How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  Thomas Babington Macaulay was an example of just how far a young man could go in those years, if he had talent, ambition, and wrote for the Edinburgh Review. He was the son of a Scottish abolitionist from Inverary who moved to London, where he became the prime mover in the evangelical reform- and abolition-minded circle known as the “Clapham sect.” Although Zachary Macaulay’s precocious son went to Cambridge instead of Edinburgh or Glasgow, and trained for the English rather than the Scottish bar, he knew the Scottish historians almost by heart, and automatically fit in with the Edinburgh Review set now living in London. It was Brougham who recommended him to Francis Jeffrey as a potential reviewer, and it was his essay on John Milton in the August 1825 issue that made Macaulay famous almost overnight. By defending Milton’s revolutionary politics in the English civil war, and his role in the execution of Charles I, Macaulay turned England’s most famous epic poet, the author of Paradise Lost, into a champion of the radical Whigs. He became the latest sensation at Holland House dinner parties, leaving guests agog at his eloquence and erudition. Four years later, Lord Lansdowne, another of Dugald Stewart’s English pupils and leading Whig, offered him one of the seats in Parliament under his control. In the election of February 1830, Thomas Macaulay entered the House of Commons.

  By now the demands for reform had reached critical mass. The year before, the Tories, under the Duke of Wellington, had consented to another major topic in the Whig reform program, Catholic emancipation, but now they dug in their heels on making any further changes. The country was in a deep economic depression. In the Midlands of England, workers and businessmen joined together in the Birmingham Political Union; in the south, laborers rioted and burned farm machinery. After twenty-three years as the party in opposition, the Whigs sensed that their moment had come. On November 2, Wellington made his speech in the House of Lords denying any need for a reform bill. On the fifteenth the Tories lost their last vote and Wellington, the Iron Duke, went to Buckingham Palace to resign.

  Five hundred miles away, in far-off Lothian, a team of day laborers were breaking stones in a seaside quarry when the news came that the Tories were out of power. One of them, Alexander Somerville, who later wrote Autobiography of a Working Man, remembered: “We took off our hats and caps, and loud above the north wind, and the roaring sea, shouted ‘Henry Brougham forever!’”

  The Whigs were in. In the new cabinet were no less than four former Stewart pupils: Lansdowne, Palmerston, Sir John Russell—and, of course, Henry Brougham. In his explosive, mercurial way, Brougham was the driving force behind the Whig program for reform. It was not as radical as some wished (no vote for working-class Britons and no secret ballot), but it was far more advanced and comprehensive than anything that had ever been proposed by a sitting government.

  Brougham would, however, play no role in promoting it in his former arena, the House of Commons. The only position available for him in the Whig cabinet was lord chancellor. The new prime minister, Lord Grey, distrusted Brougham, as many of his own party did; even the prospect of having him as chancellor, a politically minor post, made them uneasy. When the cabinet learned that Brougham had accepted, one of them murmured, “Then we shall never have another comfortable moment in this room.”

  But taking his seat in the upper house as Lord Brougham, he made huge efforts to push the bill through. And sitting as England’s most important judicial figure, he also began reforming its legal system and the Court of Chancery. He abolished the abuses and bottlenecks that had tied up lawsuits for generations (and which are described in comic yet horrifying detail in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House) and pushed England’s common-law system forward to meet the modern age.

  Instead of Brougham, the party’s leading orator in the Commons was the Scottish abolitionist’s son, and in the end Macaulay’s contribution was more far-reaching and profound. His speeches gave the Reform Bill a historical grounding, and therefore a legitimacy, that even its most fervent supporters had never imagined was there. Thirty-three years old, upright and motionless, “a little man of small voice, and affected utterance, clipping his words and hissing like a serpent,” Macaulay hammered away day after day and in speech after speech. Each time he came back to the same point. This was a decisive moment in English history, and the history of Britain, and that humanity’s political progress now required another turn of the wheel.

