The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  Presumably his lordship replied to Ross's letter, though he said nothing which either the lawyer or the Northern Ensign thought necessary to put into print. And in September Her Majesty, through her Lord Justice-Clerk, made it plain that her police, with their monogrammed batons, had been in Strathcarron with her authority. Before the Northern Circuit Court of Justiciary, Ann Ross, alias Taylor, and Peter Ross, alias Bain, were accused of ‘mobbing and rioting, breach of the peace, and assault on officers of the law in execution of their duty’. The charges referred to the deforcement of William Macpherson and Peter Mackenzie on 7 March, the comic repulse of Dugald MacCaig and his preventive men on 22 March, and the resistance given to Sheriff Taylor, Superintendent Cumming and thirty-five policemen on 31 March. On the advice of their counsel (who hoped that the court would ‘deal leniently with the prisoners’), Ann Ross and Peter Ross pled guilty to a breach of the peace, and this modified charge was accepted by the Advocate-Depute. No doubt there were many who were happy that he did so, for as a result there was no discussion, no argument, no examination of witnesses. Indeed, the Court seemed unaware of the fact that, by Donald Ross's account, Margaret Macgregor Ross of Greenyard was dead from a broken skull.

  Lord Justice-Clerk Hope (who had come to Court in Inverness after a pleasant holiday shooting on his son's estate in Sutherland) spoke at some length, addressing the prisoners in a legal English which they must have had some difficulty in following, if they understood it at all:

  The course of the Law must have its effect with all, in order to protect all persons high and low; and all must submit whatever their feelings, or rank, or perverted notions of right and wrong, to the authority of the Law…. It is fortunate for the deluded parties that no life was lost on this occasion, for there was no degree of vigour, no exercise of authority that the Sheriff-Substitute might not have been fully authorised and justified in resorting to in order to accomplish his purpose. It is quite essential therefore, that such a spirit as that which these pannels exhibited should be repressed. Neither they nor their neighbours can be allowed to suppose that they can live in this kind of wicked and rebellious spirit against the Law. They must be taught submission in the very first instance…

  He sent Ann Ross to prison for twelve months, and he sentenced Peter Ross to eighteen months with hard labour. He thanked the jurymen for their attendance, and he hoped that none had been put to serious inconvenience by it. They had performed a most important duty in ensuring the conviction of Ann Ross and Peter Ross. ‘You are aware,’ he said, ‘that there exists a singular and perverted feeling of insubordination in some districts of the Highlands against the execution of civil processes in the removal of tenants. This feeling is most prejudicial to the interest of all, and it is absolutely necessary to suppress it.’

  6

  WHERE ARE THE HIGHLANDERS?

  ‘My business lies with the poor and oppressed!’

  THOMAS MULOCK was an eccentric, and thus not all that could be hoped for in a champion of the evicted. He had little of Donald Macleod's obstinate courage, and less of the objective integrity shown by The Times Commissioner. But he had passion, and anger, and if he treated the Highlands as a skittle alley, rolling woods at the proprietors for the pleasure of seeing them fall, he was sincere enough while the game lasted. With a cry of ‘Justice to Scotland!’, and with the little Inverness Advertiser under his control for eighteen months, he attacked the clearances with sustained violence and occasional brilliance. He then retired to France, where he became a hired hack for Louis Napoleon.

  He was sixty when he arrived in the Highlands in 1849, a tall, white-haired Irishman, handsome, witty, and a darling at conversation provided nobody interrupted him. The great pride of his life was his daughter, ‘a very celebrated writer, kind and obedient to me, and worthy of every respect and honour’. Celebrated though she was in her time, her father's polemics now make better reading than John Halifax, Gentleman. That she had written so splendid a novel was always a consolation to him, and sustained him in his old age when he was summonsed for non-payment of his rent, or sent to prison for contempt of court, or committed to Stafford Asylum ‘through the influence of some magistrate whose displeasure I had incurred’.

