A People's History of Scotland (8 page)

By 1705, a joint Anglo-Scottish parliamentary commission had drawn up a draft treaty of union. The Scottish representatives were selected from supporters of the Hanoverian succession, followers of the Dukes of Queensberry and Argyll. Nonetheless, anger was
mounting as it became clear that this was an elite stitch-up. In both Dumfries and Stirling the treaty was burned in public, and rioting broke out in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The writer Daniel Defoe reported a ‘Terrible Multitude' on Edinburgh's High Street led by a drummer, shouting and swearing and crying ‘No Union, No Union, English Dogs and the like'.
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Defoe, there as an agent for the London government, added that the Scots were a ‘hardened, refractory and terrible people' and the Scottish ‘rabble' the worst he had experienced. As the vote was to be taken, troops surrounded the parliament building and the royal palace of Holyrood while two more regiments were stationed in Leith and Musselburgh.
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It was sufficient to allow the vote to ratify the treaty to be held.

What drove the crowd that rioted outside Parliament as it ratified the Union in 1707? The Kirk was the one institution that defended their interests and provided them any say, in addition to poor relief, and it appeared under threat. Another reason is that they knew higher taxes on salt, ale and other basics would follow; also, tighter custom controls based on the English model would crack down on smuggling, which was widespread.

Although there was a growing sense of nationhood, this could not overcome the distinction between Lowlands and Highlands, and the exclusion of Catholics and Episcopalians. The Union, in the end, maintained the independence of the Kirk and both the educational and legal systems. It did so, as the historian Neil Davidson points out, ‘to preserve the function of the Scottish
state
'.
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By the time, in 1707, that the Scottish Parliament approved the Act of Union, the key political figure, the Duke of Argyll, was back fighting the French, but he had received an English peerage and been made a lieutenant general for helping to ensure the outcome. Twenty thousand pounds had been sent north from London, some used for bribes, the rest as the usual reward for loyalty.
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Scotland had became an integral part of what was effectively a new state. Few people in 1707 or for years after would describe themselves as British, but that had changed by the end of the century. More important, Scotland was not Ireland and was free to prosper in
the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, dislike of the Union opened up possibilities for the Jacobites, the one force that seemed to oppose it. Popular discontent in Scotland, and to a lesser extent south of the border, could often find expression in Jacobite slogans, symbols and songs, but it generally foundered on the Catholicism of the Stewarts.

The chances of the Stewarts regaining the throne depended on France providing military support, without which their supporters in England, and many in Scotland, would not move. In 1708, a French invasion fleet, with the ‘Old Pretender', the supposed James VII and III, on board, reached the Firth of Forth. Several local lairds took up arms in support, but the French commander refused to land and fled when the Royal Navy arrived.

The accession of George I to the British throne in 1714 was not popular, and in response the Jacobites planned a rising: a French invasion force to land in south-west England. This was to be the main thrust, followed by a rebellion in Scotland. With the collapse of the English rising before it ever started, however, all efforts were concentrated on Scotland.

Good news came when the Earl of Mar, an architect of the Union, was sacked by George as Secretary for Scotland and he now switched allegiance to James. In September 1715, he gathered a force of 600 men at Braemar and proceeded to take control of Scotland north of the Tay. By October, Mar was sitting in Perth but failed to move, giving the Duke of Argyll time to raise a smaller force. Both armies were made up of tenants pressed into service by their lords, and the majority of the Jacobite force came from the north-east.

When, in November, Mar finally advanced from Perth he was met by Argyll at Sheriffmuir. The battle was famously indecisive but in the end, despite having overwhelming superiority in numbers, the Jacobite commander withdrew. James's arrival did not boost the rebels' fortunes, and when Argyll advanced, Mar evacuated Perth. James returned to France and Mar ordered his army to stand down.

On the same day as Sheriffmuir, a Jacobite force made up of rebels from Northumberland and the Borders, reinforced by troops sent by Mar, which had advanced into Lancashire, surrendered at Preston. Thus ended the Jacobites' best chance of seizing back the throne.

