A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  The armies that faced each other twenty miles north of Dublin on the last day of June 1690 were divided, then, by more than the river Boyne. They also stood for utterly different historical destinies for Britain. Neither offered a particularly happy outcome. But perhaps the measurement of felicity is beside the point. The point is that they represented contrasting visions of power. In James’s tents between the walls of Dublin and the river were encamped the servants of a cult: the mystery of the godlike king, the obedience of the Christian flock, the unquestioning service of the faithful. William, on the other hand, was the chief engineer of a war machine. His grandfather Maurice had led the first armies to use printed drill manuals. When William looked out across the river at the French–Irish lines he did so through the most accurately lensed telescope that Dutch instrument-makers could devise (though he was looking the wrong way when an opportunistically fired cannonball nearly took his head off on the eve of battle). His army was truly international, containing Danes and Germans as well as Dutch, Huguenots and English, as befitted the king of a multinational corporate state. And it was funded, of course, by international finance – Portuguese Jews and Huguenots, precisely the kind of people for whom the absolutist monarchies found no place.

  In the end, it’s true, machinery was not what decided the battle but, rather, intelligent and daring strategy, accomplished by horses, riders and shooters. William sent a division of his army down river to ford it and outflank the defenders while his own troops rode straight across in a headlong attack. Surrounded as the French and Irish were on three sides, panic inevitably ensued, with James himself not especially keen to fight to the bitter end. After a night spent in Dublin, he made one of the hasty departures, at which by now he was well practised, and settled down to end his political career, as he had begun it, as a guest of the king of France.

  To many, then and since, it looked like the end of a chapter. And so it was, if the book is a history of England. But if the book is a history of Britain, the Boyne was just the turning of another bloody page.

  CHAPTER 5

  BRITANNIA INCORPORATED

  IN WILLIAMITE BRITAIN, showing up late could get you killed. William III came from a culture that set great store by good timing. In 1688, his own carefully maintained and calibrated political clock (as well as the luck of the Protestant winds) had made the difference between a throne and a débâcle. The Dutch king expected men, money, armies to move like clockwork, with reassuring predictability. Although the kingdom he now governed fell far short of those ideals of regular movement, the winding of a spring, the greasing of a wheel might yet make the machine keep proper time and motion.

  There were some places within his new realms, though, that seemed regrettably indifferent to punctiliousness, nowhere more than the Scottish Highlands. There, where a third of Scotland’s population lived, loyalty seemed still to be governed by codes of honour and bonds of kinship that appeared timeless, impervious to the quickening of modernity. Although from Edinburgh or London such places, with their predilection for cattle stealing, evidently seemed backward, they could still muster crude force enough to do damage to the fragile machinery of power that William and his Scottish allies were putting in place. At the river gorge of Killiecrankie, in the southeast Grampians, on 27 July 1689, John Graham, first Viscount Dundee, obstinately and sentimentally loyal to King James, threw 2000 Highland warriors, some of them barefoot, down the hillside against 4000 musketeers and dragoons. In ten minutes 600 Highlanders, including Dundee, died under a hail of well-drilled fire. But in the same ten minutes they had sliced to pieces as many of the enemy, caught fumbling with the muzzles of their muskets as the claymores came brightly at their heads.

  Ultimately, it would not matter. In the spring of 1689 James VII (James II of England), the last in the line of Stuart kings who had been on the throne of Scotland since 1371, was formally deposed. But William ruled securely only south of the Forth. The shock of Killiecrankie, and continuing resistance in the ungovernable Highlands, made William’s allies in Scotland, especially the Campbells, determined to bring the clans to heel. The means would be moderation where that worked, coercion and slaughter where that seemed to be needed. In the summer of 1690 a warship sent from Ulster sailed through the Hebrides, burning down Jacobite villages and killing those unlucky enough to be found there. On the island of Eigg, all the adult men were away fighting on the mainland, so the women were raped before being put to the sword.