  He was born in Dublin, first son of the third son of Thomas Mulock of Kilnagarna, Comptroller of the Stamp Office, and one of the many oddities of the man is that although he was Irish (at least Anglo-Irish and small gentry), he never wrote in defence of the Irish peasantry. But, to be fair, he did take up causes more as a result of geographical accident than selection, and had he received a newspaper appointment in Wexford rather than Inverness he might have attacked Irish oppression as boldly as he did that in the Highlands. When young, after a promising career at Oxford and a short term as Private Secretary to George Canning, he decided to read for the Bar. With a man called Blood, he opened a law firm in Liverpool. The people he met there did not know what to make of him, except that their acquaintance was likely to be brief, and they remembered him, guardedly, as ‘perhaps the ablest man, as well as the most original genius who has temporarily resided in Liverpool’.

  He turned from law to literature for greater excitement, lectured to the Pitt Club, and attacked the Whigs in the Press over the signature ‘Six Stars’. But he was too vain for anonymity, and when he boasted his identity the Whigs laughed at him and nicknamed his firm ‘Bloody Moloch’. He lampooned Byron in a pamphlet called An Answer Given by the Gospels to the Atheism of all Ages. ‘This gentleman seems to be my great admirer,’ said Byron, ‘so I take what he says in good part.’ Instinctively, Byron recognized that this furious iconoclast was in fact a tragic figure, a man of considerable ability, greater ambition, and no discipline. ‘I thought there was something of wild talent in him, mixed with a due leaven of absurdity, as there must be in all talent let loose upon the world without a martingale.’

  He married the daughter of a tanner, an anticlimax almost, and a marriage that crippled any social pretensions he may have had. He left Liverpool and the law, appeared in Geneva as a savant, and again in Paris, lecturing on English literature. Thomas Moore, who attended some of these lectures, found them irritating and absurd. ‘He talked of persons going to the wellspring of English poetry in order to communicate what they have quaffed to others…. Dryden was no poet. Butler had no originality, and Locke was of the school of the devil!’ When Moore heard that Mulock intended to speak on his poetry, he stayed away from the lecture in protest, and was ashamed afterwards, because the Irishman had in fact praised his work.

  The lectures were a dismal failure. Mulock turned to divinity, entered the Baptist Ministry and founded a chapel at Stoke-on-Trent. This he conducted on highly original lines, of course. Resenting privilege by birth or wealth, and power by inheritance, he created his own ‘elect’, selecting the Godly and the righteous from among his congregation and giving them a special corner of his chapel, railed off from lesser men. Most of those so chosen were his friends and his creditors. He was always in debt, borrowing heavily to pay for the numerous law-suits in which his writing involved him, and which he rarely won. He armed himself with the Almighty's approval when he asked his friends for a loan: ‘I must ask you to send me two pounds and no more. I do not wish to be constrained to ask of anyone but yourself, to whom the Lord hath given a largeness of heart not to be found but in specially gifted gospel creatures.’ When this friend later ran out of patience, or money, Mulock denounced him from the pulpit as ‘a blasphemer and the greatest heretic that has arisen since the days of the Apostles’.

  Mulock left Stoke and the ministry in 1831 and became a wanderer again. He reappeared in Liverpool, writing articles for the Chronicle on ‘The Duke of Newcastle, England's Scribbling Liberator’. He had a sniper's skill with a well-aimed phrase. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he said, was ‘paid £5,000 every quarter for opening letters’. Thomas Carlyle was ‘an amateur statesman and an uninspired prophet’, and Disraeli was ‘that Jew-Gentile romance-writer’. His dar
k suspicion of the Prince Consort was like a grumbling appendix, always demanding relief. When Albert promoted the Great Exhibition, and thereby won some belated popularity with Press and public, Mulock stood firm in his distrust of the humourless man. ‘Prince Albert is a mere nose of wax in this business; and a sort of fashionable joint stock company (very like some of the railway concoctions) is at the bottom of the whole affair.’ He had no approval for Albert's habit of lecturing industry and the arts at public dinners, the only form of intellectual exercise available to the consorts of queens. He called it ‘the Prince's post-prandial eloquence’. He never thought a phrase could be spoiled by too much alliteration.

