Born Fighting (8 page)

And so the die was cast. Over the next four hundred years, two passionate viewpoints, each technically supportable based on their respective cultures, would clash again and again. Under English law the departed earls had participated in a rebellion, consorted with the Spanish, and then fled the country, leaving their properties behind to be properly confiscated. And from the English perspective, bringing other British subjects into Ulster would prevent future rebellions as well as strategically protect their flank from foreign powers. But in Irish eyes, their traditional rights of subownership had been ignored and the land had been dishonorably taken. The end of the rebellion had brought overwhelming violence against innocents, confiscation of property, and colonization from the outside rather than a resolution from within.

The Catholic Irish would be left with an unending bitterness and a perpetual desire for revenge. But for the Protestants, the situation would become far more complex. For rather than attracting large numbers of English settlers, by far the largest percentage of “British Protestants” to come to Ulster would be the hard-bitten, unbending, tightly knit lowland Scots who would migrate from the war-ravaged areas along Scotland’s southwest border. These were desperately poor people, as accustomed to armed conflict as the London English were to commerce and trade. Except for those equally rugged northern English who had faced them for centuries across that brutal border, neither the English nor the Irish in Ulster had seen their likes before. The Scots had their own history of struggle against English attempts at conquest. And as the last four hundred years in Ireland and elsewhere have shown, they have never been a yielding people.

True to a pattern that has played itself out in many forms during their historic journey, those who emerged from the hills and glens of the southwestern Scottish lowlands brought with them no real stake in the previous feuding between the English ruling class and the rebellious, wronged Irish. But they would not hesitate to fight when attacked, and they were not above extending the battle once it was engaged. The “Ulster Scots” would shape the character and conduct of the Protestant elements of the Ulster Plantation. And then many of them would move on to the mountains of America.

2

Border Warriors—
and Bible Beaters
                              

THE BORDER DWELLERS
of southwestern Scotland were still William Wallace’s people. They were also, after a fashion, the descendants of Robert the Bruce, whose family had held vast land grants in southwestern Scotland and northwestern England. The centuries after the historic victory at Bannockburn had not been kind to them, or to their land. Their numbers had ebbed and flowed, periodically visited by smallpox and the plague, which thirty years after Bannockburn had wiped out one-third of the population. But by 1600 the number of inhabitants in the region had grown so large that the thin soil could not support their agrarian ways, and famine had become a common malady. The once thick forests that had hidden Braveheart and his men so well from their English pursuers were now denuded. As an English visitor of the time pointed out, southwestern Scotland had turned into “a bleak and bare solitude, destitute of trees, abounding in heather and morass and barren hills; soil where cultivation was found only in dirty patches of crops, on ground surrounded by heather and bog.”
¹⁵

The Scottish victory at Bannockburn had resolved two vital issues: gaining an acceptance from the English that Scotland was indeed a nation, and getting a guarantee from Rome that the Scottish king deserved to be recognized by the Church and thus by other rulers as a national sovereign. But it was not in the character of the English to slide away into obscurity just because they had lost a battle. Scotland may have established a somewhat separate existence, but the exact boundaries of the nation itself had not been agreed upon. And in addition, a continuous stream of ineffective or reckless Scottish monarchs ensured the country’s instability.

The issue over where, exactly, England ended and Scotland began had resulted in hundreds of years of continuous warfare, turning farms and hamlets in the contested areas into repeatedly ravaged battlegrounds that call to mind the free-fire zones of the Vietnam War. Although Hadrian’s Wall had provided an emotional and historical line of demarcation, the English wanted more, and over time they succeeded, rolling back the Scottish border in the west and especially in the east. The bitter fights during these middle centuries caused many areas that were ethnically and historically Scottish to end up on the English side of the border. Indeed, most of the English province of Northumbria as well as a portion of Cumbria lie north of Hadrian’s Wall, and during this period were populated by people of similar heritage to the Scots.

