Glencoe and the End of the Highland War

Paul Hopkins

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9781788853958
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Paul Hopkins, an authority on early Jacobitism, sets the Massacre of Glencoe in its true context. The book describes the tensions in the Highlands between the Restoration and the End of the Revolution and the influence on the Highlands of national politics. Besides filling a blank in our knowledge of the Highlands in the decade following the Massacre, the book transforms our perspective on lowlands politics by showing that the Inquiry was part of a secret patriotic campaign to break the aristocracy's political stranglehold and increase the Scottish parliament's powers.

1

The Highlanders and the Nation (1590–1660)

At Charles II’s restoration in 1660, the bulk of the nobility and greater gentry of Scotland, the nation’s traditional rulers, faced financial ruin. Even in the pre-war period, their indebtedness had been increasing. Then came nearly two decades of warfare, in which they equipped and maintained armies, directly or through loans and taxes, and often had their estates ravaged: the Bishops’ Wars, the armies in Ulster and England, Montrose’s campaigns, the Engagement, the resistance to Cromwell, Glencairn’s Rising — several of them civil wars in which Scottish resources were wasted on both sides. The Cromwellian regime deliberately set out to break their power. The rigorous laws of debt allowed ‘apprisings’, compulsory ‘wadsets’ (mortgages) of estates, which made the raising of redemption money very difficult, and it was the new judges’ enforcement of these which drove many nobles in despair to join Glencairn. The rising forced General Monck to modify the policy and allow them some share in government. Yet in 1658 Robert Baillie lamented:

Our Noble families are almost gone; Lennox hes little in Scotland unsold; Hamilton’s estate … is sold; Argyle can pay little annuel rent for seven or eight hundred thousand merkes, and he is no more drowned in debt than publict hatred, almost of all, both Scottish and English; the Gordons are gone; the Douglasses little better … many of our chief families states are crashing; nor is there any appearance of any human relief …¹

Even after Charles’s return restored their status, the problem remained. In the impoverished and humiliated nation to which they referred almost automatically as ‘poor Scotland’ and ‘our poor country’, with its comparatively backward agriculture, undeveloped economy and restricted overseas trade, few could reduce their debts to a safe level and secure their family positions by normal exploitation of their estates. One noble realistically prayed to be preserved from ill-gotten gain, ‘for if my hands once get it, my heart will never part with it’. Most of them heaped up further debts by large-scale rebuilding and purchase of luxuries, often imported at great expense from England: this was partly a conscious policy of re-establishing their status before the public through conspicuous consumption, but it further undermined their financial foundations.²

Immediately on regaining authority, this ruling class moved to crush anyone who might ever again threaten it. The presbyterian church, blamed as the root of all disorder, was replaced by episcopacy; and, when the bishops imagined that this gave them independent spiritual authority, an Act of Supremacy whipped them into place. The lesser gentry might again seek power, through Parliament: the government-controlled guiding committee, the Articles, was given almost total power over it. The royal burghs might show independence: dictatorial, corrupt Provosts were imposed on them. Besides fear, the ruling class felt anxiety to restrict access to three potential sources of fortune. The first was the profits of high office, which no other form of income could match. The second was repayment of wartime expenditure; as Charles had, at one time or another, recognised almost every regime as legitimate, this would be done by favour, not logic. The third, fines and forfeitures, must provide the bulk of the rewards for eager nobles, ‘mostly younger, bred in want, when their fathers were pinched by their creditors, … having no hope but in the king’s favour’. In Scotland, with its tiny revenue, they could not, like their English counterparts, hope for rewards from other sources (except, briefly, for commissions in a large permanent army to be employed in holding down the Presbyterians). They knew that they must ruin and destroy others, or be destroyed by their own debts, and the knowledge drove them constantly to instigate more prosecutions, for real and technical treasons, for ‘reset of (conversation with) traitors, for nonconformity — from which to obtain fines or forfeitures, sometimes promised to them in advance. Successful prosecutions for treason caused the most widespread suffering (and provided the richest pickings); landholding in Scotland was feudal, and when the feudal superior was ‘forfaulted’ (forfeited), his vassals lost all their rights in the land they held of him, and could, theoretically, be evicted — a royal prerogative even the lawyers admitted was unjust. A similar ruthlessness was shown in normal factional politics and private dealings: ‘this kingdome is as a troubled sea, and the small fish are devored of the great’, wrote one lawyer.³ The normal safeguard for ‘small fish’ in politics was to link themselves to the faction of one of the great noble families of the kingdom, such as Hamilton or Huntly. However, these houses had had the heaviest fall during the Interregnum; and the long years needed to repair the damage, and the political skill of Charles’s chief minister, Lauderdale, stunted the growth of these political ‘interests’, and delayed their complete dominance until after his fall.