  In 1849 he was in Scotland. Donald Macleod of Strathnaver, who should have had more compassion for him, first liked Mulock and then despised him (for apologizing to the second Duke of Sutherland). ‘He came to Scotland a fanatic speculator in literature in search of money,’ said Macleod, ‘or a lucrative situation, vainly thinking that he would be a dictator to every editor in Scotland.’

  He first attacked the immortal Hugh Miller of the Witness, Edinburgh, but in him he met more than his match. He then went to the north, got hold of my first pamphlet, and by setting it up in a literary style, and in better English than I, he made a splendid and promising appearance in the northern papers for some time; but he found out that the money expected was not coming in, and that the hotels, head inns and taverns would not keep him up any longer without the prospect of being paid for the past or for the future. I found out that he was hard up, and a few of the Highlanders in Edinburgh and myself sent him from twenty to thirty pounds sterling. When he saw that was all he was to get, he at once turned tail upon us, and instead of expressing his gratitude, he abused us unsparingly, and regretted that he ever wrote in behalf of such a hungry, moneyless class. He smelled (like others we suspect) where the gold was hoarded up for hypocrites and flatterers, and that one apologising letter to his Grace would be worth ten times as much as he could expect from the Highlanders all his lifetime.

  It was a bitterly unfair attack. Sutherland may or may not have bought off the Irishman, but if he did one suspects that Mulock would have made the apology a great deal more abject than it was. Probably Sutherland threatened him with a suit which Mulock, debt-ridden and emotionally exhausted, could not face. Macleod, seeing men as friends or enemies, was not able to understand the tormented Irishman who had nothing to live by but his pen, and little to gain by imprisonment.

  He began his journalistic career in the north as an editorial writer for the Inverness Advertiser, a small paper recently started by a young man called James MacCosh. When MacCosh died of a heart attack, the paper's new owner put Mulock in the editor's chair pro tempore. Most Highland newspapers walked carefully through the squalor of the evictions, taking care not to soil their reputations or the proprietors'. Mulock took the Advertiser into battle on the side of the people with wild disregard for circulation and advertising revenue. He undertook what he called a ‘close and impartial inquiry into the state of the Highlands’, and when he went to the west and the Isles to report the results of the evictions there the Inverness Courier felt compelled to send its own man too, just to balance the picture.

  Mulock went to Glenelg, a wild and beautiful estate on Loch Hourn. Once it had been Macleod country, belonging to the Dunvegan chiefs. It was sold for £30,000 in 1798, again in 1811 for £100,000, and in 1824 it was bought for £82,000 by Charles Grant, President of the Board of Trade. In 1831 he took his title from it when he was given a barony, and six years later he parted with it for £77,000 to the sheep-farmer, James Baillie of Dochfour (he who was once of Bristol, and was now to be ‘of Glenelg’). With each successive sale of the property more of the small tenants were removed, and now, in 1849, five hundred of them were to be helped on their way to Canada by a grant of £2,000 from Baillie (he had been asked for £3,000) and £500 from the Destitution Board. The Courier made much of Baillie's liberality and of the strong desire of the people to leave their homes. Mulock thought this was humbug.

  To suppose that numerous families would as a matter of choice sever themselves from their loved soil, abolish all the associations of local and patriotic sentiment, fling to the winds every endearing recollection connected with the sojourneying spot of vanished generations, and blot themselves, as it were, out of the book of ‘home-born happiness’, is an hypothesis too unnatural to be encouraged by any sober, well-regulated mind.

  Forty or fifty families had been unable to find room on the Liscard, which took the Glenelg people to Quebec. They had sold most of what they possessed, and were now living close to starvation on the edge of Loch Hourn. Mulock called the heads of these families together, and asked them if they were indeed willing emigrants. ‘With one voice they assured me that nothing short of the impossibility of obtaining land or employment at home could drive them to seek the doubtful benefits of a foreign shore. So far from the emigrations being a spontaneous movement springing out of the wishes of the tenantry, I aver it to be the product of desperation, the calamitous light of hopeless oppression visiting their sad hearts.’

