How the Scots Invented the Modern World (20 page)

An English visitor in the 1720s stopped at one chieftain’s house and remarked casually that some of the chief’s clansmen had behaved with less than the sort of courtesy one expected from Highland hospitality. The chieftain, the Englishman recalled, “clapped his hand to his broadsword and said, if I required it, he would send me two or three of their heads.” The visitor laughed, thinking this was a joke, “but the chief insisted he was a man of his word.” Eventually the visitor talked his host out of his gruesome offer.

In his natural habitat, surrounded by his henchmen, his bard, his piper, and his servants or gillies, the Highland chieftain could be an awe-inspiring figure. What generally struck most outsiders, however, was the shabbiness and poverty of the average chief’s existence. Like his followers, he was the product of a fundamental and intractable poverty.

People lived by raising cattle, sheep, and goats, and maintaining tiny plots of land for growing stands of oat and barley. In winter, “they have no diversions to amuse them,” said an observer, “but sit brooding in the smoke of their fire til their legs and thighs are scorched to an extraordinary degree.” Most of the year food was scarce, so clansmen supplemented their income by stealing from neighboring clans, with elaborate and daring cattle raids. A burning cross, made of two sticks tied together with a strip of linen stained in blood, summoned clansmen together, as they saw it blazing forth from mountaintop to mountaintop. As the warriors passed along the mountain trails, they watched for portents of future victory or defeat. A stag or hare or fox that crossed their path and was not immediately hunted and slain boded evil. If a bare-footed woman was sighted, she had to be seized and blood drawn from her forehead with a dirk before the men could go on.

The cattle raid, the
creach,
was not only a test of leadership and honor, celebrated in bardic song. It also paid a tidy profit, when the clan could charge ransom to return the stolen cattle. The term in Scots was
blackmail
—
mail
being the word for “rent” or “tribute,” and black the typical color of the Highlander’s cattle. Blackmail determined the rhythm of life in many parts of the Highlands. Some observers estimated that at any given moment the average chief had half his warriors out stealing his neighbor’s cattle, and the other half out recovering the cattle his neighbors had stolen from him.

In summer, families lived on milk and whey from their cattle, and little else. Bread was available only in the spring, which was when most work had to be done. In winter the scarcity cut deep. Deprived of other sources of protein, Highlanders often had to bleed their cattle, mixing the blood with oatmeal and frying it in the fire. Sometimes cows were bled so frequently they could barely stand. It is worth remembering that a “traditional” Highland dish such as haggis, the stuffed sheep’s stomach that is the bane of visitors to Scotland and such a source of pride to its natives, would have been a great luxury to an average Highland family. “Where flocks and corn are the only wealth,” Dr. Johnson observed, “he who is poor never can be rich. The son merely occupies the place of the father, and life knows nothing of progress or advancement.”

Families lived in a one-room hut of mud and stone, called a bothy. The typical Highland village was a collection of bothies; to visitors at a distance, it looked like heaps of dirt in a field. It was only when they grew closer that they saw that these heaps of dirt housed human beings, with dogs, goats, and half-naked children roaming among the huts and peat fires. In poorer clans the only way to tell a chief’s children from the other half-naked urchins was that they were the ones who could speak English. In fact, these were people much poorer than Plains Indians or the other pastoral-nomadic peoples civil-society theorists knew about. Poverty was the keynote to everything in the Highlands. It even determined who was loyal, and who was not, in the Forty-five. Twenty-two clans joined up with the Stuarts; ten remained loyal to the British. But the ten who stayed loyal were the most prosperous, including the Clan Campbell. By contrast, many who joined the revolt, such as the MacDonnells of Keppoch and the MacDonalds of Glencoe, were either landless or on the edges of bankruptcy. One contemporary estimated that the total yearly income of all the clans that marched for Prince Charlie did not add up to 1,500 pounds.

The Highlander’s poverty was compensated by one thing: his pride as a warrior. The crucial distinction in the clans was between those who worked and those who fought. Peasants and women did the former; men, the clansmen, did the latter. Visitors found this hard to fathom. In the early nineteenth century an Englishwoman became fed up at the sight of a Highland woman laboring wearily on her family’s meager plot of ground while her husband, in full Highland regalia, sat and watched. She upbraided the man’s mother: How could she allow her son to sit idle like this, while her daughter-in-law did all the work? The old woman stoutly replied that if her son lifted his hand to till the soil, he would cease to be a gentleman.

