At the trial, Gerrald told the court that the English had deprived the Scottish people of their rights from the time of the Union of 1707, ‘But if that Union has operated to rob us of our rights, it is our objective to regain them!’ Margarot likewise wrote from his cell that the Scots must form ‘armed associations’ and ‘get arms and learn the use of them’.22
Unrest expressed itself in other ways. In 1795, grain exports at a time of hunger and following a poor harvest led a crowd of several hundred to march on the harbour of Annan in Dumfriesshire in an attempt to stop ships sailing.23 In 1797, the need for extra conscripts to fight the French led Pitt’s government to introduce a Militia Bill that forced young men to be conscripted via a ballot, except those who could afford to buy their way out or gain an exemption. This meant the majority facing conscription came from the labouring classes. It was greeted by a wave of rioting. The house of the Duke of Montrose in Dumbarton, the Duke of Atholl’s Blair Castle and William Forbes’s house in Falkirk came under attack. In Dalry, protesters planted a Tree of Liberty, and in Lanarkshire, they demanded an end to taxation on horses.24
At Carstairs a mob burned the schoolhouse and carted off the parish registers. In the mining villages of Prestonpans and Tranent, miners’ wives and children, led by Joan Crookston, sacked the village schools and forced the schoolmasters, who were tasked with drawing up the ballots, into hiding. The ‘mob’ passed a resolution to be sent to the ballot officers, saying: ‘Although we may be overpowered … and dragged from our parents, friends and employment, to be made soldiers of, you can infer from this what trust can be reposed in us, if ever we are called upon to disperse our fellow-countrymen or to oppose a foreign foe.’25
In response, the authorities sent in the Cinque Ports Cavalry from southern England on 28 August, and after the Riot Act was read they charged. The rioters had stones, the cavalry pistols and sabers. After dispersing the crowd, the horsemen attacked innocent travelers and farmers. The official death toll was eleven.26
In the Perthshire Highlands, it was reported that 16,000 people mobilised at a call from Angus Cameron, a wright from Weem, forcing the Duke of Atholl to pledge that the ballot would not be held there. The crowd then marched on Taymouth Castle in search of arms, but when government troops arrived they melted away. Cameron was caught and tried but, on being bailed, fled.
In the spring of 1797 a new secret body, the United Scotsmen, was growing in support. It was organised into cells modelled on the United Irishmen, who were planning an insurrection to take place the next year.
In Perth the radicals set up such an organisation. Reports circulated of one group of twenty men drilling with arms in Auchterarder and other towns. Nevertheless, government agents succeeded in infiltrating the group, and Walter Miller and Robert Sands were amongst many radicals arrested in what was called the ‘Pike Plot’. They were charged with trying to obtain 4,000 pikes. Sands spent seven months in Edinburgh awaiting trial.27
An uprising was planned, with the first target being the houses of the very rich, but it was betrayed by government informers. In Dundee, George Mealmaker, a weaver, was tried on the charge of delivering illegal oaths and distributing seditious literature, and transported for fourteen years by a jury made up of men who believed their homes were targeted for burning. Other arrests took place and the United Scotsmen were broken by repression. Robert Watt’s end was a gruesome business, for he was hanged at the Tolbooth on Edinburgh’s High Street, after which his body was cut down and laid on a table. The head was cut off, with the executioner holding it up and crying, ‘This is the head of a traitor.’28
Radicals were silenced and driven underground for a decade and a half as Britain pursued its war with Napoleon. The reign of Dundas did, however, come to an end. He had been pocketing money from naval funds for years, but by 1805 (the year of the Battle of Trafalgar) money was scarce and sailors had to do without pay. Dundas was impeached, and while he escaped a guilty verdict, he had to resign in shame and died shortly afterwards.29
The Radical Legacy
Today the Thomas Muir memorial that stands outside his home in Huntershill carries his statement “I have devoted myself to the cause of the people. It is a good cause. It shall ultimately prevail. It shall finally triumph.’30
In this manner Scottish radicals could combine appeals to Anglo-Saxon (English) liberty with the reaffirmation of a native Scottish radical tradition. At the first convention in Edinburgh, a young Scottish medical student, Alexander Aitchison, told delegates: ‘But in faith we had nothing more to ask, than to be restored to our original rights – That he was certain that by the English Constitution so long ago as the days of King Arthur every free man had a vote in choosing his representative and that in those days Parliaments were annual.’31