  It was all, or virtually all, the Scottish school, evoked as justification for a new way to see political change: as reform, an action that preserves at the same time as it alters and improves. Macaulay was quite capable of playing the demagogue, as other Whigs did, warning listeners of the tumult and even bloodshed that could erupt if the bill failed to pass. “The danger is terrible,” he would say. “The time is short. If this bill should be rejected, I pray to God that none of those who concur in rejecting it may ever remember their votes with unavailing remorse, amidst the wreck of laws, the confusion of ranks, the spoliation of property, and the dissolution of social order.” He stressed, “The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onwards, constitutions stand still.”

  But most of his oratory evoked a larger historical canvas, as depicted by the leading figures of the Scottish school from Kames and Hume to Ferguson and Millar. It told of man’s progress from barbarism to civilization, of which an essential part was the growth of political liberty, and participation in self-government. He packed into his speeches a wealth of historical detail and imagery, which he later reused in his classic History of England: “In listening to him,” said one spectator, “you seemed to be like a traveler passing through a rich and picturesque country by railroad.” He mentioned the great figures of the English past, and familiar moments in the securing of constitutional liberty: Magna Carta, the Petition of Right of 1628, the Glorious Revolution of 1688—moments sacred to Tories as well as Whigs. This was another, he said: parliamentary reform was another step “in one great progress” toward Englishmen securing their rights and the nation securing its freedom. In this sense, he suggested that the Reform Bill was a matter of historical inevitablity. “Good or bad, the thing must be done,” he said at one point, “a law as strong as the laws of attraction and motion [in physics] has decreed it.”

  Macaulay had found a way to fuse the conservatism of Edmund Burke, whom he greatly admired, with the radicalism of Brougham. The English constitution, with its unique brand of self-government, had saved itself through reform in the past, he asserted, and it was about to do so again. His speeches created a historical framework for Brougham’s political liberalism, and moved the assumptions of the Scottish school directly into the heart of Britain’s political consciousness. And in so doing he may have saved the Reform Bill.

  At last, on the night of March 22, 1831, the bill came up for its crucial second reading. Macaulay described to a friend the drama as the house “divided” (that is, as members passed through opposite doors to register their vote) and the Whigs realized they had 302 votes in favor, but still had no idea how many the opposing Tories could muster:

  The doors were thrown open and in they came. . . . First we heard that they were three hundred and three—then the number rose to three hundred and ten, then went down to three hundred and seven. Alexander Baring [later Lord Ashburton, and another Dugald Stewart pupil] told me that he had counted and that they were three hundred and four. We were all breathless with anxiety, when Charles Wood who stood near the door jumped on a bench and cried out—“They are only three hundred and one.” We set up a shout that you might have heard to Charing Cross—waving our hats—stamping against the floor and clapping our hands—The tellers scarcely got through the crowd—for the House was thronged up to the table. . . . You might have heard a pin drop as [Chief Whip] Duncannon read the numbers. Then again the shouts broke out—and many of us shed tears. . . .

  As Macaulay left (it was now past four o’clock in the morning), he hailed a cab. The first thing the driver asked was, “Is the bill carried?” Macaulay answe
red, “Yes, by one.” “Thank God for it, sir,” the man replied.

  The last chance the Tories had was the House of Lords. On October 8 the Reform Bill came before the upper house, and Brougham made a final speech in support of it, the longest ever given in the House of Lords. He finished dramatically, kneeling before the hushed house, his arms stretched out over his head, as he pleaded, “I solemnly adjure you—I warn you—I implore you—yea, on my bended knees, I supplicate you—Reject not this Bill.”

  Yet reject it they did, by a wide margin. The question was what to do next; the country demanded reform or revolution, yet the Lords were adamant. It was Brougham who came up with the solution. There could be no compromise on the bill itself, he told the rest of the cabinet. It would be a mistake “to sacrifice a tittle of our principle or a grain of the Confidence we had gained in the House of Commons and Country by any thing like negotiation.” Instead, he urged, the government should threaten to create enough new peers to allow the bill to pass. It was pure political brinksmanship. If the House of Lords did not budge, they would see their influence diluted and their hallowed institution destroyed—and the Reform Bill would still pass.

