Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  Walter Scott claimed a longstanding interest in the Highland rogue, collecting stories and even acquiring some of his alleged possessions He bought a gun, a dirk and a sporran, items presumably not handed over to General Wade’s men. They are still on display at his house at Abbotsford. When Scott had completed the novel in late 1817, he sent it off to the his publisher with a jaunty verse:

  With great joy

  I send you Roy

  ’Twas a tough job

  But we’re done with Rob.

  The sales of the novel confirmed Archibald Constable’s marketing instincts and it was a runaway best-seller. Copies comprised an entire cargo loaded at the port of Leith on a ship bound for an eager London market. So widespread was its popularity that, by itself, Rob Roy fostered an enduring cultural stereotype. Highlanders had long been seen as savage, even subhuman, but Scott added a romantic sheen, a windswept nobility seasoned by a touch of mystery as the mists swirled around the mountains and the men who knew their secret places. With each passing decade, it seemed, Rob Roy grew more and more like Robin Hood. The atmosphere around him was made seductive by the power of Walter Scott’s storytelling. Where the Highlands had been a threat, a dangerous source of sedition and barbarism, the novel helped consign all that to a comfortable past, the stuff of novels and plays. A very colourful and distinct version of Scottishness – and one that was harmless and quaint – had been created by a Lowlander.

  Five years after the publication of Rob Roy, Scott would create an even greater fiction, one whose popularity has grown hugely in recent times – and, remarkably, place the disnamed and formerly reviled MacGregor clan at the centre of a Highland fantasy. At his meeting with the Prince Regent, the future George IV, in 1815, ‘the author of Waverley’ discussed the prospect of a royal visit to Scotland. Not since the Act of Union in 1707 had a reigning monarch ventured north of the Tweed. Scott was anxious about the growth of radicalism in Scotland and keen to foster a sense of national unity, what was needed for peace and good order. Soon after his accession in 1820, the new king had visited Ireland, the scene of a much more recent rebellion, and, for the sake of balance and even-handedness, it was thought that George IV should pay a state visit to Scotland.

  Later to become known as ‘the King’s Jaunt’, a state visit had been mooted for some time but, when it eventually came, the decision that it would take place was made suddenly. In July 1822, Edinburgh’s town council was horrified to be informed that the king and his retinue would be landing at Leith harbour in two weeks’ time. Thrown into paroxysms of dismay and disorganisation (who knew how such a thing should be done?), the councillors quickly resolved to hand over the running of the entire jamboree to an outsider. Walter Scott was to create the programme, look and tone of the state visit. With only days to come up with a workable plan and enact it, Scott fell back on fiction, turned it into fact – or at least ceremony – and set the Highlands, Highlanders, the clans and tartan at the centre of it all. Rob Roy would have been astonished to see the MacGregors leading the celebrations.

  At a levee held at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, George IV made a spectacular entrance. Swathed in a bright scarlet sett of tartan that would become known as Royal Stewart, he wore a Glengarry bonnet stuck with eagle feathers, two belts (perhaps to restrain his vast belly – the king tipped the scales at almost 20 stone) – and a silk and goatskin sporran, and the whole outfit was set off by gems, silver buckles, a dirk, a powder horn and diced stockings. His kilt sat well above the knee and, to disguise his grotesquely swollen and veined legs, the king wore flesh-coloured tights. Lady Dalrymple was heard to remark, ‘Since he is here for such a short time, it is as well that we see so much of him.’

  It was an astonishing bouleversement. Scott’s solution to the problem of the Jacobites and the fact that the last royal visit to Edinburgh was by Bonnie Prince Charlie at the head of an army of Highland savages was to embrace it all utterly.

  The first act of the royal visit was a procession to conduct the recently rediscovered Scottish regalia from Edinburgh Castle down the Royal Mile to Holyroodhouse. The escort was none other than Clan Gregor. And at one of several banquets in the king’s ample presence, the chief, Sir Evan MacGregor, proposed a loyal toast to ‘the chief of chiefs’. That arch equivocator and survivor, Rob Roy, would have smiled.

