Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  As the mania subsided, British politics began to grip the Church of Scotland in unwelcome ways and its splits and secessions supplied J. M. Barrie with the source of much of his satire in Auld Licht Idylls. Even though the Union of 1707 explicitly enshrined the independence of the Church of Scotland, it nevertheless threatened it almost immediately. In 1712, the Toleration Act badly dented the universality of the Godly Commonwealth when it allowed the Episcopalian Church to be established in Scotland. Instantly dubbed ‘the English Kirk’ or ‘the Chapel’, its ungodly interest in ceremony and music set it apart from Presbyterian austerity. Because they installed organs to accompany hymn and psalm singing, Scots still talk of the ‘whistlin’ kirks’. In his novel, Barrie commented wryly and probably accurately that ‘to the Auld Licht of the past there were three degrees of damnation – auld kirk, playacting, chapel’.

  Also enacted in 1712, the Patronage Act was an even more serious threat to the Church of Scotland. In the long struggle for independence, congregations had won the right to choose their ministers for themselves. Composed of elders appointed for life, the Kirk Session was mandated to fill a vacancy by, in essence, holding auditions for applicants. In Auld Licht Idylls, standards of evangelism were high and exacting. Ministers should be able to deliver a sermon without notes, as though it rose up almost unbidden from the depths of their piety and the profundity of their learning. Written texts were anathema. ‘To follow a pastor who “read” seemed to the Auld Lichts like claiming Heaven on false pretences.’ When one unfortunate candidate preached outdoors to the congregation in Thrums, he used an ingenious stratagem to conceal his written sermon. But a sudden gust of wind blew up and away went his pages that had been trimmed precisely to fit with the same size of the pages of his Bible. Ever after he was known as ‘Paper Watts’.

  The Marrowmen

  In 1699, Thomas Boston became the minister for the tiny parish of Simprim near Coldstream. There were only 90 communicants. While visiting one of his sparse flock, he picked up a copy of a book entitled The Marrow of Modern Divinity, which had been brought north by a soldier who had fought in Oliver Cromwell’s armies. Written by Edward Fisher, it was a compendium of the views of various radical thinkers of the Reformation but it dealt particularly with the notion of grace. Thomas Boston was greatly taken with Fisher’s belief that what mattered in a Christian life was not repentance or even personal reformation but the complete and absolute acceptance of Christ and his teaching. Once that state was achieved, repentance and a new life followed. The book was republished in 1718 and like-minded ministers were dubbed The Marrowmen. Boston and his supporters were attacked by conservatives in the Kirk and their zealous and highly effective preaching was thought to be excessive and intemperate. The Marrowmen were distressingly popular with their congregations. Boston himself appears to have been surprisingly self-effacing. The distinguished Canadian writer, Alice Munro, was attracted to him: ‘In his autobiography he speaks of his own recurring miseries, his dry spells, his sense of unworthiness and dullness even in the act of preaching the Gospel, or while praying in his study.’

  The Patronage Act of 1712 removed the right of the Kirk Session to choose ministers and vacancies were to be filled by the choices of the lairds and other potentates who could ‘intrude’ their own candidates. Dissent rumbled and, in 1732, the First Secession took place. Led by ministers from Perthshire and Stirling, congregations left the Church of Scotland, believing that they were returning to its founding principles.

  In 1747, a new oath of loyalty was required from burgesses after the upheavals of the Jacobite Rebellion. Those who controlled and prospered in Scotland’s burghs were compelled to swear allegiance to a secular authority. Many churchmen believed that this compromised their first commitment to their faith and so another split occurred, this time between the Burghers and the Anti-Burghers.

  Only five years later, a controversy over the intrusion of unacceptable ministers to vacant parishes set in train the creation of the Relief Church. In 1761, this new and more liberal faction was constituted and it quickly grew popular, with more than 100,000 members. Meanwhile, trouble was brewing in the Burgher Church and, in 1799, they divided into two groups – the New Lichts and the Auld Lichts or what might be subtitled the Progressives and the Traditionalists. Six years later, the Anti-Burghers followed suit and the New Licht Anti-Burghers distanced themselves from the Auld Licht Anti-Burghers.