In the wake of 1715 it was clear more was needed than relying on the power of Clan Campbell to hold down the Highlands. The Duke of Argyll was introducing commercial methods onto his estates and his new tenants were not required to give military service, replacing feudal obligation with modern contracts and capitalist relations. The London government built a network of military roads and garrison forts, but the most effective work was done by the Kirk via the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which converted Highlanders to the Church of Scotland and worked effectively to eradicate Gaelic in its schools and churches.

Meanwhile, economic change was sewing rthe seeds of popular unrest. In the south-west the economy was improving, with Galloway sending black cattle to meet London's demand for meat and by 1720, landowners were enclosing arable land with stone dykes, behind which cattle grazed.
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The economy of Galloway was centred on cattle-rearing and was in that way similar to the Western Highlands. The peasantry of the Lowlands had gone through much, but this was the first time they suffered being cleared off the land.
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The beneficiaries of enclosure included Jacobite landlords such as Sir David Dunbar of Baldoon and Sir Robert Maxwell of Orchardton. Dunbar used the money he earned from the cattle trade to buy more land.
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In 1715, Dunbar's great-grandson Sir Basil Hamilton joined the Jacobite forces raised in the Borders and Northumberland but was taken prisoner at the Battle of Preston. His family secured his release, and to stop any loss of his estates his mother took ownership of them, with Hamilton running them on her behalf. ‘In 1723, Hamilton built a cattle park near Kirkcudbright on land originally owned by the McLellans.'
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The Earl of Galloway, Sir William Maxwell, Sir Godfrey McCulloch, Sir James Dalrymple and the Laird of Logan were landowners who followed Dunbar's example and built cattle parks. These landlords were Episcopalians or Jacobites, or both.

Fears of a Stewart return were revived, in the early summer of 1719, by a small-scale invasion of Kintail in the north-west Highlands by a few hundred Spanish troops, which succeeded in rallying some local Jacobite clansmen, although it was swiftly defeated by
Hanoverian troops.
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Hatred of enclosure and of supporters of the Stewarts helped create a rural uprising in the south-west. For four months in 1724 a popular movement swept Galloway, with crowds ‘levelling' the dykes used to enclose the cattle parks. The first dyke-breaking occurred on 17 March at Netherlaw near Kirkcudbright, and in early April a call to a meeting against cattle parks was fixed to church doors in Borgue, Twynholm and Tongland parishes.

The
Caledonian Mercury
reported that this meeting was addressed by a ‘mountain preacher' and ‘big with that ancient levelling Tenet', several hundred armed persons subsequently demolished dykes in the neighbourhood.
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The landlords demanded troops be sent, and in May, four troops of Stair's Dragoons arrived in Kirkcudbright. Just prior to their arrival, a call for people to gather at Sir Basil Hamilton's new cattle park at Bomby Muir was put up on eight church doors. In answer, nearly two miles of dykes were levelled by 1,000 people.

Despite the fact that the ordinary people of Galloway were staunchly Presbyterian and the south-west had been a stronghold of the Covenanters, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted through a denunciation of the dyke-breaking. Many of the Calvinist groups that had operated in Covenanting times were still outside the Kirk, however, and they helped provide an ideological and organisational framework for the rebellion.
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All through the summer the levelling continued, and the concern was such in both Edinburgh and London that a government inquiry was promised. The Levellers sent a letter to the officer commanding the Dragoons in Kirkcudbright, explaining,

We unanimously agreed to throw down Mr. Murdoch's dykes which enclosed the Barony of Airds out of which two or three years ago great multitudes of good and sufficient tenants were driven away and also the same Mr. Murdoch's dykes which were a building about the lands of Kilwhannadie and Macartney, like wise great tracts of land which tenants were immediately to be turned out.
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In October, troops arrested some 200 Levellers but allowed almost all to escape en route back to Kirkcudbright. The dyke-breaking
continued into the next year and the Levellers' actions halted the pace and extent of enclosure in the south-west.
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Indeed, the Galloway Levellers had so ‘frightened the authorities' that the process of agricultural improvement and clearances in the Lowlands proceeded more cautiously and slowly.
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Levelling was not confined to Galloway. As early as 1718, enclosure walls on the estate of Sir James Carmichael of Bonnington near Lanark were torn down, and this continued after the Galloway events. In Cromarty in 1732, a 500-strong crowd pulled down a dyke and put up trees to block access to the local peat bog.

