by John Prebble
LOYAL HIGHLANDERS!
The present crisis calls upon all LOYAL SUBJECTS to rally round the CONSTITUTION of our country. Highlanders from 18 to 40 years of age, are invited to attend a MEETING of the
SUTHERLAND AND TRANSATLANTIC FRIENDLY ASSOCIATION
which is appointed to hold at GOLSPIE in Sutherlandshire, on Tuesday the 4th of January, at 10 o'clock a.m. for the purpose of evincing their firm attachment to His Majesty's present Government, by an officer of their services in a Military capacity.
Thomas Dudgeon, Secretary.
Fearn, December 20, 1819
The last thing the authorities wanted at this time was Mr Dudgeon's help. He was already in bad favour for his attempt to organize sympathy for the evicted tenants from Lord Stafford's estates, and now he wished to place arms in the hands of the Populace, of those very people against whom the Forces of Law might have to proceed at any moment. Sheriff Macleod and others in the counties of Ross and Inverness promptly dissociated themselves from any schemes this crazy man might have, and in Sutherlandshire prompt steps were taken to discredit his Friendly Association and to destroy it if possible. Robert Nimmo, who had succeeded MacKid as Sheriff-Substitute, issued a Public Notice on New Year's Day, signed by himself and twelve Justices of the Peace, one of whom was Patrick Sellar. The Notice warned the people that the meeting called by Dudgeon was illegal, and that his Society was suspected of dark aims beyond those it openly expressed.
We therefore consider it our duty as Magistrates of this county to warn the loyal and peaceable inhabitants of this jurisdiction of the impropriety of their being participants of such a meeting, or of the consequences thereof.
The Address of the county of Sutherland is already before His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, offering the most cordial support in defence of our King and Constitution; and the people know well that, as on every former occasion, they will be called upon whenever their services may be required, and that in a legal and proper manner, and without the interference of men of doubtful principles, totally unconnected with the county.
This seems to have scotched Mr Dudgeon's meeting and anything he may have hoped to come of it. Two weeks later the Courier reported that his Friendly Society was at an end, and later still that all its funds (£58 collected in pennies and sixpences from the people) had gone into Mr Dudgeon's pocket with the exception of £8. But more yet was to be heard of the gentleman from Fearn.
The year moved toward spring and the gentry's nervousness increased with each alarming report from the south. The cry for Parliamentary reform was audible even in the Ross-shire hills. The monster Liberty, now known as Democracy, was questioning the right of landowners to dispose of their acres and their people as they wished, and the Cato Street affair had shown that the land-reformers were ready for brutal murder. In Easter Ross, where new clearances were being planned for this year, the proprietors declared that in the event of resistance from the tenantry they would make one landlord's cause the cause of all, and they secured a promise from Sheriff Macleod that he would march to their assistance with musket and ball.
The landowners could see no reason for complaint. Wool was making them rich. Wool had forced up the value of land all over the Highlands. In five years the sale-price of the Castlehill estate had risen from £8,000 to £80,000. Redcastle, which had been sold for £25,000 in 1790, was shortly to be sold again for £135,000. Fairburn, which had yielded a rental of £700 in 1800, was now worth £80,000. In July, 1817, an Annual Sheep and Wool Market had been opened in Inverness, with the encouragement and support of staplers from Huddersfield and Leeds, woollen manufacturers from Aberdeen, and merchants in Liverpool. At its most prosperous, 100,000 stones of wool and 150,000 sheep would change hands at this market. Joseph Mitchell, the road-builder, said that a thousand farmers and buyers attended it every year, transacting business worth £400,000: ‘The burly south-country feeder stands at the street corner in deep conversation and about to strike a bargain with that sharp, lynx-eyed, red-haired little man who is the largest farmer in the North, and counts his flocks by 40,000 or 50,000. The greatest agriculturalist in the North compares notes of his experience with the celebrated member of the Highland Society who is also an extensive farmer in the Lothians. That stout man who is talking with the Highland drover came North some thirty-eight years ago a common shepherd. He is now a great farmer and the owner of 12,000 or 15,000 sheep.’