The death of Robert the Bruce was quickly followed in 1333 by an English incursion into Scotland that amounted to the “systematic destruction of the Scottish lowlands as far north as Edinburgh.”
¹⁶
This campaign included a vast massacre of Scots outside the hapless city of Berwick, which later fell permanently to the English. After that, in the words of Professor Smout, “There followed a hundred years of fluctuating and intermittent warfare in which the Scots strove to evict the English from the southern counties all the way from Haddington to Dumfries, not ending until 1460 when James II fell regaining the castle of Roxburgh. . . . Half a century of peace between monarchs ensued, though it was no longer observed by their subjects along the Border. In 1513 official warfare erupted again with the tragic campaign of Flodden and the death of James IV. After Flodden came another truce, then the Scottish defeat at Solway Moss in 1542, the ‘Rough Wooing,’ and the further defeat at Pinkie in 1547.”
¹⁷

King Henry VIII’s “rough wooing” campaign in the 1540s harkened back to the days of Roman emperor Severus and Edward I’s first slaughterhouse campaign against Berwick. Henry had ordered his battlefield commander, the earl of Hertford, to put “man, woman and child to fire and sword without exception where any resistance shall be made against you.” The earl would later proudly report that he had “plundered and burnt Edinburgh, Leith and Holyrood, with Newbattle Abbey, Haddington, Burntisland and Dunbar, taking 10,000 cattle and 12,000 sheep . . . sacking seven abbeys, sixteen castles, five ‘market towns,’ and no less than 243 villages.”
¹⁸

As these campaigns ensued, bringing with them continuous local turmoil, the national leadership of Scotland also remained chaotic. “Seven monarchs ruled between 1406 and 1625, and of the seven, five had been infants or mere children upon their accession.”
¹⁹
In addition, “James I (1406–37) was assassinated by his own henchmen; James II ‘of the fiery Face’ (1437–60) was blown to pieces while attacking the English at Roxburgh; James III (1460–88) was murdered by a family of rampaging border warlords; and James IV (1488–1513) died fighting the English at Flodden Field.”
²⁰

Such turbulence at the center of the national government not only empowered the local clan leaders, it also demanded that they be strong, both for their own survival and also for the well-being of their extended families. And again a familiar pattern reinforced itself in what would become the Scots-Irish character: the mistrust of central authority, the reliance on strong tribal rather than national leaders, and the willingness to take the law into one’s own hands rather than waiting for a solution to come down from above.

In addition to frequent warfare with the English, the people of lowland Scotland, particularly along the border areas with their ever-shifting boundaries, became dominated by unending blood feuds, rampant acts of group violence, and the settlement of contentious issues by force or tradition rather than formal law. The celebrated feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys in America’s Appalachian Mountains had numerous predecessors in sixteenth-century Scotland, many of them far lengthier and more violent.
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Professor Smout notes that one Ayrshire vendetta between the Cunninghams and the Montgomerys and parts of the Kennedys lasted for more than a century. He then points out that “Border families from both sides were quite happy to gang up to help in each other’s feuds, an English surname joining a Scottish surname against another Scottish or English family as occasion required. As Borderers they all had more in common with one another than with the tiresome governments in Edinburgh and London.”
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David Hackett Fischer writes of these ethnically similar peoples on both sides of the borders in his magnificent book
Albion’s Seed
, quoting historian George Fraser. “English and Scots Borderers had everything in common except nationality. They belonged to the same small, self-contained, unique world, lived by the same rules and shared the same inheritance.”
²³

The centuries after Bannockburn ushered in a predictable, even naturally populist result. If the conditions of daily life had remained harsh, the effect on the lowland Scots themselves was peculiarly the opposite. Living continuously on the edge of warfare created a society founded on military rather than economic principles. The shared risk inherent in frequent conflict developed an egalitarian, if not democratic, set of personal relationships. And the hardships of this existence, plus the frequent attacks by organized English armies designed to break their spirit, bred a peculiar form of nationalism among the lowland Scots. Such dangers fused “the Lowlanders into a single people . . . [They] all lost their old ethnic loyalties and became part of a coherent Scottish nation, assertive, warlike, resilient, patriotic and freedom loving. ‘Scotland was born fighting’ was an old saying and a true one.”
²⁴

Such a concept was not conducive to commercial success, however, and in fact seemed to ignore economic conditions altogether. “Scottish rural society was so largely organized to face war and feud and was so closely bound in blood and duty to its lords that it had no conception of itself as divided along other lines by economic interest. . . . Land tenure had to be organized to maximize fighting power rather than productivity; the best warriors rather than the best farmers got the best holdings.”
²⁵

The impact of the centuries was to accentuate rather than ameliorate the strongly individualist tendencies that had become so apparent in the wars of independence leading up to Bannockburn. The typical lowland Scot was bound to a complicated set of loyalties to his clan and willing to serve his laird, but he answered in his honor to no one. “It is a notable fact that in Scotland, probably alone among all the countries of Europe, there was never anything approaching a general uprising against the lords. On the contrary, the sense of personal and reciprocal loyalty between barons and underlings, lairds and tenants, usually made the farmers devoted retainers.”
²⁶