At his trial Thomas Muir fought on the grounds of free speech; meanwhile, his fellow defendant William Skirving drew on the gains of the 1688–89 revolution and made comparison with the repression of radicals and the religious persecution in the sixteenth century, adding that the High Court of Judiciary might be compared to the Star Chamber and saying his trial represented ‘a revival of the conventicler persecutions with a vengeance.’32
After his escape to revolutionary France, Thomas Muir took up this theme, writing a brief history of Scotland for its government that defended the Calvinist republicans of the sixteenth century and strongly denied the accusation that these were simply religious fanatics.33
Identification with past struggles for freedom was something evident in radical politics: in 1810, for example, the colliers of Falkirk laid the Wallacestone, a monumental stone, on the site where Wallace’s army camped before the Battle of Falkirk. The radicals focused more on Falkirk, because of the betrayal of the people by the nobility which resulted in defeat, whereas the upper classes concentrated on the victory at Stirling Bridge.34 In 1844, the Scottish Political Martyrs Monument was erected in Edinburgh’s Old Calton Cemetery, by the Friends of Parliamentary Reform in England and Scotland. The funds had been raised by public collection. It commemorates Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald – the Scottish Martyrs.
In the twentieth century, Adam MacHaughton would write this song, ‘Thomas Muir of Huntershill’:
My name is Thomas Muir, as a lawyer I was trained,
Remember Thomas Muir of Huntershill.
But you’ve branded me an outlaw, for sedition I’m arraigned,
Remember Thomas Muir of Huntershill … Gerrard, Palmer,
Skirving, Thomas Muir and Margarot,
These are names that every Scottish man and woman ought to know …35
The Radical Wars
As Scotland entered the nineteenth century, class warfare was never far beneath the surface, whatever repressive measures were employed. Despite the suppression of radical groups, the first decade of the nineteenth century saw a Scotland-wide strike by paper workers, a series of strikes by calico printers in defence of working conditions and, in 1808, the founding of the General Association of Operative Weavers in Scotland. They demanded minimum payments for their work, and to win for their members ‘… fair hours and proper application, to feed, clothe and accommodate himself and his family’.36
When their demands were rejected, they struck, with some 30,000 looms lying idle. They also went to court, using legislation that allowed Justices of the Peace to regulate wages, and won. The employers ignored the verdict and the courts did not enforce their adjudication. The sheriffs of Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire instead had the strike organisers arrested, and as the strike crumbled the law regulating wages was scrapped.
Between 1780 and 1820 the number of weavers increased from 25,000 to 78,000, but that increase served to cut wages. In addition, the years immediately after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 saw an economic depression and rising food prices. The English reformer William Cobbett, touring Scotland and blaming bad government for people’s ills, advocated a complete change of gove
rnment. In October 1816, an estimated 40,000 people came to hear him talk at Thrushgrove outside Glasgow. This was the biggest political gathering in the country’s history and heralded a new age of mass political involvement.
On 18 August 1812, Edinburgh’s new police force, together with soldiers from the castle, were sent to deal with ‘a riotous crowd in the Grassmarket who had seized meal carts and attacked the homes of meal-sellers after an extraordinary rise in the price of oatmeal’.37 A further riot broke out in December 1818 after the bungled execution of one Robert Johnson outside the main post office in the High Street. The rope was too long and the crowd rescued Johnson before magistrates and police took him back, revived him and hanged him to death. In the rioting that followed, ‘nearly 200 panes of glass were smashed in the vicinity’.38
In September 1819, the Edinburgh Magazine reported on events from the 11th of that month, when a crowd of 12,000–18,000 had gathered for a reform rally at which sheriffs had banned flags and banners, sending in constables to seize them: ‘The crowd resisted and commenced throwing stones and other missiles, by which the council chamber windows were broken.’
