This latter occasion inspired the ultimate campaign to destroy the civilization of the Scottish Highlands. After the terrible disaster of Culloden Moor, on 16 April 1746, when the last great charge of the clansmen was cut down by the volleys of redcoat English and Lowland Scots, the life of the clans was suppressed forever. Their Gaelic language was proscribed, their native dress forbidden, their organizations banned, their leaders banished. The terrible Clearances, which allowed loyalist landowners to expel the inhabitants in favour of sheep, left more Gaels in North America than in Scotland. They gave the Highlands that haunting emptiness which unknowing tourists have admired ever since,
[
PHILIBEG
]
Combined with the enclosure movement, which had been driving smallholders from the land in England for two centuries or more, the Clearances completed a purging process which was to give British society some of its most abiding characteristics. These purges deprived Great Britain of the peasants who formed the backbone of most other nations in Europe. They took away the social solidarity, the primitive democracy, and the sort of national consciousness which grows naturally from a peasant-based community. They meant that a sense of British nationality could only be projected downwards from the institutions of the state, especially from Crown and Empire, and could not grow upwards from the peasant family’s traditional attachment to the soil. Henceforth the soil was largely the property of a narrow class of farmers and landowners. British society was divided into a well-endowed loyalist minority and a dispossessed majority, who would carry the half-remembered resentments of their disinheritance into the very bowels of the British class system.
MASON
O
N
St John Baptist’s Day 1717, representatives from London’s four existing freemasons’ lodges met at the
Goose and Gridiron
alehouse to form a ‘Mother Grand Lodge of the World’ and to elect their first Grand Master. Though the minutes did not survive, historians of freemasonry do not question that the meeting took place, or that London’s Grand Lodge was henceforth the nerve-centre of an international movement.
1
The earlier history of freemasonry is murky. The story of a thirteenth-century papal bull creating a society of church-builders is pure fiction. Connections with the medieval
commecines
or
steinmetzen
, still more with an underground association of ex-Templars, are quite unproved. A report of 1723 contained the jingle:
If history be no ancient Fable
Freemasons came from the Tower of Babel.
The earliest reliable references point to seventeenth-century Scotland, and to contacts with England made during the Civil War. Elias Ashmole (1617–92), the antiquary, astrologer, and founder of the Oxford Museum, made a note of his own initiation in his diary:
1646 Oct 16, 4h 30’ pm. I was made a Freemason at Warrington in Lancashire with Col. Henry Mainwaring of Cheshire. The names of those who were then of the Lodge: Mr Rich. Penket, Warden, Mr. James Collier, Mr. Rich, Sankey, Henry Littler, John Ellam, Richard Ellam, and Hugh Brew.
2
The air of mystery surrounding freemasonry is deliberately cultivated. It is attractive to sympathizers, offensive to opponents. Non-initiates are left guessing about its rituals, its hierarchy, its pseudo-oriental jargon, its signs and symbols, and its purposes. The compass and square, the apron and gloves, and the circle on the floor are obviously designed to encourage belief in the movement’s medieval guild origins. But it is the alleged oath of secrecy which has caused the greatest controversy. According to one account, the blindfolded initiate was asked:
‘In Whom do you put your trust?’ and answered, ‘In God.’ ‘Where are you travelling?’ and answered ‘From West to East, to the Light.’ He was then required to promise on the Bible, not to reveal the society’s secrets ‘under no less penalty than having my throat cut across, my tongue torn out, and my body buried in the rough sands of the sea …’
3
Freemasonry has always acted essentially as a mutual benefit society, though the benefits are nowhere defined. Its enemies have often maintained that it is anti-feminist, since it does not admit women, and antisocial as well as anti-Christian, since its members supposedly help each other with political, commercial, and social contacts to the detriment of others. Freemasons have always stressed their opposition to atheism, their religious tolerance, neutrality in politics, and commitment to charitable works.
Freemasonry expanded dramatically in the eighteenth century. It recruited from the highest ranks of the British aristocracy, and became a lasting pillar of the monarchy. A lodge was founded in Paris in 1725 by expatriate Scots; thereafter it spread to every country of the Continent. It was established in Prague (1726), Warsaw (1755), even St Petersburg. By the time of the Napoleonic wars the network was sufficiently wide for stories to circulate about officers on opposing sides at Borodino or Waterloo giving each other the secret sign of recognition and holding their fire.
