High food prices also led to riots. In 1720, food riots broke out in the coastal burghs of Angus, Perthshire, Fife and West Lothian, with crowds ranging from 50 to 2,000 breaking open barns and warehouses belonging to farmers and merchants believed to be hoarding oatmeal and grain. Men and women wielding axes and hammers boarded ships taking grain for export, tearing down sails, removing rudders and driving holes through their hulls. In Methil, Fife, colliers and sailors were to the fore in the crowd.29
The town of Dysart in east Fife was in the hands of the crowd for three days. Led by a bayonet-wielding woman, they drove off one party of soldiers before the army retook control. A ballad praising the ‘Valiant Wives of Dysart’ describes this woman: ‘… shipped through the Gate / And pass’d throw the Kirk yard. / Calling where is that stinking Beast, / The Ugly Swine the Laird’.30
Riots broke out over aristocrats’ control of town councils or their imposition of ministers on congregations.31 Women played a prominent role in the riots and popular disturbances. A nineteenth-century local historian of Renfrewshire noted that in the customs and excise riots in Greenock and Port Glasgow of the previous century, ‘women … of a class above the lowest – were active participants in the riots that generally accompanied seizures of contraband articles’.32
Christopher Whatley points out that in Dumfries and Galloway, ‘… between 1711 and 1718 there were at least four major incidents involving virtually all-female crowds of one hundred and up to two hundred people … It was attacks by armed females on the queen’s warehouses and their fellow officers that terrified the customs service in Dumfries in the first post-Union years.’33 In 1725, a tax on malt led to riots in Stirling, Dundee, Ayr, Elgin, Paisley and, most seriously, Glasgow. There, rioters burned down the house of the local MP, fought the local garrison, losing eight lives, and driving them out of the city, before the arrival of General Wade with 400 dragoons and accompanying infantry to restore order. Christopher Whatley, who has charted much of these disturbances, notes the high involvement of women among Covenanters of the south-west, and in the Galloway Levellers’ Revolt of 1724 against evictions and enclosure.34
The Porteous Riot became the centrepiece of Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian. In March 1737, a convicted smuggler, Andrew Wilson, was hanged in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket. He was a popular man, and the evasion of duty on spirits, something imposed after the Act of Union, was equally popular. After the gruesome deed had been carried out, a section of the crowd pelted the City Guard with stones and rubbish. In response, its commander, Captain James Porteous, gave the order to open fire. Nine people were killed.
The resulting anger was so great that the city magistrates had Porteous charged with murder; he was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged on 7 September. At the last minute a royal pardon arrived from London, prompted, it was said, by the same magistrates who had been in the habit of playing golf with Porteous. A crowd broke into the Tolbooth, where Porteous was still in custody, dragged him out and hanged him.
In 1740, an Edinburgh magistrate who talked his way out of a food riot ‘had to be protected from the women and most dangerous party of ye Mob … who called out to knock him down’.35
Meanwhile, the old order in the shape of the Stewarts was about to make its last appearance. In 1744, with France and Britain at war, the French gathered an invasion fleet at Dunkirk, where it was joined by the Old Pretender’s son, Charles – ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, or Prince Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stewart, to give him his full name. A storm devastated the fleet and the expedition was called off.
Charles decided to press ahead nevertheless, and in July 1745 set off with three ships, only the one carrying him reaching the Hebrides, from where he crossed to Knoydart. The absence of a French army meant little support was forthcoming, but after promising Cameron of Lochiel that he would be guaranteed financial security in France if a rebellion failed (it was one of the few promises Charles kept), he was able to gather a small army of 1,300 at Glenfinnan.
The government ordered General Cope to march north to crush this rebellion, but he diverted to Inverness and then Aberdeen, allowing the Jacobites to march south and take Edinburgh, meeting no opposition. When Cope sailed south with his troops, the Jacobites under their capable military commander, Lord George Murray, routed them at Prestonpans.
