John Prebble's Scotland

by John Prebble

  With little justification of this nature, but with a keen eye for seasonal profit, Edinburgh is the city which perpetuates a tartan mythology wherein every Scottish heart is Highland. It has done so since 1822 when the royal yacht brought George IV to Leith Harbour, the first British monarch to visit the northern kingdom for almost two centuries. Sir Walter Scott went aboard to welcome him with an ornate gift made by the “loyal ladies of Scotland”, a diamond saltire on a field of blue velvet, with the words Riogh Albhain gu brath embroidered in pearls. This, His Majesty was quickly told, meant “Hail to the King of Scotland!” He did not go to Glasgow, where his people had recently risen in revolt against his Government, but any unhappy thoughts he may have had about that were smothered by the enthusiastic reception he was given in Edinburgh. Like the Young Pretender, whom he sentimentally admired, he held court at Holyroodhouse. His royal and corsetted body was draped in scarlet tartan by Sir Walter, and Highland lairds honoured it with a gathering of those kilted followers of their name whom they had not yet evicted from their glens.

  Edinburgh is a proper setting for such theatrical manifestations. The English traveller Thomas Pennant rarely surrendered to emotion, but when he first saw the city from a distance he admitted that he was struck with wonder. “It possesses a boldness and grandeur of situation beyond any that I have seen … a look of magnificence not to be found in any other part of Great Britain.” That is still true, despite the city’s self-inflicted wounds. The first sight of its gabled rock and louring castle, hazed in summer mists or winter sleet, can stop the heart and choke the throat. Pennant was writing of the old city, but it had already broken from its medieval chrysalis and was sunning its wings to the north, beyond the drained bed of a marshy loch which the Victorians would fill with a railway line and a garden of geraniums. The classical splendour of the New Town is perhaps the finest achievement of domestic architecture in Britain, and the vision of what it would become moved one of its designers to add a poetic prophecy at the foot of his plans.

  August, around, what PUBLIC WORKS I see!

  Lo, stately streets! Lo, squares that court the breeze!

  Its conception and creation were inspired – ambitious crescents, streets and squares climbing into the sun, grey stones and wrought iron in joyous harmony, and the sky mirrored in a million panes of black glass. At first it awed the people, and few were willing to move from the hugger-mugger of tenements on the rock until the city council offered a haberdasher exemption from burghal taxes if he would become one of its first residents. And then the great flitting began. The rich, the noble and the powerful competed for elegant houses in an astonishing new world, paying £5,000 for the best of them. Mindful of God’s directing hand in this grand enterprise, the city at first proposed to honour its principal thoroughfares with the names of Scottish saints, but when George III was told that the finest prospect was to be called Saint Giles he spluttered in disapproval, “What … what? Never do! Never do …!” It was renamed Princes Street in honour of his quarrelling sons, but there is no historical justification for any lingering indignation the Scots may feel. The tutelary saint of Edinburgh was a Greek abbot who came no closer to the Forth than Languedoc, and the High Kirk of his name on the Royal Mile was once a Northumbrian parish church. Moreover, when a Reformation mob threw his image into the Nor’Loch the city magistrates appropriated the holy relique of his arm and transferred its silver case, weighing five pounds three ounces, to the funds of the corporation.

  With the building of the New Town much of Edinburgh became orderly and well-proportioned, and thus acceptable to the eye of an 18th-century English gentleman. And also to his nose, for the stench of the old city and the foul habits of its people had once been more objectionable than London at its worst. Acceptance by the English, and acceptance of English modes and manners, had been Edinburgh’s growing concern since the Union of the Crowns. From the day James VI left them, without regret – to become a greater king whom the English stubbornly call James I of England – its douce citizens had looked southward for fashionable precept and example. Seventy years after the Union of Parliaments, Edinburgh was already “The English City” derided by Glasgow, and Samuel Johnson was pleased to record that its people had accepted the first requirement of this title, the need to make themselves understood when they spoke to an Englishman.

  The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away; their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustick, even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the English phrase, and the English pronunciation, and in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old lady.

