of the mother in childbirth. In spite of the violence, the killing of any and all who voiced doubts about what was happening, still the oppressed of Scotland found inspiration in events across the Channel.
There had been political parties in Scotland since the seventeenth century. When hardline Presbyterian Covenanters had marched on Edinburgh in August 1648 to oust the moderate ‘Engagers’ determined to work in league with Charles I, they thought of themselves as the ‘Kirk Party’. Their opponents, however, looked on at those anti-Royalist zealots, mounted on horseback, and nicknamed them ‘Whiggamores’ - possibly a corruption of a Scots Gaelic term meaning ‘horse-drivers’. In time this was shortened to ‘Whigs’ and, though originally meant as an insult, the Kirk Party members eventually adopted the name for themselves.
By the early years of the eighteenth century, all those who supported the House of Hanover - and constitutional monarchy over the absolute rule of kings - styled themselves as Whigs. As the century progressed, however, the picture became more complicated. Whigs were still devoted, in the main, to the Presbyterian faith and indeed to all ‘Dissenters’. But increasingly they began to draw their support from among the emerging merchant and industrialist classes, while their opponents championed the rights of the landed gentry. This body of opposition was the ‘Tory Party’, drawn from another nickname - this time Toraidhe, an Irish word for an outlaw. And while most Whigs in the House of Commons supported the Presbyterian faith, their Tory counterparts backed the Anglican Church of England. More so than the average Whig by then, they also backed the rights and wants of the Crown.
The fallout of American Independence and French Revolution hung heavy in the air over Scotland and the rest of Great Britain in the last years of the eighteenth century. To radicals and would-be reformers - many liberal Whigs among them - democracy smelled like an opportunity to right old wrongs of inequality; to conservative Tories and the rest of the landowning Scottish establishment it seemed an airborne disease that might fatally infect all they held dear, not least their ownership of most of the country.
Irish-born philosopher and politician Edmund Burke was a self-styled Whig. But while many of his colleagues were exhilarated by events across the Channel, the émigré Dubliner was appalled from the start. Widely regarded as a father of modern Conservatism, Burke demonstrated the foresight of a mystic when he predicted not just the horror of the Terror but even the rise of the imperialist dictator soon to be personified by Napoleon. Burke was proved right, of course, but fortunately excesses of the Jacobins were enough to snuff out the fires of the reform movement in Scotland. The French had merely gone too far; it was still right to dream of and to fight for a society based on freedom, equality and protection of the rule of law for all.
It was in this febrile atmosphere - of uncertainty or opportunity, depending on your point of view - that the nature of a national identity for the people of Scotland first occurred to those blessed with the time to think about such things.
With Napoleon making war on every country in mainland Europe and even threatening to invade Great Britain, philosophical opinion became sharply polarised. William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister in 1783, at the age of twenty-four. Although he called himself an ‘independent Whig’, he is usually described as a Tory, especially in terms of his opinions about Revolutionary France. The Tories had lined up in opposition to the Revolution and its offspring almost from the beginning. When Great Britain went to war with France in 1793 the Whigs - or at least those described by Burke as ‘New Whigs’ - had loudly and bitterly opposed the conflict. The Tories turned it into a test of patriotism.
In Scotland the call for patriots energised all those who had long since taken to describing themselves as ‘North Britons’. Devotion to the union and to freedom became synonymous with opposition to the French Revolution, even to the notion of democracy itself. Into the vanguard of the forces fighting to preserve the North British status quo stepped a young Edinburgh lawyer named Walter Scott. Born in 1771, Scott was the son of a Writer to the Signet and set out, without a great deal of enthusiasm, to follow in his father’s footsteps. A bout of polio in his right leg when he was just a year and half old left him slightly lame for life, unable to engage in the sort of valorous pursuits that would inspire his writing; but in his chest beat the heart of a dashing warrior nonetheless.
