Scottish MPs at Westminster were ‘managed’ to ensure they supported government measures, and in return were given a say over matters Scottish, and rewarded with patronage. Their ‘manager’ would decide on Scottish legislation in Edinburgh, in consultation with Scottish law officers, the Faculty of Advocates, the Convention of Royal Burghs, county freeholders and the Kirk.
The system worked smoothly enough, first under the House of Argyll, for the Whigs, and then under Henry Dundas, for the Tories. Scottish politicians such as the Earl of Bute – a favourite of King George III and briefly prime minister – were hated in the 1760s because they represented the right wing of British politics, and Scotland was the least democratic part of the United Kingdom. That’s why that hero of the London mob, John Wilkes, was so effective in his campaign against Scottish influence.
Meanwhile, the Scottish aristocracy transformed itself with the cash it received from its improved estates and from the Empire. Aristocratic landowners in the fertile coastal plains of East Lothian and Berwickshire did well from the ‘Age of Improvement’. In the final decades of the eighteenth century, the Earl of Haddington built Mellerstain House, the Earl of Lauderdale built Thirlestane House and the Duke of Buccleuch, the biggest Lowland landowner, Dalkeith Palace.11 Then, in 1803, the Irish Second Earl of Moira married the heiress Flora, Countess of Loudon. The new couple ran through their fortune rebuilding Loudon Castle as the ‘Scottish Windsor’. To restore his wealth, Moira became Governor General of India, in turn being made Marquess of Hastings.12
Their lives contrasted with that of those working the land. Alexander Somerville was born in 1811. His father had been a small independent farmer in the Ochils but lost his land to ‘improvement’ when the local landowner amalgamated, so that after working as a carter in nearby Alloa, then as a docker in Limekilns after his horse died, he eventually became a farm labourer on a new, improved farm in Berwickshire. Alexander described his house there, home also to his mother and father and seven siblings:
About twelve feet by fourteen, and not so high in the walls as will allow a man to get in without stooping. That place without ceiling or anything beneath the bare tiles of roof; with no floor save the common clay, without a cupboard or recess; with no grate but the iron bars which the tenants carried to it, built up and took away when they left it; with no partition of any kind save what the beds made; with no window save four small panes at one side – it was this house, still a hind’s house at Springfield, for which, to obtain leave to live in, my mother sheared the harvest and carried the stacks.13
This was a largely literate society. According to some estimates, the male literacy rate in 1750 stood as high as 75 percent, compared with only 53 percent in England. Scotland had become ‘Europe’s first modern literate society’, which meant ‘there was an audience not only for the Bible but for other books as well’.14 Despite his poor upbringing, Alexander Somerville went to school and became one of the first in a long line of working-class intellectuals.
Scotland was still a Calvinist country. This is what marked it off from England in the eighteenth century, but the Kirk always faced opposition to its strict disciplinary code. When a man from Fetteresso in Kincardineshire was threatened with excommunication in 1748, he replied: ‘What care I? The Pope of Rome excommunicates you every year, and what the waur are ye o’ that?’15 Even the poet Robert Burns would be forced to sit on the ‘Stool of Repentance’ in the Kirk, and it continued to exercise close social control. But new thinkers were emerging who did not accept its writ.
Until the eighteenth century the myth that the land was communally owned still endured. In the Lowlands, leases were often for as little as a year, but no one complained because they were always renewed. Communal grazing lands existed by custom, but there was no legal guarantee of access.
After the Union, Scottish landowners began to notice the improvements in crop yields and livestock that their English counterparts were making, and the increased rents they were pocketing. What they saw around them were cotters relying on methods of agriculture rooted in feudal times. In order to generate greater profits, drastic change was needed.16
A new system of agriculture was developed, producing wonders like Aberdeen Angus beef and hugely increasing the amount of food available. But this agricultural revolution was based on mass eviction. As the year-long leases came to an end, landlords, having secured legal recognition of ‘their’ land, including the common grazing land, started drafting new leases with vastly increased rents. Evictions followed. Unlike the nineteenth-century Highlanders, the fate of the Lowland peasantry is not remembered today. That is because the Lowlanders simply slipped away to the cities, where new industries demanded labour, or took ship to North America.
Meanwhile, the Highlands were also undergoing a great deal of change. The most obvious was that no longer did peasant farmers have to partake in military service. Baronial courts were abolished. Commercial rents were now being introduced by chiefs who were moving away to enjoy life in Edinburgh or London. For most tenants, subsistence farming remained the rule but they could enhance their income by migrating south to work in the new industries for part of the year, through service in the army, by working in the kelp industry (turning seaweed into fertiliser) and by fishing for herring.
The Committee of Forfeited Estates, which administered the lands of the rebel chiefs and nobles, was run not by English politicians but by Edinburgh lawyers. In 1784, it was considered wise to return these estates to their original owners, who repaid their debt by acting as recruitment agents for the British Army.
