A People's History of Scotland (5 page)

As Stewart kings reached maturity they would try to establish control but would often meet bloody ends in battle with the English or at the hands of noble opponents. The descendants of the Norman nobles settled in the north by the Canmores adopted the customs of the Gaelic chiefs as royal control weakened, allowing them to grasp the opportunity to manage their own affairs. By the late Middle Ages these chiefs held their land under feudal charter from the Crown or another chief.

In the Highlands, clan chiefs were able to force military service from lesser landlords who had previously held their land from the Crown. They relied on ‘bonding', whereby lesser men agreed to serve them in return for protection, and they claimed seniority in real or, more usually, imagined kinships.

The runrig system of agriculture is sometimes cited as a collective form of agriculture, but it was nothing of the sort. The strips of land farmed by the peasants were allocated annually not through
collective decision-making but by the landlord. The system was hierarchical.

This social stratification was fixed by the belief in kinship with the chief and the legend that the clan had some collective right to the land. While the chiefs needed military service they encouraged this belief, but after 1746, when there was no need for this, the reality of who owned the land quickly hit home. Membership of a clan could cut across a feudal lordship – so MacLeans or Camerons lived on land owned by the Duke of Argyll and were subject to his baronial courts. They paid rent to Argyll and gave service and sometimes tribute to their chief. As Neil Davidson argues: ‘Clans, far from being opposed to feudalism, were representative of its most extreme form.'
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Whether in the Highlands or Lowlands, Scotland remained a militarised society where war was commonplace and life short and brutal even for the elite.

Thus far we have heard little from the ordinary people. In a feudal society they counted for little, and the records we have are those written by churchmen for the glory of God, the king and their temporal lord.

In the course of the fourteenth century, however, climate change created cooler and wetter conditions, squeezing fertile land and acting to reduce the population. Plague arrived in 1349, which further cut the number of the living. The result – as elsewhere in Western Europe – was to create a shortage of labour, and the peasantry were able to use the leverage this gave them to improve their own conditions. Rent, usually in kind, replaced labour services.
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Change was coming, and with it ordinary people would begin to tread the stage of history, even if hesitantly at first.

Reformation

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n 1549, a Dumfries priest, Robert Wedderburn, anonymously published ‘The Complaynt of Scotland', which gives an impression of ordinary life in sixteenth-century Scotland, living on the front line of an almost permanent conflict with England:

I labour night and day with my hands to feed the lazy and useless men, and they repay me with hunger and the sword. I sustain their life with the toil and sweat of my body, and they persecute my body with hardship until I am become a beggar. They life through me and I die through them. Alas, oh my natural mother, you reproach me and accuse me of the faults my two brothers commit. My two brothers, nobles and clergy, who should defend me, are more cruel to me than my old enemies the English. They are my natural brethren, but they are my mortal enemies.
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In his disillusion with his ‘betters', Wedderburn calls for unity against the invader and an end to divisions that saw some Scots nobles side
with the English. Rather than wait for divine help or some turn in the wheel of fortune, he also implores ordinary Scots to rise up. This was Wedderburn's prescription to cure the affliction besetting Scotland.

At the time, the nation was in the hands of the Stewart dynasty. In 1542, after military defeat by the English, James V died in shame, uttering the final words ‘it came wi a lass, it'll gang wi a lass'. The Stewarts had succeeded to the throne through marriage to Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert the Bruce, and now James's only legitimate heir was his infant daughter Mary. Though James V obviously had no high hopes for his daughter, Mary would not be the last of the Stewart monarchs, though not through want of trying.

Scotland had been at war because James had refused the command of England's Henry VIII, his uncle, to convert to Protestantism. Now Scotland would be ruled by his widow, the French Mary of Guise. England and France were at war and both viewed Scotland as the back door. Henry demanded that the infant Mary be married to his son, and when diplomacy failed, his troops invaded, winning the Battle of Pinkie outside Edinburgh but failing to take the city, although occupying much of southern Scotland. In response, the infant Queen of Scots was spirited off to France to marry the king's eldest son, the Dauphin. Mary of Guise brought over a French army to protect her from the English, and Scotland was now caught up in a great power conflict.

Mary of Guise, backed by the French troops, became an effective ruler, something the Scottish nobility always disliked. Because France and Mary of Guise were Catholic, the religious question became a national imperative. The Catholic Church was a feudal institution that demanded rents from its tenants and levied taxes. Throughout Scotland the Church had fallen increasingly under royal and noble control. Kings appointed their bastard sons to bishoprics and nobles ran monastic lands as their own. James V had secured five of the richest religious houses for his bastard sons while they were still infants, and none would grow up to lead a celibate life.

