by John Prebble
The Register also published a long letter from Miles in which he gave a full account of the charges against Sellar. He could not understand why the authorities were so slow in proceeding against Sellar in the face of such terrible evidence.
All this, Sir, is charged to have been acted in a country where there is always a resident under-Sheriff; in a country where, in every district is at least one Magistrate, and yet, this alien for 12 months stalks abroad, without even the semblance of a judicial inquiry into his conduct. Oh fie, fie upon it! But such, Sir, are the effects of remote local tyranny.
Eleven months of argument and delay passed before Sellar was brought to trial (and then, it was said, at his own request in order to clear himself). The Register kept tip its fire during these months, and Robert Scott wrote an editorial in which he demanded: ‘The Sutherland people must have justice! We know nothing comparable to the cruelty of their case but the Massacre of Glencoe.’ The circulation of the Military Register in Sutherland was stopped by the factors. Miles accused them of opening the mailbag before it reached the Post Office and taking from it whatever they wanted. ‘The Factors of Sutherland,’ he said, ‘had much rather see both the Register and precognitions burnt by the common hangman, and you and me, Mr Editor, in the middle of the piles for having given an honest disclosure to their foul misdeeds and the wrongs of a brave people!’
At last, on Tuesday, 23 April 1816, and at ten o'clock in the morning, Patrick Sellar appeared before the Circuit Court at Inverness, and before the Lord Commissioner of Justiciary, Lord Pitmilly. There was a jury of fifteen men. Eight of them were local landed proprietors, two were merchants, two were tacksmen, one was a lawyer, and most were magistrates and Justices of the Peace. All were old enough to have vivid and unnerving memories of the Year of the Sheep.
The Court was crowded, and according to the marathon custom of the day the trial lasted without a break until one o'clock on Wednesday morning. Sellar was charged, primarily, with ‘CULPABLE HOMICIDE, as also OPPRESSION and REAL IN-JURY’, and with ‘wickedly and maliciously setting on fire and burning’. The charge was long and the Advocate-Depute, Mr Home Drummond, was nearly two hours in reading it. The homicides involved were the sad and premature deaths of the aged Margaret Mackay and Donald MacBeth. Sellar heard that he was charged with saying, ‘The devil a man of them, sick or well, shall remain!’ He heard that ‘all the persons whose houses, barns, kilns, mills and other buildings were burnt and destroyed, or caused and procured to be burnt and destroyed by you, the said Patrick Sellar, all as above described, did sustain great loss.’ He heard that he was accused of burning ‘heath and pasture on which a number of small tenants and other poor persons maintain their cattle’. He was told that he ‘ought to be punished with the pains of law to deter others from committing the like crimes in all time coming’. And then Mr Drummond sat down and the trial began.
Of the forty witnesses whom MacKid had examined, fifteen only were called for the Crown. Nine were called for the defence, though more were waiting ready outside the Court. These nine were Sheriff-Officers and servants who had accompanied Sellar to Strathnaver, and they would have been very stupid men not to realize that, in one sense, they were on trial too. The Factor was also armed with letters from gentlemen of the county and others, in which he was described as ‘a person of the strictest integrity… incapable of any cruel or oppressive action… a most respectable character… of a humane disposition’. The only report of the trial that exists is that prepared by Patrick Robertson, who was junior Counsel for Sellar, and while it seems full enough within the space it allows itself, it fails to report the arguments of counsel. It does report, however, that Mr James Gordon, counsel for Sellar, used these words when he addressed the jury of landlords:
‘The question at issue involves the future fate and progress of agricultural and even moral improvements in the county of Sutherland; that (though certainly not so intended by the Public Prosecutor, whose conduct throughout has been candid, correct and liberal), it is nevertheless, in substance and in fact, a trial of strength between the abettors of anarchy and misrule, and the magistracy as well as the laws of this country.’
