16
The Highland clearances
While this agony unfolded across Ireland, a pain of a different sort was experienced by Scotland. The disbanding of the Scottish clans after 1745 had been accelerated by an agricultural revolution already well under way in England and much of Europe. Crop and livestock specialisation had transformed a predominantly subsistence localised economy into one of land enclosure and monetary exchange. Common land was privatised and uplands devoted largely to sheep.
Scotland’s glens had long been populated by settlements of smallholders, subtenants of so-called ‘tacksmen’, who were agents of clan chiefs or absentee landlords. These glens were now more profitable for sheep and were duly cleared of crop farmers. In England such clearances and enclosures had taken place over generations, with farm workers migrating into industrial towns and cities. In Scotland the revolution was sudden. Whole communities were evicted, mostly into coastal settlements, where they were expected to find work in fishing and kelp gathering. Here some landlords found them ‘crofts’, or plots of adjacent land, others financed their emigration.
Economics now disbanded the Highland clans more effectively than any government edict after the ’45 uprising. In the second half of the eighteenth century, some two-thirds of Highland estates were sold to outsiders, often by clan chiefs claiming ancestral ownership. More conscientious owners made some effort to rehouse their people in crofts, while many paid for passages on migrant ships to North America. The Chinese opium tycoon Sir James Matheson, son of a Sutherland tacksman, bought the entire Isle of Lewis in 1844 for half a million pounds and transported 2,300 of its inhabitants to Canada. It was estimated that the province of Nova Scotia received 50,000 Highlanders in the early nineteenth century and remained Gaelic-speaking for three generations.
Protests were fragmentary but sometimes fierce. Between 1807 and 1821 the largest landowner, the Countess of Sutherland in north-west Scotland, cleared thousands of tenants into what she intended to be model coastal villages. While the family’s declared intentions were constructive, their execution was less so. The local agent, Patrick Sellar, called the victims ‘primitives and aborigines’, and the name of Sutherland was associated with the worst abuses. Dubbed ‘the Devastation of Sutherland’, it led to demonstrations and death threats outside the family’s London mansion.
The clearances stripped Highland Scotland of its human geography. A third of the population left the uplands in half a century, moving either to coastal settlements or to America. Few headed for the booming Lowlands industries, illustrating the depth of Scotland’s internal divide. Gaelic-speaking plummeted, since resettlement mostly required a facility in English.
One experience Scotland did not share with Ireland was starvation from the potato famine. This was in large part because of a continued supply of oats. When famine hit in 1846, churches and other charities raised funds for local relief. In Edinburgh, official destitution boards were set up to record those in need of help, with some 250,000 names listed as being at risk, a fraction of those suffering in Ireland. There was hunger and resulting disease but little actual starvation. None the less, parallels were drawn. The Scottish historian Tom Devine estimated that 90 per cent of Scotland was still owned in mid-century by 1,500 mostly absentee families, a proportion similar to Ireland. Many were Lowlanders. There was the same lack of security of tenure, though in Scotland smallholders were allowed to own land.
Apologists for the clearances pointed out that they were an economic necessity and that most Highlanders went sadly but peacefully to their new homes. Emigration was long a fact of life in Ireland and Scotland, as it was in Scandinavia and Italy. Even the Lowlander Robbie Burns was so desperate for work that at one point he applied for a job on a Caribbean slave plantation. When Dr Johnson remarked that ‘the noblest prospect which a Scotsman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England’, he might have extended that destination to the world. But nothing in Scotland generated a political response, a yearning for self-rule, comparable to the famine in Ireland.
A Scottish romance
Scotland’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment had, by the time of the Regency, turned Edinburgh into a city of European celebrity. It was now enhanced by a cultural rebranding through the efforts of its most famous citizen, Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). As a popular novelist and champion of the Romantic movement, the young Scott had opposed union with England, but that was past. His writings had alerted him to the dramatic potential of a revived Scottish history, notably of the Highlands as dubiously exploited by James Macpherson in the 1780s. Even as the Highlanders were being driven from their homes, Scott prepared for them a glamorous renaissance. He declared in 1814 that no European nation in the past half century ‘has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland’. He went so far as to warn England that ‘if you un-Scotch us you will find us damned mischievous Englishmen’.