In the Catholic countries, freemasonry took an anti-clerical turn and played an important role in the radical Enlightenment.
4
Its members were often deists, philosophers, critics of Church and State. In Austria, for example, where the papal bulls denouncing it were not published, it was extremely active in the promotion of the arts until its suppression in 1795. In France, it contributed to the pre-revolutionary ferment. In the nineteenth century and beyond, it would be strongly associated with the cause of Liberalism.
The response of the Catholic Church was unequivocal. The Vatican regarded freemasonry as evil. From the Bull
In Eminenti
(1738) to
Ab Apostolici
(1890), the popes condemned it on six separate occasions as conspiratorial, wicked, and subversive. Loyal Catholics could not be freemasons, who were often classed in ultra-Catholic circles as a public enemy alongside Jacobins, Carbonari, and Jews. Totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century were still more hostile. Freemasons were consigned to concentration camps by both Fascists and Communists. In many parts of Europe they could only rebuild their activities after the fall of Fascism, or, in the East, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Controversy about the role of freemasonry continues. But the most impressive document about freemasonry is its membership list, which is said to include, Francis I of Austria, Frederick II of Prussia, Gustav IV of Sweden, Stanislaw-August of Poland, and Paul I of Russia; Wren, Swift, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gibbon, Goethe, Burns, Wilkes, Burke; Haydn, Mozart, Guillotin, and Marat; Generals Lafayette, Kutuzov, Suvorov, and Wellington; Marshals MacDonald and Poniatowski; Talleyrand, Canning, Scott, Trollope, O’Connell, Pushkin, Liszt, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Kossuth; Leopold I of Belgium, William I of Germany; Eiffel, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Masaryk, Kerensky, Stresemann, and Churchill; and all British kings except one from George IV to George VI. Which shows that the greatest of international secret societies was not completely secret.
PHILIBEG
I
N
1727 the chief of the Clan Macdonnell of Glengarry entered the iron-smelting business. He leased the forest of Invergarry to a Quaker forgemaster from Barrow in Lancashire, Thomas Rawlinson, and raised the workforce to cut the timber and man the furnace. Rawlinson, who visited regularly, noticed that the clansmen’s traditional attire, the long
breacon
or ‘belted plaid’, was hampering their labour. So, consulting the garrison tailor at Inverness, he designed a shorter, pleated, knee-length garment, which would soon be known as the
felie-beg
, the ‘philibeg’ or small kilt. In this way, the central item of Scotland’s supposedly ancient Highland costume was invented by an Englishman.
1
Soon afterwards the second Jacobite Rising was defeated; and the Westminster Parliament banned all Highland dress. For forty years the kilt could not be worn in public, except by the Highland regiments which the British Army was busy recruiting—the Black Watch (1739), the Highland Light Infantry (1777), the Seaforth Highlanders (1778), the Camerons (1793), the Argyll and Sutherlands and the Gordons (1794). In those same decades, whilst the Highland Society in London campaigned for the return of the kilt, male civilians in the Highlands took permanently to trousers,
[NOMEN]
In 1822 George IV paid the first royal visit to Edinburgh since the Union. Sir Walter Scott, the novelist, acted as a master of ceremonies. The Highland regiments, who had covered themselves in glory at Waterloo, were paraded in full kilted splendour. All the clan chiefs of Scotland were urged to attend in ‘traditional costume’. They, too, wore kilts, each in a distinctive tartan. Chequered plaid had been woven for centuries by a thriving industry, which supplied the ‘trews’ or tapered breeches of the well-to-do. But its colourful ‘setts’ or patterns had been loosely associated with regions, not with clans; and it had not been used by ordinary folk. The most famous of the setts, the black-and-green tartan of the Campbells, which would be given to the Black Watch, had been known in the trade as ‘Kidd No. 155’, after a Caribbean planter who ordered it for his slaves. Yet the Highland regiments and the gathering of 1822 combined to establish the custom of linking each sett with one particular clan name. They were greatly assisted by the later publication of a finely illustrated but spurious work, the
Vestiarium Scoticum
(1842), written by two charlatan brothers, the self-styled Sobieski-Stuarts, who held romantic court on the island of Eileann Aigas near Inverness.
