by John Prebble
At the time of writing Mutiny I regretted the absence of any reminder of the revolts on the ground where they took place the water-orchard of Ladywood, the lochside at Linlithgow, a street in Portsmouth, Dumfries, Glasgow or Edinburgh. Military revolt is of course distasteful to all governments, however long ago it occurred, and authority in general cannot be expected to think of it with sympathy. But in one case, the mutiny of the Black Watch, I once hoped to establish some public acknowledgement of the event.
The regiment was quartered at Hampstead and Highgate in the spring of 1743. The government’s intention was to send it to Flanders, but the soldiers had not been told this when they left Scotland. They thought, and were encouraged to think, that they were marching south to be reviewed by the King, after which they would return to the Highlands. Their officers had also failed to explain that a marching-regiment could be sent wherever the Crown required, unlike the companies of the old Watch which had been recruited for employment in the mountains only. When told that the waiting transports at Dartford and Gravesend would take them to Flanders, many of them refused to believe it, saying “they were informed they were to be sold for slaves in the West Indies.” This fear was not as nonsensical as it may now seem. The Caribbean was the nightmare of their recent history, a place of lost souls to which many of their ancestors, defeated in one rebellion or another, had been transported as felons or bonded servants. They also complained of ill-usage and arrears of pay, and in an atmosphere of growing rumour, suspicion and distrust, the response of the most resolute was simple and direct. Since they had been deceived and betrayed, they said, they were released from their enlistment and would go home to their hills. They gathered by night on Finchley Common and travelled northward for 150 miles before they were surrounded by pursuing dragoons on the timbered ridge of Ladywood, four miles to the west of Oundle. They took a defensive position within the moated enclosure of that water-orchard, near the cruciform shell of a Jacobean manor-house, Lyveden New Bield. They swore to die sword in hand rather than go to Jamaica, but toward midnight of their second day in the wood they surrendered on trust, believing they were assured of a pardon. All were court-martialled and sentenced to death, and although three only were shot the rest were sent to Georgia or the West Indies, from which pestilential garrisons few can have returned.
The National Trust now owns Lyveden New Bield, the water-orchard and the lost grave of a Highlander who died beneath the trees during the night. It seemed to me that a commemorative plaque on a pathway beside the wood would be a fitting recognition of those confused and honourable men, as well as adding to the interest of the site. I proposed this to the Trust, offering to defray any reasonable cost. I cannot remember submitting a draft of the wording that might be used, but I have a copy of it still.
In this wood on Whitsunday, May 23, 1743, ninety-eight men of the 43rd Highland Regiment (Black Watch) at last surrendered to the King’s mercy without bloodshed. Five days before, they had marched away from London in defiance of their officers, declaring that promises made to them had been broken, and that because they feared a further betrayal of trust they would return to their mountains and soldier no more. This plaque remembers all of them, and in particular
Corporal Samuel Macpherson
Corporal Malcolm Macpherson
Private Farquhar Shaw
shot for mutiny and desertion in the
Tower of London, July 18, 1743
“Sliochd fineachan uasal,
a ghin o na tuathaich”
The Trust acknowledged the proposal with interest, but thought a plaque “might be a disruptive intervention in this isolated yet complex and imaginative architectural setting”, and that a more suitable reference to the event would be an appendix to the next edition of the guide-book. After a further exchange of letters my correspondent agreed that the Trust should “consider the possibility of putting up a plaque, perhaps in the area where tickets are bought.” That was eight years ago. There is as yet no plaque and no new guide-book, although I am told the latter may soon be printed.
My earliest knowledge of the Black Watch Mutiny came from a melancholy account in Stewart’s Sketches. I first opened the two volumes of this work fifty years ago in the Reading Room of the British Museum, to which I had somehow acquired a ticket while I was still at school. They contain a history of most of the Highland regiments raised in the 18th century, much of it drawn from Stewart’s personal knowledge of men and events, and it undoubtedly excited my romantic interest. This is now more realistic, I hope, but just as I am still emotionally and perversely moved by the swirl and colour of tartan, so do I respond to the story of the regiments, and I am a plodding visitor to the museums that preserve their memory, not the least at Fort George and Stirling Castle.
Before their amalgamation with the Cameron Highlanders in 1963, the Seaforths had their own depot at Fort George on a spit of land in the Moray Firth. Magnificently moated, an irregular polygon in shape, with six great bastions, lunettes, glacis and ravelin, it is one of the finest buildings of its kind in Europe, and more pleasing to me than Vauban’s grey fortress at Tournai where I once spent an uncomfortable night, my last in the Army. Fort George was built after the Rebellion of 1745, when there was no great need of it, perhaps, and it now lies on the water like a stranded prehistoric animal, by the black-legged oil platforms at Ardersier. Stewart was stationed here in 1792, in Bliadhna nan Caorach, the Year of the Sheep, when the men of Ross tried to reverse the flow of history by driving the Cheviot from their glens. He marched against them as a lieutenant of the Black Watch, and because many men of the regiment had been enlisted in Ross he was relieved when the affair was settled without bloodshed, “as the necessity of turning their arms against their fathers, their brothers, and their friends, must have been in the last degree painful to the feelings of the soldiers.” And dangerous to their discipline, he felt obliged to add. Nineteen years earlier, Johnson and Boswell had dined at Fort George, called to the Governor’s table by a beating drummer of the 37th Foot. If the diarist was so affected by the grandeur of the fort as to remember youthful ambitions and fancy himself a military man, his companion, may Reason be thanked, was properly unmoved. “It did not strike him as anything extraordinary,” said Boswell, “if there had been less than what we found, it would have surprised him”.