By the time of his birth, some of the fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment were still lighting up the sky with their brilliance. Others were already on the wane. But if ever there was a son of their collective genius, it was Walter Scott. As the child of an Edinburgh lawyer he grew up surrounded by a fair degree of privilege. He had access to a fine education - first at the city’s Royal High School and then at the University. It was during that period, around 1787, that the young Scott, just fifteen, crossed paths with the new darling of polite Scottish society - Robert Burns, recently arrived in the city and with his dreams of a life in the Caribbean fading softly behind him.
Whether the pair exchanged idealistic notions concerning the universal rights of man seems highly unlikely, but it is undeniable that Scott’s early life and early adulthood had allowed him to taste the fruits of learning and of property. So it was that when war broke out with France in 1793, the language of some of the reforming voices sounded horrifying to him. He was and would always be a property-defending, royalty-supporting Tory, both by inclination and by action.
In 1797 the threat of an invasion by French forces prompted the British government to permit the raising of militia groups in Scotland. This was a huge boost to Scottish pride and did much to bolster Scots’ confidence in their status as equal partners within the union. The Militia Act of 1757 had allowed the formation of armed civilian forces for the defence of the realm against invasion in England and Wales only. No such permission was granted to Scotland, making it plain to Scots that they were not to be trusted with weapons. Relieved of this shameful ban in 1797, Scotsmen responded to the call by joining the militia in their tens of thousands. Within weeks they amounted to over a third of Great Britain’s volunteer defence force.
Scott, seeing his hitherto unfulfilled dreams of life as a cavalryman suddenly within his grasp, was quickly among those who formed the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons. There was no invasion - not that year or any other - but from then on Scott would fight to preserve his own unique and idealised view of his homeland.
Perhaps even more upsetting to Scott in the long term than the threat from France was unrest at home. There were several popular uprisings in Scotland and England during the 1790s by radicals and proto-revolutionaries demanding change, and Scott was only too pleased to see government forces mercilessly crush them. The Black Watch, a regiment of heroes since the Seven Years War and a totem of Scottish loyalty to the union, were to the fore in putting down the troublemakers north of the Border.
Scott was married in 1797, to Frenchwoman Charlotte Charpentier, and two years later he accepted the post of Sheriff Depute of Selkirkshire. This return to the fields and hills where his father had spent the first half of his life seems to have kindled a fire within Scott. He and Charlotte had five children, four of whom - two daughters and then two sons - survived to adulthood. Out of his contentment sprang a need to look back into his childhood years, and to remember the Border ballads and tales he had heard from his father. Perhaps a desire to preserve them for his own children inspired Scott to write down the folk stories and poetry of the people living and working around him. His first foray into publishing came in 1802 with The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of Border ballads. Then between 1805 and 1810 he turned out three long poems of his own, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, ‘Marmion’ and ‘The Lady of the Lake’.
Scott had pulled aside the heavy curtain of oblivion to reveal the world of the past, still populated by the real-life heroes, heroines and villains who had once strode across the landscapes of Scotland, fighting battles and breaking hearts. For his readers, it was a version of the truth - their own history brought to life and celebrated as something precious, something all but lost amid the clamour and commerce of the modern world.
The poetry alone made his reputation as a writer and earned enough money for him to begin building a grand new family home at Melrose, near the River Tweed. Named ‘Abbotsford’ by Scott, it was designed to be an unashamedly sentimental and idealised fantasy of a Scottish baronial mansion. Into its rooms, into its very fabric indeed, he incorporated countless keepsakes, mementoes, treasures and artefacts from Scotland’s past, including antique weapons like Rob Roy’s long-barrelled musket.
It was at Abbotsford that he turned from poetry to prose, producing the twenty-seven novels of the Waverley series along with many others, short stories and yet more poems and histories. It was a prolific outpouring of genius the like of which Scotland had never seen before and has not seen again. As if his output was not impressive enough, he was also pioneering an entirely new literary genre at the same time - indeed inventing it as he went along. This was the historical novel and it was with tales like Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815), Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Ivanhoe (1819) and Redgauntlet (1824) that Scott set out on the grand quest that was to shape his life and destiny, as well as his legacy.