  By 1820, to the relief of many, no doubt, a new spirit of harmony was in the air and the New Licht Burghers and the New Licht Anti-Burghers found common ground and united. Two years later the Auld Lichts Anti-Burghers joined the United Original Secession Church (the version that originated in 1732) and, in 1847, the United Secession Church united with the Relief Church. This flurry of accord left one dogged faction, the Auld Licht Burghers, determinedly un-united – much to the delight of J. M. Barrie, and his readers.

  Seeing themselves as the keepers of the flame of an austere reforming zeal, the Auld Lichts held fast to tradition. In Barrie’s opening chapter, the parish schoolmaster, the hero of the story, is snowbound in a severe winter. Only the Auld Licht congregation struggled through the drifts to hold a Sunday service. The competition between denominations is one of the themes of the novel and enmities remained sharp. In Thrums there were two main churches, the Free Kirk (the product of another rift) and the Parish Kirk (Church of Scotland) ‘both of which the first Auld Licht minister I knew ran past when he had not the time to avoid them by taking a back wynd’.

  Jacobite Cricket

  Scotsmen and the quintessentially English game of cricket may seem unlikely bedfellows. But the reality is surprisingly different. J. M. Barrie adored cricket and founded his own team of enthusiastic amateurs. He called them the Allahakbarries, believing it was the Arabic for ‘Heaven Help Us’ as well as being a partial pun on his own surname. In fact, the phrase means ‘God Is Great’. Team members included other literary greats who were also Scots. Arthur Conan Doyle, A. A. Milne and Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse all bowled and batted for the Allahakbarries. But they were not the most feared XI to adorn a cricket pitch. When asked to describe how quick his own bowling was, Barrie replied that, after delivering the ball, he usually sat down to wait for it to arrive at the other end, ‘which it sometimes did’. He tried to encourage teammates by saying, ‘You scored a good single in the first innings but were not so successful in the second.’ Barrie forbad his team from practising on an opponent’s ground before a match ‘because it will only give them confidence’. He believed that his own worst performance was the time he was clean bowled by an American actress. Other Scots did a little better. Mike Denness and Tony Greig both captained England in recent times but perhaps the most fascinating figure was Richard Nyren. Captain of the fabled Hambledon Cricket Club, the forerunner of the MCC who regularly defeated All England XIs, Nyren was involved in the evolution of the rules of the game in the later 18th century. He and his team proposed a bat of uniform width. Noted as a left-arm bowler, he specialised in sending down deliveries overarm. The term bowling originally referred to the old-fashioned underarm action, like bowls. Richard Nyren’s origins are uncertain. One scholar believes that his surname is an anglicisation of Nairn and that he was a Jacobite refugee who took up cricket because it was quintessentially English and good cover.

  Ministers were feared as well as revered. In the severe setting of the Auld Licht Kirk (‘white is not a religious colour and the walls are a dull grey’), they would bang the Bible and rail directly at sinners cowering in the pews. Horrified members talked of the time when ‘a laddie whistled when he went past the minister’ in the street. Others were awestruck at the familiarity shown by Hendry Munn, the Kirk Officer, towards Mr Dishart, the minister: ‘he was the only man in Thrums who did not quake when the minister looked at him. A wild story, never authenticated, says that Hendry once offered Mr Dishart a snuff from his mull.’ Barrie strikes a deep chord when he exaggerates – only a little – the
deep-seated masochism of the poor sinners in the Auld Licht congregation: ‘Old wives grumbled by their hearths when he [the minister] did not look in to despair of their salvation.’

  Light comedy might be made out of their traditions but it was a turbulent and hard-won history that brought the thrawn, obdurate and deeply pious Auld Lichts into being and they never forgot the sacrifices and the martyrs. More than anything, it was the time of the Covenanters that inspired them, the middle years of the 17th century when Scotland was aflame with dreams of a religious utopia and was determined to defend them.

  The idea of a special covenant between God and the people of Scotland (or at least those Scots who were true believers) grew out of the Godly Commonwealth. Famously, at Falkland Palace in 1596, the great reformer Andrew Melville pointed out to James VI that, while he may be king of Scotland, he was only ‘God’s sillie vassal’. And, in Christ’s kingdom of Scotland, he was not a king or a lord but merely a member. Forty years later James’s son, Charles I, by then installed as king of Great Britain and Ireland, attempted to bring Scotland into conformity with England and the Anglican Church by imposing bishops on the Kirk. The response was emphatic. In 1638, a National Covenant reinforcing the particular bond between God and Scotland was drawn up and, in a public ceremony in Greyfriars kirkyard in Edinburgh, it was signed by many powerful men.