Another form of protest also became a feature of Scottish life in this period. Riots are almost always an expression of popular anger when no other channel exists and in Inverurie in 1724 townspeople rioted when they were taxed to fund a road- and bridge-building programme. In the same year farther south, the Baillie of Duns, John Grey, had his house attacked and his life threatened after he tried to stop the town's annual football game on ‘Fasting Even'. And in Irvine, Ayrshire, there was a series of riots in the 1740s and '50s over the enclosure of the town's moor.
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High food prices also led to riots. In 1720, food riots broke out in the coastal burghs of Angus, Perthshire, Fife and West Lothian, with crowds ranging from 50 to 2,000 breaking open barns and warehouses belonging to farmers and merchants believed to be hoarding oatmeal and grain. Men and women wielding axes and hammers boarded ships taking grain for export, tearing down sails, removing rudders and driving holes through their hulls. In Methil, Fife, colliers and sailors were to the fore in the crowd.
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The town of Dysart in east Fife was in the hands of the crowd for three days. Led by a bayonet-wielding woman, they drove off one party of soldiers before the army retook control. A ballad praising the ‘Valiant Wives of Dysart' describes this woman: ‘… shipped through the Gate / And pass'd throw the Kirk yard. / Calling where is that stinking Beast, / The Ugly Swine the Laird'.
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Riots broke out over aristocrats' control of town councils or their imposition of ministers on congregations.
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Women played a prominent role in the riots and popular disturbances. A
nineteenth-century local historian of Renfrewshire noted that in the customs and excise riots in Greenock and Port Glasgow of the previous century, ‘women … of a class above the lowest – were active participants in the riots that generally accompanied seizures of contraband articles'.
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Christopher Whatley points out that in Dumfries and Galloway, ‘… between 1711 and 1718 there were at least four major incidents involving virtually all-female crowds of one hundred and up to two hundred people … It was attacks by armed females on the queen's warehouses and their fellow officers that terrified the customs service in Dumfries in the first post-Union years.'
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In 1725, a tax on malt led to riots in Stirling, Dundee, Ayr, Elgin, Paisley and, most seriously, Glasgow. There, rioters burned down the house of the local MP, fought the local garrison, losing eight lives, and driving them out of the city, before the arrival of General Wade with 400 dragoons and accompanying infantry to restore order. Christopher Whatley, who has charted much of these disturbances, notes the high involvement of women among Covenanters of the south-west, and in the Galloway Levellers' Revolt of 1724 against evictions and enclosure.
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The Porteous Riot became the centrepiece of Sir Walter Scott's novel
The Heart of Midlothian
. In March 1737, a convicted smuggler, Andrew Wilson, was hanged in Edinburgh's Grassmarket. He was a popular man, and the evasion of duty on spirits, something imposed after the Act of Union, was equally popular. After the gruesome deed had been carried out, a section of the crowd pelted the City Guard with stones and rubbish. In response, its commander, Captain James Porteous, gave the order to open fire. Nine people were killed.

The resulting anger was so great that the city magistrates had Porteous charged with murder; he was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged on 7 September. At the last minute a royal pardon arrived from London, prompted, it was said, by the same magistrates who had been in the habit of playing golf with Porteous. A crowd broke into the Tolbooth, where Porteous was still in custody, dragged him out and hanged him.

In 1740, an Edinburgh magistrate who talked his way out of a food riot ‘had to be protected from the women and most dangerous party of ye Mob … who called out to knock him down'.
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Meanwhile, the old order in the shape of the Stewarts was about to make its last appearance. In 1744, with France and Britain at war, the French gathered an invasion fleet at Dunkirk, where it was joined by the Old Pretender's son, Charles – ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie', or Prince Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stewart, to give him his full name. A storm devastated the fleet and the expedition was called off.