  Others scowled. In August 1822, many in Edinburgh did not approve of Walter Scott’s efforts ‘to turn [them] into a nation of Highlanders’, according to his son-in-law and biographer, J.G. Lockhart. This was no exaggeration. In ‘Hints Addressed to the Inhabitants of Edinburgh and Others in Prospect of His Majesty’s Visit’, a pamphlet circulated before the royal visit, allegedly written by an ‘Old Citizen’, Scott’s most emphatic hint sounded more like a direction, a theatre direction: ‘We are the CLAN and our King is the CHIEF’. Other stage directions included the burning of a Fiery Cross on Arthur’s Seat. This traditional and suitably dramatic call to arms for the clans had featured in The Lady of the Lake and it was to become a notorious symbol for the most infamous clan of them all, the Ku Klux Klan. And grim contemporary historical realities sometimes intruded, at least by implication. Scott organised a Gathering of the Clans, the real ones, that is, but only five attended, including, of course, the ubiquitous MacGregors. Others such as a contingent from Sutherland and another from Glen Garry came in response to critical mutterings that the clan chiefs were depopulating their estates – which many were. It was more than a bitter irony that, at exactly the moment when Edinburgh was filled with tartan-clad Lowlanders and a German king all pretending to be Highlanders, the real originators of this bowdlerised version of their culture were being ruthlessly cleared off the land as aristocrats forgot the bonds and obligations of the past and focused on future profit.

  The last official engagement of the King’s Jaunt to Edinburgh was perhaps the most ironic, not to say most cynical. At the Theatre Royal, a dramatised version of Scott’s novel Rob Roy had been hurriedly cast and rehearsed for a command performance. The play ended with the actors in a rendition of ‘Pardon Now the Bold Outlaw’ and a more direct appeal to ignore history and install Scotland fully back in royal favour. The last song was cringingly entitled ‘A’ That’s Past Forget – Forgie’. No one blinked. It was all part of Walter Scott’s hypnotic mirage. Earlier in the week, the king himself showed that he had read the script when he proposed a toast to the people who had attempted to remove his grandfather from the British throne and, surprisingly, to Scotland’s excellent tradition of baking. To ‘all the chieftains and clans of Scotland, long may God bless the Land of Cakes’, proclaimed George IV and history faded into nothing more than a colourful, tartan-clad, picturesque backdrop. The recent past was not so much forgotten as transformed into comforting, harmless and politically prudent parody.

  Lockhart caught the paradoxes perfectly when he wrote:

  It appeared to be very generally thought, when the first programmes were issued, that the Highlanders, their kilts and their bagpipes, were to occupy a great deal too much space . . . With all respect and admiration for the noble and generous qualities which our countrymen of the Highland clans have so often exhibited, it was difficult to forget that they had always constituted a small, and almost always unimportant part of the Scottish population; and when one reflected how miserably their numbers had of late years been reduced in consequence of the selfish and hard-hearted policy of their landlords, it almost seemed as if there was a cruel mockery in giving so much prominence to their pretensions. But there could be no question that they were picturesque – and their enthusiasm was too sincere not to be catching; so that by and by even the coolest-headed Sassenach felt his heart . . . ‘warm to the tartan’.

  In the developing story of Scotland’s sense of herself, the King’s Jaunt marked a clear turning point. By accepting a caricature of Highland culture as representative of the whole nation, Scotland self-consciously carved out a very distinctive place in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. K
ilts were different and, by wrapping them around Lowland backsides, Walter Scott solved a fundamental difficulty. Those who lived in Lowland Scotland, the vast majority as Lockhart pointed out, had, in truth, much in common with their neighbours in Northern England. Scots was a recognisable northern dialect of English, a clear cousin to what was spoken on the banks of the Tyne and in Durham, and there were close economic and ethnic links. To prevent Scotland becoming little more than a district of England, to make her look distinctive, Scott turned north to the Highlands, frisked the Gaels for their emblems and appropriated them wholesale. And Scots men and women bought into this new and bogus version of Scottishness with great enthusiasm and in near-complete ignorance of the culture that had given rise to it. Tartan crossed the Highland Line but all of the more complex aspects of Highland society, such as language, did not.

