A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  At least there was somewhere for the displaced to go. The clansmen who had been unable to break Britannia were now given the option of joining it, and many took it. In the second half of the eighteenth century tens of thousands of Highlanders were recruited into the British army and saw action in its many theatres of war around the world from India to Canada. Some 70,000 were said to have served in British regiments during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. And the annals of imperial government, as well as the barracks and the battlefield, are dominated to an extraordinary degree by famous Scottish names: Munros and Elfinstones, Murrays, Gordons and Grants. Even when some of the most obstinate Jacobites – like Flora MacDonald and her husband, who had famously helped the Prince make his escape – emigrated to America, they declared themselves (in North Carolina) as resolutely patriotic British loyalists during the revolutionary wars.

  Instead of being colonized by the British Empire, then, the Scots colonized it themselves. Nearly half of those leaving fortunes worth more than £1000 in Jamaica in the second half of the eighteenth century were Scots. Glasgow grew rich off the transatlantic tobacco trade, and the great merchant capitalists like John Glassford and Alexander Speirs became some of the most economically powerful men in Britain. Speirs is a perfect example of the new kind of ‘North Briton’ whom Defoe had in mind when he attempted to imagine a happier and more prosperous Scotland within the union. Speirs had been a merchant of modest means until he married into one of the older tobacco families, the Buchanans. After that there was no stopping him, and Speirs, Bowman and Co. became one of the meteors of the transatlantic trade, sending their own Clydeside-built ships (using a dry dock constructed in 1762) on sixteen voyages to Virginia and the Carolinas between 1757 and 1765. In America, Scottish agents had established company warehouses that dealt directly with the growers, cutting out middlemen. Cheaper costs of handling and shipping the crop and a booming market throughout Britain meant a doubled turnover between the middle and the end of the century, and higher profits. Those profits (interrupted for a while by the depression of the early 1770s and the War of American Independence) in turn capitalized other sectors of the economy in which Speirs and his fellow Glaswegian tobacco lairds made investments: glassmaking, sugar refining, linen weaving.

  It was the vindication of Darien, and it was an improvement on Darien. Separate from England, the Scots who imagined a new kind of future for their country had been helpless to withstand the kind of political and military muscle that the English could bring to their economic intimidation. As an integral part of a united kingdom, they had been pulled into an increasingly indivisible economy that had transformed the entire country. The roads and bridges that had been built by General Wade and his teams of surveyors and engineers (including the artist Paul Sandby, who made a superlative record of the landscape), primarily for strategic purposes, now provided incomparably improved routes for the shippers of goods and the drovers of cattle and sheep. Highland products like kelp, slate, wool, whisky and even smoked fish (for there were hundreds of herring boats plying the waters of Loch Fyne alone) now found their way south to an English market. And the movement of men, merchandise and technology was genuinely two-way. James Watt, the Scot who provided a steam pump for the Greenock dry dock, teamed up with an Englishman, Matthew Boulton, to found Boulton & Watt, the Soho Engineering works near Birmingham; Coalbrookdale in the English Midlands sent its smelting technology north for the foundation of the Carron ironworks in Stirlingshire.

  In the circumstances it cannot possibly be fortuitous that it was in Scotland, in the ‘hotbeds of genius’ that flowered in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, that the first theory of progress was systematically articulated. It was built, in the first place, on the denial of, or at the very least the sceptical indifference to, knowledge allegedly based on revelation, such as miracles. The kinds of miracles that the Scots were interested in were happening on Clydeside. Scotland, which had for so long been torn apart by confessional wars, was being healed by the cult of reason that flowered in the academies and reading clubs of these three cities. The culture that had been captive to nostalgia was rapidly turning into the empire of hard facts, the temple of the gospel of modernity. Both could be found housed in the extraordinary three-volume Encyclopedia Britannica, first printed and published in Edinburgh in 1768–71. Originally conceived by the Scottish printers Andrew Bull and Colin Macfarquar, it was edited chiefly by another Scot, the printer and antiquary William Smellie. The first revised and enlarged, ten-volume edition, 1776–84, was the brain-child of James Tytler, poet, printer, surgeon, chemist and hot-air balloonist, the very prototype of the new Scot. Just as English tourists were beginning to come north and ruminate soulfully on the Scottish tragedy on windswept moors and misty-shrouded lochs, Scottish writers and philosophers were brushing away the cobwebs of sentiment. First see with absolute clarity, argued David Hume, how it is we can know things for sure; and once sure of the solidity of our knowledge, make it work to make a society in which happiness might prosper. Happiness was what Bonnie Prince Charlie had promised his followers at Glenfinnan. But the chances of its realization, thought Hume and his fellow philosophers, depended exactly on the degree to which Britons liberated themselves from the old siren songs.

  ‘This is the historical age and we are the historical people,’ Hume announced. But for once he did not mean that Scotland, or for that matter the Britain for which he was an unapologetic champion, was history’s fall-guy, doomed to the kind of repetitive cycles inscribed in the chronicles of antiquity. On the contrary, Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith looked at the epic of their own country and saw in one place the entire arc of human social development from hunting-gathering societies to nomadic herders, settled farmers and finally to true civilization: the beckoning world of commerce, science and industry, the world of the town. By the end of the century, no country in the world was urbanizing or industrializing more swiftly than Scotland.