  When open war broke out between Charles I and the English parliament and spread to Ireland and Scotland, the Covenant became an instrument of unity and, in the 1640s, the Lords of the Covenant in effect governed the nation. After defeat at Dunbar in 1650 at the hands of Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army, their power was temporarily diminished. And, when the Stuart dynasty was restored in 1660, an even more serious threat materialised. Again, bishops were to be imposed in Scotland and, this time, Covenanters were actively pursued and persecuted. Martyrs began to be made.

  Covenanting congregations were forced out of their churches and, across the countryside, many held regular open-air services known as ‘field conventicles’. A young preacher from Fife, Richard Cameron, quickly made his mark. But, when Charles I’s government insisted that the Kirk submit to High Anglican governance and accept the king (and not Christ) as Head of the Church of Scotland, he and many others fled abroad. In 1679, Richard Cameron was formally ordained at the Scots Kirk at Rotterdam by the Rev. Robert Ward:

  Richard, the public standard of the Gospel is fallen in Scotland; and, if I know anything of the mind of the Lord, you are called to undergo your trials before us, and go home and lift the fallen standard, and display it before the world. But, before you put your hand to it, you shall go to as many of the field ministers as you can find, and give them your hearty invitation to go with you; and if they will not go, go your lone, and the Lord will go with you. Behold all you spectators! Here is the head of a faithful minister and servant of Jesus Christ, who shall lose the same for his Master’s interest; and it shall be set up before sun and moon in the public view of the world.

  It was a ghoulish prophesy, perhaps even a fate Cameron himself sought. When he returned to Scotland, the fiery young preacher joined with two others, Donald Cargill and David Hackston, and they issued the Sanquhar Declaration. It was a manifesto of the Kirk Militant from the outset. Accompanied by twenty armed men, Cameron walked into the market square in the village in the Galloway Hills and read out what amounted to a call to arms. After disowning Charles Stuart, he announced, ‘[W]e, being under the standard of our Lord Jesus Christ, Captain of Salvation, do declare a war with such a tyrant and usurper’.

  Cameron did not have to wait long to meet his grisly fate. Soon after setting out his intentions at Sanquhar, he was killed near Cumnock in a sharp skirmish with government soldiers, the hated dragoons. Cameron’s body was decapitated and his head and hands spitted on the Netherbow Port in Edinburgh. Calling themselves Cameronians, his followers multiplied, especially in Lanarkshire, Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway and throughout the 1680s, the period known as the Killing Times, they attempted to protect Covenanters from persecution.

  By 1688, the feckless Stuart dynasty had run out of support and been forced to flee and, in what is called The Glorious Revolution, the Protestant William of Orange succeeded. Persecutions ceased immediately but peace did not descend. In the Highlands, the clans were raised in the very first Jacobite Rebellion by John Graham, Viscount Dundee. Supported by Clan Cameron and only a few other chiefs, he led a small army south to Blair Atholl. On 27 July, they caught a slightly larger government army in the narrow pass at Killiecrankie and defeated them after a downhill charge. Dundee had waited until the evening sun had moved around behind his position and the Highlanders swept General Hugh Mackay’s dazzled army off the field. In the immediate aftermath, more clansmen rallied to the royalist standard and a force of 5,000 or so would have presented a much more potent threat had Dundee not died of wounds on the battlefield.

  Meanwhile, the followers of Richard Cameron had come together to form a regiment of foot. In April 1689, more than 1,200 men had enlisted near Douglas in South Lanarkshire. Each company of twenty had an elder assigned to organise worship and prayer and each recruit was given a Bible. The Cameronians placed themselves in the service of King William III and marched north to Perth to meet the growing threat from the Highlands. The Scottish Privy Council was terrified at the news from Killiecrankie and, while it made preparations to abandon Edinburgh, it ordered the new regiment to move to Dunkeld and hold the town against the rebels at all costs.