When Lord Pitmilly came to sum up (‘in a very clear and able manner’, thought Mr Robertson) he told the jury that it was unnecessary for them to consider any of the charges except that relating to the death of Margaret Mackay. He directed their attention to the evidence given by her son-in-law, the tinker, William Chisholm. He said that Chisholm's evidence, corroborated though it had been by others, should be matched against that given by witnesses for the defence, and if the jury had any difficulty in striking a balance then they must take into account the character of the accused. The implication was clearly that against the word of a man so nobly commended as Patrick Sellar, of what value was the evidence of a caird, a thief, and a bigamist?
With that the jury retired, and when they returned fifteen minutes later it was to declare the Factor innocent, an opinion which Lord Pitmilly happily shared. He looked across the court and said, ‘Mr Sellar, it is now my duty to dismiss you from the bar; and you have the satisfaction of thinking that you are discharged by the unanimous opinion of the Jury and the Court. I am sure that although your feelings must have been agitated, you cannot regret that this trial took place; and I am hopeful it will have due effect on the minds of the country, which have been so much and so improperly agitated.’
And in Strathnaver there was an old woman, simple of mind, who would be thrown into a fit by the arrival of any stranger, of a man who appeared to carry authority in the set of his shoulders. She would roll her eyes, hug her body, and cry out, ‘O shin Sellar! There's Sellar!’
With the Loch Policy vindicated, as much as his own character, Sellar spent the summer of 1816 removing those tenants on his new estate on Strathnaver whom he had allowed to remain in 1814. He did this with caution, burning no roof-timbers and destroying no barns until the people were gone. He told them they might return to harvest their small crops, but before the grain ripened he had four thousand sheep on the land, from the River Naver to the twin peaks of Ben Griam. And winter came early that year, as hard and as cruel as any winter that the oldest tenant could remember. It began in October with heavy snowfalls and a great and bitter cold. Without barns or shelter, the people were unable to gather or store the harvest they cropped before the first snows.
‘I have seen scores of these poor outcasts,’ said Donald Macleod, ‘employed for weeks together, with the snow from two to four feet deep, watching their corn from being devoured by the now hungry sheep of the incoming tenant; carrying on their backs, horses being unavailable, across a country without roads, on an average of twenty miles to their new allotments on the sea-coast, any portion of their grain and potatoes they could secure.’
Others came down from the north to dig what they could from beneath the snow and eat it there, cooking a few potatoes among the ruins of what were once their homes. ‘Many severe diseases made their appearance, hitherto unknown in the Highlands, typhus, consumption and pulmonary complaints, bloody flux, bowel complaints, eruptions and rheumatism.’
Patrick Sellar did not forget Mr MacKid. His pride and dignity had been hurt by the days he had spent in the Tolbooth at Dornoch, while a clerk's pen scratched down his cold declaration of innocence. He remembered the gloating with which MacKid had written to Stafford. His acquittal was not enough, nor was he satisfied when the Sheriff-Substitute resigned his office in disgrace. In the summer of 1817 he began a suit for damages against the wretched man. MacKid was broken. From Drummuie, to which he had fled with his family, he wrote to Sellar in cringing humility, denying all that he had once charged against the Factor.
‘I gave a degree of credit to those misstatements of which I am now thoroughly ashamed and which I most sincerely and deeply regret.’ He allowed that Sellar would be entitled to exemplary damages, but pleaded with him not to prosecute. ‘I shall not only acknowledge it as a most important obligation conferre
d on me and on my innocent family, if you will have the goodness to drop your law-suit against me, but I shall also pay the expense of that suit…’ He promised to pay any further sum which Sellar might choose to exact in compensation, believing this would be less than it would cost him to fight the suit which had already saddled him with heavy expense He said that Sellar was free to make whatever use he wished of this letter, hoping only that he would not publish it in the newspapers. The little man, mindful perhaps of the faith which the people of Strathnaver had placed in him, wished to retain some public respect.
More in disgust than compassion, Sellar withdrew the suit. ‘I have no wish to distress Mrs MacKid and her family,’ he said. He accepted MacKid's offer to pay what expenses he had incurred, and demanded £200 sterling beside. The money was paid. Robert MacKid left Sutherland, going north to practise law in Caithness, where, said Donald Macleod, ‘every malignant influence followed him from the ruling powers of the former county’.