As Dr. Johnson observed, in the Highlands “every man was a soldier.” The clansman was trained to fight from boyhood. Armed with his double-edged broadsword,
¹⁴
which measured a yard long and two inches wide; his dagger or dirk; and his shield or targe, and screaming his clan’s motto as he rushed headlong at his opponent, he was a formidable sight. But he was no Iron Age throwback, the “bare-arsed banditti” of English legend. He could be as familiar with handling a musket, and fighting in formation, as any British grenadier. For generations the principal export of the Highlands had been its surplus males, as soldiers and mercenaries for the armies of Europe. In the Middle Ages, Irish chieftains had hired them: nicknamed
galloglasses
or
redshanks
because of their exposed knees below their kilts, Scottish mercenaries had kept the Gaelic parts of Ireland safe from the English for four hundred years. They fought for the Dutch against the Spanish as the Scots Brigade, and served the princes of Germany and central Europe in their frequent internecine conflicts. Clan Mackay kept Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus supplied with a Scottish regiment during the Thirty Years’ War. The men who fought at Culloden were in large part seasoned, hardened professionals, led by men with commissions in various European armies.

So, if poverty was one keynote of Highland life, war and violence was another. It is what made the Highlander admired, and feared. Daniel Defoe watched them walk the streets of Edinburgh: “They are formidable fellows. . . . They are all gentlemen, will take no affront from any man, and insolent to the last degree.” But he also noted the incongruity of one of these proud men with his weapons and tartan (another myth: genuine Highlanders wore plaids in any color that pleased them, regardless of their clan) walking “as upright and haughty as if he were a lord,” while driving a cow in front of him. Duels, murder, and feuding were constants in the Highlands, as was “scorning,” or taking food and shelter by force from tenants of other clans when a feud was under way. Lairds routinely burned down the houses and seized the livestock of tenants who displeased them. When Lord Lochiel brought the Camerons in on Prince Charles’s side in 1745, his brother Archibald passed through Cameron country warning villagers that “if they did not come off directly he would burn their houses and cut them in pieces.” When some Cameron males refused, he beat them with his whip. When another hesitated, he killed four of the man’s cows until he agreed to join him.

It was a way of life most Lowlanders had not known for generations, and they avoided it as much as they could. Contact could be dangerous, or even fatal. Once a member of Clan MacDonald of Glencoe passed a Lowlander on the road near Achnacone and gave him a traditional Gaelic greeting:
“Beannachd Dia duit, a duine!”
(God’s blessing on you, sir!) The Lowlander knew no Gaelic, but replied nervously it was indeed a fine day. “Foolish man,” said the Highlander, “do you despise the word of God?” With that he drew his sword and killed him, and then robbed the body, taking his shoes, his musket, and a guinea piece he found in the man’s coat pocket. Later he told his laird what he had done, “adding that to his mind it had been a profitable morning.” Big Archie MacPhail, as he was known, was a famed cattle stealer and was never prosecuted for the murder. But he did worry at night, he told others, about being haunted by the dead man’s spirit.

The English usually dismissed Highlanders as “savages” and barbarians. Enlightened Scots could be more understanding, although just as censorious. One such was Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of Session in the 1740s and friend to Lord Kames. From his estate in Inverness-shire, overlooking Drummossie Moor, he watched the clansmen around him with a critical, if sympathetic, eye. They were, he wrote, “unacquainted with industry and the fruits of it, and united in some degree by the singularity of dress and language, stick close to their antient way of life.” They “depend generally on the Chiefs, as their sovereign Lords and masters; and being accustomed to the use of arms, and inured to hard living, are dangerous to the public peace.” He noted that their isolation left them “the prey of their accustomed sloth and barbarity,” and made enforcement of the laws impossible.