One of the great uncertainties in 1660 was the nature of future relations between this regime and the apparently alien society in the Highlands, where perhaps nearly a third of the Scottish population lived. Highland and lowland society had diverged sharply in the Middle Ages, and the rift was at its widest in the reign of James VI. Highlanders were conspicuously different in everything, from their dress, which lowlanders considered indecent, to their religion, which they concluded contained neither true faith nor its fruits in a Christian life (as measured by the Kirk), but widespread surviving catholic and even pagan customs and superstitions. One of the two most important differences was in social structure. Highlanders lived in clans identified to outsiders by the family names (in their various versions) of the chiefs who headed them, and followed them, apparently without scruple, in private warfare and plunder, often against other clans. Most lowlanders believed that this state of war and rapine was the norm for them, that they reckoned their daughters’ dowries in cattle to be stolen, and that their bards’ poetry was chiefly a celebration of past, and incitement to future, slaughter. The poetry was, of course, in Gaelic; and, now that Gaelic had died out in the Lowlands, the difference in language was the most serious. It encouraged lowlanders and highlanders to believe in another difference, which had less real basis, that of race. Lowlanders referred to Gaelic (and, by implication, to its speakers) as ‘Irish’; the fact that its culture was oral, not written, merely confirmed its barbarousness. Many highlanders saw the lowlanders as alien invaders who had robbed them of the fertile plain country — a convenient belief, which justified perpetual cattle-raiding and robbery. On a higher level, linguistic and cultural isolation encouraged the highland elite, although they preserved a concept of Scotland as one nation, to give their deeper emotional loyalty to Scottish Gaeldom, whose political and cultural centre until 1493 was the court of the Macdonald Lords of the Isles, and sometimes to the greater Gaelic community including Ireland.

The practices which lowlanders found alien were not, of course, equally strong throughout the Highlands. Generally, the eastern clans were, by Edinburgh standards, the most civilised and peaceful. Admittedly some on the ‘highland line’ like the Macgregors and Farquharsons were notorious for ferocity, but their immediate lowland neighbours could match them. The further west, the greater the differences: the sight of a Lochaber clan in full battle array was as nightmarish a shock in 1688 to a Gaelic-speaking highlander from near Inverness as to a lowlander.⁴ Such clans’ readiness for warfare and raiding arose partly from their social circumstances. They were predominantly a pastoral people, with their main wealth in cattle and other animals, necessarily living at a level of great poverty and simplicity. In war, they could retreat to the mountains with their cattle — often not much worse than what happened normally each summer, when a high proportion of most communities moved to ‘shielings’ — settlements near the upper cattle pastures — and they could replace what was destroyed more easily than a richer arable-farming society, another grievance for the lowlanders, whose retaliation for highland raids could never inflict comparable material damage. Yet this comparative poverty explained many features of highland society outsiders merely condemned as ‘barbarous’, such as the state of religion: many areas simply could not afford the cost of any established church. Other such features, arising from the need of protection in an insecure society, had existed until recently in the Lowlands, still lingering on the Borders. Indeed, the change had often been in appearance rather than essence; but those involved would naturally be the last to see this. The Hamiltons massed on the benches of Parliament, normally voting as the Duke, the head of their ‘name’, required, rather than as they perceived the national interest, felt no affinity between the barbarous Macdonalds, following their chiefs without scruple in private wars and defiance of the government, and themselves — or even their great-grandfathers, who had done exactly the same in the days of feuds.

