by John Prebble
The scouts brought back surprising news. The drovers had as good an intelligence service as the Sheriff, or his men had made too much noise, for before the forces of Law and Good Order had made their appearance on the brae the Men of Ross had fled. All of them, leaving the sheep where they slept and the embers of their fires still warm. Here was no armed band from Sutherland, no evidence of gunpowder bought boldly in Inverness for £26 sterling, but simple men running in fear.
‘As the soldiers were a good deal fatigued,’ said Mr Macleod, ‘some of the Gentlemen agreed to accompany me on instantly to search the house and some wood that was in the neighbourhood, and with the assistance of our riding-servants, and about a dozen countrymen, we began our search.’ They rode down at a gallop to the twisted stream that runs from Loch Morie to the Alness, and it was here that they drove eight men from hiding in the barley-corn. The Rosses ran, or stood in stupid fear until all were rounded up. Mr Macleod and other gentlemen splashed through the river and rode up Strath Rusdale for three miles. All but two of the houses were empty, and in these were taken John Ross alias Davidson, Donald Munro alias MacAddie and his sons, William and George. ‘They had been out with the Sheep Drivers,’ reported Mr Macleod, ‘but returned home that night, all the rest of the inhabitants of that glen were still out with them.’
It may have occurred to some of the 42nd Highlanders, veterans of Brandywine, Germantown and White Marsh in the American Revolution, that here was a very sorry insurrection indeed, without a shot fired or a drum beating the advance. But as the Gentlemen rode to Novar House for breakfast their blood pulsed with pride. When Mr Macleod sat down to write his dispatch, without washing from himself the grime and sweat of the campaign, he wrote like a victorious general of an army in the field. The feeling that he had narrowly averted a calamity remained with him for the rest of his life, and the memory of it was to bring him out in arms again twenty-eight years from now.
The Men of Ross who had gone from Boath on Saturday to drive off the flocks of the Cameron brothers and Mitchell drifted back to their homes as soon as they heard the news. They closed their faces to the Sheriff officers who came seeking precognitions against the ringleaders, and they watched with bitter and heavy hearts as the Great Sheep came once more to the braes. The 42nd remained at Dingwall until the end of the month, and then it was recalled to the south, where, said David Stewart with thin sarcasm, it was ‘actively employed against the Lowlanders who were rioting, and hanging, drowning and burning the effigies of those whom they called their political oppressors; a species of refinement in the expression of their sentiments towards their superiors to which the ignorant Highlanders have not yet attained’.
Mr Macleod found his ringleaders, or those whom he chose to call the ringleaders. They were: Hugh Breac Mackenzie, tenant of Acharn in the parish of Alness; Malcolm Ross alias Macrob, tenant in Alladale in the parish of Kincardine; Donald Munro alias Roy, tenant in Drumvaich in the parish of Kincardine; Alexander Mackay, tenant in Langwell in the parish of Kincardine; and William Cunningham tenant in Aulanguish in the parish of Kincardine.
At the bar of the Circuit Court in Inverness on 14 September they were charged jointly and severally with ‘advising, exciting, and instigating persons riotously and feloniously to invade, seize upon, and drive away from the grounds of the proprietors flocks of sheep amounting to several thousands’ whereby ‘a daring insult was offered to the law, the public peace was disturbed, and the property of the lieges greatly damaged and at the mercy of a lawless and seditious mob’.
They could not have understood the charge, or, if they did, have recognized it as a fair and reasonable description of what they had done. Their actions had been passionate and impulsive, they had believed that by the arbitrary removal of the cause of their sorrow they would be able to recover their land and their old ways. They were defended by Charles Ross, a young advocate of their own country, but all his eloquence, putting their case in terms of common humanity as much as in Law, could not argue away the insolence of their assault on the sacred rights of property.