Consequently, the Catholic Church had few defenders. The nobility who had watched Henry VIII seize its lands south of the border
were already salivating over that possibility in Scotland. Lesser gentry resented paying tithes to a church known for its wealth. Meanwhile, in the towns Protestantism had spread quickly. It already had martyrs burnt at the stake and one failed rebellion in 1546, when a gang of Protestants had murdered Cardinal Beaton then held out in St Andrews Castle for a year.

A former priest, John Knox, had been among them, and when the castle fell he was punished by being sent to work as a galley slave in the French navy. Knox stood for the purification of worship and believed that out of duty to God it was right to revolt against the Catholic religious and political establishment. But from his experiences on the Continent he was also concerned by religious radicals who had gone as far as to challenge the existing political and social order. In particular, the Peasants' War in Germany (1524–1525) had seen Thomas Munzer lead the lower orders against the nobility, preaching a form of primitive communism.

On 11 May 1559, Knox, fresh from studying in John Calvin's Geneva, preached a revolutionary sermon at St John's Church in Perth, after which the congregation rushed to attack the town's monasteries. At the time, Knox described the mob as his ‘brethren' but later termed them ‘the rascal multitude'.

Knox had been summoned back to Scotland by some great nobles, including the heir to the earldom of Argyll and an illegitimate son of James V, Lord James Stewart, the Earl of Moray, who had supposedly taken part in the sacking of the monasteries in Perth. Knox was prepared not just to ally himself with these nobles but, in future, to allow them substantial influence within the emerging Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

The French regent, Mary of Guise, mobilised her troops to crush these ‘heretics' but similar riots followed in Dundee, Scone, Stirling, Linlithgow and Edinburgh. Knox could now call on powerful friends to raise an army for the new Protestant religion. England, fearing its northern neighbour would become a province of France, acted. In 1560, Queen Elizabeth sent her fleet to take control of the Firth of Forth, cutting off Mary's supply line to France. The subsequent peace treaty ended French involvement in Scotland's affairs and the
Scottish Parliament voted to make Calvinism the new state religion. This was a decision made up of landowners, the landed nobility and the richest men from the royal burghs.

The Reformation effectively destroyed Catholicism outside of a few pockets in the Highlands and the north-east, and brought Scotland closer into England's orbit. But it was largely brought about by a revolt of the nobility, and not by a popular movement. At the beginning the ‘mob' had been useful, but very quickly it became a power struggle between rebel lords backed by Queen Elizabeth of England, and Mary of Guise and the French.

But amidst this chaos new ideas were beginning to circulate. Literacy was spreading not just in the towns, but among the peasantry. They no longer relied on priests to translate scripture, but they were free to read, interpret and dispute it amongst themselves. The original, revolutionary message of Jesus, preaching rebellion against Rome and denouncing the refusal of the great and the good to act, could still shine through and inspire.

In one sense nothing changed with the Reformation, in that noble power not only remained but was strengthened. But in other ways Scotland had changed. There was the faint glimmer of democracy within the new Kirk. More important, the idea that it was correct to rise up against tyrants, couched though it was in religious language, was set loose.
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When Knox called on the ordinary people of Perth to rise up, he was unleashing something that could not be so easily controlled.

Yet there was one further obstacle to the ultimate success of the Reformation. In 1561, Mary, Queen of Scots, sent as a child to France and married to the French heir, returned after her husband's early death. Verbally she accepted the Reformation but was opposed by Elizabeth of England and a majority of Scotland's nobility. A tumultuous reign ended in a short civil war, Mary's flight to England and her execution there after long imprisonment.

Mary is one of those historical figures who feature on shortbread tins and other kitsch sold in souvenir shops. Knox and others attacked her morals and her love life, famously denouncing the ‘monstrous regiment of women' (although this was directed at her mother, and
did not endear him to Elizabeth I in England). The new queen was soon involved in the assassination of her second husband, who had previously taken part in the gruesome murder of her Italian secretary in front of her when she was pregnant. We shall not share such misogyny, but Mary was not a romantic figure swept from the throne because of ill-fated love.

She regarded herself not only as queen of Scotland but also of England, because the English queen, Elizabeth, was held, by the Catholic Church, to be illegitimate (her father, Henry VIII, had divorced his first wife to marry Elizabeth's mother) and a heretic. In order to win the English throne she was involved in all sorts of conspiracies and plots with France and, in particular, Spain and the Vatican. They wanted to topple Elizabeth as part of the campaign to destroy the Protestant Reformation in Europe and England's ally, Holland, the first capitalist state that was struggling to achieve independence from Spain. It is hard to shrug off the anti-Catholic sectarianism that has blighted modern Scotland, but if one can, this can be seen as an attempt by the old feudal order to strangle a new society, struggling into life, and Mary was quite conscious of what she was involved in.