The eponymous hero of Waverley is an English British Army officer sent north in advance of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s arrival. Captivated by the Highlanders, he turns Jacobite and fights against both his own kind and his innate sense of duty. Scott would revisit similar themes again and again: men and woman torn between head and heart, between their own cultures and those that circumstances force them to confront.
In addition to entertaining his readers, he sought nothing less than the preservation of something he believed was in mortal danger, namely Scotland’s sense of herself as a unique and ancient nation. While many in Edinburgh were happy to consider themselves ‘North Britons’, Scott also feared the consequences of galloping into the future without a backward glance. ‘What makes Scotland Scotland is fast disappearing,’ he wrote. He felt the pull of something in the past - an anchor or perhaps a True North - and believed the modern world could benefit from sensing the connection as well. This set him at odds with much of contemporary ‘enlightened’ thought. The luminaries of the Enlightenment had found no cause for pride in their nation’s history - on the contrary, when they looked back they saw only a shameful barbarism that had not ended until 1707. As Scott gazed out through the windows of Abbotsford, his mind’s eye let him see far beyond the trees and fields of his steadily expanding demesne.
In England the continuing unrest was throwing up worrying intrigues and events like ‘the Peterloo Massacre’ of 1819 and the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820. As is always the case, soldiers returning from war had looked with clear eyes at their world and found it lacking. A post-war economic downturn soon followed, heaping financial hardship onto urban communities already suffering the indignities of low wages, poor conditions and the contemptuous disinterest of the owners. The trouble spread north of the Border and found a warm reception among the dispossessed and similarly vote-less of Glasgow. Without a voice in parliament they knew they could change nothing. What they wanted were workers’ rights, reform of the voting system - and if those pipe dreams were not realised they would seek wholesale revolution.
This was the so-called ‘Radical War’ - or ‘Scottish Insurrection’ - of 1820. Starting on April Fool’s Day with calls for strike action, it quickly escalated to the point where a small group of protesters marched towards Carron Iron Works in Falkirk in the hope of seizing weapons. They stopped at Bonnymuir, near the village of Bonnybridge, outside Falkirk, where they were attacked by a force of Hussars. Three men were killed in the clash and three of the protesters - James Wilson, John Baird and Andrew Hardie - were subsequently tried, convicted of treason and executed. A score more were sentenced to transportation.
Despite being remembered as a ‘war’, the Glasgow uprising of 1820 was small-scale and never a realistic threat to the safety of anyone but the protesters themselves. Nonetheless, it was a symptom of what Scott saw as a potentially debilitating, enervating disease that might lead to the downfall of modern Scotland - a Scotland, as he saw it, existing in happy, profitable union with England.
The apparent conflict at the heart of Scott’s thinking was that while he sought to immortalise and keep in the public mind the epic struggles of Scotland’s past, he was completely committed to her present as a nation at peace. And although he drew so much of his inspiration - for works like Waverley and Redgauntlet - from Jacobite warriors and their romantic lost cause, he never again wanted to see Scotland unsettled, far less ruled, by anyone opposed to the House of Hanover. For Scott, it seems, Scotland’s history was the stuff of collective memory, to be recalled, enjoyed and celebrated. Even his critics - and they are many and vociferous - usually acknowledge that he encouraged his fellow Scots to take an interest in their history in a way that no one had managed before, or perhaps since.
Almost as a by-product, his writings also inspired a love affair between Britons, North and South, and the landscapes of Scotland. Before Words-worth and the other Lake Poets turned the Lake District into a tourist destination, Scott enticed thousands to visit places like Loch Katrine and the Trossachs, the setting for ‘Lady of the Lake’. A landscape dismissed before by polite society as a barren wilderness of gloomy glens and forbidding mountains was reinvented as a place of inspiration, of soul-soothing solitude.