When I first visited Fort George, the Seaforths’museum was in an ante-room to the Officers’Mess, I think, intimate and personal like a family’s loving collection of memorabilia. Its attendant and guide was an aged sergeant in scarlet sash and Mackenzie trews. At first he watched me from a discreet distance, standing to attention by the door while I studied the display of old uniforms and arms, brown photographs of bearded soldiers leaning reflectively on their muskets, fading letters, bright medals, silent timepieces, and tinted engravings of battles in which there was no noise of pain or gunfire, no stench of blood. I turned from these to the glass cases in the centre of the room, each filled with gold and silver it seemed, the shameless loot of Victoria’s little wars. Now the sergeant approached me, by a well-measured pace on the polished floor. He introduced each case in a soft Highland voice that ached to lift itself across a barrack-square. “This is something our officers brought back from Lucknow … from Delhi … Did you know we are called The Saviours of India …? And this from Kabul … from Kandahar …” As I drove westward on the Inverness road, it occurred to me that the most moving item in the museum had not been an exhibit but the pipe-clayed gaiters the sergeant wore. According to legend, they are a remembrance of the rags which Highlanders wrapped about their bleeding feet on the winter retreat to Corunna. “The soldiers suffered more from want of shoes than from any other privation,” said Stewart of Garth,
… and marching over mountains deeply covered with snow, their feet were torn by the ice, and their toes frost-bitten. The shoes were supplied by contract, and, as is too common in such cases, became wholly unserviceable after a few days marching.
Stirli
ng Castle is the headquarters of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, an odd Victorian hybrid uniting regiments with origins and allegiances at opposite ends of the Highlands. One November, when Edinburgh was choked by yellow fog, I asked at Waverley if Stirling was free of it, and being told it was I went there to see the Argylls’museum. I should have known the fog would be thicker on the Stirling Plain, blinding all sight and muting all sound. From the station I felt my way by foot and hand to Spittal Street, and upward there toward the Castle. A few paces ahead of me, a man and woman were walking just as cautiously, and when we reached Castle Wynd a tall sergeant stepped from the fog and assumed we were one party. He led us across the great parade and through the outer gate to a courtyard square, the fog now burning orange from lights behind the mullioned windows of King James’s Palace. Before I could explain why I was there, the sergeant opened a door and brushed us into a large hall. It was brightly lit and cold. A platoon of young soldiers was at ease in the middle of the floor, eyes to their front and pink faces lifted as they listened to an address from the commander of the Highland Brigade, a welcome to the regiment now that their initial training was over, and an unemotional recital of its history. They were watched by admiring relatives from banked rows of chairs, to the topmost and inescapable tier of which I was taken by a sergeant whose breath, as he bent to whisper guidance, was a pleasing indication that he had begun the afternoon well. When the ceremony was ended, young subalterns moved among the seated audience. How many sons, I was asked, did I have with the regiment? I apologised for my intrusion and was politely taken to the museum in the Officers’Mess. There I was left alone with the silent relics and faded honours of other young men, now long dead.
When I came down to the courtyard again it was crowded with khaki and the green tartan of the Argylls. Dusk had thickened the fog, and torchlight beams moved across a Jeep where a Regimental Sergeant-Major sat impassively erect, his wife beside him and a drawn broadsword in his hand. He was leaving the battalion and the Army, I think, honourably and traditionally escorted from the garrison. Eight sergeants pulled the Jeep away through the gate, behind a strutting piper whose brave music was soon muffled by the fog. When one of the sergeants returned, I was the first of the watchers he saw. He stopped before me, greatly moved, and it was some seconds before he said “Ye’ll no see that again.” I asked why, and he struck me on the chest with his fist, and more force than he intended, I hope. “Because that’s Argylls!” he said, and turned away.
I understood his emotion later, when I realised he must have known that his regiment might soon be disbanded. The public announcement of this was followed by a vigorous campaign to reverse the Government’s decision. There was scarcely a car in Scotland, or a wall it seemed, that did not carry a sticker exhorting the country to Save the Argylls!, and officers of impressive rank (retired) told television cameras and radio microphones of their shock and dismay. The response was enthusiastic, arousing that admirable but wasteful passion which Scots sometimes expend upon such inconsequential matters as the flying of an incorrect standard during a Royal visit, or the lack of an anthem for sporting events, while ignoring a greater injury in authority’s continuing neglect of their economy. But the Argylls were indeed saved, and the Government was no doubt pleased that the wilder anger of Scottish nationalism was so easily placated.