The rock on which Scott built his new Scotland was the Highlands. He transformed what had long been regarded as primitive and squalid backcountry into a land of exotic excitement. In 1820 he was a founding member of the Celtic Society of Scotland, using an epithet almost never applied to the Scots. He did not indicate it was an epithet to be in any way shared with Ireland or Wales. Two years later the new British monarch George IV (r.1820–30) signalled Scotland’s elevated status by declaring his intention to be the first monarch to set foot there for 171 years. Scott was to be his master of ceremonies, with the Celtic Society staging a rolling pageant of Scotland’s history and fashion.
Most conspicuous was Scott’s decision to make the star of that pageant none other than the recently condemned Highland clans and their banned kilts and tartans. The unmentionable became, as if overnight, the fount of Scottish glory. The tartan was a patterned fabric – tribally non-specific – that had vanished along with the kilt after the Disclothing Act that was passed following the ’45 uprising. The ban had been lifted in 1782. Though tartans and kilts were not Lowland garments, Scott ordered the Edinburgh crowds to greet King George’s procession ‘all plaided and plumed’. Clans were rediscovered and celebrated as the foundation peoples of the Scottish nation. To Norman Davies it was ‘one of the greatest publicity stunts in history’ and brilliantly successful. Over the next ten years 900 people would attend the Celtic Society’s annual Celtic Ball, with kilts and tartans compulsory for men and women. In 1873 the society was accorded the epithet ‘Royal’.
Scott was accused of ‘Celtified pageantry’. It would today be called Disneyfication. But after a millennium of neglect a northern people calling themselves Gaels were in the spotlight. A territory formerly regarded as hostile and with a population devastated by clearances became the object of fascination and study. The paintings of Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840) and Edwin Landseer (1802–73) brought the Highlands into English drawing rooms. Landseer’s majestic stag, the Monarch of the Glen (1851), was the most noted of Scottish paintings, almost a national emblem. The artist was not averse to acknowledging current history with his bleak Rent-Day in the Wilderness (1868).
The enthusiasm for Scotland shown by George IV was redoubled by Queen Victoria (r.1837–1901). She and her husband Albert first went north in 1842 and spent a week touring the country, publicly lauding its charms. They leased Balmoral Castle (sight unseen) in 1848 and purchased it four years later, greatly extending it to accommodate their retinue. At the gateway to the Highlands, Balmoral supplanted Edinburgh’s Holyrood Palace as effectively the second seat of the British monarchy. The men of the royal family wore kilts when in residence, and the formerly illegal Stuart tartan was deftly relaunched (and respelled) as the Royal Stewart. Victoria wrote in her diary of the ‘romance of wild loveliness … beloved Scotland, the proudest, finest country in the world’. Her tartaned Albert declared it ‘so gemütlich’.
Scotland was now presenting itself as a supposedly Celtic brand under the sponsorship of a Saxon monarch. Royal patronage made owning a Highland estate a status symbol of English aristocracy. Dukes, marquesses and earls patrolled the recently emptied glens, guns under their arms. The Bloomsbury Group’s Lytton Strachey scornfully remarked that German industry in the nineteenth century overtook British because German tycoons invested in factories while the English built hunting lodges. Tourism boomed. Dr Johnson’s grim Highland visits of the 1770s mutated into a Caledonian grand tour. George Earl’s painting Coming South: Perth Station, showed a platform crowded with wealthy visitors returning from a Highland break.
What is a Celtic revival?
The one facet of Celticism that Scott did not summon to his cause was Gaelic. It was never the tongue of the Lowlands, which had now long been an English dialect known as Scots English. When eighteenth-century Edinburgh had dubbed itself ‘the Athens of the North’, linguists had described its Scots English as ‘Attic’ and provincial north-east Scottish as ‘Doric’, both in reference to the regions of ancient Greece. These dialects are traceable back to Old English, Scandinavian and other Germanic roots. They have no link with Gaelic.