  His most inviting windmill was Sutherland. He read Loch's book and declared: ‘It has no more weight with me than the history of Sinbad the Sailor. It is a laboured attempt to blacken a people whom it was resolved to oppress, and in order to vindicate tyranny he seeks to vilify those who were fore-doomed to slavery.’ With his usual recklessness, he sailed close to the wind of criminal libel. When Sutherland claimed that he was making no profit out of his estates, Mulock suggested that he ask Loch and the agents where the rents were going. He criticized a grant made to the Duke by the committee of the Destitution Board, saying that a rich man should be able to put his hand into his own pocket to help his people, and not ask for the charity of others.

  Mr Loch, the Duke's Premier, put the committee in mind that the Duke of Sutherland had formerly subscribed £1,000 to the Highland Destitution Fund, and conjoined with this reminiscence a supplication to the committee to grant his noble employer the sum of £3,500 to help towards the relief of the poor people of Sutherland! Subsequently the Duke's petition was acceded to, on condition the money was to be expended building a road bisecting His Grace's territory in the most favourable direction.

  The second Duke of Sutherland had none of his father's serene indifference to public criticism. He wrote an open letter to Mulock, which was published in the Courier, and which said that if the wild man took the trouble ‘to visit this country, and make yourself personally acquainted with local circumstances, I should not apprehend the sharp scrutiny you mention’. Mulock accepted the challenge with enthusiasm. He left for the north in October 1849. Those who suggested that he might think more kindly of the gentry if he cultivated their acquaintance were sharply reminded of his duty: ‘I never obtrude myself on the hospitable walls of proprietors or their local managers. My business lies with the poor and the oppressed, and if I overcharge my statements of their case, I confess myself open to the censure of aggrieved proprietors or their officials who, it is to be hoped, will be more successful in their recriminatory scribbling than the Duke of Sutherland and his factor, Mr Gunn.’

  He went with a copy of Macleod's book in his pocket, and his letters, as they were published in the Advertiser, made good use of it. He retold the story of Kildonan and Strathnaver and he accused the middle classes of Scotland and the Highlands of being accessory to the extirpation of a people.

  At Inverness the Sutherland clearances received a sort of solemn sanction, proprietorship was re-enforced with supreme sway, and from henceforth the prosperity of the rich was to be secured by the ruin of the poor. The population, it was now decided, should quit for ever their former abodes on cultivatable land, be penally fixed on coasts where the reclamation of rocky land was to constitute their chief hope of subsistence.

  He described the ruins in empty glens, a debased tenantry living on sterile coasts. He accused the Sutherland agents of continued extortion and ex
ploitation. He said that they were determined to recover from the tenants, by increased rents, every penny given in ‘charity’ by the Duke. The majority of the people, at great sacrifice, managed to pay these increases.

  I found the wretched inmates possessed one proof of probity, the last of a continued series of receipts for rents. Nay more, I saw clouds of printed notices threatening these same needy rent-payers with legal prosecution if they did not repay the Duke certain ‘arrears of grain’ delivered from Dunrobin during the appalling scarcity consequent on the failure of the potato: and the tendered payment of rent was refused until these said ‘arrears’ should be previously discharged!

  He saw so much poverty, so much hardship and squalid destitution in the county that he wondered what had happened to the money which was said to have been spent for the relief of hardship there.

  Perhaps the enormous outlay at Dunrobin, without and within that superb pile, may help to explain this mysterious expenditure; to which might be subjoined the lavishness that palpably prevails in providing costly buildings for opulent sheep-farmers, whereas the small holders of land have to house themselves at their own expense…

  A thoughtless, selfish proprietor deprives his people of all incentives to industry, and all scope for profitable exertion. He denies them land, he renders the sea unprofitable, he places over them stonyhearted and iron-handed Commissioners and factors…. One of the functions of such factors is to obstruct marriage.

  He [Sutherland] has a palatial residence at Dunrobin, and he has half a dozen sheep-feeding satraps lording it over his once-peopled but now deserted inheritance, and positively this is all that can be said of the princely possessions of Sutherland.