How the Scots Invented the Modern World (19 page)

This has led some critics to condemn the Scottish Enlightenment for knuckling under to English “cultural imperialism.” But just the opposite was the case. Far from leading educated Scots to abandon or forget their Scottish identity, Anglicization seems to have encouraged them to keep it alive and intact. Kames continued to speak Scots on the bench up into the 1780s. Poets such as Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns became in effect bilingual, composing verse in good Scots or perfect Augustan English, depending on the occasion or the mood. Boswell himself spoke his native dialect during his stays in Edinburgh, and when he met Jean-Jacques Rousseau he fantasized about admonishing him in broad Scots for his eccentricities: “Hoot, Johnie Rousseau mon, what for hae ye sae mony figmangairies? You’re a bonny man indeed to mauk siccan a wark; set ye up. Canna ye just live like ither fowk?”
¹²

In effect, the Scots
became
English speakers and culture bearers, but
remained
Scots. Instead of forgetting their roots, they acquired new ones. Men such as Boswell, Hume, and Robertson freely conceded the superiority of English culture so that they could analyze it, absorb it, and ultimately master it. They refused to be intimidated, because they intended to beat the English at their own game. They would reshape the dominant English culture so that both the English and the Scots could find a home in it.

The effort paid off. Robertson and Hume taught the English how to write “philosophical history,” using the four-stage theory to illuminate the past. The greatest masterpiece of Enlightenment history, Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
would be unimaginable without its Scottish school predecessors. Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
would become the most famous biography in English letters—again, in
English,
not Scottish letters. And of course Adam Smith would compose the founding text of modern economics—
Inquiry Concerning the Wealth
of Nations
—in a language that was, it is all too easy to forget, a foreign tongue to him.

By 1758, Horace Walpole, the son of the former prime minister, had to admit “Scotland is the most accomplished nation in Europe.” Voltaire agreed: “It is to Scotland that we look for our idea of civilization.” A central European observer stated that “it is now an incontestable fact that the principal authors who have adorned the British literature in these latter times, or do honour to it in the present days, have received their birth and education in Scotland.” It was as neat an example of reverse cultural imperialism as one can find, and David Hume expressed his pleasure with it in the form of a paradox:

Is it not strange that at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliament, our independent Government . . . are unhappy in our accent and . . . speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of, is it not strange, I say, that in these Circumstances, we shou’d really be the People most distinguished for Literature in Europe?

All the same, it was a rash man who could have predicted all this before 1745. At that date, Scottish Whigs knew that life even in Edinburgh was still pretty primitive compared with what was going on south of the Tweed. But they understood that change was under way, and that the changes were for the better—that the institutions and habits that still held Scotland back, such as the intolerance of the Kirk and the old feudal customs that made rural tenants so dependent on their lairds, were slowly improving. So it came as a shock when so much of Scotland lashed out violently against these changes in 1745, and the deepest, darkest aspects of Scotland’s past suddenly rose up to blot out the future.

Many myths abound about the Highland clans. The oldest, and most persistent, is that the rising of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 symbolized a cultural clash between a Celtic “Jacobite” Highlands, steeped in primeval tribal loyalties, and a modernizing, proto-industrial “Whig” Lowlands. Scottish Whigs actually encouraged this view. It implied that they and their English allies were engaged in a virtual crusade for civilization, a war against an anachronistic social order left over from Scotland’s barbarous history.

The clans were an anachronism, all right, except that they were a holdover from Scotland’s feudal, not tribal, past. The bonds that held the clan together were land and landholding. Their origins had as much to do with French-speaking Normans as with ancient Celts. If we want to identify the true prototypes of the Highland warriors who fought for the Earl of Mar at Sheriffmuir or Prince Charlie at Culloden, we should look not to the ancient Picts or Britons, but to the followers of William the Conqueror.