The accusations that had been made against the Men of Ross in the hysterical letters that had passed between Dingwall and Edinburgh – Sedition, Insurrection, Rebellion – demanded the extreme penalty if proved. The sentences passed were less harsh, although they were bitter and merciless. Hugh Breac Mackenzie was sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay for seven years. Malcolm Ross was sentenced to a fine of £50 and imprisonment until it was paid, which to a man with empty pockets could be for ever. Donald Munro and Alexander Mackay were banished from Scotland for life, and William Cunningham was sentenced to three months in gaol.
But one night as the five men lay in prison at Inverness, awaiting execution of their sentences, the door was miraculously opened, and in the morning they were gone. No one could or would say how it had happened. Although a reward of £5 was offered for the apprehension of each man, and an advertisement to this effect was published in the Edinburgh Courant of 3 November, they were never heard of again.
It was the end of the Ross-shire Sheep Riot. Never again would Highlanders gather to turn back the invasion of the Great Cheviot. Though they had a history of battles, one defeat could always persuade them to abandon a war, and their inability to create leaders from among themselves was to waste their anger in despair. For many years yet they would forcibly resist eviction from their homes, and in such resistance the women would be bolder than the men, but they now accepted the sheep as they accepted famine and pestilence. They were numbed by the betrayal of their lairds, and they could learn no lesson from the Year of the Sheep but that the great hatred of the Lowlander intended to destroy them.
For their part, the lairds, once they had recovered from the shock, realized that in future they could count upon the full power of the Law, backed by bayonets if necessary, to support them in removing their tenants and replacing them with sheep. They would not be slow in making use of it.
There was one more lesson to be learnt from the Year of the Sheep, although one man only seems to have recognized it and he, perhaps, the most unlikely. He was the Commander-in-Chief of the King's Armies in Scotland, Lord Adam Gordon.
On 15 July he had left Edinburgh and its mob in the care of his deputy, Lieutenant-General Leslie, and set out on his annual tour of the Royal forts in the Highlands, intending to relieve the tedium and discomfort of the duty (he was approaching seventy) with a long visit to the Duke of Gordon. But when he arrived at his grandnephew's home on Friday, 17 August, he found there a letter from the Home Secretary asking for his report on the affair in Ross, and making it plain that this was required immediately. Testily Gordon sent word to Sheriff Macleod and Sir Hector Munro to meet him the next day at Fort George, following the messenger himself at post-haste. He listened to Macleod and Munro throughout Saturday, and to all the gentry of Ross and Inverness who buzzed about him with talk of Sedition and Rebellion nipped in the bud.
On Sunday he wrote a private letter to Henry Dundas. Though he was an indifferent soldier, he was a wise old man, and in those few hours he had obtained a clearer picture of past, present and future than anybody in the country.
‘If I was to hazard an opinion upon the matter it is a decided one,’ he told the Home Secretary, ‘that no disloyalty or spirit of rebellion, or dislike to His Majesty's Person or Government is in the least degree concerned in these tumults, and that they have solely originated in a (too well-founded) apprehension that the landed proprietors in Ross-shire and some of the adjacent Highland counties were about to let their estates to sheep-farmers, by which means all the former tenants would be ousted and turned adrift and of course obliged to emigrate, unless they could be else-where received.’
He agreed that the behaviour of the Men of Ross was a disgrace to any civilized country, and he did not argue against the lawful right of a proprietor to do as he pleased with his own property ‘even if the Publick suffers thereby’. But there was something more to be considered.
> ‘Everybody knows the wonderful attachment a Highlander has to his native spot, be it ever so bare, and ever so mountainous, and if these speculative gentlemen shall by any means, or from avarice, once dispeople their estates and stock them with sheep and that a bad season or two should follow, and the sheep be thereby destroyed, I am convinced no temptation under the sun will be able to bring inhabitants to such Highland property from any part of this world.’
