Of sixteen families that resided on the farm at Littertie, thirteen were extinguished. On the estate of Greens, which presently accommodates 169 individuals, three families (the proprietors included) only survived. The extensive farms of Toucher, Greeness, Overside and Burnshide of Idoch, now containing more than 100 souls, together with some farms on the parish of Turiff, being entirely deserted. The inhabitants of the parish were diminished by death to one half, or as some affirm, to one fourth of the preceding number … Until the year 1709, many farms were waste.8
Scotland tottered on the verge of catastrophe, with those in power able to do little in response. But they did look south and see that England was accruing a colonial empire that brought in significant riches but from which Scots were excluded by law. The idea took seed that Scotland might create its own empire.
The Scottish Parliament was described by the historian T. C. Smout as ‘little more than a solemn rubber’ for the monarchy.9 But the Glorious Revolution had abolished the Privy Council, which had controlled parliamentary affairs. From then until the Act of Union the Scottish Parliament did exert a degree of independence, most notably in authorising the Darien Scheme.
In 1695, the Scottish Parliament passed the Act for a Company Trading to Africa and the Indies. Two forces conspired in the company’s foundation – desire in Scotland to find new markets overseas, and the wish of certain London merchants to circumvent the monopoly of the East India Company.
As official disapproval became clear, however, London’s interest in the new scheme melted away, and Scottish investors went ahead alone. The enthusiasm for such a risky venture, in so poor a country, was astonishing. The nation’s hopes were committed to the idea of establishing a colony in Panama as an entrepot for world trade. The first expedition of would-be colonists sailed in July 1698. The Scots colonists found themselves in a swampy, disease-ridden land with the Spanish determined to remove them. The king in London refused to do anything to protect them. By March 1700, after 2,000 lives had been squandered, the remaining colonists submitted to the Spanish, whose monarch had long claimed the territory on which ‘Darien’ stood.
Spanish hostility was one factor in the experiment’s failure, diplomatic opposition by King William was another. But the Scottish historian Neil Davidson argues that both these problems ‘could have been coped with had either the Scottish state or civil society been resilient enough to sustain the venture’.10 Scotland had neither the wealth not the military and naval clout to take on Spain, unless England backed it up, which was not going to happen because of the close alliance between the grandees who ran the rival East India Company and the Crown.
Following their recent experience of famine, this destruction of a Scottish attempt at economic breakout created uncertainty and a sense that ‘something must be done’. Meanwhile, another crisis was developing 400 miles to the south.
Queen Anne, who succeeded William III to the throne in 1702, had no heir, and the Whig ruling class in England were determined that, on her death, the Crown would pass to the Protestant candidate, George, the Elector of Hanover. England was a contending world power, but it was also an emerging capitalist economy. As such it was pitted against feudal-absolutist France, which wanted to expand its empire but also to exert hegemony over Europe. War inevitably followed throughout the century following the Glorious Revolution, and the French saw that a Jacobite rebellion could undermine their opponents.
The English ruling class needed the Scottish Parliament to accept the Hanoverian succession, and was determined to stop it backing the return of the Stewarts. In the wake of Darien, the Scottish Parliament voted in 1703 that it should get to decide on Anne’s successor and also that if Britain was at war, it could vote for peace. Within the nobility and elite burghers who made up the parliament, a Jacobite minority of government loyalists and others understood that this was an opportunity to negotiate, but when push came to shove they could not stomach a return to Catholicism, because that was what a return of the Stewarts would entail.
The Scottish Parliament’s assertion of its authority was nevertheless unacceptable to London. In 1705, the English Parliament passed the Alien Act, which recommended to Anne that commissioners be sent to Edinburgh to negotiate a parliamentary union. If the Scots did not comply from Christmas Day onwards, Scots visiting England would be treated as aliens and Scottish imports would be stopped. It was economic blackmail at its most aggressive.