  The true Scotland was now to be discovered in the handsome squares and streets of the new Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1767 James Craig, the nephew of the arch drum-beater for a united Britain and the lyricist of ‘Rule Britannia’, James Thomson, laid out the design for the New Town of Edinburgh. He inscribed on the plans some characteristic lines from his uncle’s verse, comparing the edifices of the new Britain to a new Rome – in fact an improved Rome. Unlike Charles Edward Stuart, who was trapped in one kind of Roman reverie, the new Scots would return from the Grand Tour perhaps bringing with them plaster casts or antique medals supplied by the entrepreneur Gavin Hamilton, full of plans to make classicism commercial. And none brought off this apparently oxymoronic feat more triumphantly than ‘Roman Bob’, Robert Adam.

  Thirteen years after Bonnie Prince Charlie brought the Jacobite army to its endgame at Derby, Robert Adam, the son of a successful Edinburgh architect, William Adam, came back to Derbyshire as a very different kind of invader, Britain’s first invincible king of style. And in that capacity he took the country by storm. At Kedleston Adam was not shy about showing off his learning. The south front of the house is modelled on the Arch of Constantine and the domed salon on the Pantheon. But Kedleston was emphatically not a museum disguised as a country house. It was a brand-new style for a new kind of aristocrat. Its owner, Nathaniel Curzon, first Baron Scarsdale, had made his money and political power not just from land and political connections, the Walpolean way, but from the Derbyshire coal mines as well. And what he evidently wanted was a house in which wealth would not overpower the visitor with swaggering ostentation, but speak instead of noble, Ciceronian austerity, a temple of virtue and contemplation, cool, pure and benevolent.

  Adam’s triumph at Kedleston made him the most sought-after architect of his generation, an authentically British designer with offices in both London and Edinburgh, building in both countries. And part of the secret of his success was his ability to translate into building style the principle, articulated by Adam Smith, that what his generation called ‘
opulence’ was not merely (as had been displayed at Houghton) a phenomenon of purely private accumulation; it was also a force for general happiness.

  In 1746, while the last unfortunate survivors of Cumberland’s terror were being tracked down, Adam Smith, the son of a customs officer on the north bank of the Firth of Forth, returned to his native country. He had turned his back on Oxford where, he wrote, the university had given up ‘even the faintest pretence of learning’. But he also turned his back on the Scottish past for an exhilarating vision of what might be to come. The vision was based on Smith’s rejection of guilt and sin, both the Catholic and Calvinist varieties. Instead, in The Wealth of Nations, written from 1766 to 1776, he laid out as a matter of historical fact man’s instinctive and wholly natural drive towards self-betterment. That such an instinct was driven by motives of vanity and acquisitiveness was neither here nor there. Allowed to follow their natural urges, men would create, without even consciously willing it, a better world: a richer, more educated and freer society. And here Smith also turned away from the immense apparatus of Hanoverian state power. In the new world he was imagining it was no longer the enemy. It was simply an irrelevance. For no government was needed to legislate wealth; indeed, any that imagined it could was simply the victim of self-delusion. The best government was that which got out of the way and permitted the invisible hand of the market to do its work. The economic world, he wrote, was like a watch, the springs and wheels ‘all admirably adjusted to the ends for which it was made’; so too the countless movements of industrious men would perfectly interconnect for the purposes for which God had made them.

  That purpose was progress, material, moral and intellectual. And it was one of history’s sweetest ironies that it fell to Scotland, bloodied, mutilated Scotland, to show Britannia the way ahead. If you want to see the future, the Scottish philosophers said, forget the vainglorious monuments of England’s past, the dusty tombs and forbidding cathedrals. Come north, instead, to the new ‘hotbeds of genius’, to Glasgow and Edinburgh, and see what lies in store for Britain, perhaps for the world.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE WRONG EMPIRE

  The Scene: Represents a plain surrounded by woods. On one side a cottage, on the other flocks and herds – distant prospect. A hermit’s cave in full view overhung with wild trees; wild and grotesque.

  Enter: ALFRED with the Earl of Devon.

  How long, O, ever gracious heavens, how long

  Shall war thus desolate this prostrate land?