But Angus Cameron, a fox-hunter from Stratherrick, saw no merit in these sheep-farmers. ‘They are the worst of all. It would hardly be considered a reason for grief if they were all to die. The lairds are so discontented they won't take their pleasures in reason. Their pride makes them seek pleasures painful to us, demanding exceptional rents, and causing hardship to the tenantry. They go to spend them in London and Edinburgh. Some go even further to the ports of France.’
The resistance and riot feared by the proprietors of Easter Ross came from the tenantry of Hugh Munro, the young and rakish laird of Novar. At the beginning of 1820 he made it known that he proposed to clear his estates at Culrain and to place the land under sheep. ‘This Grazing,’ announced his factor, James Aird, ‘is very compact and well-adapted from its low and sheltered situation for a wintering to a larger farm….’ It was beautiful, too, a green valley floor watered by the black run of the River Oykel, rich pastures rising in gentle slopes to the south. The townships to be cleared lay on the west bank of the Kyle of Sutherland at Culrain, where John Munro was the principal tenant-at-will, and northward up Strath Oykel by the holdings of Duncan Kennedy at Achnagart and John Ross at Kilmachalmack. With these and other tenants, their relatives and dependants, between five and six hundred people were to be evicted, and according to their minister a hundred of them were aged and bedridden. The rents of Strath Oykel had been steadily increasing. One township of three farms, for example, supporting nine tenants and sharing a hundred acres of meadow by the river with muir-pasture to the west, had once paid a total annual rent of £9 sterling. This had been increased to £30. When the tenants first heard that their laird proposed to evict them they offered to pay five per cent more, hoping that this and the fact that they had never been in arrears would persuade him to change his mind. But Major Forbes of Melness, who wished to lease part of Strath Oykel for a sheep-walk, had offered £100, and young Novar, who had ambitions to be an art-collector, needed the money.
On 2 February 1820, the laird's law-agent, with the statutory Witnesses, arrived in the valley to serve Writs of Removal on all the tenants and their dependants, warning them to be ready to quit by Whitsunday. But this was the glen where the Men of Ross had gathered in 1792 before setting out on the great sheep drive. Alexander Mackay, taken prisoner afterwards and sentenced to banishment for life, had lived at Langwell on the upper braes of the Oykel. The memory of the Year of the Sheep was perhaps stronger in this strath than anywhere in Ross. The people had another reason for their pride, and for thinking that their laird and the Government were in their perpetual debt. During the Napoleonic Wars the county had supplied more than two thousand five hundred men for the three battalions of the 78th Regiment, Ross-shire Highlanders. Three-quarters of the third battalion raised had consisted of six hundred young men under the age of twenty,* many of whom later died in Calabria and Egypt. Strath Oykel had sent its youth with the rest of Ross, and those who had returned were in no mood to walk meekly from their homeland upon an order from an advocate of Novar. They may have remembered, too, the warning an old man had given the county thirty years before: ‘Take care of yourselves, for the Law has reached Ross-shire!’
Law-agent and witnesses were met by a hostile crowd at Achnagart, driven through the snow and from the glen.
‘They were maltreated and pillaged of their papers,’ wrote Sheriff Macleod in his letter to the Inverness Courier, ‘they were pursued off the bounds of the property, threatened that if they returned their lives would be taken and themselves thrown into the Kyle of Firth… and one of the Witnesses, who had
run away from the terror, was pursued and struck with stones to the danger of his life.’
The deforcement of the law-agent was no more than what the gentry had expected in their fear of resistance and riot, and on Novar's behalf they urged the Sheriff to come to their aid and to enforce the Writs. Macleod could remember the Year of the Sheep as well as any man in Ross. Nor did he need reminding of the contribution in blood which the county had made to the 78th. His son Patrick, a Lieutenant-Colonel of the young 3rd battalion, had been killed at El Hamet on the Nile when Albanian infantry and Arab horsemen had come down on his five companies of Highlanders and left only eleven of them on their feet. Class interests will interpret such things relatively, and the old Sheriff probably saw the bloody waste of life as a sacrifice to Law and Good Order, and he was conscious of no irony in the fact that he was now called upon to proceed in arms against the relations of the boys whose heads had been impaled on Arab lances with his son's.