The allocation of tartans completed a remarkable process of cultural invention which had been evolving over two centuries. In the first stage, after the founding of the Presbyterian colony in Ulster, the obviously Irish origins of Highland civilization were neglected, then repudiated. A new, exclusively Scottish history and literature were compiled, not least by the brilliant fake poetry of James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’. Supposedly ‘ancient and original’ Highland customs, like the kilt, proved attractive, since they met the demand for an unambiguous national pedigree. In the final stage, which started with the Act of Amnesty (1786), masses of Highland refugees crowded into the Lowlands, and the new traditions were adopted by Scots of all ilks as a mark of their non-Englishness. This highly romantic game was abetted by Queen Victoria, who acquired the estate of Balmoral in 1848, and invented a Balmoral tartan for her own very un-Scottish consort and family.
The Macdonnells of Glengarry did not see the end of this revolution.
2
Originally a sept or sub-clan of the Clan Macdonald of Skye, once ‘Lords of the Isles’, their Gaelic name meant ‘sons of Domhnull’, the ‘world ruler’. During intervals of their feud with the Mackenzies, they had always been prominent in the Catholic and Jacobite cause. A Macdonnell carried the standard of James II at Killiecrankie in 1689, and fought again at Sheriffmuir in 1715. His successor fought in the Forty-Five at the head of 600 clansmen, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. But the sixteenth chief sold the ancestral lands and emigrated to New Zealand. Their red, black, dark green, and white tartan has all the signs of a simple and ancient sett. Whether it adorned the original Scottish kilt of 1727 is not known.
In the late nineteenth century, ‘invented tradition’ was mass-produced all over Europe.
3
When the German Socialists invented May Day (1890), when the Greeks restaged the Olympic Games (1896), when the Russians marked the founding of the Romanov Dynasty (1913), or the Scots instituted ‘Burns Night’—the Lowlanders’ answer to the kilt, the pipes, and the haggis— they were all seeking to endow their constituents with a common sense of identity.
Within the British Isles, Ireland was a country apart. Though its fate cannot be compared to the harrying of the Scottish highlands, the legacy of conflict was deep and bitter. Both Protestants and Catholics had suffered foul persecution during the religious wars. After 1691 the Protestant supremacy was bolstered by dracon-ian penal laws which denied Catholics the right to office, property, education, and intermarriage. Ireland was excluded from the Union of 1707. It retained its own Parliament, but was still subject to the ancient ‘Poyning’s Law’, which gave automatic control of legislation to the king’s ministers in London. Unlike Scotland, Ireland was not allowed to benefit from free trade with England. Unlike Wales, it did not yet experience any sort of national or cultural revival. With the sole exception of Protestant Ulster, where Huguenot refugees started the prosperous linen
industry, it did not participate directly in Britain’s industrial revolution. A rising population made rural distress a fact of life. The famines of 1726–9 and 1739–41 foreshadowed the disaster of the 1840s. The ferocious ‘Whiteboy’ gangs first made their appearance in the countryside in 1761. A movement for reform led by Henry Flood (1732–91) and Henry Grattan (1746–1820) was eventually overtaken by the abortive rebellion of Wolfe Tone and his United Irishmen (1798), and by Ireland’s forcible incorporation into the United Kingdom through the second Act of Union (1801).
Hanoverian Britain lasted for 123 years. The reigns of the four Georges—I (1714–27), II (1727–60), III (1760–1820), and IV (1820–30)—witnessed a truly constitutional monarchy presiding over the acquisition and the loss of an empire, over the world’s first Industrial Revolution, and over the rise of unprecedented naval power which rendered Britain uniquely immune from the Continent’s affairs. Such indeed were the differences between Britain and its Continental neighbours which arose during this period that many insular historians have been led to conceive of British and European history as separate subjects.
In retrospect, the most momentous event of later Hanoverian times is to be found in the loss of thirteen British colonies during the so-called ‘American Revolution’ of 1776–83. Of course, no one in 1776 could possibly have foreseen the full potential of the USA. The thirteen colonies still looked to be very fragile ventures, surrounded by the uncontrolled forces of nature in a largely unexplored continent. Even so, the prospects for the British Empire on the eve of the War of Independence were enormous by any standards. British naval power had already raised the very real possibility that the vast western and mid-western territories of Spain and France in America could be absorbed without serious opposition. (In 1803, the French were indeed obliged to sell their ‘Louisiana’—effectively, the whole of the mid-West—for a song.) Shorn of their most attractive transatlantic possessions, however, the British were increasingly constrained to seek their further imperial fortunes elsewhere, especially in India and Africa.