  In August 1691 the principal leader of the campaign, the Earl of Breadalbane, published an order stipulating 1 January 1692 as the deadline for making a formal act of submission to King William. Perhaps this was too much time to get the intended result. For while there were some clan chiefs who did indeed make a pledge of allegiance, urged on by the Governor of Fort William, Colonel Sir John Hill, there were others who held out as long as they could, hoping for some military miracle from France or Ireland, or perhaps just wrestling with their consciences. One such clan was the MacIains of Glencoe, a branch of the fervently Jacobite Clanranalds. Their chief, the twelfth Chief of Glencoe, Alasdair Macdonald, who had fought at Killiecrankie, procrastinated – fatally, as it turned out, and long enough to get selected by Breadalbane for an exemplary killing. A glance at the map made it all seem foolproof. Eight hundred soldiers from the new, palisaded Fort William on Loch Linnhe would be sent to torch Glencoe, about 8 miles (13 km) south, where 600 mostly unarmed villagers lived in groups of crofts scattered through the valley. Blood would of course have to be shed if the exercise in terror were to have its proper effect. But no one would hear about it because the troops could block off the mountain passes leading into the steeply walled valley.

  Things began to go wrong with these careful calculations when Alasdair Macdonald belatedly decided to make his submission. He had waited until the last possible moment in the hope of obtaining permission from the Jacobite court in France to relinquish his old oath of loyalty to James. When no word came, and the clock was ticking ominously down to the New Year, he finally made the journey over the old Highland Way to the west of Ben Nevis and down to Fort William on 31 December to make his pledge to the new king. But he was told by Colonel Hill that he was in the wrong place and was sent off again through the deep snows, south across the western Highlands of Argyll to Inveraray on Loch Fyne. Detained en route, Macdonald finally appeared at Inveraray on 2 January, one day late. Hill had given him a letter to take to the Sheriff of Argyll, Sir Colin of Ardkinglas, in the hope that the submission of ‘the great lost sheep Glencoe’ would be acceptable even if late. But the sheriff was away and heard Macdonald out only on 6 January, warning ominously that it would be for the Privy Council in Edinburgh to make a final determination on the lawfulness of the submission. A day later, John Dalrymple, the ‘Master of Stair’, William’s counsellor on Scotland, wrote to the commander-in-chief with orders confirming that the lands of the chiefs who had failed to submit would be ravaged: ‘Glencoe hath not taken the oath at which I rejoice. It will be a proper vindication of the public justice to extirpate that den of thieves . . . It were a great advantage to the nation that thieving tribes were rooted out and cut off. It must be quietly done, otherwise they will make shift for both men and their cattle . . . Let it be secret and sudden.’ On the 16th Breadalbane signed the order for a killing.

  The soldiers arrived at Glencoe on the first day of February. Their officer, Captain Robert Glenlyon, was a Campbell, but distantly related to the Maclains, as were many of his men. Tradition required that hospitality be offered, and for ten days 120 officers and soldiers were lodged, warmed and fed against the bitter Highland winter. On the 12th an order arrived commanding Glenlyon ‘to fall upon the rebels, the Macdonalds of Glencoe, and put all to the sword under seventy’. At five in the morning, in the icy darkness, the troops butchered at least thirty-five of their hosts. The elderly chief, lain Maclain, was shot in the back while he was rising from his bed to dress, his widow robbed of her rings and stripped naked. Unlik
e many other women (also stripped) and children, who died of exposure, she was rescued by her sons. At Inverrigan, Glenlyon had nine men shot and reserved for himself the coup de grâce with a bayonet. Attacked by a sudden fit of conscience he attempted to prevent the killing of a small boy, but the soldier shot him anyway, commenting that to spare a nit was to ensure the growth of a louse. Corpses were defiled with dung, cattle driven into the hills. But far more villagers escaped than perished – enough, since the troops had failed to seal the passes at either end of the valley, to make sure the story got out.

  There was an immediate outbreak of hand-fluttering and pious professions of regret in London and Edinburgh, especially by those who, directly or indirectly, had actually been responsible for what was now called ‘slaughter under trust’. The obligatory inquiry was instituted at Holyroodhouse. The Scottish parliament formally expressed its horror. Breadalbane and the Master of Stair became the scapegoats for what had been an entirely premeditated act of official murder.

