And guardian angels sung the strain:
Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves!
Britons never shall be slaves.
Here was the Scottish Whig ideal: we are Britons, Scots and English all, belonging to one nation and enjoying the same privileges and liberties. All the same, although it was Thomson’s own home of Southdean in the Tweed river valley that inspired his poetic landscapes, and although he studied in Edinburgh and lived there for nine years, it was not until he went to London in 1726 and found a fellow Scot named Millan to publish the first part of his cycle of poems, The Seasons, that he found the literary success he craved.11 An English, not a Scottish, reading public made Thomson one of the most celebrated writers of the eighteenth century—and English, not his native Scots, served as the vehicle for his poetic muse.
So which to use, English or Scots (not, we note, Gaelic, which hardly any urban dweller spoke)? Despite their shared origin as dialects of old Anglo-Saxon, the two languages diverged widely in vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Enlivened by borrowings from French and Scandinavian as well as Gaelic, broad Scots could be heard up and down the streets of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, as well as in the farms and valleys of the Clyde and Tweed. For centuries it had served as the language of law, government, commerce, and the Kirk. It had also spawned a rich literary heritage during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as even a dedicated Scottish Whig such as William Robertson readily admitted. But now, as the eighteenth century dawned, it seemed second-class. As the career of James Thomson demonstrated, any Scottish modern or “polite” culture would have to take root in the idiom from the south.
For most Scots, learning to converse and write in English was as difficult as learning a new language. Mistakes in grammar, as well as accent, would constantly give them away. David Hume conversed in broad Scots all his life, but he always regretted that he never learned to speak English as well as he wrote it. He confessed that he and his fellow Scots were “unhappy in our Accent and Pronunciation.” It was not easy to pronounce night as nite instead of nicht, or say brite instead of bricht. It was hard to remember to say old instead of auld; above instead of aboon; talk instead of crack; a gathering instead of a rockin’; to say “It made me very glad” instead of “It pat me fidgin’ fain” or “I am angry” instead of “I’m a’ in a pelter” and “I have drunk a great deal” instead of “I drang a muckle.” Hume confessed to an English correspondent, “Notwithstanding all the Pains, which I have taken in the Study of the English Language, I am still jealous of my Pen. As to my Tongue, you have seen, that I regard it as totally desperate and irreclaimable.”
However, the person who best and most famously represents the problems of being a Scot in Georgian Britain is James Boswell.
Boswell is one of those writers whose reputation has suffered from his own success. Generations have come to take him for granted. In his Life of Johnson, Boswell turned himself into a sensitive, self-effacing sounding board in order to reveal the character of someone he believed to be not only interesting and admirable, but a truly great man—much as he would have done if he had ever finished his biography of Lord Kames. His voluminous diaries suffer from the same virtues. Boswell made them an absolutely honest and candid record of his own thoughts, experiences, and emotions. They present us with “Bozzie” not as he appeared to others but as he appeared to himself: his fantasies, ambitions, missteps, anxieties, and weaknesses are all revealed in detail. They dominate our recollection of reading them—and of him. Taken together, they have created the image of James Boswell as a genial, bumbling mediocrity, who happened to compose a literary masterpiece almost by accident.
Now, finally, we are beginning to realize that Boswell was a truly gifted writer and an accomplished man, that rare combination of an intellectual with broad human sympathies as well as a deep personal honesty. He grew up in Edinburgh under the shadow of the impossibly high demands of his disapproving father, Lord Auchinleck of the Court of Session, and found an emotional and intellectual counterweight in his mentor, Lord Kames. It was Kames who encouraged Boswell’s intellectual and literary interests, and who probably enabled Boswell, against his own inclinations, to complete his studies to become a lawyer.
The idea of setting off for London was Boswell’s own, however. He was twenty years old when he first arrived in 1760, determined to succeed in the city that seemed the center of civilized life. He was, as he described himself, “a young fellow whose happiness had always centered in London, who had at last got there, and had begun to taste its delights.” He fantasized about “getting into the Guards, being about Court, enjoying the happiness of the beau monde and the company of men of Genius.”
One thing stood in the way of this fantasy: being Scottish. When he first met Dr. Johnson, his first stammered words were, “I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” Johnson’s reply was devastating: “That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.” It was a bad season for being a Scot in London. The new king, George III, had selected an extremely unpopular prime minister of Scottish origin, Lord Bute, and political feelings ran high against “North Britons.” Boswell even attended a play at which the audience kept shouting over and over, “No Scots! No Scots!” The radical John Wilkes published daily diatribes against Scottish immigrants, attacking them as ignorant, grasping, and corrupt: “The principal part of the Scottish nobility are tyrants,” Wilkes sneered, “and the whole of the common people are slaves.”
In this hostile atmosphere, Boswell struggled with his giveaway Scottish diction, just as Hume did. When he introduced General Sir Alexander MacDonald to Dr. Johnson in March 1772, the distinguished soldier remarked, “I have been correcting several Scotch accents in my friend Boswell. I doubt, Sir, if any Scotchman ever attains to a perfect English pronunciation.” Johnson replied loftily, “Why, Sir, few of ’em do. . . . But, sir, there can be no doubt that a man who conquers nineteen parts of the Scottish accent may conquer the twentieth.” Later, Boswell met a Dr. Kenrick, who claimed “he taught a man from Aberdeen to speak good English in six weeks.” Kenrick explained to Boswell that his great difficulty was to get the Aberdonian to stop lilting his words as he spoke, as a Scotsman did and an Englishman did not. Kenrick finally told the man, “Sir, you don’t speak at all. You sing.”
Today we would naturally expect this sort of prejudice and “negative stereotyping” to breed a deep cultural resentment among educated Scots, or at least a backlash. Remarkably, and characteristically, it had just the opposite effect. Boswell not only read Wilkes’s anti-Scottish scandal sheet (he admired its “poignant acrimony,” as he put it), but when they met he found Wilkes to be funny and charming, and they struck up a lasting friendship. Intellectuals in Edinburgh were thrilled, not offended, when in the summer of 1761 the Irish actor and “orthoepist” (or pronunciation expert) Thomas Sheridan arrived in town to offer a series of lectures on English elocution. More than three hundred gentlemen, “the most eminent in this country for their rank and abilities,” attended Sheridan’s lectures (one of them, we note, was Boswell). They encouraged Sheridan to enlarge on those aspects of spoken English “with regard to which Scotsmen are most ignorant, and the dialect of the country most imperfect.” They even encouraged him to run a separate set of lectures for ladies. Sheridan, whose son Richard would become a celebrated playwright and author of The School for Scandal, sold places at his lectures for a guinea each—in today’s money, almost a hundred dollars—as well as subscriptions for his forthcoming book for half a guinea. The Edinburgh town council even made him a honorary freeman of the city. All in all, it was a remarkable summer, not only for Sheridan but also for Edinburgh’s elite, whose cultural anxiety evidently ran so deep that they were eager to be lectured on good English from an Irish actor.
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 Sc
ots 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.
II
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 MacDonnell13 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.
How the Scots Invented the Modern World Page 14
