How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

III

  The Waverley novels thrust Scott onto the public stage (although they were published pseudonymously, everyone knew who wrote them). He became friends with the mighty and great in London and at Whitehall. Following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, he traveled to Paris to meet his hero, the Duke of Wellington, as well as the Russian Tsar. He also became friends with the Prince of Wales, soon to be George IV. The prince had already offered him the post of Poet Laureate, which Scott declined—the idea of having to compose a poem every year to celebrate the king’s birthday, or for other state occasions, was too much even for this staunch Tory. But in 1815 they finally met in London.

  The Prince of Wales was fat, lazy, lecherous, vain, and inconsiderate. He was a drunkard who practically lived on cherry brandy. He had abandoned his wife and betrayed his old political allies, the Whigs. But he was also a cultured and intelligent man, who had read Ossian and knew Waverley almost by heart. The prince’s admiration for his work, and his undeniable charm, won Scott over. In turn, Scott began to impress on the man who would soon be king the idea that his mission should be to restore to Britain its rich historical legacy, including the legacy of Scotland. He could be the new Bonnie Prince Charlie, Scott explained, a romantic monarch for a modern empire.

  One place to start was to recover the lost regalia of the Scottish monarchy: the Sword, Sceptre, and Crown. They had been stored away in Edinburgh Castle after 1707 and then forgotten. The Prince gave Scott permission to enter the castle to conduct the search. After a long and dramatic hunt through the dark cellars, corridors, and storerooms of the old fortress, which drew enormous public interest and crowds, they were finally found in a dilapidated chest. To Scott, they were the sacred symbols of Scottish nationhood. When one of his assistants jocularly offered to place the crown on the head of a nearby young lady, Scott shouted, “By God, no!” and snatched it away. The recovery of the Scottish regalia earned Scott his baronetcy, and prepared the way for the next step in restoring Scotland’s vanished glory.

  It is not true, as is sometimes claimed, that the King’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822 was Scott’s idea. The Prince of Wales, now George IV, had been planning a tour of his British dominions for years, and following his state visit to Ireland, Scotland was the next stop. When he announced his plans to Edinburgh’s Lord Provost, the Provost turned to Scott, now Sir Walter Scott, for help. Scott, in turn, called on David Stewart of Garth, the sharp-tongued soldier and critic of the Sutherland clearances, for ideas on how to stage the ceremonies to accompany the royal visit. In the end, it was Stewart as much as Scott who devised the pageantry for “the king’s jaunt” that August, pageantry that changed irrevocably the relationship between England and Scotland, and capped the Highland cultural revival—even as that culture was vanishing forever.

  The King made his view of the visit clear when he said, “I dislike seeing anything in Scotland that is not purely national and characteristic.” For an enthusiastic reader of Waverley and Rob Roy, that meant Highland attire and display, with kilts, bonnets, tartans, bagpipes, and Gaelic battle songs, so those were what Walter Scott and David Stewart decided to provide. Of course, the King had never seen actual Highland dress, except on soldiers in the Black Watch or other Scottish regiments. They wore the shorter version of the kilt, the philabeg or féileadh-beag, which strapped around the waist with a yard or so of plaid attached at the shoulder, instead of the breacan an féileadh, the full twelve yards of plaid baggily belted in the middle, which had been the traditional dress of Highland males for centuries. On the other hand, the philabeg used less material, was easier to wear, and was less redolent of rural poverty and sleeping out of doors on an empty stomach. So the King’s visit made it the new “authentic” Highland kilt. It has remained so down to today— just as the visit turned Scottish history into Highland history, with Lowlanders and Borderers largely forgotten.

  If the King had no idea what real Highlanders looked like, neither did most Edinburghers. The ceremonies Stewart and Scott devised were to be as much a lesson in Scottish history for Scots as for George IV, and as much a salute to their country as to the King. It was the first state visit by a reigning monarch since 1650, and the first since the Union. This was Scotland’s chance to shine in the eyes of its King and the rest of the world, a chance to establish its place in the British Empire. For that reason, its organizers decided, too much would probably not be enough.

