14
An old empire and a new one
When Queen Anne was crowned in April 1702 it was as ‘Queen of England, Scotland, Ireland and France’. This embraced echoes of two English empires, one real, one defunct. A third now beckoned that was to dwarf them both. Two figures towered over the new government of eighteenth-century Britain, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745) and William Pitt (1708–78), later Lord Chatham. Neither showed any great interest in Scottish or Irish affairs. Their attitude was summed up in Walpole’s motto, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’. But would they sleep?
Both statesmen were drawn into conflicts alive in the rest of Europe as its nations developed imperial ambitions around the globe. Just as Norman and Plantagenet England had fixed its sights on an empire across the Channel to the neglect of its empire at home, so Hanoverian England fixed its sights on an empire across the oceans. In the course of the Seven Years War (1756–63) Britain had held aloof from military action on the European mainland, but it had been ready to snatch advantage elsewhere in the world. By 1759 India, Canada and most of the West Indies had been invaded by British fleets and armies. As Horace Walpole wrote, ‘Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories.’
This new empire offered unprecedented openings to the growing populations of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Most of their inhabitants had previously emigrated for reasons of politics or faith. They now did so to acquire fortunes and status inconceivable at home. The impact of this is hard to exaggerate. Two historians of the diaspora, Neil Davidson and Tom Devine, argue that the Irish and Scots were not so much flag-waving imperialists, rather loyal governors, soldiers, merchants and settlers. For them, the empire was a new meritocracy, breaking down walls of class and wealth that seemed impenetrable at home. Canada became New Scotland and Australia New South Wales, just as a New England was dotted with Hampshires and Suffolks.
A third of British colonial governors were estimated to be Scottish. Half of the British army in India were Irish Catholics. Legend holds that Indians speak with a Welsh accent through serving under Welsh military engineers. The effect back home was by no means altogether benign. For two centuries Ireland, Scotland and to an extent Wales were stripped of their talented young. Nor did the example of empire feed back to the politics of the home front. As the Irish MP John Redmond was to remark in 1893, ‘While in the government of the empire, Irishmen have proved themselves equal to the best of Englishmen, Scotchmen or Welshmen … the one spot where the Irish could not fully practise their virtues and talents was in the land of their birth and affection.’
Enlightenment comes to Scotland
Scotland, unlike Ireland and Wales, was at least able to capitalise on the empire’s pecuniary benefits. The industrial revolution sweeping the north of England swept also into the Scottish Lowlands. Between 1750 and 1800 Scottish commerce trebled while that of England only doubled. The city of Glasgow boomed, particularly its trade with the Americas. The plantations of the slave-driven Caribbean and the Deep South poured sugar, cotton and tobacco onto its quaysides. Half of Britain’s ‘tobacco barons’ were Scottish. A third of Scotland’s 2.5 million people were soon living in cities. While they did so in considerable squalor, the squalor was usually an improvement on conditions in the countryside. Scottish life expectancy rose throughout the eighteenth century.
Other forces were also at work. With a cultural and religious tradition distinct from that of England, Scotland’s universities and church had been in the forefront of the north European Reformation. They were now in the vanguard of the so-called Enlightenment. Initial impetus came from Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), born a Presbyterian in Ulster but writing and lecturing on philosophy and ethics in Dublin and Glasgow. To the economic innovations of Adam Smith (1723–90) were added the history and philosophy of David Hume (1711–76) and the mathematics of Adam Ferguson (1723–1816). Art saw the paintings of Allan Ramsay (1713–84) and Henry Raeburn (1756–1823) and the writings of Robbie Burns.
Leading figures of the similar French movement were ready to marvel at the maturity and prosperity of Georgian Britain, and of Scotland in particular. Voltaire revered Britain’s political tolerance and Montesquieu the pluralism of its Parliament and legal institutions. To them, the British people had fashioned a constitution that no one called democratic but which enjoyed popular consent sufficient to hold revolution at bay. As for where the intellectual hub of this Britain lay, there seemed no doubt. Voltaire proclaimed in what became a Scottish motto, ‘We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.’
Most lasting symbol of this Scotland was the city of Edinburgh itself. James II as lord high commissioner in Holyrood in the 1680s had first proposed a new town outside the walls of the ancient citadel, but it was not until the 1760s that a true suburb, so named, began to emerge. Terraces of townhouses serviced a new Scottish bourgeoisie, marrying classical grace to northern robustness and eventually outdoing Dublin and rivalling even London in stately decorum. By a miracle, their essence survives to this day. A New Town terrace house makes its London equivalent look like a cottage.
The Scottish Enlightenment was the product of a nation newly confident in its identity and apparently unhandicapped by union with England. The paradox did not pass unnoticed. Hume reflected, ‘At a time when we have lost our princes, our Parliament, our independent government … and speak a very corrupt dialect of the tongue, is it not strange that in these circumstances we should really be the people most distinguished for literature in Europe?’ This was a political paradox. Here was a Scotland clearly benefiting from the wider horizons, commercial and intellectual, offered by union with England, and with it a broader outlook on the world in general. As Hume implied, what need had it of self-government?