Lord Kames had described a four-stage progression for human society: hunting and gathering, nomadic-herding, farming and finally the commercial society of merchants and lawmakers. Unconsciously or not, Scott had refined this clinical analysis of human nature by reinvesting the people of the earlier stages with humanity itself. By making nomadic herders and farmers into real, believable people with loves and losses, needs and wants, he reminded the inhabitants of the present that only time separated them from their ancestors.
For all that he admired the nation’s history, Scott had no wish whatever to bring any of its precepts back into the present. Jacobites (and Scott was even ready to declare himself a bit of a Cavalier at heart) were sworn to the overthrow of the House of Hanover and no dream was further from his heart. Furthermore, he considered Scotland’s landed gentry, nobility and aristocracy the living links between past and future. Since the nineteenth-century rebels wanted to throw them out, Scott was always going to be implacably opposed to them and their demands to change anything else in his comfortable, elegant world.
A memory is precious but fragile. Any attempt to revisit it - or to reach out and touch it - will destroy it, like a reflection in a pool of water disturbed by an outstretched hand.
The seeming irony of Scott is that all the while he battled to preserve Scotland’s history, the remnants of the very culture he venerated above all others - that of the Highlands - were being swept away for ever by the same aristocracy he was determined to protect. Of course he was aware of the Clearances while they were happening and readily acknowledged that there would be a great sadness were the glens to be emptied completely of their people. But he was also a product of the world defined by Adam Smith, the world of profit and of the market. He accepted that, while the end of a way of life upset him, it was the work of economic forces neither he nor anyone else could halt. In fact he feared that any attempt to intervene with temporary solutions to the epic of human suffering unfolding in Sutherland and on the Islands and elsewhere might only delay the inevitable. (Dependence on the potato in some parts of the Highlands saw vast swathes of the crop smothering every available square foot of fertile land by the 1840s. The yield was four times that of any alternative foodstuff and crofters turned to it in ever-increasing desperation. As fathers sought to provide for multiple sons, plots that were too small to begin with were sub-divided even further. When the potato blight struck in 1846 it wreaked a localised havoc not unlike that which so devastated Ireland.)
Scott enjoyed looking at the past, considering how its heroes and villains might guide actions in the present; but he was no would-be time-traveller. For him the past worked precisely because it was forever out of reach. What he sought to do instead was the near-impossible: to achieve an equilibrium in which past and present co-existed, to the benefit of both. In fact he craved something more intense, something that depended for its existence upon its own pain: rather than equilibrium he demanded the acceptance of a stalemate. Scott believed the modern Scotland in which he so enjoyed living would be holed below the waterline without reverence for its history. But for him the fact that the values and traditions of the past were at odds with those of the present was a necessary state of being: it was the tension between the two that was holding the whole thing together. Lose one and lose both; cut the guy-rope and watch the big top collapse.
Undeterred by the march of progress, therefore, Scott eagerly got in step with the beat of the drum. In 1815 he met the future King George IV and asked permission for another quest. This time he wanted to go in search of the Scottish crown jewels, ‘the Honours of Scotland’. Last seen on the very day the Scottish parliament had ceased to exist in 1707, they had subsequently been bricked up in the redundant Crown Room in Edinburgh Castle. The Prince Regent consented and on 4 February 1818 Scott led the party of treasure hunters that recovered the Crown, Sceptre and Sword of State from over a century in the forgotten dark.
For his initiative in instigating the search, Scott was awarded a baronetcy by the newly crowned king. At last he was among the nobility he so valued and admired. The quest for the Honours had begun a friendship between the two men that prompted the grateful monarch - an avowed fan of the Waverley novels - to make the first royal visit to Scotland since that of Charles II in 1650. From the moment of his arrival in the port of Leith on 14 August 1822, aboard his royal yacht, King George IV’s days in the capital were a glittering triumph, not least for Sir Walter Scott, who choreographed the whole affair down to the last minute.
