Fry A Higher World

Scotland 1707-1815
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-85790-832-2
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 496 Seiten

This new and compelling history of eighteenth-century Scotland paints a rich and detailed portrait of the country at a time when it was of truly global significance. This journey from the Union of 1707 to its centenary and beyond takes in vivid scenes from all over the country, and ranges up and down the social scale from peeresses to prostitutes, from lairds to lunatics, and covers every major aspect of national life from agriculture to philosophy. Whilst most other Scottish histories published in recent times concentrate on social and economic history, Michael Fry demonstrates that any true understanding of the nation, in the past as in the present, needs to pay at least as much attention to politics and culture. The social and the economic history show us how Scotland was integrated into Britain, whilst the political history and the cultural history show us why the integration was never complete. In this book both sides are surveyed, offering new perspectives on Scotland's experience within the Union.

Michael Fry was educated at Oxford and Hamburg Universities. He has held academic positions in Scotland at Strathclyde and Edinburgh Universities, in the US at Brown University, and in Germany at Leipzig University and the Max Franck Institute, Frankfurt. He is the author of ten books on modern Scottish history, including The Dundas Despotism (1993), The Scottish Empire (2001), Wild Scots, Four Hundred Years of Highland History (2005) and Edinburgh, a History of the City (2009). He has contributed to most major Scottish and British newspapers, and has been a regular columnist for The Scotsman, the Herald and The Sunday Times.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fry, Michael

Leseproben

1

Agriculture: ‘To do useful things’

We cannot be sure what the Highland brigand, Rob Roy MacGregor, was up to on the day of the Union, 1 May 1707, but probably he had his thoughts on something quite different from matters of state. He was about that time generally preoccupied with the affairs of an orphaned nephew – to whom he proved, whatever his other failings, a faithful tutor and guardian. The nephew was a MacGregor too, but the name had been officially proscribed for a century and it was better for the youngster not to use it, at least in any transaction with the English-speaking authorities. To Gaels this mattered little, for they seldom bothered with surnames anyway: what would be the point in a clan where everybody had the same surname? They called one another rather by given names and epithets: Rob Roy was Raibeart Ruadh (red-haired) and his nephew was Griogar Ghlun Dubh (with a black birthmark on his knee).1 Now this youth, who in a more tranquil age might have been known as Gregor MacGregor, turned for all public purposes into James Graham of Glengyle.

The feudal toponym came from a small estate at the head of Loch Katrine in the Trossachs. Rob Roy, acting on James’s behalf, had secured the feu in 1703 from the Duke of Montrose, and Montrose was chief of the Grahams. As a compliment to the feudal superior, or perhaps as an appeal for his protection and patronage, the lad assumed his surname. He was then set up in what security Highland life of the time might offer. Under the Scottish feudal system he could not be outright owner of Glengyle anyway, but his rights to it amounted to much the same thing. He could bequeath it to his descendants, and meanwhile it made him a desirable match for some lucky lass.2

It so happened Rob Roy had just the right girl in mind: Mary, daughter of John Hamilton of Bardowie, laird of a castle near the present-day Milngavie.3 Her brother was Montrose’s factor in the barony of Buchanan, which included Glengyle. The happy couple would be wed in November 1707. Rob Roy was by then getting a home ready for them, built in the Lowland style of stone and mortar rather than as the normal Highland rickle of rocks and turf. The house still stands today. The whole arrangement was clannish in inspiration, then, intended to join by blood what had hitherto been united by mere interest. It did not preclude other connections, however. Rob Roy had also entered into amicable relations with the Campbells of Glenorchy, Earls of Breadalbane, a cadet branch of the mighty Campbells of Argyll occupying territory north of the Trossachs. In fact, in his legal dealings in the English language, Rob Roy called himself Robert Campbell. His mother had been of that name but anyway he wanted and needed to identify with those powerful kinsmen. He wrote to Breadalbane:

I long to see your lordship, and I presume to tell your lordship that I have come of your lordship’s family and shall keep my dependency suitable to the samine of which I told your lordship, when I parted with your lordship last and what I sayed to your lordship or ever promised shall be keeped while I live. My nephew is to see your lordship, whom I hope will be capable to serve your lordship and will do it tho I were in my grave he is a young man so my lord give him your advice he is bigging his house and I hope your lordship will give him a precept for the four trees your lordship promised him the last time I was there.4

The letter was clearly addressed to a person of higher rank. Rob Roy and his nephew did not belong to the top level of Highland society, but to a second level that came to be known as tacksmen (a tack was a lease, more or less, in Scots law).5 Its members combined the practical functions of laird and businessman, or military officer when the clan went to war. Many such people turned out as improvident as their chiefs but Rob Roy was one who exploited every opportunity to advance his fortune and standing, by means also of his fund of native wit and homespun philosophy or else, should occasion demand, by resort to cold steel. Like his forebears, his main economic activity lay in trading and raiding cattle, the principal form of Highland wealth. If he got the chance, he would blackmail potential victims of his raids and make them pay for protection from him. An alternative would be to provide them with general protection against all raiders, of whom there were many, and in this his product looked attractive – premiums tolerable, record of recovering stolen goods impressive. He was on the one hand an entrepreneur, on the other hand a bandit, and he switched roles as it suited.