  That July, Scott’s house at Castle Street was a workshop of activity. Every day from seven in the morning until past midnight, a steady stream of messengers, visitors, porters, and officials came and went, while Scott drew up designs, protocols, invitations, lists of guests, and orders of predecent during ritual ceremonies. Everything was to be as it had been before 1707, with a parade of state and regal splendor down High Street such as Edinburgh might have seen in the days of James IV.

  Some things had to be changed, however. There was no longer a Scottish Parliament, so no “riding of the Parliament” was possible. Other ways of celebrating Scotland’s political traditions had to be worked out. Scott and Garth turned the Royal Company of Archers, for example, into a sort of King’s bodyguard of Scottish peers and aristocrats. Likewise, the Highland dress everyone would wear for the ceremonies had to be suitably martial, including targes, broadswords, and dirks, with a sgian dhu, or short dagger, inserted at the top of the stocking. This would remind onlookers of Scottish courage and valor, whether on Dunrossie Moor at Culloden or, more recently, on the battlefields of Spain, India, and Waterloo.

  Yet, ironically, despite all the insistence on things Highlandish, very few Highlanders were actually going to be there. Walter Scott had sent a formal invitation to MacLeod of MacLeod and other great chieftains, summoning them and their followers to a modern-day version of the gathering of the clans to greet their “chief of chiefs.” But only five showed up. Campbell of Breadalbane brought fifty men wearing tartans—not their own tartans, but one the Earl had designed in Edinburgh and sent to them. The MacGregors of Griogaraich were there, as bodyguards to the Regalia. Their chief, Sir Ewan MacGregor, was looking forward to finally erasing the family’s long history of royal disgrace. The flamboyant Alistair MacDonnell of Glengarry also showed up. He had been the inspiration for Waverley’s Fergus McIvor and looked the part, with his pipers, henchmen, and foresters in attendance—and proceeded to make an obnoxious nuisance of himself through the whole visit, to the disgust of both Scott and Stewart.

  The Drummonds of Strathearn sent a contingent, as did, more surprisingly, the Duchess of Sutherland. She had been stung by the criticisms of her clearance policy in David Stewart’s recent book, and was determined to show the proper Highland spirit. Everyone agreed they were the scruffiest of the lot: “[S]o inferior, indeed, was their appearance,” according to Donald MacLeod, “that those who had the management refused to allow them to walk in the procession. . . . They were huddled in an old, empty house, sleeping on straw and fed with the coarsest fare while the other clans were living in comparative luxury.”

  So the vast majority of participants in this “plaided panorama” (as Scott’s son-in-law called it) ended up being members of Edinburgh’s Celtic Society and the Strathfillan Society: gentry and middle-class citizens, most with Highland names or roots, but almost all with no experience of clan life. In that sense, they were like most people who wear kilts today. Indeed, the authorities preferred it that way. When Walter Scott tried to send for some men from the Earl of Atholl, Henry Dundas, a man who was still mindful of the recent violence around Glasgow and earlier troubles in the Highlands, said no. “I think we have fully as many of the Gael, real or imagined, as is prudent or necessary.”

  On the eve of the King’s visit, the Edinburgh Observer ran this editorial:

  We are all Jacobites now, thorough-bred Jacobites, in acknowledging George IV. . . . Our king is the heir of the Chevalier, in whose service the Scotch suffered so much, shone so much, and we will find many a Flora MacDonald amongst the “Sisters of t
he Silver Cross,” and many a faithful Highlander attending his Throne. . . .

  The city was in a frenzy. It had filled up with visitors from across Scotland, who watched General Stewart and the Celtic Society’s tartaned contingents drilling on the meadow between Queen Street and Heriot Row. Lords, lairds, archers, soldiers, and militiamen gathered in the streets, with pipes blaring and flags and banners waving in the summer sun—and at night, in the soft glow of Edinburgh’s new gas streetlighting.

  On Wednesday, August 14, the royal yacht was spotted in the Firth of Forth. The cannon on Castle Hill signaled the news, as the crowd gathered to join the march down from Edinburgh to Leith to greet the King. Scott rowed out to meet his monarch on board. “Sir Walter Scott!” the King exclaimed, “The man in Scotland I most want to see! Let him come up!” With a grin, George IV toasted his loyal servant with a tumbler of genuine Highland whisky. Scott put the glass in his pocket as a souvenir (later, in his excitement, he sat on it and crushed it).