He wrote to the Lord Advocate for military assistance (five hundred foot-soldiers and three cannon, so it was said in Dingwall). But the Lord Advocate seems to have thought the demand frivolous, or at best excessive, and no soldiers were sent from Fort George. Macleod had to be content with the army he could raise from the police, the militia and the gentry. This was substantial enough. On Thursday, 2 March he set out from Dingwall in his carriage to deliver the Writs himself, accompanied by forty constables, twenty-five sorry militiamen, and a large party of mounted gentlemen with their servants. The red-coats were the whole permanent staff of the Easter Ross Regiment of Militia, a corps which Macleod had himself founded and of which he was the proud Colonel, but there seems to have been some doubt about their efficiency or their loyalty today. Their black pouches were filled with blank cartridges only.
Macleod was seventy-six years of age, and in this cold Spring weather the journey must have been a great hardship, though he rode in the warmth of his carriage. For the first twelve miles the route of march followed the same road taken by his little army in 1792, then it climbed over the central hills of Easter Ross to the south shore of the Dornoch Firth. Northwards then through Ardgay to the Kyle of Sutherland, and at Culrain it was halted. Macleod put his head out of his carriage window.
Here, where the Orkneymen of the Great Marquess of Montrose had been defeated one hundred and seventy years before, Macleod saw a great crowd of people gathered on the road and on the braeside. There appeared to be more women than men, but the Sheriff always maintained that most of them were in fact men wearing their wives' or daughters' clothes. They had placed their battle order with instinctive rather than reasoned strategy, the women on the road and the men behind dry-stone walls on either side. There was a great deal of noise, the women shouting and crying, young boys blowing whistles* or horns to summon the laggards from the valley behind. Macleod said that some of the men had guns in their hands. ‘There were also seen many running backward and forward from the shelter of a birch wood close by the scene. There were also observed many men running down the hill on the Sutherland side towards the Ferry, with the apparent desire of crossing to assist their neighbours.’ This confirmed in the Sheriff's mind the ugly rumour that had been circulating in Dingwall since 2 February that a Sutherlander had been seen in Strath Oykel, warning the people of what had happened to him and his friends in Strathnaver, urging them to resist and promising them help.†
Old Macleod got down from his carriage, waving the Writs of Removal, and immediately the crowd pressed upon him and the wall of constables and militia. He shouted to them to disperse, but the women cried back desperately. They shouted. ‘We must die anyway!’ They said it would be better to die here than in America or on the Cape of Good Hope. ‘We don't care for our lives!’
The first blow was struck by a woman with a stick, and then a nasty struggle began, along the road and across the walls. The constables struck back with their ash-sticks, the gentry leant out of the saddle and beat at the women's heads with their crops. The militia fired one blank volley and then gathered about their Colonel with the butts of their muskets swinging. But among them was ‘a disreputable young man’, a drummer whose pride had been offended by that humiliating issue of blank cartridges, and he had secretly loaded his piece with ball. The shot struck a woman in the chest, wounding her mortally.
Old, and too infirm for this kind of brawling, the Sheriff was saved from injury only by the passionate desire of his militia to get as far away as possible from the maddened women. They carried him away quickly down the Ardgay road. He left his carriage behind, the Strath Oykel people overturned it, kicking in its panels and scattering it with the torn Writs of Removal. Then – men, boys and bloodstained women – they chased the gentry and constables four miles down the bank of the Kyle to Ardgay, where the forces of Law then barricaded themselves in the inn. The people threw stones at the windows, shouted taunts, and at last went home in triumph.