As this legislation was going through Parliament, a ship of the East India Company, the Worcester, anchored in the Firth of Forth on 12 August 1704. It was a bad time to dock. The East India Company had just had the Company of Scotland’s last remaining vessel seized, as part of its relentless campaign to destroy its erstwhile rival. Now the English ship was seized and its crew put in jail. Feelings were running high. The secretary of the Company of Scotland had the sailors charged with piracy and murder, claiming they were responsible for the disappearance of a company ship a year earlier, lost at the hands of English pirates. The Worcester’s captain and two others of the crew were sentenced to be hanged. Queen Anne appealed for clemency but the Scottish Privy Council voted to uphold the verdict. On 11 April 1705, the three men were marched from Edinburgh Castle to the gallows on Leith Sands. It was claimed a crowd of 80,000 (far in excess of Edinburgh’s population) lined the route and the shore, hurling abuse at the doomed men. This was mob rule in a real sense and it was not pretty, because the convicted men were clearly innocent.
The Edinburgh mob was fiercely anti-union but it was the elite who would decide the future of the nation. The supposed leader of the opposition was the Duke of Hamilton, feted on the streets of Edinburgh but a landowner in England who was secretly in league with the government in London. In 1706, this rhyme was overheard on the streets of Edinburgh:
Come to the union lett us ryde
Wee shall do great matters there
Scotland shall be England’s bride
Or else be fuckyt by Earl of Stair11
There was popular opposition to the Union, including from the country’s small merchant and commercial class, and from the lower classes of town and country. For several months the Edinburgh mob was almost permanently on the streets, demonstrating and rioting. Their fear was that union would be followed by Anglicisation of the Kirk, the one institution with any element of democracy, and that it would bring higher taxes. The riots and demonstrations did not stop the treaty going ahead but they did manage to get several of the most offensive clauses changed or deleted. In the end, the lords pushed the treaty through Parliament because the English regime was prepared to guarantee the preservation of their feudal jurisdictions and legal system – their class position.12
A majority of the nobility sensed that union would open up new opportunities to them: in London, in the army and through being able to sell their cattle and other produce in England. The Earl of Roxburgh explained in 1705: ‘The motives will be, Trade with most, Hanover with some, ease and security with others.’13
Why did the English ruling class want a united British state? Apart from closing the back door to invasion and securing the Hanoverian succession, they were at war with France and the army was a British one. Its commander, the Duke of Marlborough, wanted a centralised state and his argument carried sway.
The English negotiators conceded that the Church of Scotland would be left untouched and the privileges of the royal burghs and their elites left alone. The nobles could keep their private courts and, most important of all, free trade with England and the colonies was granted, something denied to Ireland. This would create the biggest trading area in the world, no small part of the subsequent rise of what was, in effect, the new British state.
By 1705, a joint Anglo-Scottish parliamentary commission had drawn up a draft treaty of union. The Scottish representatives were selected from supporters of the Hanoverian succession, followers of the Dukes of Queensberry and Argyll. Nonetheless, anger was mounting as it became clear that this was a
n elite stitch-up. In both Dumfries and Stirling the treaty was burned in public, and rioting broke out in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The writer Daniel Defoe reported a ‘Terrible Multitude’ on Edinburgh’s High Street led by a drummer, shouting and swearing and crying ‘No Union, No Union, English Dogs and the like’.14
Defoe, there as an agent for the London government, added that the Scots were a ‘hardened, refractory and terrible people’ and the Scottish ‘rabble’ the worst he had experienced. As the vote was to be taken, troops surrounded the parliament building and the royal palace of Holyrood while two more regiments were stationed in Leith and Musselburgh.15 It was sufficient to allow the vote to ratify the treaty to be held.
What drove the crowd that rioted outside Parliament as it ratified the Union in 1707? The Kirk was the one institution that defended their interests and provided them any say, in addition to poor relief, and it appeared under threat. Another reason is that they knew higher taxes on salt, ale and other basics would follow; also, tighter custom controls based on the English model would crack down on smuggling, which was widespread.