  For all the mistimed cues and fatal stumbles, the dawn massacre in the heather floor of Glencoe, the ‘weeping valley’, anticipated the standard operating practices of the British Empire, to be repeated countless times, over the next two centuries, in America, Asia and Africa. ‘Backward peoples’ were to be given the opportunity to collaborate and, if they accepted, would be welcomed to a proper share of the spoils and to a partnership in the modernizing enterprise. Rejection – invariably characterized as unreasonable – would invite annihilation. In the 1690s the two opposed worlds ought not to be thought of simply as English and Scots, with the anti-Jacobite Scots cast as unscrupulous cronies of the colonial power to the south. For the crucial conflict was taking place within Scotland, between two cultures: one based on the ancient obligations of honour and kinship, the other on the aggressive pursuit of interest and profit. That some sort of climactic battle between those societies would take place in the century about to dawn might have been predicted by the prescient. But what could never have been anticipated was the transformation that actually followed, so complete and so breathtaking that it turned Scotland from a victim of the English state into the bulwark of the British Empire, from the hard-luck case of Britannia into its most dynamic and aggressive working partner.

  In 1700, that future was virtually unimaginable. The Highland clan was governed by the regularity of tradition and an immemorial calendar of work and tribal play – the seasonal obligations of pasture and hunting and the family rituals of celebration and mourning. Clan loyalty was built on the assumption of a common tribal ancestor. Even though this was, more often than not, a myth, it created a genuine bond, which extended all the way from the chief through his bigger tenants, the tacksmen, to the simple crofter. If the grandest lairds were beginning to develop a preference for Bordeaux over ale and whisky and an ear for the viola da gamba as well as the pipes, the Highland tacksman was still close to the crofters. Like them he still wore the plaid and spoke Gaelic, ate herring and oatmeal and blood pudding, and kept his sword at the ready to answer the call of honour. Like them he lived by contracts dictated by custom, and sworn by word of mouth.

  South of the Forth, in urban, commercial, Lowland-Protestant Scotland, as well as in metropolitan England, contracts were made with money and law, written on paper, signed in ink and sealed in hard wax. In that world the bonds of family were more and more a matter of business and property: the maximization of estates; the capitalization of farms; production for urban markets on both sides of the border of the Tweed. With more to sell, the appetite for buying grew. Silverware and pottery dishes began to be common in Lowland farmhouses along with linen sheets and grand bedsteads with turned posts. It was a society that had not yet turned the corner into modernity, but it had craned its neck and seen what it was like.

  In the years after Glencoe, both Scotlands (but especially the south) endured the misery of what became known as the ‘ill years’. For several summers in a row the sun refused to appear. Torrential rain deluged the country and continued into the autumn, turning the stunted crops of barley and wheat into sodden slurry and making any kind of harvesting impossible. Occasional years of respite suffered from the seed deficits of their predecessors. Cattle and sheep developed murrain and footrot. The first (and mercifully last) great famine in living memory dug its talons into Scotland. At least 5 per cent of Scotland’s one and a quarter million population died of hunger. Patrick Walker, a pedlar in the Highlands, claimed to have seen women in distress after all the meal had been sold, ‘clapping their hands and tearing the clothes off their heads crying, “How shall we go home and see our children die in hunger?”’ Sir Robert Sibbald, the first Professor of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and author of Provision for the Poor in the Time of Dearth and Scarcity (1699) catalogued the wild herbs and grasses that might be digestible and recommended that cats be eaten if there were no other kinds of meat. The highways were full of destitute, disbanded soldiers, vagrants of all kinds. Plainly, it was a time to steal or starve.

  In all this darkness, though, there were some Scots who believed they could see the light. It shone from a plan that they were convinced would raise Scotland virtually overnight from impotence and misery into a global power, rich beyond the dreams of any Glasgow counting-house. A New Caledonia was to be planted across the Atlantic athwart the trading routes of the world at the isthmus of Darien, just south of Panama. There amid the palms, fortunes would be made that would seed a Scottish prosperity the like of which had never been seen.