Like other enlightened Scots, what Forbes wanted for the Highlands was civilization, of which the chief beneficiary would be the Highlander himself. The key to this, according to Forbes, was to take away their weapons. “Their successors . . . must be as harmless as the commonality” in the Lowlands. When the Highlander “could not longer live by Rapine,” Forbes wrote, he would be forced to “think of living by Industry.” The other key was roads. “The want of Roads . . . [has] proved hitherto a bar to all free intercourse between the High and Lowlands,” and prevented the spread of civilizing influences to the north.

Beginning in the 1720s, after the failed Jacobite revolt in 1715 and another in 1719, the government began building roads. General George Wade was dispatched with garrison troops to lay out an ambitious network of roads and forts. Between 1725 and 1740, General Wade boasted of having constructed 250 miles of highway, designed to link Fort William and Fort Augustus in the west to Inverness. Communication, along with military fortification, was supposed to counterbalance the Highlanders’ chief military advantage: numbers.

In 1715 the Earl of Mar, a man with no military experience, had assembled a Highland force of nearly six thousand warriors in a matter of weeks. MacDonnell of Keppoch alone boasted of being able to raise five hundred fighting men. The Campbells could summon up two or three thousand. Duncan Forbes calculated that if all the Highland clans joined together in a single enterprise, they could raise more than thirty thousand troops. There was no military force in Britain capable of standing up to an army such as that. The possibility of a general rising in the Highlands frightened government officials, just as it frightened Duncan Forbes. But in 1745, Wade’s network of roads was still not finished. Even worse, other events, very far away from Scotland, had drawn away the bulk of his garrisons. The roads that were completed would enable soldiers to move with speed across the heart of the Highlands, just as Forbes predicted—except that they were soldiers in the army of Prince Charlie. And Drummossie Moor, beside Forbes’s house at Culloden, would become the bloody ground on which the struggle for Scotland’s future would be played out.

CHAPTER SIX

Last Stand

To wanton me, to wanton me,
Ken ye what maist wad wanton me?
To see King James at Edinburgh Cross,
Wi fifty thousand foot and horse,
And the usurper forced to flee,
Oh, this is what maist wad wanton me!

—Traditional Jacobite song

Officials in the Spanish West Indies were at their wits’ end. For years, English and Scottish traders had been carrying on an illegal trade along their coasts. They collected salt in the Tortugas, cut timber in Honduras, and smuggled black-market slaves to plantation owners in Trinidad and Santo Domingo. So Spanish officials began issuing warrants to local captains to act as
costa gardas
or coastguard cutters, allowing them to stop and search any vessel they suspected of violating Spanish law. If any English smuggler found himself roughly handled as a result, he had only himself to blame.

On April 9, 1731, Captain Juan de Leon Fandino was patrolling the coast of Cuba with his ship the
San Antonio
when he spotted an English sloop, the
Rebecca,
under the command of Captain Robert Jenkins. Fandino ordered the
Rebecca
to stop and submit to a search. Jenkins, who was bound for London from Jamaica, allowed Fandino to come aboard to examine his log book and his cargo hold. According to Jenkins, the Spaniards then proceeded to tear the ship apart, including stealing his nautical instruments. When Jenkins remonstrated, Fandino had him tied to his own mast and cut his ear off as a final warning, before letting Jenkins and his crew go.

Seven years later, Jenkins had his chance to tell his story before Parliament. He brought with him his severed ear, still wrapped in a ball of cotton. He told the stunned House of Commons how Fandino had told him to give it to King George, and how the arrogant Spaniard had said that if His Britannic Majesty had been present, he would have cut
his
ear off. An MP rose to ask Jenkins what his feelings had been at this dreadful moment. “I recommended my soul to God,” he replied stoutly, “and my cause to my country.”

The phrase reverberated through the press and nation, and triggered a massive outcry. English public opinion demanded that Britain send a fleet to punish the Spanish. Prime Minister Robert Walpole tried to deflect the tide of war hysteria, much of it fomented by his political opponents, but in the end he could not hold it back. The official declaration of war came on October 19, 1739, with the ringing of bells and the Prince of Wales toasting the London populace outside the Rose Tavern near Temple Bar. “This is your war,” Walpole told his rival the Duke of Newcastle, “and I wish you joy of it.”