Charles had only a few thousand troops, but if he had decided to hold Scotland he might have brought George II and his government to the negotiating table; instead, he wanted to take England, and swung his council by just one vote to march south with promises of French help and support from English Jacobites.
The Jacobite army is usually portrayed as a Highland force, but West Highland clans supplied only around 44 percent, with a similar percentage from the north-east, Angus and Perthshire.36 As they marched into England few joined, with the greatest support coming from Manchester, where some 400 men, many Catholics, enlisted. Charles had made no attempt to contact Jacobite sympathisers, but there was no indication from them that they were ready to take up arms.
The invasion reached Derby, attracting little support. Three armies were now in the field against them. One, led by General Wade, was still in Yorkshire, too far away to affect things; a second, led by the king’s son the Duke of Cumberland, was trailing behind him; and another was gathering at Finchley, north of London, to defend the capital, where there was panic in ruling circles.
Charles wanted to go on, but his council refused and the army turned back, despite defeating a government army at Falkirk, a victory Charles did not exploit. The retreat continued to Inverness, with Cumberland following. Murray was now sidelined, and Charles and his courtiers decided military strategy. When Cumberland’s army forded the River Spey, 2,000 Jacobite troops were on high ground overlooking them but were ordered to withdraw.
On 16 April 1746, the Jacobite army, outnumbered, tired, hungry and with an easterly wind blowing rain into their faces, made their last stand at Culloden. During the night, they had been made to march on Cumberland’s camp in an abortive attempt to carry out a surprise attack. Retreating towards Inverness, many fell asleep when they halted.
Charles had chosen the battlefield, despite Lord George Murray pointing out that a flat moor benefitted Cumberland’s artillery and cavalry. As the Jacobite army waited for an order to attack, Cumberland’s artillery blew great gaps in their ranks. Eventually the men charged but few reached the government’s lines. Those that did found that their opponents had been trained to withstand the Highland broadsword. As the Jacobite forces broke and fled, the commander of the Hanoverian cavalry, Lieutenant General Henry Hawley, ordered his men to charge. He would report that they ‘cleared all the country for three miles before them and … made great slaughter every way’.37
The few French regular troops, mostly Irish exiles, fighting with the Jacobites were allowed to surrender and treated according to the rules of war. When Cumberland arrived at Inverness, he discovered that Major General Bland had ‘taken about a hundred of the Irish officers and men prisoner but not one Scotchman’.38 Hawley’s aide James Wolfe (the future conqueror of Quebec), wrote to his uncle: ‘… as few prisoners were taken of the Highlanders as possible’.39
This was not a case of troops escaping control, this was a vicious reprisal sanctioned at the very top. Innocent civilians who had tried to observe the battle, or who were found on the road or in the fields, were cut down or shot. After the battle, Cumberland’s troops went on to ravage the Highlands, burning crops and crofts, driving off cattle, looting and murdering.
In the aftermath of Culloden, the Abolition of Heritable Jurisdictions Act ended the right of Scottish nobles to dictate justice on their own estates through baronial courts. The only rights accorded to them were those of landownership. Lords who were loyal to George II were compensated for the loss of such powers, with the Duke of Argyll receiving £21,000. This legislation effectively destroyed feudalism in Scotland.40
The estates of Jacobite lords such as Cameron of Lochiel, Fraser of Lovat and MacDonnell of Keppoch were confiscated. These remained annexed to the Crown until 1784, when by Act of Parliament the king could grant them to the heirs of the original owners. This is largely what happened, because by then they had raised regiments to fight for the House of Hanover in its wars with France.
Highlanders were banned from wearing the kilt (a recent introduction to the Highlands by an English industrialist), playing the bagpipes and carrying arms. The region was effectively demilitarised.