Mary's infant son, James VI, took the throne and was fought over by rival sections of the nobility, who abducted and tried to murder him. On reaching adulthood he used conciliation and coercion to exert a degree of control through a strong Privy Council and overcame the strict Calvinists to create bishops in the Church of Scotland, as agents of royal power.
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In the meantime, parts of Scotland remained relatively free of royal rule. In the north-east the earls of Huntly remained Catholic, and in 1594 defied James's order to renounce their religion or quit Scotland. The Earl of Argyll was ordered to raise an army to assert royal power, and mobilised 8,000 of his clansmen and their allies. In Glenlivet they met with Huntly and Errol's smaller force of 2,000, but their cavalry and artillery were able to rout Argyll's clansmen.
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James's continued attempts to disarm and demilitarise the Highland clans had limited success, but he still had to rely on powerful magnates such as the Campbells to maintain some kind of order. Nevertheless, a number of clans became Calvinist at the diktat of
their chief: the Campbells, Frasers, Grants, Munros and Rosses would generally support the government over the next century and a half. Not only were the Highlands physically divorced from the Lowlands, but now they were also divided along religious lines.

The dispossession of Church lands following the Reformation benefitted the nobility, not the peasantry. Nevertheless, Calvinism had its attractions for the lower orders, being based on regional presbyteries, made up of delegates, and with the election of local ministers. In response, nobles used their power to attempt to dominate much of these proceedings. The Kirk held itself as being above the power of a king and thus represented a challenge, never far from the surface, to royal rule.

The absence of peasant rebellions is something that contrasts Scotland with other Western European countries during the period. It can be explained by the very struggle to survive, the dominance of the nobility and the lairds, and the frequency of war and feuding. The historian Victor Kiernan argues, regarding the power of Calvinism, that ‘It may not be surprising if some strata of the peasantry learned to hold fast to a dogmatic creed as a substitute for the inherited patch of soil that peasants in other countries clung to.'
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Scotland differed from the development of feudal society in Western Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Unlike in France, Spain and Austria it had no royal standing army nor a numerous and capable state bureaucracy. Here the chaos characterising this period meant royal control remained limited while the nobility retained and increased its power.

By the seventeenth century the peasantry seldom owned the land they worked. Crops were sparse and rents could be as high as a third of what was grown, with payments in kind or service on top. At some point leases, it seems, grew longer, offering the peasantry more security. Smallholdings and small estates were, however, more numerous in the south-west, which was farther from royal control and in close contact with Ireland. This was the one area that would produce a rural rebellion later on.

During the Thirty Years' War, Protestantism was pitted against the old, Catholic order. In Scotland, identification with the Kirk and
anti-Catholicism meant a popular national consciousness emerged. But it also meant that because Scotland was too weak, and faced an internal, non-Calvinist ‘enemy within', it needed English protection. The overthrow of Mary, Queen of Scots, meant Scotland was firmly allied to England.

Scotland was weak in other respects, as Thomas Johnston noted nearly a century ago: ‘Scotland was not a nation: it was a loose aggregation of small but practically self-supporting communities, and scanty supplies and high prices at Aberdeen may quite well have been coincident with plenty and comparatively low prices in Dundee and Glasgow.'
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But fortunes would change for the Scottish king. In 1603, Elizabeth of England on her deathbed named James VI as her heir. When news reached Edinburgh he took off to London with alacrity, not surprising given his experience of being abducted, threatened and bullied. As he travelled south, James VI was impressed at the wealth of the English lords who joined him on his journey to be crowned. They no longer lived in fortified castles; in Scotland they still did.

Once he had settled in London, he wanted more than the Union of the Crowns, thinking of the possibility of direct rule from London, but sensed that the Scottish nobility would resist any attempt to bring that country under one rule. Despite the best efforts of his Calvinist teachers, James believed in the divine right of kings, but he had a poor hand to play. The English Parliament, which he did not control, held the purse strings and was reluctant to finance any royal army. Nevertheless, James played this hand well, extending royal power in Scotland where he could. But this good governance would not last long.

The War of the Three Kingdoms

In 1639, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Alexander Henderson, wrote: ‘The people make the magistrate (king) but the magistrate maketh not the people. The people may be without the magistrate but the magistrate cannot be without
the people. The body of the magistrate is mortal but the people as a society is immortal.'
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The Union of the Crowns in 1603 created a British state but there were, as yet, few cross-border institutions. The two kingdoms ran their own affairs. Yet it would be a rebellion in Scotland against James's son Charles that triggered the English Revolution of the 1640s and war throughout Britain and Ireland.