  The scheme was not as lunatic as it might at first sound. The ‘free port’ was to be created about 150 miles (240 km) away from where the Panama Canal now cuts between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and with very much the same commercial logic behind it. Its most eloquent advocate, William Paterson, a Scot who had made money in the West Indies and had been a founder of the Bank of England, argued persuasively that what was holding back the expansion of Asian–European trade was the ruinously lengthy and dangerous choice of journeys, around either the African Cape of Good Hope or the South American Cape Horn. If the Company of Scotland could realize its dream, all this would change. Ships from China and Japan could sail east and at New Edinburgh exchange cargoes with ships sailing west from Europe. With freight costs slashed, the goods thus shipped would become more cheaply available in their respective domestic markets. Demand would soar correspondingly, and the volume of trade increase exponentially. And sitting on top of the world’s newest and most prosperous exchange and mart would be the Scots, taking portage, marketing and banking charges off the top and waiting for the next great fleets to sail in from the Pacific and Atlantic.

  The Darien projectors were not, in fact, proposing anything more outlandish than the kind of services that had been offered for centuries in Amsterdam. This may, indeed, have been the very reason why the circle of Dutch money men around William III felt so threatened by the scheme. But the project also struck at the reigning economic orthodoxy of the time, which conceived of international trade as a zero-sum game, playing for shares of a fixed amount of goods and gold. To maximize that share meant using the power of the state – militarily if necessary – to lock up exclusive sources of colonial supply, and to enforce a monopoly of shipment and marketing for the home country’s vessels and ports. Pepper, tea, silk or sugar were to be carried only in the ships of officially licensed and chartered companies.

  But Paterson’s ‘Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies’ was something else again: a shameless commercial maverick disrupting orderly procedures of mercantilism. Its first – its only – great project would be the creation of a tropical free zone, where sellers and buyers from who knows where could come together on the little neck of land between the oceans to haggle and clinch deals at mutually agreed prices. No wonder everyone in London – other than Paterson’s circles of Scots and well-wishers like Daniel Defoe – wanted it to fail. Lobbying hard against it in the English parliament, the Royal African Company predic
ted that if this unregulated monstrosity were allowed to establish itself, there would be a mass migration of England’s merchants and seamen across the Tweed and ‘our commerce will be utterly lost’. In one week the stock of the other pillar of English colonial trade, the East India Company, fell from 72 to 50 pence.

  If the reaction in London to a Scottish–American hypermart verged on the hysterical, the Scots themselves made no secret of the fact that they thought of the Darien venture as a break-out from the economic stranglehold of English power. One of the Company’s most fervent supporters, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, wrote that all his countrymen’s ‘thoughts and inclinations as if united and directed by Higher Power seemed to have turned to trade . . . the only means to recover us from our present miserable and despicable condition’. No one in Edinburgh in the summer of 1695 could possibly have missed the significance of the moment. At one end of Holyroodhouse the Glencoe inquiry was under way, at the other end a debate on the new trading company – Scotland’s past and Scotland’s future weighed together.

  So when the first fleet of three ships sailed out from the Firth of Forth in July 1698 flying the blue-and-white saltire, and the company flag of llamas, Indians and an optimistically rising sun, it was carrying more than the 1200 men, women and children selected to be the first colonists. It was carrying the hopes of the entire country. And much of its money. The response to an English prohibition on capital investment in existing enterprises had been an outpouring of investment in the Company of Scotland. Fourteen hundred subscribers had anted up £400,000 of working capital needed to float the first voyages to Panama, and since some of those subscribers were institutions, the actual number of individual investors was much bigger. The true believers went all the way through Scottish society and could be found in the north as well as the south of the country, from dukes and countesses to advocates, from surgeons and preachers to small shopkeepers, tanners and gunsmiths, from Glasgow and Edinburgh to Selkirk, Inverness and Aberdeen. To look at the Company’s ledger book is to see entrepreneurial Scotland attempting to get under way, sailing for better times.