‘Nothing but the sword was wanting…’
‘IT IS SAID,’ reported the Scotsman in June 1819, ‘that a posse of men (with legal warrants be it observed) are parading the county of Sutherland and ejecting poor Highlanders from the homes of their fathers.’ It was true. The burners had come again to Strathnaver. Lord Stafford's agents* were clearing all remaining tenants, tenants-at-will, cotters, tinkers and vagrants from both banks of the river and the loch, from Achness of the cascade to the water's end at Altnaharra. Included in the removals was Robert Gordon of Langdale, who had been Sellar's host in the Year of the Burnings. Mr Gordon seems to have forfeited any consideration this hospitality may have earned him by being grievously in arrears with his rent. Had he not been in debt to the proprietor, James Loch would certainly have found a way to be rid of him. The Englishmen who had taken a lease on the land, Atkinson and Marshall from Northumbria, were waiting to extend the great sheep-walk they had held in that part of the country since 1812 – the mountain pastures of Ben Klibreck between Loch Naver and Loch Choire.
First warning of the removals reached Strathnaver in October 1818, when a man came running to the manse at Achness, arousing the Reverend Donald Sage. This young man was new to the mission, having been appointed when David Mackenzie left to enjoy his reward of the Parish of Farr. ‘I can yet recall,’ Sage wrote in his Memorabilia, ‘the deep and thrilling sensation which I experienced as I sat at the fireside in my rude little parlour when the tidings of the meditated removal of my poor flock reached me from headquarters. A tenant from the middle of the strath had been to Rhives, the residence of Mr Young, paying his rent. He was informed and authorized to tell his neighbours that the rent for the half-year, ending in May 1819, would not be demanded as it was determined to lay the districts of Strathnaver and Upper Kildonan under sheep.’
Many of the people in the strath, with the innocence that was at once their weakness and their strength, refused to believe the news, despite the fact that across the river they could still see the smoke-black stones of the townships Sellar had destroyed in 1814. They said that the Ban mhorair Chataibh would not permit her people to be persecuted further, but there were some who were less credulous. William Mackay, commonly known as Achoul (‘and a distinguished member of my congregation’, said Sage), was an old man of ninety-two who could remember the skirmish fire of musketry when the Jacobites came to Dunrobin in his youth. Until 1812 he had been a tenant-at-will on the south slope of Ben Klibreck, but had been removed to make room for the Northumbrians' sheep. He came to Grummore and buried his wife, Janet, in the churchyard at Achness, speaking his own valediction over her: ‘Well, Janet, the Countess of Sutherland can never flit you any more.’
Whatever their hopes or fears, the people were not left long in doubt. ‘Summons of ejectment were issued and despatched all over the district,’ said Sage. ‘These must have amounted to upwards of a thousand, as the population of the Mission alone was 1,600 souls, and many more than those of the Mission were ejected. The summonses were distributed with the utmost preciseness. They were handed in at every house and hovel alike, be the occupiers of them who or what they might, minister, catechist, or elder, tenant or sub-tenant, out-servant or cotter, all were made to feel the irresponsible power of the proprietor.’
He himself received notice of eviction. He was thirty years of age and had been born in the manse of Kildonan beyond Ben Griam, where his father was still Minister. He was a warm-hearted and generous man, weak in the ill-deserved admiration he felt for the gentry, but strong in his concern for the common people. His Memorabilia, edited and published by his son seventy years later, contain his bewildered indictment of the great landowners and the policy of removals, but there is no evidence that he spoke out against them at the time, and when his people expected him to follow where they went, he abandoned them. For this, perhaps, he should be understood rather than blamed. He had to cut his clerical cloth according to the tailoring demanded by his superiors. He had a conscience and a sense of injustice, and they were rare enough among his profession.