When Burns turned his nationalism to verse he sought to do so in this Lowlands vernacular, which he termed Lallans, a tongue that he wished to be written and sung with pride. True Scots ‘took nae pains their speech to balance/ Or rules to gie/ But spak their thoughts in plain braid Lallans/ Like you or me’. Ulster was later also delighted to find in Burns’s language an echo of their own Ulster Scots dialect, since christened Ullans. I am told that some Aberdeen carol concerts are conducted in Doric, Lallans, Latin and Greek.
Language thus reflected a distinction that most Scots still recognised between the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands and the Lowlands of the east and south. Sir Charles Trevelyan, who had moved on from the Irish famine to the Scottish one, detected a difference even among the northerners. The North Sea coast, non-Gaelic speaking, had been peopled ‘by the Danish or Norwegian race’, whom he described as harder working and thus less afflicted by famine, whereas the Gaelic-speakers facing the Atlantic were no different from the Irish.
The prominence given to such distinctions fed the Victorian fashion for ethnic stereotyping. The playwright George Bernard Shaw in his John Bull’s Other Island depicts a fellow Irish expatriate deriding his compatriots back home. An Irishman’s imagination, he says, ‘never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can’t face reality nor deal with it, nor handle it, nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do. It saves him from working.’ Others extended such generalisation to the Welsh and Scots. The poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88) was one of many who distinguished the newly defined ‘Celts’ from Anglo-Saxons. After visiting a Welsh eisteddfod in Aberdare in 1861 he was ‘filled with admiration at the enthusiasm awakening in your whole people’. He duly characterised ‘the Celts’ as a people of ‘sentimentality, poetry and romance … always ready to react against the despotism of facts’ – a splendidly loaded remark.
Some responded by acting up to the music-hall caricature. In Scotland the Highlander was presented as a noble savage on a wild mountain, tartan-kilted and with claymore in hand, apparently waiting to smite the English. The Welshman was the hairy last Bard of John Martin’s magnificent painting of that title (1817), chanting above a precipice before hurling himself to his death before Edward I’s army. The Irishman was a mischievous, green-hatted leprechaun, musical, poetical, prancing and chuckling. He was the cheery Irish busker I watched swaying down a London Tube train with his fiddle. An enchanted American sitting opposite caught my eye and remarked, ‘Oh I do love your Celts.’
This depiction was of a people of the British Isles supposedly unsuited to business and public affairs. To Arnold they were lacking ‘the skilful and resolute appliance of means to ends … and the right temperament to form their own organised political entity’. All were to be contrasted with the Anglo-Saxon, who, in an age of Hanoverian and Saxe-Coburg dynasts, were lauded as ‘a disciplined and steadily obedient people, retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-dependence’.
Such caricature perhaps explains why so many Scots in the nineteenth century were reluctant to identify themselves with the word Celtic, while the concept of union with England was bedding down. Edinburgh’s New Town was growing ever more extensive, while Glasgow’s industrial prosperity gave it the title of ‘second city of the empire’. The latter’s wealth expanded from commerce to manufacturing, notably of ships and clothing, drawing in so many Irish that a third of Glasgow’s population claimed to be Catholic. In 1887 a football club was founded in east Glasgow to serve this community, taking the name Celtic, pronounced with a soft initial ‘C’. No one would dare call fans of Rangers, their rival team, Celts.
Scotland’s aristocracy continued to attended English private schools and universities and spoke with English accents even as they asserted their Scottishness. Regiments, railways, hotels and even postal addresses were renamed ‘North British’. Edinburgh’s grandest hotel was still the North British until renamed the Balmoral in 1991. The attempted Irish equivalent of ‘West Britain’, unsurprisingly, did not catch on. The Scots were as Scottish as the Irish were Irish, but the identity was carried with a confidence that did not seem to require political expression.