The 1745 rebellion was not just the last throw of the Stewarts but also of the Scottish nobles who had clung to their feudal rights. Many of their counterparts, such as the Duke of Argyll, had already begun producing crops and cattle for the market, improved their estates and introduced tenants who took out commercial leases. Among the Jacobites, Lord George Murray was one such. But most of the clan chiefs, Lowland gentry and nobles who rallied to Charles, were facing bankruptcy, and were saved only because privilege prevented their prosecution. As Lord Kilmarnock explained before his execution: ‘For the two kings and their rights, I cared not a farthing which prevailed; but I was starving, and, by god, if Mahommeds had set up his standard in the Highlands I had been a good Mussulman for bread, and stuck close to the party, for I must eat.’41
Many have seen Culloden portrayed as a clash between Scotland and England; it was not. The majority of Scots opposed any return of the Stewarts. In Perth the population celebrated King George II’s birthday in November 1745, despite the town having a Jacobite governor, and laid siege to him and his supporters in the council house. The Jacobites were saved only by the arrival of some Highland troops. In Glasgow they met with open hostility, and as they retreated north, Stirling resisted the Jacobites and agreed to open the gates only after they were promised there would be no reprisals.42 It is also important to mention that a majority of the clans did not rally to Charles Edward Stewart. Some, as we have seen, were pro-Hanoverian. Most did not want to join a risky adventure.
Despite the truth, the myth would grow of Charles Edward Stewart as a hero to grace the shortbread tins. His evasion of the Hanoverian troops during the summer of 1746, the help he received from Flora MacDonald and his eventual escape back to France facilitated that. In reality, he was a desperate gambler who failed. He was little interested in Scotland except as a stepping stone to the throne in London. The army he took south was a feudal one marching into an emerging capitalist society, and was regarded as alien. At Culloden it came up against regular troops bloodied in wars with France. He chose the field with disastrous results. He would die in Rome, a hopeless alcoholic, secretly playing on the bagpipes.
Peter Watkins’s documentary Culloden, shown by the BBC in 1964, left no doubts that Cumberland earned the title ‘The Butcher’. But it also showed Lowland Scots ready to butcher prisoners and Jacobite soldiers pressed into military service by the threat of having their home burned and their cattle driven off. Culloden cleared the way for the launch of capitalist Scotland. It was a bloody birth, but that’s the norm for capitalism.
FIVE
Enlightenment and Capitalism
In 1814, Walter Scott wrote in his first novel, Waverley, ‘There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland.’1 Most Scots would have been aware of changes taking place around them. In 1700, just 5.3 percent of Scots lived in towns of more than 10,000 inhabitants, but by 1800 the figure was 17.3 percent, one of the fastest rates of urbanisation in Europe. Scotland transformed itself from a society more akin to Ireland or Poland to one on a level with England and Holland, an economic powerhouse with an economy centred on profit.
Industrialisation also took place at breakneck speed, comparable to what happened in late twentieth-century China. Between the early 1770s and the late 1790s, exports from Scottish ports increased from £0.5 to £1.35 million. By 1814, they were worth more than £5 million. The rise of cotton was the most spectacular case of growth; at the beginning of the 1770s, 0.15 million pounds of raw cotton arrived on the Clyde; by 1801 the amount stood at 7.5 million tons. The agricultural revolution the country experienced enabled the population to grow by 50 percent between 1770 and 1820.
Between 1740 and 1790 there was a spectacular growth in the cattle trade with England, driven, in part, by the demand from Britain’s armies and navy, with prices increasing by 300 percent in those years. Wool exports also increased and prices rose too. To meet demand, sheep farming spread across the Southern Uplands and from there north into the Highlands. Farming rather than rents became the best source of revenue, and landowners competed as to who was the best ‘improver’, introducing the latest techniques.2 One French observer noted in 1800: ‘If Scotland were not prospering, Glasgow would not be growing as fast as it is, the size of Edinburgh would not have doubled in thirty years, and they would not now be building a New Town whose construction is employing close on ten thousand immigrant workers.’3 Walter Scott, a conservative, was disturbed by all this:
The state of society now leads so much to great accumulations of humanity that we cannot wonder if it ferment and reek like a compost dunghill. Nature intended that population should be diffused over the soil in proportion to its extent. We have accumulated in huge cities and smothering manufacturies the numbers which should be spread over the face of a country and what wonder that they should be corrupted? We have turned healthful and pleasant brooks into morasses and pestiferous lakes.4
This rapid transformation of Scottish society was driven by the creation of an all-British economy, a growing empire and the demands of constant war. Capitalist farming reduced the numbers living off the land, first in the Lowlands and later in the Highlands. Some emigrated, and many found employment in the growing industries of the central belt. In the subsequent centuries we have seen how such rapid industrialisation and creation of a working class creates an explosive mix.