The Celtic revival
The Scottish Enlightenment was a phenomenon of European scope. Its impact closer to home on the identity and ideas of the Scots, Irish or Welsh, on their history and language, was less evident. But it undoubtedly coincided with a surge of interest in the past, and in the putative origins of the emerging nations of the British Isles. Isolated scholars such as Scotland’s George Buchanan and Wales’s Edward Lhuyd had joined with the Breton Paul-Yves Pezron in deciphering the similarities between the various Celtic tongues. These had long been treated as the incomprehensible mumblings of prehistoric tribes. It had been seen as the task of the new learning to help the poor escape linguistic imprisonment into the light of English.
As the eighteenth century progressed, what Lhuyd had classified as the Celtic languages began to attract interest in their own right. They took flight from history and myth into the realms of antiquarianism, literature and even music. In Wales in the 1730s, three Morris brothers in Anglesey sought a self-conscious Welsh ‘renaissance’ through promoting ‘Welsh scholarship and knowledge’ and publishing almanacs of Welsh writing and song.
The most articulate concentration of Welsh speakers was in expatriate London. In 1715 the London Welsh formed the Honourable and Loyal Society of Antient Britons. The word loyal was to stress its deference to the Hanoverian crown – unlike certain rebellious Scots. True to Welsh form, it in 1751 split into the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion and the more popular Gwyneddigion Society, committed to Welsh-speaking and Welsh-singing, particularly among Gwynedd expatriates.
This activity stimulated a burst of interest in Welsh education, notably the remarkable ‘circulating schools’ of Carmarthen’s Griffith Jones. A shepherd turned Anglican clergyman, Jones in 1734 invented a mobile school that would settle for three months in a community, usually in winter or when farms were quiet, and invite children and their parents to learn reading and writing in Welsh. The teachers would then move on. Jones could be operating three dozen schools at a time.
The teaching method was full-time and intensive, immersing pupils, mostly through the Bible and psalter, in their written and spoken language. The method was successful. By the time of Jones’s death it was estimated that almost 3,500 Welsh schools had been held and 250,000 children and adults taught to read and write. The result was that Wales was one of the few European countries at the time with a literate adult majority. The intensive teaching method appears to have been far more efficient than today’s low-intensity schooling, aimed at keeping children occupied and teachers employed over years of formalised lessons. It lives on in high-speed commercial language courses.
The challenge faced by this burst of chiefly antiquarian revivalism was whether it was specifically Welsh, Scottish and perhaps Irish, or was in any sense a new ‘Celticism’. It also suffered from a hazy borderland between scholarship and the wilder shores of fantasy and invention. The Irish-speaking philosopher John Toland (1670–1722) envisaged a Celtic existence rooted in pre-Christian paganism. He founded an Ancient Druid Order that met on London’s Primrose Hill in 1717, with no shred of archaeological evidence. A clergyman, William Stukeley (1687–1765), took up the call and appointed himself an archdruid, claiming Stonehenge as Druidism’s temple on a theory advanced by the antiquarian John Aubrey. No amount of scepticism has allowed the theory to die.
London’s Welsh were briefly captivated by a stonemason turned antiquarian, Edward Williams, who called himself Iolo Morganwg (1747–1826). Williams collected (or wrote) old Welsh writings and songs, linking them with a putative Welsh prehistory. He founded a group of literati called the Gorsedd, or throne, and held its first ceremony in 1792, also on Primrose Hill. The resulting fantasy of Druids, bards, legends and Welsh verse, much of it invented by Morganwg, found an eager market among London’s Welsh exiles. An attempt to bring the Gorsedd to Wales was baulked by the authorities for its supposedly revolutionary potential.
Scotland was not left out of this movement for long. James Macpherson (1736–96) was a Scottish collector, politician and, as it turned out, fraudster. He claimed to have discovered and translated an epic saga by a third-century Scots-Irish bard named Ossian on the subject of his father, Fingal. Ossian duly became a publishing sensation across Europe and did more than anything to sow the seeds of a so-called Celtic revival, otherwise known as ‘Celtomania’. The American founding father Thomas Jefferson declared Ossian ‘the greatest poet that has ever existed’. Voltaire wrote a parody of his verse. Beethoven wrote music for twenty-five Scottish songs in Ossian’s honour, and Mendelssohn composed his ‘Fingal’s Cave’ overture. Macpherson’s verses were soon exposed as fabrication. Their Gaelic was dire – indeed a back translation of Macpherson’s own verse – and they were panned by Dr Johnson. This in no way diminished their appeal.
Even Napoleon Bonaparte was soon seeing himself as a ruler in a Celtic line of descent, convinced that ‘the French were a nation of empire-building Celts’. He went on to found the Académie Celtique (now renamed Société des Antiquaires de France) in Paris in 1804, dedicated to a glorious French past. In Germany, too, a new national self-consciousness was eager to find branches in the Celtic tree. All Europe seemed delighted to have at last discovered a pre-classical history of its own.
This was particularly relevant to the nations of the British Isles. Celtomania offered the Welsh, Scots and Irish an identity, whether collective or specific to each, that could be set against that of England, so long their oppressor and custodian of their history. It was good news.