In many ways, the years after Culloden saw changes that benefitted the Highlands. The price of cattle, the region’s main export, rose by 300 percent between then and the 1790s. The introduction of the potato gave the peasantry a cheap and easily grown food. Demand for wood increased. On the coast, demand for kelp was fuelled by the glass and soap works of the south, while fisheries expanded. The price of wool rose as well, and the new Blackface and Cheviot sheep, with their high yields, started to appear. But sheep runs demanded the removal of peasant farms.
Despite this, emigration was on the rise. Between 1768 and 1775, 20,000 people left Scotland for North America, two-thirds of them Highlanders.17
Enlightenment
The second half of the eighteenth century saw Scotland shift from being on the intellectual periphery of European and North American intellectual life to become the leading centre of a new rational and scientific school of thought, with major contributions in the fields of philosophy, political economy, engineering, architecture, medicine, geology, archaeology, law, agriculture, chemistry and sociology. Among the towering thinkers and scientists of the period were Francis Hutcheson, Alexander Campbell, David Hume, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, Joseph Black and James Hutton. The philosopher David Hume was in correspondence with the great French thinkers Voltaire and Rousseau, and was visited by Benjamin Franklin, the outstanding American thinker and scientist of his day, and subsequently one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
In the wake of Culloden, a new Scottish ruling class also emerged. Landowners, however great their title, had to improve their lands to generate income, and some of the greatest, such as the Duke of Argyll, led the way. Beside them were the tobacco and sugar merchants of Glasgow and those involved in an emerging textile industry.
Their ideological outriders were Kirk ministers, university lecturers and lawyers. These new professionals preached a gospel of rapid capitalist development, and the fact that they were making history shines through in the writings of Smith, Hume, Ferguson and, slightly later, Walter Scott. At the centre of the emerging Enlightenment was Scotland’s capital. The future US president Thomas Jefferson stated there was ‘… no place in the World can pretend to a competition with Edinburgh’.18
What the Scottish Enlightenment did was theorise about how human beings could act to change the world. That was because the world in which they lived ha
d gone in the space of a few decades from a backward, feudal society to one at the centre of the new emerging global system, capitalism. Hume joined the nobility and the bourgeoisie in fleeing Edinburgh’s medieval Old Town for the Georgian splendour of the New Town. Smith was teaching in Glasgow, where the skyline was becoming dominated by the chimneys of the new cotton plants and where his dinner companions boasted of their wealth accrued from the tobacco trade. English liberals were drawn to Edinburgh University, and the Edinburgh Review pioneered the views of what would become nineteenth-century liberalism.
Today the most celebrated of these men (women could not go to university and were effectively barred from higher education) was Adam Smith, considered to be the founder of modern economics, whose most famous book, On the Wealth of Nations, was first published in 1776. It provides an analysis of the beginning of the industrial revolution, and attempts to explain where wealth comes from and how markets work. Smith is today portrayed too often as a precursor of Margaret Thatcher, the first neo-liberal, but this is a caricature. He did believe that left to themselves markets would produce outcomes beneficial to all, but he went beyond that.
His key work begins not with the centrality of the market, but with labour, which Smith saw as the source of wealth. New techniques leading to a division of labour were capable of creating levels of previously unseen wealth: ‘The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life.’19 One famous example – illustrated alongside Adam Smith on the back of the new £20 note – involves the manufacture of pins: ‘One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head … The important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about 18 distinct operations which, in some factories, are all performed by distinct hands.’20
The free marketers who claim Smith today pass over this ‘labour theory of value’; yet it is central to his analysis. Adam Smith was very un-Thatcherite when, regarding working-class protests and strikes, he observed: ‘Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellers are always the master.’ Earlier, another great Enlightenment thinker, Adam Ferguson, warned in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1765): ‘we make a nation of helots, and have no free citizens … In every commercial state, nothwithstanding any pretensions to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.’21
The values of the Scottish Enlightenment did not extend to all parts of the globe or even to all its people. David Hume was a great historian and a very important philosopher who established materialism, but he never gained a top post at Edinburgh University because of his vocal atheism. He also attempted to provide a rationale for the slave trade based on ‘scientific’ racism.
Glasgow’s fortune in the eighteenth century owed much to its tobacco trade with the slave states of North America, and that legacy is kept alive in street names: Glassford Street and Buchanan Street are named after tobacco merchants; Jamaica Street and Virginia Street are named after colonies.
Richard Oswald was the majority shareholder in Grant, Oswald and Co., the owners of Bance Island, a major slavery shipping point on the Sierra Leone River in West Africa. Within a short time of the company taking over, it was shipping 1,000 slaves a year across the Atlantic. The island had a golf course with caddies, recruited from nearby villages, wearing tartan loincloths woven in Scotland. Oswald traded slaves for tobacco and sugar, which he sold in Britain, making himself rich. Based in London, he was well favoured in ruling circles but fell from grace because he was seen as pro-American during the American War of Independence. No matter, he could retire to his 100,000-acre estate at Auchincruive, where he entertained the likes of Benjamin Franklin, James Boswell and Laurence Sterne.22
His wife, Mary Ramsey, was the daughter of one of the biggest Scottish slave owners in Jamaica. On her death Robert Burns wrote this:
Ode, Sacred to the Memory of Mrs Oswald of Auchencruive
Dweller in yon dungeon dark,
Hangman of creation, mark!