Scott boarded a little boat so he might be rowed out to the royal yacht and when King George heard the author was at hand he called out, ‘Sir Walter Scott! The man in Scotland I most want to see! Let him come up!’ The pair toasted the occasion with glasses of brandy and Scott, ever on the lookout for souvenirs of great moments, for display in Abbotsford, subtly slipped his empty glass into his pocket. Returning home that evening in exhausted satisfaction, he forgot the thing was there and sat down without taking off his coat. The irreplaceable trinket was crushed into oblivion but otherwise his success was total.
As a fan of Scott’s Scotland in particular, the king wanted to experience nothing but the sights and sounds of the Highlands he had been encouraged to imagine between the pages of novels like Waverley. He himself was decked out in full Highland regalia - a very large version of the full plaid for a very large man - and everyone who wanted to make a favourable impression did likewise. The kiltmakers of Edinburgh and elsewhere had never had it so good.
That there was a thriving community of kiltmakers in the capital was almost entirely down to the efforts of a couple of Polish conmen. By the turn of the nineteenth century the traditional dress of the clansman - breacan an feileadh, 12 yards of plaid folded into pleats and held in place by a belt at the waist - had spent the best part of half a century in disgrace. Banned after Culloden (a simplified version called feileadh-beag, the kilt familiar to us today, was being worn by Highland regiments like the Black Watch), the full plaid remained in the doldrums until two brothers, Charles Edward Stuart and John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart, turned up in Edinburgh claiming to be grandsons of the Bonnie Prince himself.
Whatever the truth of their identities, they brandished a document called ‘Vestiarum Scoticum’ that appeared to describe which tartan belonged to which clan. There had been no such tradition in the Highlands. Folk wore plaid woven and died in any colour they pleased, even within the same clan. In time of battle, when it was necessary for opposing clansmen to recognise friend from foe, then men of the same side wore a sprig of some brightly coloured plant on their bonnets. Fake or not (the brothers only produced it once and thereafter refused to let anyone see it) the book was a work of genius. Beguiled by the brothers, the great and the good of Edinburgh could not wait to commission outfits that matched their names. For the kiltmakers, and the mysterious Poles, it was a licence to print money.
Many observers at the time mocked the royal visit of George IV; a host of historians have done so since. For them it was fakery from start to finish, the product of some sort of hysteria-induced collective amnesia. Modern Scotland - so hard won - was put on hold for a few days while the faithful donned the jester’s motley and pretended they had loved the Jacobites all along. There is no denying, however, that it was a triumph in its way, even if to some it appeared comic, overblown and riddled with hypocrisy. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Scots turned out to roar their approval - and their king, huge and bloated and wrapped in customised Highland garb, beamed back at them in delight. It was a moment.
The rehabilitation of the Highlander was complete and all his attributes, real or imagined, were the height of fashion, even down to the clothes he was supposed to wear. That Highland culture had its brightest flowering in the capital of the Lowlands, while the last vestiges of real Highland life were being scoured from the land, was an irony even Scott overlooked.
Sir Walter Scott had reinvented Scottish history for Scottish people but in the end he was undone by the present that had so troubled him. The most successful and popular writer of his time, he had maximised his income by investing both in his publishers and their parent company so he could take a cut of the profits. He had also borrowed heavily from them to help finance his work at Abbotsford and, when the London Stock Market crashed in 1825, his personal fortune was wiped out overnight, leaving him with massive debts. Rather than endure bankruptcy, Scott struck a deal whereby he continued living at Abbotsford and kept writing, but with all new profits going to his creditors. From that moment on, he worked for them with all the energy and creativity that remained to him.
There was worse to come than financial disaster. The calls for changes to society, for electoral reform in particular, had been incessant during the later years of Scott’s career. He had fought against them with all his strength and all the weapons in his formidable literary arsenal. But his efforts were in vain. A lifelong Tory, Scott cast his vote against electoral reform in the general election of May 1831. He had suffered a stroke two years before and felt at least as old as his fifty-nine years by then. The cruellest cut was the way many of his Borders neighbours - the hard-working tenant farmers, ploughmen and ghillies he counted among his friends - turned against him in his last weeks and months. Though he had loved them, he had wanted them to stay down, and they condemned him for his stance against reform - which they took as a personal sleight.