The magistrates called in troops from Glasgow, and by three a.m. they had dispersed the crowd, but rioting broke out again the next day, Sunday, when the magistrates went to church: ‘They were insulted by the populace and rioting again commenced, and many enormities committed. The riot act was read thrice before nine o’clock; and the military in clearing the streets were at one time seriously opposed by numbers who had armed themselves with bars of iron from the railings in front of a church.’
The next day, crowds gathered but soldiers cleared the streets after the Riot Act was again read. But that night trouble broke out in Glasgow: ‘… a mob collected to the amount of 3000, apparently for the sole purpose of mischief and plunder. They accordingly proceeded to break the lamps in different streets, to plunder provision shops, and to attack some private homes.’ At 9 p.m. the Riot Act was read and soldiers sent in to retake the streets.39 In the wake of the cutting down of scores of demonstrators demanding parliamentary reform at Peterloo in Manchester, a protest rally in September 1819 drew 15,000 to 18,000 to Meikleriggs Moor outside Paisley. As the rally ended, a crowd marched down Paisley High Street carrying flags in defiance of orders from the authorities banning such protest. Special constables, the magistrates and the town provost blocked their route, and the provost ordered the flags to be seized. In the fighting that followed, the forces of law and order fled, leaving the rioters in control of the town. For five days the people had control, with running battles taking place whenever the authorities tried to interfere. Eventually troops were brought in to restore order.40 Radicals also demonstrated in Johnstone, with banners proclaiming, ‘Sir William Wallace like our ancestors we’ll defend our liberty and our laws’ and ‘We are the descendants of Wallace and Bruce’.41
The fire of rebellion continued to smoulder, and across the West of Scotland there was talk of an uprising, but when it came it was abortive. On 1 April 1820, posters appeared in Ayr, Dumbarton, Glasgow and Renfrew proclaiming the creation of a Scottish provisional government. The ‘Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland’ called on soldiers to transfer their loyalties from despotism to freedom, and on workers to strike until their rights as free men had been recovered. The address also proclaimed an imminent armed uprising in Scotland and England. Sixty thousand workers – mainly weavers and cotton spinners, but also coal miners, machine-makers and foundry workers – struck in and around Glasgow in the first general strike in history. ‘Almost the whole population of the working classes have obeyed the orders contained in the treasonable proclamation by striking work’, wrote the Lord Provost of Glasgow to the Home Office.42 One historian notes: ‘For several days, an estimated 50,000 in the industrial west stopped work and some groups openly carried weapons and took part in military drill.’43
The posters had also said there would be an uprising in Glasgow with two bands of radicals assembling, one on Cathkin Braes to the south of the city and one to the north in the Campsie Hills. The authorities moved quickly to mobilise every possible soldier and yeoman, ensuring that the population of the city felt quelled. But a dozen miles south, a band of a dozen or so weavers set off for Cathkin Braes from Strathaven, led by a long-time activist, James Wilson, and carrying a banner with the words ‘Scotland free or a desert’ (Tacitus’s words being used for an altogether different purpose). At East Kilbride they were told there was no uprising, but pressed on to Cathkin Braes with hopes that would be dashed.
Meanwhile, in Glasgow a band led by Andrew Harvie assembled in Anderston, aiming at seizing the Carron Iron Works, with its stock of cannon and ammunition. They marched along the Forth and Clyde Canal and at Condorrat were joined by another group, led by John Baird. Passing through Castlecary, the band was spotted by a soldier who warned the garrison at Kilsyth, which moved to intercept the radicals, catching them at Bonnymuir outside Bonnybridge. In the ensuing engagement, four of the radicals were wounded before all forty-seven were captured. They were armed with just five muskets, two pistols and pikes.