Who in widow-weeds appears,
Laden with unhonoured years,
Noosing with care a bursting purse,
Baited with many a deadly curse?
View the wither’d beldam’s face
Can thy keen inspection trace
Aught of Humanity’s sweet, melting grace?
Note that eye, ’tis rheum o’erflows,
Pity’s flood there never rose.
See those hands, ne’er stretched to save,
Hands that took – but never gave.
Keeper of Mammon’s iron chest,
Lo, there she goes, unpitied and unblest
She goes, but not to realms of everlasting rest!
During the American War of Independence immigrant Highlanders rallied to George III, including former Jacobites. Among them was Allan MacDonald, whose wife, Flora, is celebrated on many a shortbread tin for her role in helping Charles Edward Stewart escape arrest. They owned a plantation in North Carolina and, in 1776, mobilised 13,000 Highlanders to fight for the House of Hanover. Four years later this Highland army was defeated at the Battle of King’s Mountain by an army largely made up of Ulster Scot Presbyterians – refugees from persecution at home.
In this conflict Lowland settlers generally sided with the revolution. The Enlightenment thinkers back home were critical of George III’s treatment of the American colonists, and the success of the American revolution would make an impact in Scotland.
Scotland was also part of the movement to abolish the slave trade. In 1789, the freed slave Olaudah Equiano visited Edinburgh, Paisley, Glasgow, Perth, Dundee and Aberdeen, addressing public meetings and promoting his autobiography, detailing his capture and enslavement in present-day Nigeria. A year later, another ex-slave, Thomas Peters, addressed a public dinner in Glasgow’s Tontine Tavern.23
In 1792, the London-based Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, having launched a new national petition to parliament, sent a young clergyman to Scotland to see how the anti-slavery movement was proceeding. He reported on a huge public meeting in Edinburgh thus: ‘… so orderly it was and so silent … not a whisper but when plaudits made the place resound – No less than 3685 signed on the spot … all with the most admirable decorum – the magistrates had ordered the castle troop of the town guard to be in readiness – and a troop of horse were brought in from the country – this was their duty.’24
The reaction of the ‘City Fathers’ was a reflection of the growing nervousness of the effects of the French Revolution in Scotland. Thirteen thousand people signed the same petition in Glasgow, a city that owed much to the slave economy in North America.
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REBEL LIVES: ROBERT BURNS
There are two Robert Burns. The first is the one found on shortbread tins and whisky bottles, the romantic poet who portrayed Scottish life. This is the Burns celebrated at Burns Suppers every 25 January, clothed in tartan that Burns could hardly have ever come across in his short life, and certainly never wore. The other is the radical, indeed Jacobin, supporter of the American and French revolutions whose poems and songs were sung by those fighting for democracy and social justice.
In his recent biography of Burns, The Bard, Robert Crawford produces evidence that Burns was a member of a republican circle in Dumfries and remained a ‘staunch republican’ until his death. He adds that ‘it takes a tin ear and narrow mind’ to ignore the radical message in so many of Burns’s poems.25
Burns lived at the close of the eighteenth century, when Scotland was undergoing a sudden, rapid transformation. The agricultural revolution was driving the peasantry from the land – this was the class Burns was born into. The Industrial Revolution was changing the lives of Scots, for better and for worse. Burns was born in Alloway, just outside Ayr, the eldest of seven children, in a single
-room thatched cottage with a barn and cowshed. His father worked as a gardener, but in order to support his family became a tenant farmer. By the age of fifteen, Robert was the principal labourer on the farm, interrupting his school days to help his father.
Burns tried his hand as a tenant farmer, but with rising rents it was hard to make a living. Despite his poetry and songs being widely acclaimed, Burns also failed to find a wealthy patron. Eventually, in 1789, he moved to Dumfries and took a job as an excise man (a customs officer), which he held until his death in 1796.
The greatest event in Burns’s life was undoubtedly the French Revolution of 1789. The new ideas of the Enlightenment had challenged the hold of the Kirk and the oligarchic political system. Now the French revolutionary slogan of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ spoke to Burns as it did other Scots, and he read Tom Paine’s revolutionary text The Rights of Man. This fervour is reflected, directly and indirectly, in his poetry.
He knew poverty and injustice too, and lived a life that was shocking to the Calvinist faithful. As one of Scotland’s foremost folk singers, Alastair Hullet, explains, ‘Cam Ye Ower Frae France’ is a scathing attack on the new Hanoverian King George that possesses an astonishing level of vitriol. These authentic period pieces gave rise to the use of faux-Jacobite verse as a veil for promoting egalitarian ideas in support of a universal franchise and social equality. This was at a time when Britain was a virtual police state and many of the ‘Jacobite’ songs form part of this legacy.
A People's History of Scotland Page 9