Macleod made Ardgay his headquarters for a week, unwilling to return to Dingwall without issuing the Writs, but reluctant to advance once more upon Strath Oykel. He snatched at any reason to justify what had happened. ‘We were joined by a man well-known to most of us,’ he said, ‘who had come through the body of men and who distinctly reported to us that many of them were armed with double-barrelled guns and wished to stop him. He was fired at by one of them whom he knew to be a man from Strathnaver.’ But the only firing at Culrain had come from the muskets of his militia, and the only ammunition of the people had been the stones which the women had brought in their aprons.
He waited for the mob to storm the inn, but the little revolt was over. The old weaknesses of the Highlanders had ended it – their lack of leadership, their childish faith in the laird, who must now surely change his mind, and, most insidious of all, their melancholy belief that they had been a doomed race since Culloden. Their comfort came in the stirring sadness of their own destruction.
There was also the stern disapproval of the Church. The Reverend Alexander Macbean, in whose parish of Kincardine Strath Oykel was, had no sympathy with his parishioners in their scandalous defiance of the laws of God and man, and he threatened them with certain damnation if they continued. But on the other hand he was sincerely outraged by their bloody treatment at the hands of police, militia and gentry. In the next few weeks, by the letters he wrote to the Inverness Courier and to the Ministerial Evening Courier in London, he attacked the Sheriff for proceeding against the people as if they had been an invading army, and he derided Macleod's absurd habit of calling for soldiers at the first prompting (‘There is no need for a body of 500 men and 3 fieldpieces to come amongst us!’). Goaded into the undignified necessity of defending himself in the Press, Macleod asked where the Minister had been before and during the affray at Culrain. ‘It does not appear that he exerted his boasted influence with these tenants….’
‘I employed my catechist Donald Matheson to go among them,’ replied Macbean, ‘and to exhort them in my name to obedience; and from the reports he gave me from time to time I had no reason to anticipate the opposition given to the constituted authorities on the day of the riot.’ And as to why he had not ridden with the Law to give it God's approval, he answered that boldly: ‘To go to my people at the head of an armed force, that I would never do!’
But in the days following the riot he rode from one end of the valley to the other, quoting the Scriptures with terrifying skill and ‘pointing out the madness and inutility of violence and the destructive consequences that must inevitably ensue’ if the people did not surrender to the Writs of Removal. Unfortunately, one other man rode to Strath Oykel that week, and with quite different intent. This was Thomas Dudgeon, who had witnessed the advance of the Sheriff's army from his doorstep at Fearn, two miles down the Firth from Ardgay. ‘He convened the people,’ said the Inverness Courier, delighted with another opportunity of showing what a rascal Mr Dudgeon was, ‘and as might be expected, sent them home with their minds more inflamed and hardened than ever.’ He tol
d the people that while they had certainly violated the Law by their opposition to the authorities, the Sheriff had outraged it by not reading the Riot Act,, a nice point of procedure (not to say semantics) that may have had no significance for the confused tenantry.
‘He said a great deal about the Stafford family,’ reported the Courier, ‘and about a train being laid for the extermination of all Highlanders. To prove his sincerity, he said, he would stand by them while he had a drop of blood within him, and whenever they discovered him to be faithless or deserting their cause, he bade them come down and put fire to all of his stacks, and after making this grand bonfire in honour of the occasion, to cut off his head.’
The Strath Oykel people may not have understood all that Dudgeon said (he having no Gaelic), and Sheriff Macleod soon drove the troublesome fellow away, but the fact that a gentleman had urged them to resistance prolonged their stubborn inaction. It took Mr Macbean another forty-eight hours, during which he described for them the fires of Hell, before their will broke. Humbly and sorrowfully seven of the principal tenants, led by Kennedy of Achnagart and Ross of Kilmachalmack, signed a letter which Macbean had probably written. It asked James Aird, the Ground Agent of Novar, to meet them at the inn of Ardgay with new Writs of Removal. And on 14 March they went with their Minister to the inn, and there accepted the papers. Later the Sheriff-Officers went among the rest of the tenants, and ‘were received with the greatest of hospitality’, said Mr Macbean.