Although I can acknowledge the sentiment behind the campaign I was unable to feel much sympathy for it, remembering the snuff-mull and the whisky-flask, the first recruitment of Sutherland men from Strath Helmsdale, Glen Cassley and Strath Naver. And I could not help comparing it with the hurt but dignified manner in which the Cameronians had accepted their disbandment three years before. I have said earlier that this was the only Scottish regiment in the British Army to be raised by the people and not the Crown. When James II and VII abandoned the throne of Britain in December, 1688, it was four months before the Convention of the Estates in Scotland finally resolved “That an Act be brought in from the Committee for Settling the Crown upon William and Mary, King and Queen of England.” During that uneasy interregnum Parliament House and the city of Edinburgh were protected by six thousand Presbyterian zealots. Many of them were Cameronians, so called from their attachment to the person and teaching of Richard Cameron, a field-preacher killed by dragoons on the high moorland of Aird’s Moss. In April, a month before William and Mary formally accepted the Crown of Scotland, the Estates gave the Earl of Angus a commission to muster one thousand young Cameronians into a regular battalion, which he did on Tuesday, May 14.
That day and date in 1968 the regiment was disbanded by Douglas Water, in cold wind and drizzle and on the green field where it was first mustered. The ceremony was an echo of the illegal conventicles which the Cameronians had once held in the hills, under arms and protected by outposts. When he had placed his sentries about the parade, a lieutenant reported to the conducting minister, “Sir, the picquets are posted. There is no enemy in sight, the service may proceed.” Two psalms were sung, as they had been sung on that distant day – I to the hills will lift mine eyes and The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want. At the end of the service the regimental colour was laid upon the Communion Table, and the companies were given their final order. March off!
The first lieutenant-colonel of the Cameronians, William Cleland, is buried in Perthshire, beneath a grass floor in the ruined cathedral of Dunkeld. It is an odd resting-place for so resolute an enemy of the prelacy, but he was killed here at the age of twenty-eight, three months after the regiment was raised and while it was driving Jacobite clans from the burning town. Ironic, too, that he should lie for ever in these mountains, whose people he had derisively lampooned when the King’s Commissioner sent the Highland Host into the south-west to terrorise its Covenanting communities.
It’s marvellous how in such weather,
O’er hill and hop they came together,
How in such storms they came so far.
The reason is they’re smeared with tar,
Which doth defend them heel and neck,
Just as it does their sheep protect.
But lest ye doubt that this is true,
They’re just the colour of tarr’d wool.
The history of Perthshire is largely a story of little wars, feud and foray, and since the 17th century it has contributed more men and regiments to greater conflicts than any other part of Scotland. An account of these was assembled and edited eighty years ago by Katharine, Duchess of Atholl, and it is second only to Garth’s Sketches in value and importance13 I have made great use of it, with wry memories of impassioned public meetings in my youth when The Red Duchess spoke in support of the Republican Government during the Spanish Civil War. Garth would have thought her politics perverse, but he would have admired her military history of Perthshire. Its spirit and mood reflect his work and inspiration. More than any other man, even Scott, he was responsible for the conventional and enduring picture of the Highland clansman and soldier. He began his own military career at the age of fourteen when he became an ensign in the 77th Atholl Highlanders. “The boy is of low stature,” said his father’s application for the commission, “but well made and strong; others agree that he is very promising, so that want of years is a fault that is always mending.” The Atholl Regiment was ignominiously disbanded before Stewart was old enough to leave Glen Lyon and carry its colours, but he later fought with the Black Watch and the Seaforths in Egypt, Spain and Italy, and was a brevet-colonel and a C.B. when he retired on half-pay in 1815. That year he became a founder-member of the Society of True Highlanders, and was later the organiser of what Scott’s biographer, John Lockhart, called “an hallucination” and a “plaided panorama”, the Clan Gathering for George IV’s visit to Edinburgh. Other Lowlanders were more derisive in their mockery of this charade, but all the chiefs who took part were agreed that it was a splendid success. All except the Duke of Atholl, who had thought of taking his Murray clansmen out of the city when he realised that the King was w
earing pink tights beneath his scarlet kilt.
Scott’s choice of Garth as the organiser of the Gathering, rather than Alasdair Ranaldson (who could not have organised anything, perhaps, except grounds for litigation) was undoubtedly due to the publication of his Sketches that year. He had begun them in 1817 when he was asked to repair the gaps in the records of the Black Watch, most of these having been taken by the French at Helvoetsluys in 1794. As he wrote, the work became more than a duty to his old regiment, expanding to a history of other Highland battalions and a loving account of the manners and customs of the clans. I have said elsewhere that the brave romanticism of the Sketches anaesthetised the guilt which men of Stewart’s class and sensibility may have felt for the brutality of the Clearances. In fairness, he was deeply distressed by them, and it has been said that he hoped his book would reverse the tide of removal and emigration. His loyalty to the old chiefs prevented him from condemning them in words used by Scott, who wished there could be a salutary hanging of one at least, but thirty years after Bliadhna na Caorach he still remembered the Men of Ross with anger and sorrow. The great Clearances in Sutherland were not yet over when he began his Sketches and he was dismayed by the consequent loss of what he believed to be the finest quality of the Highlanders.