2
THE YEAR OF THE BURNINGS
‘That he was dull, there can be little doubt’
HE was coal and wool joined by a stately hyphen and ennobled by five coronets. He was a Knight of the Garter, a Privy Councillor, Recorder of Stafford, a Trustee of the British Museum, a Vice-President of the Society of Arts, and an Hereditary Governor of the British Institution. He was the Most Noble George Granville Leveson-Gower, second Marquess of Stafford, third Earl Gower and Viscount Trentham, fourth Lord Gower of Stittenham in Yorkshire, eighth baronet of the same place, and ultimately and pre-eminently for the last six months of his life he was the first Duke of Sutherland.
His red sandstone effigy, in a red sandstone toga, rears thirty feet from a pedestal seventy-six feet high at the top of Ben Bhraggie, which is itself thirteen hundred feet above the green water of the Dornoch Firth. Its back is to the glens he emptied, it faces the sea to which his policies committed five thousand people as emigrants or herring-fishers. For much of his adult life he had an annual income of £300,000, and he would have agreed with the Gentleman's Magazine that he ‘expended this vast revenue nobly and munificently’. Other men helped him with the expenditure to the last. The owners of the steamer Soho, for example, charged him £700 for carrying his aged body from Wapping to Scotland.
He was the Great Improver. Where there had been nothing in his opinion but wilderness and savagery, he built, or had built for him by the Government, thirty-four bridges and four hundred and fifty miles of road. The glens emptied by his commissioners, factors, law-agents and ground-officers (with the prompt assistance of police and soldiers when necessary), were let or leased to Lowlanders who grazed 200,000 True Mountain Sheep upon them and sheared 415,000 pounds of wool every year. He pulled the shire of Sutherland out of the past for the trifling cost of two-thirds of one year's income. And because he was an Englishman, and spoke no Gaelic, he did not hear the bitter protests from the poets among his people.
Had he heard them and understood them he would have considered their complaint of small importance against the magnitude of the work he set himself. He had accepted the solemn duty to improve the property which inheritance and marriage brought him, and perhaps he may not be criticized for what he wanted to do, only for the manner in which it was done. He was the product of a class to whom Property was becoming a sacred trust and its improvement an obligation that must take precedence over all others. This class, owning the land, controlling the legislature, officering the Army, dividing mankind into Gentility and Commons, and transporting a child for the stealing of a handkerchief (because it was Property), sincerely believed that its own enrichment must bring a greater good to a greater number. And since the Marquess of Stafford on no occasion watched when his agents burned the timbers of his people's houses, and drove them to emigrant ships or to coastal villages that were like gulls' nests on the cliffs, it is understandable that he held to this view until his death.
His lineage was uniformly undramatic. The early Gowers were Yorkshiremen who moved to Stafford in the seventeenth century, marrying into the Levesons, coal-owning dsecendants of French wool-staplers. In three generations they had risen from a baronetcy to a marquessate, without doing anything significantly worthwhile to earn the elevation. ‘I wish,’ wrote Lord Ronald Gower, Stafford's grandson, ‘I could think that their promotion was owing to deeds performed by land or sea; but if the truth must be told, the family have been more distinguished by their luck and their alliances than in the senate or in the field. For generations they appear to have wedded heiresses or co-heirs of peers; and in the marriage of my grandfather to the greatest landed heiress in three kingdoms their achievements in that respect may be said to have culminated.’
Stafford was born in Arlington Street in 1758, a delicate child who never successfully conquered his physical weakness. He went to Westminster and Christ Church, made the Grand Tour in the company of the usual divine, and reached manhood a bilious and rheumatic creature with a great hawk-nose drooping over a prim mouth. Artists did their best with this discouraging material. In his youth he was painted by Romney as a cavalier in silk and lace, but his face shows his disapproval of the deception. Later Opie saw him as a beaked and fussy old man in a snuff-coloured coat and an auburn wig. In 1808 James Gillray caught him shuffling through the snow to Christie's, and drew him with back bent, gaiters dragging, and pebbled glasses resting on the bridge of that sad nose. Only in Chantrey's sculpture has his face a nobility to equal his rank, and this may be due to the fact that it is still a hundred feet above eye-level even after one has climbed to the top of Ben Bhraggie.