  It is reassuring sometimes to discover that rustick dialect still in use, and not only in the modern verse which bravely employs it. As a relief one day from the Darien Papers at the Royal Bank of Scotland I drove into the Pentlands, looking for Rullion Green where the Covenanters once sang the 74th Psalm and waited for the King’s dragoons. Thunderhead clouds were walking on forked lightning from hill to hill, and having turned off the main road to watch this from higher ground I lost my way by Logan Burn. I asked for directions at a farmhouse, and understood but one word in five of the guidance I was given. We were perhaps ten miles only from the centre of Edinburgh, but here the Scotch despised by Johnson had survived the compression of time and distance. I did not hear its words and rhythm again until I first listened to Jock-upon-land and John-the-Common-Weal in a performance of Lindsay’s Thrie Estaitis.

  At the end of the 18th century, and perhaps with a copy of Johnson’s Journey at his elbow, the journalist Robert Heron echoed its enthusiasm for the anglicisation of Edinburgh. Surprisingly, perhaps, for he was born the son of a weaver in Kirkcudbright.

  National prejudices are gradually losing ground on both sides; and the language, the dress, and the manners of the English begin to gain the ascendancy. In short, the happy era seems not very distant when the English and the Scots shall be, in every sense of the word, ONE NATION.

  That one nation was meant to be British but was soon thought and spoken of as English, although for some decades ministerial clerks in Whitehall observed the spirit of the Treaty by referring to Scotland as North Britain. Only twice, I think, have I seen Government letters to Edinburgh which were addressed from “London S.B.” While the new United Kingdom prospered imperially Scotland had little objection to this insulting disparity. Its people had accepted the Union as an escape from famine and bankruptcy, and those who regretted the loss of their independence soothed their doubts with the truth that life was better now and with the lie that they were joined in equality with a wiser and more experienced nation.

  An incorporating union is inevitably disproportionate, for a country confident of survival on its own has no need of it. Once the marriage is made, the weaker and sometimes ingratiating partner is obliged to adopt the character and manners of the stronger, to walk in its shadow and wait upon its tolerance. English democracy was born in noble dissent but its application is too often an inflexible rule by majority, under which the rights of minorities can appear obstructive and heretical. When an English Member tells the Commons today – without objection from either side of the House – that excessive time is being spent on Scotland’s affairs, he is speaking in a long and arrogant tradition. The forty-five Scottish Members who went to the first Union Parliament, to sit with twelve times as many Englishmen, incautiously protested that some of its proposed legislation was contrary to Scots law. They were told that “whatever are or may be the laws of Scotland, now she is subject to the sovereignty of England she must be governed by English laws and maxims.” They accepted this, and over the next century their successors worked and intrigued to occupy the high offices of Government by which their fellow countrymen were made to obey those laws and maxims.

  One such administrator was Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, a tall and boldly handsome man whose famil
y held the Edinburgh seat in its pocket for more than fifty years. As Home Secretary he was said to rule Scotland as if it were “a lodge at a great man’s gate”, and as Secretary of War he was the Government’s most successful recruiting sergeant in the Highlands. His likeness in stone now stands upon a Trajan column in Saint Andrew Square, more enduring than the rag and straw effigy once burnt by an Edinburgh mob. Below him is a fine Augustan building where I spent many hours reading letters and reports sent long ago from the Scots colony in Darien. It was once the town-house of the Dundas family but is now owned by the Royal Bank, which keeps part of the archives of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies. Had this “noble undertaking” been wise enough to establish its mercantile colony elsewhere than the fever swamps and rain forests of Darien the Union might have been unnecessary, and Lord Melville’s career less offensive to the common people in Scotland. There are times in the evening dusk of the old city when I wish I could hear King Joseph’s drum, beating down the wide emptiness of the Royal Mile from the Lawnmarket to the gates of Holyroodhouse. A deformed cobbler from the Cowgate, he was the leader of the Edinburgh mob, and the sound of his rallying sticks could make authority tremble for a night, a day, and another night.