Physically frail, he found life in the bleak valley of the Naver very hard. From his youth he had prepared himself for such a ministry, rising early and going for long walks in the mountains before dawn. He despised comfort, sleeping without a feather-bed or English blankets, choosing a mattress of straw and one homespun blanket only. His house at Achness stood at the foot of a weeping brae and in the middle of a fen. Its walls were of stone and lime, the roof thatched with divots, and within it were four rooms only – a kitchen, a parlour with a bed in the wall, a closet and a bedroom. They were sparsely furnished with carpets and chairs which Sage had bought from Robert MacKid when that beaten man sold his property and went to Caithness (Sage was much attached to MacKid, and had been tutor to his teeming family). In addition to the house he rented a small farm from Atkinson and Marshall for £5 sterling a year, and this gave him corn and fodder for a horse and two cows.
The meeting-house by the manse was now almost a ruin, stone and divot trembling above a floor of damp mud. Sage had preached his first sermon to Strathnaver in the open, with the wind rolling down Rowan Tree Hill behind him and catching up the Gaelic and English of his words. Throughout the winter of 1818 to 1819 he preached vehemently and passionately to the doomed people, seeking to reassure himself as much as them that their future was God's will. When the end came there was no resistance from the people. There was a typhus epidemic in the north of Scotland, and Strathnaver had been affected with the rest. ‘The factors.’ said Donald Macleod, ‘taking advantage of the broken spirit and prostrate state of the people, people trembling at their words or even looks, betook themselves to a new scheme to facilitate their intended proceedings.’ Young's men went from house to house some days before the date of eviction, demanding that the people put their names or marks to a bond promising passive obedience.
On the Sunday preceding the ejectment Donald Sage preached his last sermon, once more in the open, this time on a grass clearing before Robert Gordon's house. ‘I selected a text which had a pointed reference to the peculiarity of our circumstances, but my difficulty was how to restrain my feelings…. I preached and the people listened, but every sentence uttered and heard was in opposition to the tide of our natural feelings.’ Before he could finish his sermon, minister and congregation broke into weeping. When the officers arrived, two days later, Sage had already left Strathnaver. He gives no explanation in his Memorabilia.
Thirteen days before the May term the burners came like an army – Factor and Fiscal, Sheriff-Officers and constables, shepherds, fox-hunters and servants from Dunrobin. According to Donald Macleod, the warrants for eviction had been granted by Captain Kenneth Mackay of Torboll, an officer of Volunteers and an extensive sheep-farmer, who was acting for the Sheriff's office in this part of the country. ‘He was all the time residing in his house, situated so that he must have witnessed a great part of the scene from his own front windows. Therefore if he did not immediately authorise the atrocities to
the extent committed (which I will not assert) he at least used no means to restrain them.’*
The destruction was begun in the west at Grummore as the party approached it from Altnaharra on the Lairg road, and messengers were sent ahead to all the other townships warning the people that they had an hour in which to evacuate their homes and take away what furniture they could. ‘I saw the townships set on fire,’ recalled Roderick Macleod, who was a boy at the time. ‘Grummore with sixteen houses and Archmilidh with four. All the houses were burnt with the exception of one barn. Few if any of the families knew where to turn their heads or from whom to get their next meal. It was sad, the driving away of these people. The terrible remembrance of the burnings of Strathnaver will live as long as a root of the people remains in the country.’
The widower William Mackay was burnt out of Grummore, and walked far from his Janet's grave to die alone in Wick. Robert Mackay, whose whole family was sick with fever, carried his daughters on his back for twenty-five miles, ‘first by carrying one and laying her down in the open air, and, returning did the same with the other till he reached the seashore’. At Grummore, too, when Donald Mackay, a boy, was driven from his home with his parents, he ran naked and terrified into some bushes and stayed there, watching the flames and refusing to come out. By the loch-side an old man, also of Clan Mackay, crawled into the ruins of a mill unseen. His dog kept the rats from him and he survived for a few days by licking the dust of meal from the floor. ‘To the best of my recollection,’ said Donald Macleod, ‘he died there.’