The term
clan,
of course, comes from the Gaelic
clann,
meaning “children.” It implied a kinship group of four or five generations, all claiming descent from a common ancestor. And clan chieftains encouraged their followers to believe that they were indeed bound together like family. Men such as the Duke of Argyll of the Campbells or Lord Lovat of the Frasers routinely demanded a loyalty from their tenants not unlike that of children for a father. But it was entirely a fiction. The average clan—and there were more than fifty of them in 1745—was no more a family than is a Mafia “family.” The only important blood ties were those between the chieftain and his various
caporegimes,
the so-called tacksmen who collected his rents and bore the same name. Below them were a large, nondescript, and constantly changing population of tenants and peasants, who worked the land and owed the chieftain service in war and peacetime. Whether they considered themselves Campbells or MacPhersons or Mackinnons was a matter of indifference, and no clan genealogist or bard, the
seanachaidh,
ever wasted breath keeping track of them. What mattered was that they were on clan land, and called it home.

“In that sense,” says one prominent authority on the history of the Highlands, “one cannot really talk about a ‘clan system,’ only about specific clans.” Those clans that appear in the first written sources were all extinct by the beginning of the sixteenth century. The ones that dominated the landscape in 1745—Fraser, Cameron, Mackenzie, Stewart of Appin, and the most famous of all, the Campbells and the MacDonalds—mostly date from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, after Norman mercenaries had come to Scotland at royal invitation and established a pattern of feudal landholding across both the Highlands and Lowlands. Norman feudalism intermingled with Celtic tribal tradition, creating a hybrid: the clan, headed by a chief with his tenants living on a wartime footing. Many of these Norman knights and their descendants, such as Fraser, Drummond, Montgomery, Grant, and Sinclair, became heads of clans. Secured in their power by royal decree and tribal superstition, they became the power brokers of medieval Scotland and a law unto themselves, just like their feudal magnate counterparts in England or France. The only difference was that while the John of Gaunts and Charles the Bolds disappeared across the rest of Europe, and eventually even from Lowland Scotland, men such as the Lords Lovat of Fraser and MacDonnells of Keppoch lived on, a source of Highland pride and legend, but also of disunity and strife.

Scottish feudal law gave the chiefs land and peasants, as well as tenants-in-chief, the tacksmen, to run things. It also gave them formal jurisdiction over persons living in the clan area, including the power of life and death. They did not hesitate to use it. Once a woman was brought before MacDonald of Clanranald, accused of stealing money from him. He ordered her tied by the hair to seaweed among the rocks, until the Atlantic tide came in and drowned her.

Another chief, Coll MacDonnell
¹³
of Barrisdale, required all fishermen on his land to pay him one-fifth of their catch. Those who failed to pay up found themselves tied to a device locals dubbed the “Barrisdale.” Iron rings held a man flat on his stomach while a large stone weight was strapped to his back, and a steel spike placed under his chin. If the miscreant failed to support the stone’s weight, the spike would drive up through his chin to the roof of his mouth. It is with a jolt that we remember this was in 1740, not 1140, and that there was nothing in Scottish law to protect a MacDonnell tenant from his chieftain’s protection racket.

What the average clansman got in exchange for submitting to this sometimes brutal authority was land, land to work or graze in order to feed his family, and to pay his rent. Rarely did he call himself a MacDonald or a MacKinnon or an Ogilvie or whatever the clan name was; he used patronymics or nicknames instead, such as Collum mac (meaning “son of”) Fergus vic (“grandson of”) Ian, or Angus mór (Angus the elder) or Angus
ruadh
(meaning “red”). His membership in the clan rested on the ties of custom, not kinship. He obeyed the chief, paid the chief’s rent, listened to his bard’s songs and stories, wore his badge, a sprig of herb or plant, in battle, and shouted his slogan because they were the
clan’s
badge and slogan, just as it was the clan’s land he worked. He saw the chief and his tacksmen and his bodyguards, the henchmen, not as masters, but as guardians and trustees of what ultimately belonged to everyone.