  AS OUR ANGLO-Saxon hero, on the run from the Danes and flagging badly in energy and morale, was revealed by the candle-lights (in the usual tragick-antique costume of cuirass above, skirts below) bewailing his country’s fate, the audience, we must assume, was putting on its own show of rapt attention. Anything less would have been not just impolite but imprudent too. For Alfred. A Masque, written in tandem by the Scottish poets James Thomson and David Mallett (né Malloch, but anglicized to improve his chances among the Sassenachs), with music by Thomas Arne, had been commissioned by the grandest of patrons, the hope of Free Britons: Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales. The performance at the prince’s house, Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, was ostensibly private. But in every way that really mattered it was an occasion designed to advertise publicly, especially in the gossip-greedy press, the credentials of the prince and his supporters as True Patriots. The day, 1 August 1740, had been carefully chosen. It was the anniversary of the accession of his grandfather, George I, whom Frederick affected to respect in proportion to his public loathing for his own parents. It was also the day after the third birthday of his daughter, Princess Augusta, whose arrival had been made memorable by Frederick snatching away his wife, on the very point of delivery, from the king and queen and insisting she give birth instead in his house at St James’s Palace. If Queen Caroline’s verdict on her son, ‘the greatest ass . . . the greatest liar . . . and the greatest beast in the world’ might seem a little strong, especially when she made it no secret that to have him disappear from the world would not occasion waterfalls of grief, it was none the less understandable. But Frederick thought he had time on his side. His father, George II, was fifty-six; his unlamented mother had already departed three years before. He, on the other hand, was thirty-three and coming into his own.

  Frederick would disappoint his followers by dying of a brain abscess in 1751. But on this summer night at Cliveden, with the Thames flowing sweetly by, it was possible to overlook his gambling and his women and his temper and see him instead as the cello-playing virtuous virtuoso, the epitome of the patriot prince, the guardian of liberty. Around him were gathered his political enthusiasts, erstwhile Walpole allies, but many of them had been turned out of office in 1737 when the tug-of-war over the prince’s revenues was at its fiercest. Now they were bitter enemies of the government. In all likelihood there would have been George Bubb Dodington, the most recent reconversion to the prince’s interest, swathed in brocaded silk beneath which his considerable bulk struggled, as Horace Walpole noted, to break free of its moorings. There too would have been Sir Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham (whom Walpole had not merely peremptorily dismissed but, unforgivably as far as Cobham was concerned, stripped of his command of the King’s Own Horse regiment), with some of his own protégés, the ‘Cobham cubs’, his nephews the Grenville brothers, and William Pitt. There might also have been dissident Whigs like John Carteret. It is tempting, too, to include in the audience a particular ex-Tory politician for whom an Anglo-Saxon allegory would have had special significance: Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke.

  Though Bolingbroke’s disastrous flirtation with Jacobitism in 1714 was enough to bar him from the House of Lords, he was still an immensely influential figure. In 1738 he had published his Patriot King expressly as vocational guidance for the Prince of Wales. For Frederick, Bolingbroke had designed an improbably disinterested identity that would transcend selfish factionalism. As king, Frederick would ascend the throne sworn to purge the country of venality and oppression. But since Bolingbroke had also produced a history of medieval Britain purporting to see, from the very beginning, the forces of liberty and despotism locked in combat, Frederick’s role would be to restore the ancient Anglo-Saxon spirit of freedom, which had its crowning glory in the reign of Alfred. It was Alfred, it was said (wrongly), who had originated trial by jury and who was habitually referred to as the ‘Guardian of Liberty’. The prince’s own ambition to be considered the Hanoverian Alfred had already been signalled in 1735 when he had commissioned a statue of the Anglo-Saxon hero king from the fashionable sculptor John Michael Rysbrack for the garden of his town house on Pall Mall.

  Mallett and Thomson, the anti-Jacobite Scots, were nothing if not obliging, and what they produced for the prince and his circle that evening in 1740 was, in effect, Bolingbroke set to verse and music. Given the importance of the occasion, there could be no stinting on the performers. From Drury Lane, William Milward played Alfred while the great Kitty Clive took the part of the sympathetic shepherdess Emma. The musical attraction was the famous Covent Garden tenor Thomas Salway, who doubled as both the shepherd Corin and a bard whose solo rendition of a new song by Arne at the end of the masque was to be critical to the success of the entire evening. Before that cheering finale, though, the up-against-it king was roused to a fresh resolve to do battle with the alien forces of oppression by the spirits of three of his most glorious descendants, conjured up from the future by the clairvoyant hermit. The three royal phantoms – the Black Prince, Elizabeth I and William III – offer Alfred an inspirational glimpse of the imperial destiny awaiting his sea-girt realm (and unburden themselves of long, pull-yourself-together-for-Britannia homilies). But for the war-fevered audience of 1740 the last two would have had particular resonance, cast as they were as royal warriors for an expressly Protestant, anti-Spanish, Gallophobic nation. At that very moment the heir to the naval tradition, the universally acclaimed ‘Free Briton’, Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon, was busy fitting out
a new fleet intended to attack the eastern end of Cuba.

  His martial ardour duly rekindled, Alfred swears to rid the country of the foreign brutes: the cue for Salway to step out and celebrate the moment of patriotic reconsecration:

  The Muses, still with freedom found

  Shall to thy happy coast repair

  Blest isle! With matchless beauty crownd

  And manly hearts to guard thee.

  At which point Arne’s band would have struck up their fiddles, kettledrums, oboes and brass, and taking centre stage, Salway (knowing a hit when he sang one) would have given the moment its all, his tenor lustily mounting the scale of the first verse like a sailor climbing to the crow’s nest:

  When Britain fir- ir- ir- irst at HEAVEN’S command

  A -ro- oh oh ohse from out the a-ay- zure main

  A -roh-oh -ohse from out the azure main