The government in London demanded a special commission be set up to try the rebels under English law, so they could face the charge of high treason. Eighty-eight people were found guilty, most being sentenced to transportation and three, Hardie, Baird and James Wilson, to execution. There was little or no evidence against the latter, but he was a thorn in the side of the authorities, who were glad to see him removed. When the public executioner who cut off the dead man’s head held it up, shouting ‘the head of a traitor’, from the crowd came cries of murder. The body was then deposited in a common grave, but his family rescued it and returned it to Strathaven. Elsewhere, the call for a strike and national uprising found strong support that April. On 2 April a general strike took place in Paisley and a mass meeting was held at Maxwelltown to decide how to respond to any attempt by the authorities to intervene. Groups were sent to acquire arms from the homes of landowners, and in the process one striker was shot dead. The next day, Paisley was placed under military occupation, and troops went from house to house searching for arms and to arrest whichever strike leaders they could find.44 The defeat that followed was due to ‘poor planning, the failure of English radicals to respond and the loyalty of the Scottish propertied classes and the military’.45
For a long time it was believed the authors of the posters proclaiming the uprising were agents provocateurs, but in 1999 T. M. Devine argued that the evidence indicated that they were written by three weavers from Parkhead in Glasgow, rather than spies.46
The impact of such unrest was felt even in rural Scotland. In 1820, Alexander Somerville, a schoolboy in Berwickshire, and his schoolmates played a game of militia versus radicals, with the better-off being the militia. Somerville, a radical, was sentenced to be hanged. Perhaps because of that he wrote sympathetically about the radicals: ‘They were people who complained that the country was not governed as it should be, that the laws were not made by those that should have made the laws. They were grieved to be excluded from voting for members of parliament, and they felt at the same time that food was dear, wages low and taxation very high … the great body of the radicals was composed of honest working men.’47
The Radical War of 1820, as it became known, and the preceding social unrest marked the emergence of the working class as an organised social force in Scotland, and one that, in however a rudimentary form, had already employed the highest forms of class struggle: a general strike and an attempt at armed insurrection. Yet this was also the last gasp of the insurrectionary tradition, which had existed from 1789 onward. In the immediate aftermath, attention switched to securing parliamentary reform and the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, which was blocked by the Tories with their majority in the House of Lords – despite it being a very modest step extending the vote to £10 tenants in the burghs, and £10 owners (only males, of course) in the counties.
The d
ebate that preceded the first Reform Bill brought rioting to Edinburgh’s New Town. Fearing that the legislation might be blocked, a crowd of 10,000 gathered in the High Street. Supporters of reform had ‘illuminated’ their windows by lighting candles. Noting the lack of light in the windows of the New Town, the crowd moved down there, smashing the windows of the Lord Provost and touring the streets, breaking unlit windows and chanting, ‘Up with the Reform light, down with Tory darkness’.48 In Glasgow, 100,000 people marched in support of this Whig measure.
When the House of Lords kicked out the bill in 1831, things took a more serious turn. In Lanark, the Tories were attacked at the hustings and, after the Riot Act was read, soldiers charged the crowd. In Hawick, a hundred weavers gave Walter Scott a rough welcome; and in Rothesay, Lady Bute was stoned as she drove in her carriage. (Thomas Johnston points out the instigator as a Whig mill owner who was happy to employ children under five.) In May 1832, workers across Glasgow struck and 120,000 marched with banners saying ‘Liberty or Death’ and ‘Better to die in a good cause than live in slavery’.49
In Perth, 7,000 people, described in contemporary accounts as being overwhelmingly working class, marched through the town. There was no violence but it was also a show of strength that frightened the local aristocracy and bourgeoisie.50
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