Unfortunately, this was not how the chieftains themselves saw it. Whatever sense of communal responsibility might have existed was fading fast; loyalty was becoming more and more a one-way street. Most chieftains now thought of themselves as landed aristocrats. They wore ruffled lace and drank French claret. They and their sons were educated at the universities. Families such as the Campbells and the Camerons kept fine houses in Edinburgh, although most of their followers were dirt poor. The sons of a chief continued to be raised in the traditional way, in the midst of the clan, and wet-nursed in the cottage of a humble clanswoman, whose own son became his milk-brother. He still had to prove his leadership in battle, by leading cattle raids on neighboring clans or committing acts of petty revenge. But increasingly the chieftains came to think of the clan land as their own property, and looked for ways to guarantee that their eldest sons would inherit it intact, regardless of what the clan itself might think or want. Lord Kames’s iron law, “man is disposed by nature to appropriate,” applied equally well to the Highland chieftain, the Berwickshire farmer, or the Glasgow merchant.

The chieftain’s key ally in this push for privatizing the clan’s lands was, and always had been, the Scottish Crown. This is another persistent myth: that Highlanders supported Bonnie Prince Charlie out of some ancient, mystical loyalty to the Stuarts. The truth was that the alliance between the Crown and the clan chieftains was one of mutual self-interest. The Crown recognized the chieftain’s life-and-death power over his tenants, reinforced the privileged status of his family members and supporters, and protected his children’s rights to his land by formal law. In exchange, the chiefs gave the king a rough version of law and order in a remote and largely inaccessible part of his kingdom. It also allowed him to play one clan against another, when it suited his own political purposes.

At various times the Stuarts banished or destroyed clans that had become nuisances or even merely inconvenient. They destroyed the Clan Donald’s power in the western Highlands and islands, and handed over its lands to the Campbells. They did the same to the Clan Leod of Lewis, and the MacIains of Ardnamurchan. In 1603, James VI went even further. After a quarrel with the leaders of the MacGregors, he in effect sentenced the entire clan to death. If any man dared to use the name MacGregor again, James decreed, he was to be put to death and his property forfeit to his killer. As an additional incentive, James promised any criminal an immediate pardon if he brought a royal official the head of a MacGregor.

It was genocide, pure and simple. Within the year more than thirty-six men had been murdered or executed. James himself led the way by hanging six who happened to be in his personal custody. The clan was steadily driven from its home in Glen Strae and Glen Lyon into a life of permanent exile and banditry, regularly hunted as renegades by all the other clans in the region. One hundred fifty years later the proscription against the MacGregor name still stood. One reason the head of the illegal Clan Gregor, the son of its most famous leader, Rob Roy, joined the revolt in 1745 was the vain hope that Prince Charles might rescind the ban. In fact, it was not until 1774 that it was finally stricken off the statute books.

The real winner in the destruction of the MacGregors was Clan Campbell, which moved in and occupied their former territory. In fact, the Campbells and their most important chiefs, the Dukes of Argyll, rose to power by serving as the Crown’s principal tool in controlling the other western clans. This reached its climax on the night of February 13, 1692, when the Campbells were ordered to put to death the MacDonalds of Glencoe, including women and children. The plan was botched. Most of the MacDonalds escaped, but the Campbell soldiers managed to drag thirty-six of them out into the snow and murder them, including children four and five years old. The massacre caused an uproar in Parliament and elsewhere. Lowlanders often shuddered at the barbarity and savagery of the Highland clans; but it is worth remembering that the worst examples, the massacre at Glencoe and the extermination of the MacGregors, were both done at royal order.

What was life like in a clan? Every outside observer noted that crossing the Firth of Forth into the Highlands meant entering a different world. For one thing, normal law and order did not follow him across the border. A different law, the code of the clan, applied instead. This often meant that a Highlander who came into a town such as Aberdeen or Greenock to do business or find employment, where he got into an argument with a local and killed him, could count on getting away free if he could get back home. It was the official rash enough to pursue, not the murderer, whose life was in danger. The only recourse was an appeal to the chieftain, whose concern was not guilt or innocence, but honor.