Rob Roy’s commercial acumen told him indiscriminate raiding would be foolish. It had to be kept down to a level that never attracted too much attention, so he needed to be careful where he did raid. It would, for example, have been stupid of him to annoy all the big landowners in the region. In fact, he left Montrose and Breadalbane alone, at least for now. Such aristocrats could then be enlisted as his patrons, though we may wonder why they should have bothered with a man who was, from their point of view, a nobody. Yet they always sought to extend their influence, and he had at least some say among the proscribed MacGregors. These no longer possessed any territory of their own but were scattered over the lands of other chieftains. While despised, they could, if shown some favour, be deterred from raiding their lordships’ properties and turned instead on those of a near neighbour and rival, the noble House of Atholl, recently raised to ducal rank. Indeed Rob Roy himself took with relish to raiding the lands of Atholl, knowing that in case of pursuit he could retire in safety to Breadalbane.6

One of the oldest works of Gaelic literature, dating from the first century of the Christian era, is Táin Bó Cúailnge, The Cattle-Raid of Cooley,7 and it might be said that not much had changed in the Highlands since. Yet Rob Roy’s ventures were also just starting to connect to the emergence of modern capitalism. A recent point of growth in the Scottish economy had been the export of cattle on the hoof to England. It was already under way by the time of the Restoration of the Stewarts in 1660. In 1680 the government in Edinburgh set up a commission to consider how the traffic might be expanded; meanwhile, graziers in Yorkshire complained of being ruined by cheap Scottish imports. But the plain fact was that conditions in much of Scotland allowed more cattle to be raised there than were ever going to be eaten by the natives while, at the other end of Great Britain, stood a huge city called London, which could never feed itself. The result was a flourishing trade between the two extremities of the island.

In 1707 opponents of the Union argued that this trade, while important, did not enrich Scots as it should because it had already been taken over by English middlemen. After the long drove from the north, the herds of black Highland cattle, always small and hardy but now lean and weary, would be sold to graziers who fattened them up on their own lush pastures ready to be turned into the finest English roast beef. Scottish patriots argued for fattening the beasts at home, then exporting them as barrelled beef not only to England but also to any other country with a taste for the succulent flesh; profits could also be made from the hides. This was in fact how Ireland exploited its cattle, so the plan was not unworkable. Still, in the prelude to the Union it became hard to propagate the notion that Scots might turn into successful economic innovators on their own account, even in the agriculture from which nine out of ten of them lived.8

In any event traffic in cattle on the hoof continued to flourish after 1707, and the price of the beasts would quadruple over the eighteenth century. There proved to be particular benefits for Highlanders, who had been so hostile to the Union. Even in the wake of the first Jacobite rebellion, drovers were exempted from the Disarming Act (1716) because they might need to defend themselves on their long journey south. The government in London was interested not so much in groaning boards for gourmets as in savoury scran for soldiers and sailors now making the new United Kingdom’s power global. General William Wolfe’s redcoats at Quebec and Admiral Horatio Nelson’s tars at Trafalgar would all be kept going on salt beef originally from the Highlands. Here, to sceptical Scots, was at least one benefit of the Union.9

Commerce in cattle was yet not in itself significant enough to bring about much basic change in Highland society. This society remained through the first half of the eighteenth century traditional, feudal and armed. Rob Roy was typical of it, even in the impudence with which he at length swindled the Duke of Montrose, who in revenge got him jailed; it took a royal pardon to stop him being transported to the West Indies where, now aged over 50, he could not have lasted long. Within such a social order raiding was regarded as normal, if not sportive. As late as 1742 a veteran Jacobite, William Mackintosh of Borlum, noted how it still went on in western Inverness-shire, Perthshire, Stirlingshire and northern Argyll.10 Only defeat of a second rebellion in 1745 put a stop to it, at the hands of the standing military garrisons and their patrols that afterwards treated the region as conquered territory. In any case, raiding had never halted droving because raiders and drovers might be the same people. Even as they went about armed to the teeth they promoted not just disorder but also some degree of order – for instance, when they policed the great trysts or fairs at Crieff, held for...