Arthur Wellesley, the ‘Iron’ Duke of Wellington, had led the Tory Party to victory in the general election of 1830. He was absolutely opposed to reform and said so in a speech in the Commons. It was a personal and political disaster. A vote of no confidence soon after forced him to resign and the reforming Whig, Lord Charles Grey, was made Prime Minister in his stead. The general election of 1831 returned the Whigs with a majority and by June the following year the Reform Act had been passed.
In Scotland it meant the vote was now extended to around one man in eight and the representation of the burghs was also increased, giving recognition for the first time to new industrial centres like Paisley. The future, however, would have to go on without Scott, champion of the past. He died at home in Abbotsford on 22 September 1832, just six months after the Reform Act he so feared had received royal assent. He had paid off nearly half his debts and his immortality as Scotland’s greatest writer was assured.
Scott’s ideal - his fantasy of a Scotland just modern enough, but not too modern - was never sustainable. He had achieved one aim: of fixing a view of Scotland’s past that made inspirational heroes out of once-forgotten ghosts. But his hope that present and future could be controlled by anchoring them to that past was a forelorn pipe dream.
Commerce, business and the market were driving forward with a force that none could resist. Though most Scots still lived in the countryside at the start of the nineteenth century, soon the balance shifted for ever. Towns and cities became the places where most folk lived and worked. In the way that Scots do so effortlessly, the inhabitants of the urban centres sorted themselves into the middle and the working classes. The sheer weight of their numbers created an atmosphere in which shared concerns could find a voice.
Emigration to the New World was continuing to draw large numbers of Scots away, but there was also immigration to take their place. Word that industrial centres like Glasgow and Dundee were hungry for human fodder brought an influx of workers from elsewhere. Irish immigrants made for both cities in huge numbers and by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century accounted for nearly a fifth of the workforce in the west of Scotland alone.
With the rise of educated and vocal working and middle classes came demands for even greater reform of citizens’ rights. The Reform Act of 1832 was never going to silence the many and for some there was no alternative but to join movements like the Chartists - inspired by the ‘People’s Charter’ of 1838 and the first mass labour movement. Demands for the vote for all men over twenty-one started small but refused to be silenced.
Chartism disappeared by name during the middle years of the century but the torch of reform passed to other hands. The grinding glacier of discontent, lubricated in its passage by liberal Whig sentiment, led inexorably to further extension of voting rights. Two more Reform Acts - in 1868 and 1884 - eventually extended the vote to around half a million Scotsmen. The political scene was changing too. After 1868 more and more of those who had called themselves Whigs began to adopt the label of Liberals, a term that, by then, had already been around for decades. Successors of those who had ousted the Tories in 1831, the Liberals would dominate the Scottish political scene until the Great War.
Sir Walter Scott had feared the consequences of giving the vote to ‘un-wash’d artificers’. He had attempted to make Scottish history hold everyone in place in a world where each man and woman knew their position and was grateful for it. What he had not foreseen, however, were the events of 1843, when the Church of Scotland tore itself in two.
Since the Dark Ages, Christianity had been at least as important to the cohesion of Scotland as any secular ruler, any government. When Scottish independence had come under threat in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was the bishops who had formed the backstop from which Robert the Bruce drove forward in defiance of would-be English overlords. The Reformation of the sixteenth century had given Scots the education that later energised and informed the Enlightenment, and from the signing of the National Covenant they had gained an unshakeable sense of their worth as individuals, equal to all others in the eyes of God.
In the nineteenth century the united Church of Scotland was still the hub around which society revolved. There had been no parliament since 1707 but the General Assembly had in many ways taken its place, giving ordinary people a gathering where local grievances might be aired. In the parishes it was the Kirk that oversaw the morality of the people, took care of the poor via the allocation of Poor Relief and minded the behaviour and performance of the local schoolteachers. But in 1843 a dispute over whether the right to appoint ministers should lie with the congregation or with the lay patrons of the parish escalated out of control. When the dust cleared, some 40 per cent of parishioners and an eighth of all ministers had walked out of their churches never to return. The rebels formed the Free Church of Scotland and the once-unifying presence of the Kirk was gone for ever.