  Meanwhile the king climbed out of his belts, plaids and flesh-coloured tights to take ship for London and recover from three weeks of banquets and entertainments. And Walter Scott returned home to the Borders a hero. With the help of the literary efforts of his friend, James Hogg, he had already stimulated the textile industry to produce tweeds, checked cloth and the sort of plaid thrown over the shoulder of the romantic heroes of Waverley and Rob Roy. And, after the immense success of the King’s Jaunt, tartan became extremely popular and the mills of Galashiels, Selkirk and Hawick clacked and thrummed as they attempted to keep up with demand.

  Perhaps the most obvious and enduring legacy of the visit of George IV can be seen at weddings in Scotland. No matter where the bridegroom was born and raised, he and his best men almost always walk up the aisle dressed as Highlanders. Many other formal occasions pull kilts and sporrans out of the wardrobe – graduations, dinners, Hogmanay and a host of other important moments persuade men to dress like tidy versions of Rob Roy and the men who charged across the heather at Culloden. At the end of the 18th century, no Lowlanders would have been seen dead in a kilt but at the outset of the 21st, few need any persuasion to buckle on the tartan.

  After 1822, momentum built as royal reinforcement for Walter Scott’s version of Highland culture redoubled and the real thing began to fade from the pages of history. George IV’s niece, Victoria, embraced all things tartan with even more enthusiasm, in more than one sense. After the death of Prince Albert and a protracted period of mourning, she began a relationship with John Brown. He was the Gaelic-speaking son of a crofter from Craithenard, near Balmoral, and the surprising object of the widowed queen’s devotion. A new image of the Highlander, steadfast and immovably loyal, was constructed around Brown. And the openness of Victoria’s affection was striking – she dedicated a book to her ‘beloved friend, John Brown’ and took a portrait of him on a bracelet to her grave.

  And this, in turn, appears to suggest that there was nothing to hide, no hint of a physical relationship. Perhaps such a thing was so far beyond any precedent that it was inconceivable. Nevertheless, it was very significant that an ordinary Highlander could find himself at the heart of politics, beloved by the Queen Empress, her close confidant. The power of the illusion conjured by Walter Scott in 1822 created the possibility of a relationship otherwise unthinkable.

  Victoria and Albert first visited Scotland in 1842, taking care to read Scott’s The Lady of the Lake while touring Perthshire. Summer in Scotland for the royal family quickly became an annual trip (it still is) and, by 1848, the queen and her consort had ventured further north, emphatically crossing the Highland Line. The Balmoral Estate was bought and, in place of the demolished old house, the familiar pepper-pot turrets of the Scots Baronial style rose up. No anxiety existed that the former owners, the Farquharsons of Balmoral, had been enthusiastic Jacobites, fighting against Victoria’s dynasty in 1715 and again in 1745. In fact, the queen unblushingly declared that, at heart, she was really a Jacobite – a remark that at least shows how neutered and safe Highland history had become.

  The Munshi

  John Brown may have been the most famous of Queen Victoria’s male companions in her widowhood but he was not the only one. After Brown’s death in 1883, an Indian servant known as the Munshi, ‘the teacher’, became close to the Queen-Empress. Hafiz Abdul Karim’s elevation to royal favour infuriated the more conservative members of the household who whispered that he was ‘the brown Brown’ and often attempted to reduce him to the ranks. The Munshi appears to have been no saint and he contracted gonorrhoea. Surprisingly Queen Victoria was sympathetic and even forgave him when he engineered the publication of a photograph of him and herself in the Daily Graphic in 1897. After Victoria’s death, he retired to an estate in India she had left to him in her will.

  In the mid 19th century, the royal family was the acme of style and, in imitation of Balmoral, hundreds of shooting lodges were built in the Highlands, many of them very grand. After Albert’s death and perhaps because of her attachment to faithful John Brown, Victoria spent increasingly long periods at Balmoral, up to four months each year. This was not popular with her government and several discomfited prime ministers were forced to make long train journeys to attend meetings of the privy council.