Scotland After the Union
In the immediate aftermath of the Union of 1707 few Scots identified themselves as British. Yet within a century that was to change. The Scottish upper classes had to rely on the British state to defeat the Jacobite threat (always backed up with the threat of foreign invasion). The destruction of feudalism in the wake of Culloden in 1746 opened the way to the development of full-scale capitalism dependent on the British market. In addition, the creation of the Empire was a common enterprise in which eager Scots played no small part. By 1772 one in nine of the East India Company’s civil servants was a Scot, as well as one in eleven of its common soldiers and one in three officers. By 1803 the most important six agencies that controlled Calcutta’s trade were controlled by Scots, and in Bombay, they ran three out of five.5
Because the Union was not the simple incorporation of Scotland into the English state, but the eventual construction of a new British state, Scots could share their sense of nationhood within that common British identity. The historian Linda Colley points out that the Empire was always the British Empire, never the English one.6 This, together with eight decades of war against the French, created a British nationalism that Scots shared, in large part because Scots, Highlanders and Lowlanders made up a significant percentage of the British army.
Industrialisation meant that Scotland (Central Scotland at least) was not on the periphery of the British economy, and Scots were at the fore of the British ruling class.7 The emerging Scottish capitalist class were not even junior partners, they were a major component of the British ruling class, and their nationality was no obstacle to their becoming prime minister, running the colonies or simply amassing a fortune.
Yet the romanticism of the great novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott created a Scottish national identity that for the ruling and middle classes could sit easily with their role within this imperium. As a unionist and a Tory he was a fervent defender of Scotland’s rights, including its right to issue its own bank notes, but
was happy to champion the British state. In four great novels, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, Waverley and Redgauntlet, Scott brought to life recent Scottish history and created the modern novel. These deserve to be read by anyone interested in history.
It was Scott who orchestrated the first royal visit to Scotland in over a century and a half. In 1822, King George IV, unpopular in London, visited Edinburgh for a fortnight of pageants, balls and celebrations, orchestrated by Scott, and all with a Celtic and Highland flavour. He summoned the remaining Highland chiefs to Edinburgh with their retainers, and told them to choose a clan tartan (there were no specific tartans as yet apart from for the Highland regiments of the British Army). This was just seven decades after Highland dress had been banned and held up as the garb of savages. Now it was being worn in the salons of Edinburgh and would become adopted by Lowland Scots who had once despised it.
Nonetheless, elite control of Scotland was unchallenged in the eighteenth century. The Campbells (the Dukes of Argyll) dominated Scottish political affairs for the first half of the century. The second Duke of Argyll became Commander in Chief of the British Army in 1742. His brother who succeeded him as the third Duke served as Lord Justice General of Scotland from 1710 to 1761. En route to the family seat at Inverarary Castle, which he had rebuilt, the earl, if passing through Edinburgh or Glasgow, expected to be ‘waited upon’ by the Lord Provost.8 The seventh Viscount Stormont, who would be made Earl of Mansfield, was Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales from 1756 until 1788. He rebuilt the family seat of Scone Palace near Perth, fitting it out with French furniture. In addition, his London home was Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath.9
But the greatest political figure of the age, eclipsing even the Dukes of Argyll, was Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, who became Scotland’s Solicitor General in 1766 at the age of twenty-four, and was elected an MP for Midlothian in 1774. He held the position of naval treasurer from 1782 to 1800 and was a cabinet minister from 1796 until his impeachment in 1806. Dundas effectively ran Scotland during the government of William Pitt the Younger.10
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