  The slums of the Rock and the foul wet wynds I saw forty-six years ago are gone, but the pleasant restoration of some of its buildings, their transformation into flats for the professional classes, cannot replace the vigorous life that pulsed here for centuries. The Royal Mile is now a tourist highway – from Holyroodhouse where emotional crowds sing Jacobite songs in honour of a brief visit from Royalty, to the Castle Esplanade where every August their hearts throb with martial pride, and a lone piper on the floodlit battlements keeps alive that bitter myth. At night, for the rest of the year, there is silence where sixty thousand people once lived and brawled and prayed. Many of Scotland’s martyrs have died here, Protestant and Catholic, King’s man and the Crown’s enemy, and sometimes a drover from Glenstrae whose only mistake was to call himself MacGregor. They died by rope, fire and axe, or by the Maiden, that falling blade used by Scotland long before Doctor Guillotine recommended it to the French. Every political and religious parrot-cry, clan and family slogan, has been shouted from its wynds, and so much blood flowed on the cobbles in one stabbing affray that the people called it Cleanse-the-Causeway. But among the stench, the filth, and the savage quarrels, gentle flowers also grew – haunting verse, good books, debate, argument, and the ennobling spirit of religious and political freedom.

  Until the building of the New Town the people were fearful of moving beyond their encircling wall, and raised their houses higher and higher until some were a hundred feet and more above the back-lanes. Although little now remains of their last defence-work, its sorrowful name endures: the Flodden Wall. Erected quickly after the slaughter below Branxton Hill, it was no protection when the Rough Wooing brought Lord Hertford north to make “a jolly fire” of Edinburgh. Out with the Wall he put a torch to the Abbey of Holyrood, and to the palace of Holyroodhouse which the dead king of Flodden had built beside it. Twenty-three years later, zealots of the Scottish Reformation plundered the restored Abbey and stripped it of its images and woodwork. In the next century another mob, this time inflamed by the Whig Revolution, tore down its stones and smashed its coffins. They then sacked the Chapel Royal of Holyroodhouse and destroyed its Jesuit printing-press. When the roof of the Abbey collapsed in the 18th century, the romantic fancies of Regency Scotland preferred it to remain a picturesque and filthy ruin. If the Scots have not always defeated England in the field, they may be sure they have sometimes outmatched it in the maniacal destruction of their property.

  The vandalism of later centuries has been less violent, albeit motivated by egregious conceit. In 1829 the architect William Burn – who had successfully designed classical houses, hospitals and music-halls – refaced the Norman and Gothic fabric of Saint Giles with paving-stones believing he was making good the mistakes of medieval masons. Had the money available not been exhausted he would no doubt have improved the lantern crown of its splendid steeple, but it survived him and still stands nobly high above the Lawnmarket, mocking the prison-block ugliness of his insane botching. The Victorians and Edwardians erected their own neo-Gothic follies, notably the great red-black pile of the North British Hotel which masks and diminishes the simple nobility of Robert Adam’s Register House. They also built the Scott Monument, designed by a Pentland shepherd’s talented son. At first it must have been a bizarre contrast to the remaining Georgian façade of Princes Street, but now that has been raped by commercial development, and only saved from wealthy squalor by the majestic Rock it faces, the monument has a solacing charm. Most people in Edinburgh are affectionately attached to it, and are offended if told that the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, which it must have inspired, may be even taller and uglier. Nowhere in the world, however, is there so large a memorial to a writer, and for that reason alone I should speak of it with respect.

  Contempt for the beauty of Edinburgh, and for their obligation to maintain it, has long been a characteristic of its purse-masters. Greed and profit, said the poet William Dunbar five hundred years ago, blinded rich merchants to the disgraceful state of their city.

  Think ye not shame,

  Before strangers of all estates,

  That sic dishonour hurt your name?