  The next day the visit proper began. By one estimate, 300,000 people, or more than one-seventh of Scotland’s population, greeted the King as he came ashore with cheers and more cannon salutes, and as the cavalcade made its way up Leith Walk to Edinburgh’s High Street. Walter Scott led the way in an open carriage to rapturous applause; then came the trumpeters, yeoman cavalry, grenadiers, dragoons, soldiers from various Highland regiments and the Scots Greys, heralds, grooms, archers: then the Knight Marischal, the Barons of Exchequer, and the Lords of Justiciary and Sessions in their scarlet robes, the White Rod, Lord Lyon Depute, the Lord High Constable—and then the King.

  Fat, scarlet-faced, breathing heavily and barely able to walk, this latter-day Bonnie Prince Charlie slowly made his way up High Street to the Toll Gate, where the Lord Provost presented him with the keys to the city, and then took him across to St. Andrews Square and crowd-lined Princes Street. Turning around, the King was astonished to see more thousands of people standing in rows on Castle Hill, a living mountain of humanity watching and waving. When he waved back, the city resounded with a tremendous cheer.

  On Saturday came the King’s reception under the gleaming chandeliers at Holyrood House. David Stewart of Garth came to the King’s chamber to examine the “authentic” Highland costume he would wear for the evening. It was the full treatment: pleated tartan kilt with the pattern of the house of Stuart, trews or plaid tights, sporran bag in front, and feathered bonnet. Stewart looked at George IV’s bloated red face, his enormous belly hanging over his kilt, and tights stretched skin-tight around his bulging, flabby thighs. Discretion dictated his next words. “Ye make a varry pretty figure,” he told his monarch, and sent him out to greet his rapturous guests.

  It was a strange moment. This peculiar form of Scottish clothing, which had only recently been dismissed as barbaric frummery, and had even been outlawed, was now proper dress for royalty. The overweight heir of the house of Hanover, the great-nephew of the Duke of Cumberland who had fought and slaughtered kilted clansmen for control of the destiny of Scotland and Great Britain, was now wearing the same tartan pattern as the mortal enemies of his ancestral house. Later that week, at the banquet sponsored by the Edinburgh Town Council which lasted six and a half hours, tartan kilts again turned up in profusion, on people who only twenty years earlier would not have been caught dead in them.

  This shift of cultural mood was all due to Sir Walter Scott. He was not the first to rescue Highland culture from the rubbish-heap of history. But he was the first to make it high-minded and respectable, with an appealing romantic panache, which has made it an indelible part of the historical imagination ever since. It was part of his larger plan for the royal visit: a reconciliation of ancient enemies, Hanover with Stuart, England with Scotland, and the past with the present.

  Most historians and writers poke fun at the royal visit, and for good reason. It is tempting to yield to outrage at its falsification of Scottish history, and its hypocrisy in claiming to exalt Highland culture even while that culture and its people were being eradicated, thanks to the Clearances. Even people at the time recognized the royal visit’s exaggerated ridiculousness. Scott’s son-in-law John Lockhart dubbed it “a collective hallucination.” It was also a largely Tory celebration. The Whigs at the Edinburgh Review had their attention firmly fixed on parliamentary reform. Henry Cockburn does not even mention it in his autobiography.

  The visit’s air of phoniness was compounded by its aftermath, when wool manufacturers such as Wilson’s of Bannockburn began taking orders for the newly popularized kilt. People wondered which of the innumerable patterns or “setts” of tartan to buy. It was Wilson who began the practice of naming particular setts after specific Highland clans. There may have been some validity to this: families living in a clan area did tend to weave tartans that looked alike, and that distinguished them from their neighbors. But the real mark of clan identification was the badge worn on the hat or on the arm, such as a sprig of juniper (the badge of the MacLeods) or white heather (the MacIntyres). Clansmen generally wore whatever plaid patterns they liked, and the louder the better.

  The army started the practice of using the tartan as identification, as part of the uniform of Highland regiments. The Black Watch was first in 1739, with its somber blue, green, and black plaid. Others followed suit. Clan members then began using their clan’s regimental tartan, although with no sense of exclusiveness. In fact, when the Highland Society of London began in 1815 to collect patches of existing tartans and approached various chieftains to find out which belonged to which clan, it was amazed to learn that most had no idea.