  In 1867, Victoria published the immensely popular Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands, following it up with More Leaves in 1883. As much as Scott’s, these book were very influential. They treated the Highlands as scenery, a grandeur to be walked or ridden through, a place of tranquillity and wilderness, somewhere that hunting the four-legged monarchs of the glen for sport was somehow appropriate. Victoria’s jottings were, of course, unhampered by much knowledge of history and they certainly made no mention of what was really going on beyond the manicured policies of Balmoral Castle.

  The great 20th-century novelist and poet Iain Crichton Smith remembered another narrative. Here is his English translation of part of his own poem, ‘The Exiles’:

  The many ships that left our country

  With white wings for Canada.

  They are like handkerchiefs in our memories

  And the brine like tears

  And in their masts like sailors singing

  Like birds on branches.

  That sea of May running in such blue,

  A moon at night, a sun at daytime,

  And the moon like a yellow fruit,

  Like a plate on a wall

  To which they raise their hands

  Like a silver magnet

  With piercing rays

  Streaming into the heart.

  The emigrant ships that slipped over Atlantic horizons were one of the defining images of Fuadach nan Gaidheal, ‘the Highland Clearances’. As a brutal aristocracy pushed their tenants off the fertile inland straths and glens they had farmed for generations, the landscape emptied. In place of busy crofting townships, sheep farms and deer forests were established. Many Highlanders left, crowded on to the emigrant ships or clung to marginal and congested pockets of poor land around the coasts. None had security of tenure and they were severely restricted in how they could scratch a living from the thin soil, the shoreline and the sea.

  The contrasts between show, or myth-history, and what was actually taking place could be chilling, almost obscene in their cynicism. Sir Henry Raeburn, the great Edinburgh portraitist, painted Colonel Alastair MacDonell of Glengarry in all his pomp and finery – what he no doubt sported during the theatricals of the King’s Jaunt. Looking off to his right at an imagined picturesque scene of bens and glens, MacDonell holds a musket and behind him the iconography of clan warfare hangs on a wall – a targe with crossed basket-hilted swords and a powder horn. Wearing the feileadh mor, the ‘great kilt’, with a plaid over one shoulder, a sgian dubh, a ‘dirk’, in his stocking and a sword, MacDonell of Glengarry looks the epitome of a Highland chief, a war leader of his faithful clansmen. Scott was impressed and he used him as a model for Fergus Mac-Ivor, the wild Highlander in Waverley.

  In reality MacDonell and his tacksmen were ruthlessly evicting the clansmen and their families from the vast Glengarry esta
tes. Timber was felled for ready cash and sheep farms set up on land worked by MacDonell’s people since a time out of mind. Hundreds were herded on to the emigrant ships and Allan MacDougall, the blind bard of Glengarry, lamented this disaster, what he called a cross for his kinsmen:

  Thainig oirnn a dh’Albainn crois,

  Tha daoine bochda nochdte ris,

  Gun bhiadh, gun aidoch, gun chluain:

  Tha ’n Airde-tuath air a sgrios.

  There has come on us in Scotland a cross,

  Poor people are naked before it,

  Without food, without clothes, without pasture:

  The North is utterly destroyed.

  This is an excerpt from ‘The Song to the Lowland Shepherds’, men who crossed the Highland Line to establish the new sheep farms.

  In 1851, a year before Victoria bought Balmoral, the pace and scale of clearance increased. After the potato famine that ravaged Ireland and made Highland life almost impossible for thousands, some landlords grew impatient. ‘Redundancy of the population is notoriously the evil, and emigration is the only effectual remedy,’ wrote Sir James Matheson, the owner of large estates on the Isle of Lewis. Between 1851 and 1853, he and his factors had pressed 3,200 of the island population on to ships bound for Canada. Amongst them was a young man, Domhnall Ban Crosd, and, forty years later, in 1890, he returned to Lewis to see what had happened to the place where he had been born, the township of Carnish on the Atlantic coast. His nephew, Donald MacIver, took the old man to see it. Carnish was deserted. Domhnall Ban wept, saying, ‘Chaneil nith an seo a bha e, ach an ataireachd na mara.’ – ‘There is nothing here now as it was, except for the surge of the sea.’