How the Scots Invented the Modern World (46 page)

The Clearances are the saddest chapter in Scottish history. So many misconceptions surround the terrible “clearing,” or eviction of tens of thousands of Highland residents from their ancestral lands by their landlords, that it is worth taking time to get the story straight.

The most outrageous misconception is the charge that somehow the English were really to blame. In fact, the principal instigators of these mass evictions were the Highland chieftains themselves, and their Scottish farm managers or “factors.” In fact, some of the aristocrats who were most sentimentally attached to the traditions of Highland culture, such as the Chisholms of Strathglass and Alistair MacDonnell of Glengarry, were the most remorseless evictors. In their minds, they had little choice. Faced by an increasingly competitive agricultural market, and the need to liquidate enormous debts (Glengarry’s alone amounted to more than eighty thousand pounds, with yearly rents of less than six thousand pounds), chieftains looked for ways to make the land pay. This meant rewarding farmers who could afford higher rents, for example, or specialists in cost-effective agriculture, such as sheep and cattle farming.

Adam Smith’s division of labor had finally arrived in the Highlands. When it did, it swept aside everything in its path. It spelled the end of the traditional Highland village community, the
baile,
with its complex and unspoken web of rights, powers, and obligations sheltering in the glen. When the chief began to think in terms of profit and “improvement,” rather than rewarding generations of loyalty and service, the old way of life, fragile even in the best of times, was doomed.

Nor were the Clearances the result of the defeat at Culloden. Almost fifty years lapsed before the first forced clearings of villages and farms got under way, to open the land up for grazing. Landlords were responding to economic rather than political pressures. However, what the Forty-five did do was sever the formal bond of service between landlord and tenant. Duncan Forbes had hoped this would free the tenant’s hands to acquire and work the land for himself. It did just the opposite, in that it freed the hands of the chieftain to treat his people as temporary tenants, who could remain on his land if they could afford it—but would have to go if they could not.

The same thing had happened in the Lowlands in the early eighteenth century. There, however, the land was more fertile, the opportunities for alternate employment more numerous, and the culture not as self-limiting. This was the other key: the Highland chiefs abandoned the old ways, because it profited them to belong to the modern world. Their followers did not, because they could not. So they ended up paying the price of progress.

The price, in human terms, was terrible. On the Isle of Skye, more than forty thousand people received writs of removal; in some places, one family was left where there had been a hundred. On the lands of the Countess of Sutherland and her husband, Lord Stafford, old men in the 1880s could still remember the names of forty-eight cleared villages in the parish of Assynt alone. When people refused to leave, the more ruthless factors burned them out. “Our family was very reluctant to leave,” Betsy McKay, who had lived in Skail in the valley of Strathnaver, remembered years later, “and stayed for some time, but the burning party came round and set fire to our house at both ends, reducing to ashes whatever remained within the walls.” Another eyewitness, Donald McLean, remembered pulling one old lady out of her house at Strathnaver after it had been fired. The woman was paralyzed with fear, “uttering piercing moans of distress and agony, in articulations from which could be only understood, ‘
Oh,
Dhia, Dhia, teine, teine
—Oh, God, God, fire, fire.’ ” Between 1807 and 1821, between six thousand and ten thousand people were forcibly herded off the Sutherland lands, to make way for sheep farms. “For some days after the people were turned out one could scarcely hear a word with the lowing of the cattle and the screams of the children marching off in all directions.”

The Sutherlands, like most landlords, did not actually want to drive their tenants away. They intended to settle them along the coast in crofting villages, hoping that tenants displaced by sheep could make a living fishing or gathering kelp—and continue to pay their rents. At one point, more than 25,000 people worked in the Hebrides cutting, gathering, and drying seaweed to sell to fertilizer manufacturers. But the crofts were too small (on Skye they averaged less than one-half acre) to allow most families to feed themselves. No one wanted to confront the real problem, which was that there were more human beings in the Western Highlands than the land could support, clearances or no clearances. Communities became dangerously dependent on the potato to support them, since an acre of potatoes could feed four times as many mouths as an acre of wheat or oats. The hills of Wester Ross and Sutherland were soon thick with row upon row of potato plants. It was a disaster waiting to happen—and in 1846, it did. If the Clearances had not already forced thousands to emigrate to America, the Scottish potato blight might have been as catastrophic as the Great Famine in Ireland.