As Professor Smout points out, the notion of Celtic kinship and its emphasis on soldierly virtues thrived during the centuries following Bannockburn. “The poor man did not in fact claim the rank of an earl or a baron. What he claimed was something he valued more, to belong to a family of incomparable nobility and martial valour [
sic
], and by virtue of that to be as good as any earl, baron or commoner of different family in the land. . . . The whole atmosphere of kinship was a complex one, compounded both of egalitarian and patriarchal features, full of respect for birth while being free from humility. It appeared uncouth beyond Scotland mainly because it was a legacy of Celtic influence unfamiliar to the outside world.”
²⁷

Thus the lowland Scots as well as many of the northern English who faced them in the border areas grew to be similar in many respects and far different than other British peoples. They were insistently and even gladly warlike; they were destitute but did not measure themselves by wealth; their properties were frequently attacked and they did not risk their slim assets in fancifying an abode. They became mobile, moving easily from one temporary, hastily built lodging to another—Fischer mentions their rough homes of wood or stone or beaten earth called “cabbins,” which predated both the primitive settlements on the American frontier and today’s resultant culture of trailer parks and prefabricated houses.
²⁸
And in a tradition that carried with it their historic rejection of feudalism, they concerned themselves more with personal ties than with the ownership of a specific piece of land.

ANOTHER POWERFUL FACET
played into the cultural development of those who would become known as the Scots-Irish, and it is impossible to overstate its importance, for it still resonates in American culture and politics four hundred years later. The impact of the Protestant Reformation was far greater—one is tempted to say “more nearly total”—in Scotland than in any other country, and this impact went well beyond religion itself. Unlike its positive and even messianic contribution in Ireland, by the early 1500s the Catholic Church in Scotland had become characterized by incessant corruption on every level and was detested by many Scots of all classes. And the hard-driven Calvinism that replaced it melded neatly with Scotland’s traditional populism. In time, these twin forces of Calvinism and populism came together to create both the fundamentals of American-style democracy and the embryo of what would in the twentieth century be called America’s Bible Belt.

The rejection of a corrupt form of Catholicism while embracing the harshest form of Calvinism at first threatened to turn Scotland into a theocracy. But in the end its far-reaching changes would carry with them the veritable signature of the Scots-Irish people. The struggle with Scotland’s Catholic bureaucracy would reinforce a long-held tendency to view higher authority with suspicion and also affect attitudes toward Irish Catholics once the Ulster migrations began. Calvinism’s insistence upon accepting responsibility for one’s personal actions would help create an even stronger sense of individualism. And the very structure of this new form of Christianity also reflected the beginnings of a fresh type of democracy, built from the bottom up just like the Scottish nation itself rather than evolving slowly from the top down, as with the English and other systems. It is no accident that the Scots-Irish people became quickly known after their arrivals in both Ireland and America as rebellious, difficult to control from the top, and inclined toward a volatile political radicalism.

How did this happen? We begin with twin phenomena: the bastard bishops, and the bishops’ bastards.

Through the Middle Ages, as nations began to form their modern borders and government became more sophisticated, the Catholic Church had begun to recede from its overwhelming dominance of European affairs. In Scotland the Church had largely transitioned from a religious into a commercial power, and at the same time had allowed its positions of religious authority to become little more than sinecures to be held at the pleasure of an ever-fickle royalty.

Commercially, “the church had too great a share of the national wealth. On the eve of the Reformation its revenue amounted at least to £300,000 a year whereas the Crown’s patrimony brought in only about £17,500.”
²⁹
As Leyburn points out, “By 1560 it had amassed . . . property estimated to consist of more than a third of all the land in the country and half of its wealth.”
³⁰

Spiritually, the Church was bankrupt. As one example of how badly its sanctions were abused, in 1532, King James V, while only twenty, “had wrung permission from the Pope . . . to appoint three baby sons, all illegitimate, to be titular abbots of Kelso and Melrose, priors of St. Andrews and Pittenweem, and abbot of Holyrood respectively; a fourth was later made prior of Coldingham and a fifth abbot of the Charterhouse. The king thus got his bastards beautifully provided with an income at the churches’ expense, but the monasteries were lumbered with the face of a baby master.”
³¹
As another, in the same decade Scotland’s top priest, Cardinal Beaton, was known to have at least eight illegitimate children. Beaton had accumulated so much wealth through his priesthood that he had given one of his daughters “a marriage portion as large as that given by the greatest Earl in Scotland to his daughter.”
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