  In the decades since the war no planning authority has felt shame or thought of dishonour, and Progress and Profit – synonymous terms for those who wish to make one toward the other – have subjected Edinburgh to abominable mutilation. The listing of buildings worthy of preservation has saved some that were under threat, but much more has gone. George Square to the south of the Castle was built in the 18th century and was a pleasure to the eye and the spirit. When the University of Edinburgh bought it, three sides were “redeveloped” with towers of glass and concrete that stun the mind. Saint James Square behind Register House was thought expendable because although it was admittedly beautiful it was not the best of its kind in the New Town, an argument that could substantially deplete most museums and galleries. Thus its calm and simple Georgian houses were demolished, and in their place is a sprawling grey block that reminds me of the eyeless air-raid shelters that once dominated the ruins of German cities. Good sense befitting, much of its soulless interior is the administrative warren of a Government department. Another occupies Argyle House, a shoe-box of windows set thoughtlessly at the foot of the Castle and degrading its aloof grandeur. If such buildings have achieved anything beyond the provision of sterile capsules for computers, electronic and human, it is that they provoked an outraged public into forming associations to prevent further assaults upon its civic pride.

  The golden age which created the restrained elegance or brooding dignity of Moray Place, Charlotte Square and Royal Terrace, was also erecting monuments to its self-esteem and material success, but it had the wisdom to entrust their design to men of aesthetic probity. They too were capable of absurdities, of course, but even these were sometimes precedents in good bad taste. Upon the crown of Calton Hill, looking westward to Princes Street and eastward to the sea, is a collection of meaningless masonry, time-blackened pillars and pediments. This, as much as Castle Rock, has encouraged men to think of the Parthenon and call Edinburgh the Athens of the North, as if a city so individual in character needs distinction by comparison. It was intended to be a great memorial to the Scottish soldiers of the Napoleonic wars, but lack of financial help stopped its completion. It was thirty years since Waterloo, and the people of Scotland had already contributed £7,000 for the Scott Monument. It is now a tragi-comic folly, and any man who has been a soldier may think that the best monument to his wasting trade. It was at Spinningdale in Sutherland, and from James Robertson-Justice, that I first heard the old story that public donations ceased when radical journalists wrote of the Clearances then taking place in Ross and Knoydart, and made it known that Highland soldiers had come home from Toulouse,
New Orleans and Quâtre Bras to find their glens empty and their families replaced by Cheviot sheep. The story is untrue, I think, but once again we should perhaps print the legend.

  If I am sometimes impatient with Edinburgh’s self-satisfaction, it cannot irritate me for long. Like Glasgow, if to a lesser and more gentle degree, it is a human city. Its centre is becoming a residential area once more and is no longer empty and heartless at night. Moreover its classes can live cheek by jowl and not in cantonments in the English way. It is also a city of books, and has been since James IV gave Walter Chapman and Andrew Myllar permission to establish the first printing-house in Scotland. Although the press was originally intended to make books of law and ritual, it was soon employed by the explosive intellects of the Reformation, and more enduringly by poets. They had always been attracted to Edinburgh, by royal patronage and by the rich inspiration of its people. They were the Makaris, the makers of songs whom Dunbar once mourned at a time of ailing despair. He was a satirist, ribald and bawdy, but in his Lament for the Makaris there is no scorn, only a morbid melancholy which, reflecting upon his own infirmity, puts the history of his country into one sad quatrain.

  The stait of man dois change and vary,

  Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,

  Now dansand mery, now like to dee;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  In the best of Scottish verse, before and since his time, there is always sorrow and rage, an anguish beyond relief, and joy taken in pleasure is only a brief respite from the contemplation of mortality. I have read, but met too few of Edinburgh’s poets who today honour and maintain the precedents set by Dunbar, Henryson, Beattie and Ramsay, by the boy Robert Fergusson whose vernacular verse inspired Burns, and who killed himself in an asylum before he was twenty-five. I remember Norman MacCaig speaking of him, and reading a tranquil but disturbing stanza of his own verse, sitting beneath a Daniell aquatint of Raasay, his mother’s home he said. I cannot recall how I came to be in his tall, cool room in Edinburgh. It was in the company of others, Hamish Henderson among them, a man of eccentric wisdom who wrote some of the best soldier-verse of the war. He bought me a bad curry that day, I remember, but he always sends me a civil postcard of warning when he is about to write to the Scotsman, sternly exposing the errors in my work.