The Clearances also affected different parts of the Highlands in different ways. In the south and east, in Argyll, Perthshire, and east of Inverness, it probably raised the standard of living for those who remained, as a mixed economy based on sheep, cattle, wheat, barley (with a portion for whisky distilling), fishing, and linen weaving took root. In the West, and on islands such as Skye and Mull, where the land was poor to begin with, the alternatives were bleak. Many had to choose between emigration and starvation. In the first three years of the nineteenth century, more than ten thousand people left for Nova Scotia and Canada; by the 1820s it was twenty thousand a year, most from the Western Highlands, Ross-shire, and Sutherland. In 1831 the population of Kildonan parish was one-fifth of what it had been in 1801.

Nor is it true, as some charge, that the Scottish upper classes uniformly approved of what was happening. Some pretended it was all part of the continuing advance of “civilization” over uncomprehending ignorant savages. But others spoke out. While most Scottish journals and periodicals, including the
Edinburgh Review,
ignored the Clearances, Robert Bisset Scott’s
Military Register
became an unexpected voice against “improving” landlords and chieftains. Edited for and by former British army officers, the
Register
knew that many Highland soldiers, after risking their lives for the empire in Spain and India, had come back to find their homes gone and their families dispersed. The
Military
Register
published full accounts of the atrocities in Sutherland and even helped to get an indictment against the man responsible (he was later acquitted).

Another soldier, David Stewart of Garth, was also landlord and chieftain of more than eight miles of territory between the rivers Lyon and Trummel. His father, although an ardent supporter of Union, had been a chieftain in the old style:

Hospitality’s prince,
To guests and relatives kind,
Good chieftain of tenants,
Who frowns not when rent is behind.

The son and heir made a career for himself in the 82nd Highlanders, serving in nearly every campaign of the Napoleonic Wars. When his commanding officer asked him to put together a chronicle of the origin of the Army’s Highland regiments, David Stewart used it as a vehicle to write a detailed history of the people and communities he had grown up with and loved. His
Sketches of the Character, Manners, and Present State of
the Highlanders in Scotland
appeared in March 1822. It was the first sympathetic nonfictional account of that part of Scotland that most people, including many Scots, had ever read. It surveyed the customs and traditions of the Highland clans, and gave a map of their territories. It also bitterly attacked the impact of the Clearances: “It can never be for the well-being of any state to deteriorate the character of or to extirpate a brave, loyal, and moral people, its best supporters in war, and the most orderly, contented and economical in peace.”

David Stewart, like most opponents of clearance, may have not have realized that no one could stop it. It was rooted in an economic reality, and social forces, beyond anyone’s control. But he did grasp the costs involved, both in human and cultural terms. The end result, he warned, would be “to root out the language of the country, together with a great proportion of the people who speak it.” This, ironically, at the very time when the rest of the country was celebrating and honoring that heritage, thanks to his friend Sir Walter Scott.

Walter Scott did not ignore the Clearances, nor did he support them. He saw the necessity of them, but also wrote, “In too many instances the Highlands have been drained, not of their superfluity of population, but the whole mass of the inhabitants, dispossessed by an unrelenting avarice. . . .” But he also felt that there was nothing that he, even as Scotland’s leading spokesman, could do to prevent the day coming when “the pibroch may sound through the deserted region, but the summons will remain unanswered.”