The Disruption, as it was called, was felt especially strongly in the Highlands and Islands. There the trouble had been coming for a long time, as congregations and lay patrons - usually the landowners - made the appointment of ministers a trial of strength. As long ago as 1712, a Tory-dominated parliament had passed the Patronage Act, giving landlords the final say in church appointments. The whole question of landowners’ and tenants’ rights had been a root cause of friction ever since. The matter of who should appoint the minister was another symptom of deeply rooted grievances.
When the ordinary people’s fight for survival was pushed beyond breaking point by the potato famine of 1846-8, many thousands found their only option was to follow well-worn paths towards the coast. There they boarded ships heading west and away from a land that could no longer support them. There was cholera too and for many it must have seemed the land itself no longer wanted them around. The departures were not always voluntary - no more than they had been at the height of the first wave of Highland Clearances. Landlords were well used to putting profit ahead of human need and forcible evictions in the 1840s and 1850s reached such levels that the matter was even discussed, in anxious terms, in Westminster.
Those left behind among the ruins of their civilisation found some relief, in the main because the population had been substantially reduced, taking pressure off the land. But there can be no denying that the haemorrhage was draining the very life out of the Highlands. The cities continued to swell, of course. Glasgow in particular seemed always able to swallow more people into its insatiable factories and the dehumanising misery of its squalid, overcrowded tenements.
Deaf and dumb to the human cost, the engine of the British Empire raced ever faster, mindlessly, cheerfully whirling. Scots made reputations in the British Army and a disproportionate number of them found posts as governors in colonies around the world. Fortunes were being made by the few and any thoughts of Scottish national identity seemed to have been subverted to the greater good of a Greater Britain. But across the Irish Sea, where geology had long ago denied the people any prospect of industrial revolution, upheaval of another kind was about to have its impact on Scotland’s history.
Without the alternatives provided by coal mines, factories, cotton mills and the rest of the stuff of nineteenth-century progress, the Irish had remained dependent upon the land. Their hunger for it, their attachment to it, meant they would always fight sooner and harder to control their own patches of it.
Since the Act of Union of 1801, the whole island had been a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As early as 1803 there was an attempt to regain independence and two more in 1848 and 1867. In 1879 the Irish Land League was formed to oppose ‘landlordism’ and to fight for farmers’ rights to own the land on which they worked. The League’s first president was Charles Stewart Parnell, of gentry stock and described by William Gladstone as the most remarkable man he ever met. In 1886 Gladstone’s Liberal government attempted to push an Irish Home Rule Bill through parliament, with the support of Parnell and his newly founded Irish Parliamentary Party, but the move was defeated by British and Irish Unionists. There had been no intention to break with Great Britain - to break the union - just a desire for control of their own destiny within the union. But fear of the consequences for the all-important empire made any tinkering with its foundations unthinkable.
Gladstone’s commitment to Irish Home Rule would split the Liberals down the middle, beginning the end of decades of political dominance for the party. By then, however, the notion of tenants’ rights to land had long since crossed the Irish Sea to the Highlands of Scotland.
In 1853 the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights was formed, not to threaten the union with England but merely to modify its terms. Irritated by what they saw as excessive attention being given to the matter of Irish Home Rule, the Association’s members had grumbles of their own and felt duty-bound to speak out. As well as insisting that the United Kingdom should be referred to only as ‘Great Britain’, they wanted to see more seats for Scottish MPs in Westminster - at that time just 53 out of a total of 658. Despite having only modest ambitions, the Association was wound up within a few years without achieving much of note. Nevertheless, Gladstone was ready by then to concede that if Home Rule was right for Ireland, then it was right for Scotland as well.