Although there was a growing sense of nationhood, this could not overcome the distinction between Lowlands and Highlands, and the exclusion of Catholics and Episcopalians. The Union, in the end, maintained the independence of the Kirk and both the educational and legal systems. It did so, as the historian Neil Davidson points out, ‘to preserve the function of the Scottish state’.16
By the time, in 1707, that the Scottish Parliament approved the Act of Union, the key political figure, the Duke of Argyll, was back fighting the French, but he had received an English peerage and been made a lieutenant general for helping to ensure the outcome. Twenty thousand pounds had been sent north from London, some used for bribes, the rest as the usual reward for loyalty.17
Scotland had became an integral part of what was effectively a new state. Few people in 1707 or for years after would describe themselves as British, but that had changed by the end of the century. More important, Scotland was not Ireland and was free to prosper in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, dislike of the Union opened up possibilities for the Jacobites, the one force that seemed to oppose it. Popular discontent in Scotland, and to a lesser extent south of the border, could often find expression in Jacobite slogans, symbols and songs, but it generally foundered on the Catholicism of the Stewarts.
The chances of the Stewarts regaining the throne depended on France providing military support, without which their supporters in England, and many in Scotland, would not move. In 1708, a French invasion fleet, with the ‘Old Pretender’, the supposed James VII and III, on board, reached the Firth of Forth. Several local lairds took up arms in support, but the French commander refused to land and fled when the Royal Navy arrived.
The accession of George I to the British throne in 1714 was not popular, and in response the Jacobites planned a rising: a French invasion force to land in south-west England. This was to be the main thrust, followed by a rebellion in Scotland. With the collapse of the English rising before it ever started, however, all efforts were concentrated on Scotland.
Good news came when the Earl of Mar, an architect of the Union, was sacked by George as Secretary for Scotland and he now switched allegiance to James. In September 1715, he gathered a force of 600 men at Braemar and proceeded to take control of Scotland north of the Tay. By October, Mar was sitting in Perth but failed to move, giving the Duke of Argyll time to raise a smaller force. Both armies were made up of tenants pressed into service by their lords, and the majority of the Jacobite force came from the north-east.
When, in November, Mar finally advanced from Perth he was met by Argyll at Sheriffmuir. The battle was famously indecisive but in the end, despite having overwhelming superiority in numbers, the Jacobite commander withdrew. James’s arrival did not boost the rebels’ fortunes, and when Argyll advanced, Mar evacuated Perth. James returned to France and Mar ordered his army to stand down.
On the same day as Sheriffmuir, a Jacobite force made up of rebels from Northumberland and the Borders, reinforced by troops sent by Mar, which had advanced into Lancashire, surrendered at Preston. Thus ended the Jacobites’ best chance of seizing back the throne.
In the wake of 1715 it was clear more was needed than relying on the power of Clan Campbell to hold down the Highlands. The Duke of Argyll was introducing commercial methods onto his estates and his new tenants were not required to give military service, replacing feudal obligation with modern contracts and capitalist relations. The London government built a network of military roads and garrison forts, but the most effective work was done by the Kirk via the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which converted Highlanders to the Church of Scotland and worked effectively to eradicate Gaelic in its schools and churches.