Scott also had other priorities he had to balance. And although his name was and is synonymous with the Highlands, Scott himself was interested in preserving
all
aspects of Scotland’s history and culture, including that of his own beloved Borders. What was happening in Sutherland and the Western Isles was, in his mind, only one instance of how the onslaught of the new Scotland was sweeping aside the legacy of its past. He was determined to fight the battles he could win, and with the weapons he had at hand.

A break with his friends at the
Edinburgh Review
gave him unexpected room to maneuver. In 1808 he published
Marmion,
his third epic set in medieval Scotland. More than 2,000 copies sold in less than two months. Four years later, sales had surpassed 28,000—unheard of for a narrative poem. But Francis Jeffrey’s forbearance had run out. He panned
Marmion
in the
Review
: “To write a modern romance of chivalry, seems as much a phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda.” Although they remained friends, Scott stopped writing for Jeffrey. Then, when Henry Brougham published an incendiary political piece that seemed to support the idea of violent revolution, Scott broke off relations altogther. He dropped Constable as his publisher and joined forces with other Scottish Tories in creating a conservative alternative to the
Edinburgh Review,
the
Quarterly Review.

Scott now found himself at the head of an ideological coterie, a group of conservative writers and poets who turned the
Quarterly Review
and then
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,
founded in 1817, into witty, intelligent counterweights to Jeffrey, Horner, and Brougham. They wanted to “dust the jackets of the Whigs,” as the
Quarterly
’s first editor, William Gifford, put it, and so they did. Gifford, Scott, John Croker, and John Lockhart, who later edited the
Quarterly
and was Scott’s son-in-law and biographer, became major alternative voices in the British literary scene. They were joined by a leader in the English Romantic movement, Robert Southey, and
Blackwood
’s John Wilson and James Hogg, a former shepherd and self-taught poet whom Scott had met while collecting ballads in Ettrick. Unlike their
Edinburgh Review
rivals, most were not interested in politics in the conventional sense. They wanted to offer to their audience a new way of seeing the world, which was actually an old way: through the lens of custom and a reverence for the past, including the vanishing folkways of rural Scotland.

They mocked the buoyant liberalism of Brougham and Dugald Stewart and its “scientific” pretensions, just as they mocked its belief in political progress. Instead, as part of their new way of seeing, they looked back with a renewed respect at the ancient Highland loyalty to the house of Stuart and Prince Charles. More than half a century had passed since the bloodshed and sordid horrors of Culloden. The story began to take on a warm, attractive glow as a Highland romantic epic of heroism and villainy, of intrigue and bravery, complete with comely maidens such as Flora MacDonald and handsome heroes such as Bonnie Prince Charlie himself.

The result was a burgeoning neo-Jacobitism, the original romantic Lost Cause. The ongoing interest in folk culture and oral tradition helped to feed and sustain it, especially after the publication of James Hogg’s
Collection of Jacobite Songs.
It swept up Robert Burns, who declared himself a Jacobite, although he came from traditionally pro-Hanoverian Ayrshire. He even wrote “Charlie He’s My Darling” and “The White Cockade” as battle songs for the long-dead cause. Another poet, Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, did the same with “Will Ye No’ Come back Again,” which became so popularly identified with the Forty-five that people conveniently forgot it was composed more than half a century later.

These reactionary neo-Jacobites were hankering after a vanished world of strong men and women ( Flora MacDonald became a posthumous Scottish national heroine), of emotional loyalties rather than economic calculation, of heroic self-sacrifice rather than rational self-interest. The events of 1745 were turned into a parable, as they still are to some people, of the doomed struggle of traditional values against a soulless modernity. Scott himself was not immune to this nostalgic appeal. “I am a bit of a Cavalier,” he wrote in 1800, “not to say a Jacobite.” But he was too much the student of history, and of Dugald Stewart, to accept the rosy myth of Bonnie Prince Charlie without reservations. The Jacobites mattered more to him as an important chapter in Scotland’s history than as a weapon for scoring political hits in the present.