  It worked. The new King, William IV, agreed in advance to create sixty new peers if the upper house refused to pass the bill as it was, without amendments. The House of Lords gave way, and on June 7, 1832, the Reform Bill became law.

  Exactly 125 years earlier, the Scottish old regime had abolished itself, under an onslaught of English-inspired ideas and hardball politicking by the Crown. All at once, Scotland found itself thrust into the glare of the modern world. Now the roles had been reversed. Scottish ideas and political brinksmanship had toppled the English old regime, and nailed together a constitutional formula suitable for a modern nation, both north and south.

  The actual changes in English politics were less than met the eye. The number of male voters rose from perhaps one in eight to one in five—hardly popular democracy, let alone mob rule. The landed interest lost many of their old nomination boroughs, but otherwise remained firmly in power. The industrial cities won representation for their middle class, but not their workers. In Scotland and Ireland, change was more sweeping because there was so much further to go. Henry Cockburn, as Solicitor-General for Scotland, oversaw the Whigs’ Scottish Reform Bill that same year, which raised the number of voters from 4,500 to more than 65,000. Eight new burgh constituencies were created, with Dundee, Perth, and Aberdeen winning a seat apiece. But the old landed aristocracy was as important as ever, and the urban middle class was kept firmly in check. And, as in England, there was still no secret ballot.

  But the direction of the future was clear, as was how to get there, thanks to Brougham and Macaulay. The British constitution had a new, self-conscious principle: change as reform, rather than revolution. Even the Tories learned the lesson Macaulay had set forth: “the great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onwards, constitutions stand still.” In fact, the next major expansion of the electorate, the Second Reform Bill of 1867, which gave the vote for the first time to members of the working class, was a Tory measure passed by a Tory government. By then the Whigs were calling themselves Liberals. Their chief was Dugald Stewart’s former pupil Lord Russell; their leader in the House of Commons was William Gladstone, son of a Glasgow businessman, who would be prime minister the following year. Yet another Liberal MP and son of a Scot, John Stuart Mill, even tried to amend the bill to include votes for women—without success.

  In British politics, reverence for the past was giving ground to the demand for change. The forward-looking, results-driven manner of Scottish liberalism had won out. However, that backward-looking Burkean impulse discovered a new outlet in the realm of culture, and revealed unexpected reserves of strength—thanks to another Edinburgh man, Scotland’s greatest writer.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Last Minstrel: Sir Walter Scott and the Highland Revival

  But I hae dreamed a dreary dream,

  Beyond the Isle of Skye;

  I saw a dead man win a fight,

  And I think that man was I.

  In 1805, Walter Scott gave a correspondent this portrait of

  himself: You would expect to see a person who had dedicated himself much to literary pursuits, and you would find me a rattleskulled half-lawyer, half-sportsman, in whose head a regiment of horse has been exercising since he was five years old; half-educated—half crazy, as his friends sometimes tell him; half-everything.

  He did not mention that he had been crippled with polio as a boy, which left him with a permanent limp and a vicarious taste for action and adventure (hence the cavalry-regiment fantasies). Or that he was raised an Episcopalian in a country that, despite the tidal waves of change in the eighteenth century, was still overwhelmingly loyal to its Presbyterian heritage. He also did not add what the correspondent probably knew anyway: that he was Britain’s most celebrated living poet. Within a decade he would be the best-known novelist in the world.

  Sir Walter Scott (he became a baronet in 1820) single-handedly changed the course of literature. He gave it, for better or worse, the place it still occupies as part of modern life. By the same token, he gave Scotland a new identity, one to tide it over into the industrial age. His reward for these services has been to be consistently underrated and downplayed, both as a writer and as an intellectual. Virginia Woolf once said, not entirely disrespectfully, “he was the last minstrel and the first salesman for the Edinburgh municipal gas company.” Edwin Muir called his novels “a mere repetition of the moral clichés of the time.”