  All this “confusion” came to an end twenty years after the Royal Visit, when two Bohemian brothers, claiming to be the illegitimate grandsons of Prince Charlie himself, appeared on the scene with their own tartan pattern book, portentously titled Vestiarum Scoticum. James and Charles Sobieski Stuart, as they called themselves, had selected seventy-five different setts, each linked to a specific clan, from a sixteenth-century manuscript they claimed had once belonged to Mary Queen of Scots’s father confessor—although they could never quite produce the manuscript when others asked to see it. It was MacPherson and Ossian all over again, with a very similar result. Tartans became all the rage in England as well as Scotland. Queen Victoria insisted on them for her Highland retreat at Balmoral Castle. Clan chieftains, and even Lowland aristocrats, suddenly decided they had better line up a “true” clan pattern or get lost in the rush.

  So one could say the great Highland revival began with one fraud and ended with another. But this would be unfair to its genuine adherents, including Scott. After all, his moment of glory after the royal visit was brief. His publisher and partner, John Ballantyne, went bankrupt in 1825. Rather than go bankrupt with him, Scott promised to pay his creditors everything he owed them. In exchange for keeping his position as sheriff and clerk of court in Edinburgh, and living at Abbotsford rent-free, he agreed to spend every penny of his royalties from all future books to pay off the debt, which amounted to more than 100,000 pounds.

  “I will be their vassal for life,” he wrote in his journal, “and dig in the mine of my imagination to find diamonds.” All thought of retiring as the distinguished laird of Abbotsford was now impossible. The work broke his health; he suffered a stroke in 1830, but continued writing. “He that sleeps too long in the morning,” he said, “let him borrow the pillow of a debtor.” He had paid off more than half before he died in 1832, the same year Parliament passed the measure he hated and feared, the Reform Bill.

  When he heard the news of Scott’s death, his Whig neighbor Henry Cockburn wrote in his journal, “Scotland never owed so much to one man.” And in fact, Sir Walter Scott had done something remarkable. He had managed to generate another Scotland parallel to the one about to be thrust into the new century. A Scotland of the imagination, a place where honor, courage, and integrity could still survive, and even thrive, within the individual. Scott had created a new national identity, based on the myt
h of the strong and noble Highlander. It was available not only for Scots but for the rest of Britain, which could take comfort and pride in the notion that north of the Tweed the old, premodern virtues were still being kept alive. Later, of course, people of Scottish descent outside Britain would help themselves to it, as well—as anyone knows who has attended a St. Andrew’s Society dinner in New York or Melbourne and watched the profusion of kilts and sgian dhus.

  This new Scottish identity complemented, but did not compete with, the one that modernity was forging. For one thing, Scott had made it essentially democratic, since it was open to anyone with a spark of imagination, and imagination, Adam Smith had shown, was the basis of modern society itself. For another, unlike Ossian’s mythic past, which “breathed old age and decay,” it was essentially hopeful about the future, even if the old ways were fading away. The lesson Scott taught the modern world was that the past does not have to die or vanish: it can live on, in a nation’s memory, and help to nourish its posterity.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Practical Matters: Scots in Science and Industry

  Don’t think, try.

  —John Hunter

  I

  James Watt was instrument maker for the University of Glasgow when someone told him about a strange machine created by a Derbyshire man named Thomas Newcomen: a device that used steam to operate a water pump. The university even had a model of it, he was told, which was in London for repairs. Watt was interested in steam. He and his friend and teacher, Professor Joseph Black, had been arguing about its properties for years. Now, in the winter of 1763, he arranged for the model to be shipped back to Glasgow, and had a look at it.

  It consisted of a boiler that sent steam into a vertical brass cylinder attached to a close-fitting piston, which in turn was attached to a metal rod. As steam went in, it pushed up the piston, depressing the rod. As it condensed back to water, the vacuum it created brought the piston down, raising the rod. Newcomen’s “fire-engine,” as some called it, was a clever device; miners in Wales had been using its up-and-down motion to pump water out of their coal pits. But as Watt fired it up and set it in motion, he saw the problem at once. The piston turned only two or three strokes at a time, because although the boiler attached was relatively large, most of the steam it generated escaped into the air.