The Liberal Prime Minister’s star fell because of his views, but a Scottish Home Rule Association was duly formed. Despite the name and its modern connotations, the Scots Home Rulers of the 1880s wanted only to improve the efficiency of the union. Scottish MPs at Westminster had been in the habit of meeting privately to discuss Scottish business and it was the will of the SHRA that such meetings should take place in Edinburgh rather than in London.
Ireland inspired the Scottish Home Rule movement in other, less obvious ways as well - namely high dudgeon. As far as many Scots were concerned, the Irish had secured greater Prime Ministerial commitment to their cause despite a conspicuous lack of loyalty to the union in the time of its greatest need.
In 1796 a revolutionary republican group calling itself the United Irishmen had invited the French to land on Irish soil and lead a fight against the British government. Bad weather and poor leadership meant the attack never happened but in May 1798, when the threat of invasion of Great Britain by Napoleon was at its most acute, the United Irishmen rose in open revolt against the Crown. Once again the French were encouraged to use Ireland to attack Great Britain’s flank but the rebellion, supported by thousands of French sailors and soldiers, had been effectively crushed by the end of September. So while Scots had rallied to Great Britain’s defence in unprecedented numbers, the treasonous Irish had sought to join forces with her greatest enemy and stab the nation in the back. That such behaviour should bring them close to Home Rule, while Scots interests languished, was irritating to say the least. The black sheep of the family was getting all the attention.
In 1885, with Scots interests on the agenda, Westminster resuscitated the ancient office of Secretary for Scotland and a Scottish Office was opened in London. But, far from Great Britain’s capital, people’s dissatisfaction with their landlords had taken a violent turn.
If we imagine the Highland Clearances at all, we tend to see a broken people meekly trudging away from their homes towards an uncertain future. But in 1883, on Lord MacDonald’s Braes estate on Skye, the meek set out to ensure their sons might inherit some little earth. A dispute over rights to grazing land on Ben Lee escalated to the point where the laird called in a force of fifty policemen from Glasgow. Accounts vary as to who cast the first stone, but a riot broke out, with locals attacking the police with any weapons that came to hand. Many crofters were taken prisoner and later fined but they had made their point.
This was the ‘Battle of the Braes’ and there would be further outbreaks of trouble before the end of a period of civil unrest in the Highlands remembered as the ‘Crofters’ War’. A subsequent government inquiry into ‘the conditions of crofter and cottars in the Highlands’ published its findings in 1884 and Highland Members of Parliament were able to exploit a slim Liberal majority in the Commons to exact some reforms. The Crofters Act of 1885 gave tenants security of tenure and meant that, for the first time, parents could pass that same security on to their children. Also for the first time a Land Court was set up to ensure fair rents.
What would Sir Walter Scott have thought of it all? Determined to maintain the unique heritage and identity of Scotland, he had made heroes of the Highlanders of the past. Now, more than half a century after his death, a handful of their descendants had reared up on their hind legs to snap at their tormentors. At the eleventh hour the last of the Highlanders had stemmed a tide of eviction, exile and grief that had seemed certain to sweep them into final oblivion. Against the odds they had persuaded a distant government to grant them at least some right to a life in their own land.
At the turn of the twentieth century members of the Liberal Party set up the Young Scots Society. In May 1914, just three months before the outbreak of the Great War, a Scottish Home Rule Bill introduced by the Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, came within a whisker of being passed. Having survived its second reading in the Commons, it failed to reach the statute book only because the need to prepare for war overtook all other concerns.
During the eighteenth century, Scotland’s desire to prove herself - both as an equal partner in the union and as a player on the world stage - had made her forget herself. The union and the British Empire had given the nation the power to punch well above its weight in international affairs and had dispatched millions of her sons and daughters to every corner of the earth. Many of her people had grown rich beyond imagination.
Now, just as the nations of the world prepared to tear themselves into bloody pieces in the greatest conflict yet seen, Scotland had begun to remember what Scotland was. It only remained to be seen what she would do with that knowledge once the smoke of battle cleared.