‘For that he was dull I think there can be little doubt,’ wrote his grandson, ‘I have searched in vain in his dispatches to find what manner of man (he) was…. Neither have I heard that he ever did anything or said anything that was worth remembering; if he did it has been forgotten long ago.’ Lord Ronald's judgement was something to be expected from a languid Victorian aesthete, but in the dispatches Stafford wrote while Ambassador in Paris during the Revolution there was nothing to dispute Gower's opinion. They were ‘mere records of official dulness, hopelessly and lamentably dull, almost as dull as poor Louis XVI's entries in his diary’.
Lady Stafford, however, provided a colourful third dimension to the pasteboard character of her husband. A passport issued to her when they left Paris in 1793 described her as: ‘Madame Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, wife of the Ambassador from England, aged 27 years, five feet high, hair and brows light chestnut, eyes chestnut brown, nose well-made, mouth small, chin round, forehead low, face rather small.’
She had been a Countess, and Ban mhorair Chataibh, the Great Lady of Sutherland, since the age of six, the title secured for her by costly litigation following the death of her father, the last Earl. In her youth her beauty was remarkable. Plump and matronly in middle age, her appearance could still turn Byron's head for a second look when he saw her in a fashionable turban at Holland House. ‘She is handsome,’ he said, ‘and must have been beautiful, and her manners are princessly.’ She was Anglo-Norman by descent. She spoke no Gaelic and had inherited her family's contempt for the tongue, manners and customs of the Highland people. Although she became sentimental and over-romantic about them in the manner of Walter Scott (writing fancifully of witches and warlocks), she was as English in mood and taste as the furniture of a London drawing-room. English, too, was her passion for painting water-colours. She left hundreds of them when she died, tranquil monochromes of Sutherland scenes in blue, grey and sepia which, if they were the only record of the county during her lifetime, would give a very odd picture of it indeed.
Almost the whole of this great northern shire became her husband's when they married in 1785. In 1803 he inherited his father's marquessate and estates in Stafford and Shropshire, and also the vast fortune of his bachelor uncle, the canal-cutting Duke of Bridgewater. With more than a million acres and tens of thousands of tenants, he was now the richest and greatest land-owner in Britain, drawing from them that monumental income of £300,000. Bridgewater also left him the finest private art collection then known, its nucleus the famous Orleans pictures brought from France during the Revolution. His wife encouraged him to add to the collection. He became the patron of Opie, Hay-don and Lawrence, and he appeared at Christie's with the dogged regularity of a farmer going to market. He spent £30,000 in one year on paintings to be hung in Stafford House, and he bought a Rubens from the Doria Palace in Genoa for £3,000, a little less than half of what he was later to give toward the relief of destitution durin
g a typhus epidemic in Sutherland. It was not necessary for him to give an opinion on the works he bought, to own them was enough. ‘Lord Stafford deserves credit,’ wrote his grandson, ‘for having been one of the first owners of works of art in London to throw open his gallery to the public.’ The gallery was Cleveland House.
More acres of paint and canvas covered his walls at Lilleshall in Shropshire, Trentham in Staffordshire, and Dunrobin (‘Cock Robin Castle’, sneered Henry Brougham) in Sutherland. Late in life, and almost as if he needed the wall-space, he acquired Stafford House. This splendid building, standing in the Mall, had been correctly described by its architect as ‘a home fit for a Prince’. It had been built for the grand old Duke of York, who died before he could properly occupy it. The sons of George III were always prodigal with the purses of their friends. The Duke had borrowed £60,000 from Stafford toward the erection of the house, and his executors charged the Marquess another £72,000 for a ninety-nine years' lease upon it (annual ground rent, £758). Happily, the people, who were inclined to riot and mobbing where Royal Dukes were concerned, were not left out of the transaction. The purchase price was used to turn a section of Hackney Marshes into a recreation ground for them.