Meanwhile, economic change was sewing rthe seeds of popular unrest. In the south-west the economy was improving, with Galloway sending black cattle to meet London’s demand for meat and by 1720, landowners were enclosing arable land with stone dykes, behind which cattle grazed.18 The economy of Galloway was centred on cattle-rearing and was in that way similar to the Western Highlands. The peasantry of the Lowlands had gone through much, but this was the first time they suffered being cleared off the land.19
The beneficiaries of enclosure included Jacobite landlords such as Sir David Dunbar of Baldoon and Sir Robert Maxwell of Orchardton. Dunbar used the money he earned from the cattle trade to buy more land.20 In 1715, Dunbar’s great-grandson Sir Basil Hamilton joined the Jacobite forces raised in the Borders and Northumberland but was taken prisoner at the Battle of Preston. His family secured his release, and to stop any loss of his estates his mother took ownership of them, with Hamilton running them on her behalf. ‘In 1723, Hamilton built a cattle park near Kirkcudbright on land originally owned by the McLellans.’21 The Earl of Galloway, Sir William Maxwell, Sir Godfrey McCulloch, Sir James Dalrymple and the Laird of Logan were landowners who followed Dunbar’s example and built cattle parks. These landlords were Episcopalians or Jacobites, or both.
Fears of a Stewart return were revived, in the early summer of 1719, by a small-scale invasion of Kintail in the north-west Highlands by a few hundred Spanish troops, which succeeded in rallying some local Jacobite clansmen, although it was swiftly defeated by Hanoverian troops.22 Hatred of enclosure and of supporters of the Stewarts helped create a rural uprising in the south-west. For four months in 1724 a popular movement swept Galloway, with crowds ‘levelling’ the dykes used to enclose the cattle parks. The first dyke-breaking occurred on 17 March at Netherlaw near Kirkcudbright, and in early April a call to a meeting against cattle parks was fixed to church doors in Borgue, Twynholm and Tongland parishes.
The Caledonian Mercury reported that this meeting was addressed by a ‘mountain preacher’ and ‘big with that ancient levelling Tenet’, several hundred armed persons subsequently demolished dykes in the neighbourhood.23 The landlords demanded troops be sent, and in May, four troops of Stair’s Dragoons arrived in Kirkcudbright. Just prior to their arrival, a call for people to gather at Sir Basil Hamilton’s new cattle park at Bomby Muir was put up on eight church doors. In answer, nearly two miles of dykes were levelled by 1,000 people.
Despite the fact that the ordinary people of Galloway were staunchly Presbyterian and the south-west had been a stronghold of the Covenanters, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted through a denunciation of the dyke-breaking. Many of the Calvinist groups that had operated in Covenanting times were still outside the Kirk, however, and they helped provide an ideological and organisational framework for the rebellion.24
All through the summer the levelling continued, and the concern was such in both Edinburgh and London that a government inquiry was promised. The Levellers sent a letter to the officer commanding the Dragoons in Kirkcudbright, explaining,
We unanimously agreed to throw down Mr. Murdoch’s dykes which enclosed the Barony of Airds out of which two or three years ago great mu
ltitudes of good and sufficient tenants were driven away and also the same Mr. Murdoch’s dykes which were a building about the lands of Kilwhannadie and Macartney, like wise great tracts of land which tenants were immediately to be turned out.25
In October, troops arrested some 200 Levellers but allowed almost all to escape en route back to Kirkcudbright. The dyke-breaking continued into the next year and the Levellers’ actions halted the pace and extent of enclosure in the south-west.26 Indeed, the Galloway Levellers had so ‘frightened the authorities’ that the process of agricultural improvement and clearances in the Lowlands proceeded more cautiously and slowly.27
Levelling was not confined to Galloway. As early as 1718, enclosure walls on the estate of Sir James Carmichael of Bonnington near Lanark were torn down, and this continued after the Galloway events. In Cromarty in 1732, a 500-strong crowd pulled down a dyke and put up trees to block access to the local peat bog.
Another form of protest also became a feature of Scottish life in this period. Riots are almost always an expression of popular anger when no other channel exists and in Inverurie in 1724 townspeople rioted when they were taxed to fund a road- and bridge-building programme. In the same year farther south, the Baillie of Duns, John Grey, had his house attacked and his life threatened after he tried to stop the town’s annual football game on ‘Fasting Even’. And in Irvine, Ayrshire, there was a series of riots in the 1740s and ’50s over the enclosure of the town’s moor.28
A People's History of Scotland Page 7