  Both judgments do him a disservice. Sir Walter Scott knew better than his critics what he was really doing. He also saw more clearly than most of his contemporaries that the Scotland of even recent memory was passing into oblivion, and that the loss was not just a matter of regret. It was a cultural tragedy, both for the Scots and for the modern world. Scott salvaged what he could from the incoming tide of progress, without vainly trying to hold the waters back. He offered modernity its self-conscious antidote: a world of heroic imagination, to balance the world of sober, and sometimes dismal, fact.

  I

  The Scotts came from a Border family that had emigrated to Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century. Walter Scott, Sr., was a hardworking, if not particularly distinguished, writer to the Signet. It was assumed that his son, despite his early bout with polio, would do the same. The younger Scott did nothing to suggest he had other plans. He was in fact a rather unpromising student in Luke Fraser’s class at Edinburgh’s High School, certainly compared to the brilliant lights who came just before and after him, Francis Jeffrey and Henry Brougham. He tried writing some poetry, but the result did not prompt him or anyone else to suggest he give up studying law when he got to the university in 1784.

  There Scott took classes with Dugald Stewart on moral philosophy and with David Hume, the philosopher’s nephew, on Scottish law. He absorbed the assumptions and methods of the Scottish school; he became friends with Adam Ferguson’s son, and was suitably awed by the august presence of Principal William Robertson. He even became friends with the future editors of the Edinburgh Review. But Scott also found himself drawn to what was happening outside the university.

  After class he haunted Edinburgh’s famed lending library, which Allan Ramsay had founded sixty years before. There he saw, and later met, the current darling of Edinburgh literary circles, Robert Burns. He had read English novelists such as Fielding and Samuel Richardson, and their Scottish counterparts Tobias Smollett and Henry Mackenzie. But the authors who impressed him most were Ramsay, John Home, and Robert Fergusson, who were trying to save what they could of Scotland’s history and folkways, including its Gaelic and Scots heritage, before it washed away in the flood of cultural change.

  Two celebrated figures illustrated the rewards and pitfalls this involved. Raised as a farmhand, virtually self-taught, Robert Burns arrived in Edinburgh in 1787 with a reputation as a boy genius. His lite
rary mentors had encouraged him to write verse in the standard high-brow classical vein, which Burns could do perfectly well. But he sensed that his true talent lay in turning the everyday speech, songs, and stories of the people he had grown up with into poetry, and communicating to readers the latent power, eloquence, and nobility of the ordinary man and woman. It made Burns Scotland’s most beloved poet, even today. But it disappointed his mentors, sank his career, and eventually drove him out of Edinburgh. His failure also drove him to drink, cutting short his life at thirty-seven.

  The tragic case of Robert Burns served as one kind of warning; James Macpherson and Ossian were another.

  In 1759, John Home, the celebrated dramatist and Moderate cleric, was vacationing at Moffat in southern Scotland when he received a visitor. This was James Macpherson, a would-be clergyman from Ruthven, who knew Home had a deep interest in ancient Scottish history and culture. Both men were also admirers of James Thomson, the founder of the British school of nature poetry, who had also translated old Scottish songs and ballads into English verse. Now Macpherson excitedly told Home that during one of his rambles across the Highlands, he had discovered a manuscript with several examples of ancient Gaelic poetry. Home wanted to see them. Macpherson asked if he could read Gaelic. Home said no, but suggested that Macpherson do a translation of one of the poems and bring it by for examination.

  A day or two later Macpherson returned with an excerpt of a poem by the legendary ancient bard Ossian, called “The Death of Oscar.” Home was astounded. Like most of his Edinburgh literati friends, Home had found most Gaelic literary remains to be pretty crude and pitiful, for all their historical interest. But this was eloquent, sweeping, breathtaking. It was a tale of epic heroes and romantic maidens, of battlefield valor and lost love, of spirits on the wind and haunting mountain scenery. It contained passages of genuine literary power: “Dermid and Oscar were gone. They reaped the battle together. Their friendship was as strong as their steel; and death walked between them and the field.”