  Lying precisely on the Highland Line, where the River Tay emerges from its narrow valley threaded through the mountains, the douce little town has a long, intriguing and turbulent history. The name of Dunkeld derives from the Dun (or Fortress) of the Caledonians, the ancient confederacy that faced the Romans at the Battle of the Graupian Mountain. Such a name implies not only importance but also a frontier place, somewhere so called by neighbours who were not Caledonians. Nearby, Schiehallion rises up and reinforces that sense of the south-eastern edges of Caledonian territory because its name translates as the Magic Mountain of the Caledonians. Clearly a place of some long-forgotten spiritual significance, the magic of Schiehallion may come from the fact that it is a shape shifter, a mountain that looks very different from a variety of aspects.

  Christian belief replaced paganism at Dunkeld and, on the flat haughland on the banks of the Tay, an early monastery was planted. Dating from the 6th or early 7th century, its foundation was inspired by a missionary expedition from Iona, led by St Columba. Its reputation for sanctity grew and, in the 9th century, Constantine I, probably the first to rule over both Picts and Scots, caused stone buildings to replace the primitive cells of the Celtic monks. The medieval cathedral of the 13th and 14th centuries remembered the simple faith of the earlier churches and it was dedicated to St Columba. Before the reformers did away with such things, the saint’s relics were displayed and revered in the side chapels of the great church by the river.

  When the Cameronians marched into Dunkeld on Saturday 17 August 1689, their captains saw immediately that its flat site would be very difficult to defend. Led by Lt Col. William Cleland, the soldiers mustered around the cathedral precinct and many of the 1,200 men found shelter in the church. Even though he was only 28, Cleland was an experienced officer, having fought in the Covenanter armies at the battles of Drumclog and Bothwell Brig in 1679. Like Richard Cameron, he had been forced to flee abroad. Surprisingly, he was also a published poet, the author of a mock epic ‘On the expedition of the Highland Host who came to destroy the western shires in winter 1678’ and, in the this lengthy composition, Cleland made his feelings about Highlanders very clear.

  The Cameronian regiment was organised into 20 companies of 60 men apiece, each commanded by a captain, supported by a lieutenant and an ensign. Armed only with muskets and without any artillery, the soldiers would clearly have to create a makeshift defensive perimeter. There was no town wall, only a dyke around the cathedral precinct. The Marquis
of Atholl’s house stood close by and it was quickly fortified. A single street (now Cathedral Street) with lanes leading off it ran eastwards from the precinct gate to a wider area where the market cross stood. Some of the houses were of two storeys, although most were thatched cottages. To the south of the cathedral flowed the River Tay and a little way downstream there was a ford. To the north-east of the precinct lies Stanley Hill, covered, then as now, with tall trees. After a rapid reconnaissance, Cleland’s captains posted sentries and the regiment settled for the night, bivouacking in and around the cathedral.

  The following morning, despite it being the Sabbath, the soldiers set to and worked hard to dig defensive ditches and repair the wall around the precinct. To act as lookouts, a detachment climbed the steeple. They quickly reported sightings of small groups of Highlanders in the surrounding hills and, at 4 p.m. in the afternoon, a large company of several hundred armed men emerged ominously from the trees on Stanley Hill, very close to the town. From the vantage point in the steeple, lookouts called down to Cleland that they could see a messenger approaching, carrying a halberd with a white cloth attached. He handed a letter to the Cameronian commander. It presented him with what amounted to an ultimatum: ‘We, the gentlemen assembled, being informed that you intend to burn the town, desire [to know] whether you come for peace or war, and to certify that if you burn one house, we will destroy you.’

  Cleland replied defiantly that he would not retreat and, at the same time, he got a horseman away, splashing across the Tay fords towards Perth and its garrison. Reinforcements were desperately and immediately needed. Perhaps, after sending out two of his Gaelic-speaking officers, Dhu and Roy Campbell, Cleland had gathered intelligence that the large body of armed men on Stanley Hill were clansmen from the surrounding area anxious to protect Dunkeld and who had risen to join the rebellion. The town was seriously threatened and the Highland army had yet to reach it. No doubt the Cameronian colonel hoped that his messenger was galloping hard down the Perth road.