During the seventeenth century, as the Irish Gaels were finally subdued and memory of the Lords of the Isles faded, the chiefs and major clan gentry were becoming more closely involved with Scottish elite society, both in culture — adopting lowland manners, language and dress — and in political activity. In the Civil Wars, many clans previously known for fighting only among themselves appeared in arms for Charles I and his son, gaining spectacular victories under Montrose. This was a natural reason for the restored regime to sympathise with them and offer them a closer alliance. Yet the highlanders’ savage appearance and occasional acts of extreme violence on their lowland campaigns sometimes alienated even their official allies, and some clans plainly fought primarily for Gaelic or catholic ends rather than the Crown; this made it easier, if desired, to undervalue their services. Just possibly, the predatory ruling class might go further and, extending James VI’s policies, seek to confiscate highland estates for development or extort fines from chiefs as well as Presbyterians. There was a partial parallel: in its illogical Act of Settlement, the restored regime in Ireland largely confirmed the Cromwellian confiscation for rebellion of the estates of most Catholic landowners (Gaelic and English), even though many had been royalists. Opportunities certainly existed: some chiefs led a Jekyll-and-Hyde life, with their status as law-abiding gentlemen at the mercy of their clansmen’s conduct or other men’s independent decision to enforce the laws of debt or property. They might suddenly be obliged to abscond, to become (technically) outlaws, even to appear in arms defying formal government authority to protect their clans’ very existence; and then, normally, came a compromise, and they resumed intercourse with their peers — until the next time.

The traditional explanation of these anomalies is that they arose from clashes between a ‘clan system’ and an irreconcilable (and irrational) ‘feudal system’ imposed upon it; this concept historians are increasingly questioning.⁵ One of them, David Stevenson, gives a (simplified) summary of the other, traditional view of a clan: ‘a body of people related by blood, descended from a common ancestor, inhabiting a clan territory, ruled by a chief who is head of the kin, … and all having the same surname’ — although some of the sub-divisions or ‘septs’ might take different ones. The chiefs rule was ‘patriarchal’, that of a father over his family; although his clansmen owed absolute obedience to his orders, he was expected to take the advice of the leading clan gentry, the daoine uaisle, who had perhaps elected him from among rival candidates and might depose him for conspicuous misgovernment. Social divisions within the clan, although sharp, were surmounted by institutions such as fostering, which could create ties as strong as blood. In contrast, feudalism, originally the grant of land in return for military service (although it soon began the metamorphosis into the concept of individual property and inheritance) began with the King’s arbitrary division of the nation among his tenants-in-chief, creating illogical boundaries: a chief might come to owe service to several different lords, some of them his or each other’s enemies. If an enemy came to own a clan’s traditional lands, he had a legal right — though not always the power — to evict them. A chief lost the power of criminal justice over his clan necessary for maintaining order if he were a vassal or if a heritable right of justiciary over an area had been granted to a family, perhaps his hereditary enemies. Within the clan, also, feudal principles of ownership and succession did harm. The grants of land, made to the chief as an individual, strengthened succession by primogeniture, even of the incapable, and weakened the informal mechanism of a chief’s accountability for his use of the land.

Modern historians do not deny these hardships; but they argue that, whatever the theoretical differences, in practice clanship and feudalism usually worked in concert; for both, rather than imposed ‘systems’, were attempts to organise the existing reality of power and the need for protection. The most important revision is to the traditional picture of a clan. Even when the chief was of genuine Celtic or Norse origin, the bulk of those living under him bore no relation to him; that they did was a useful myth to create unity, since blood-relationship was one of the most reliable bonds in times of disorder. For that reason, a chief would by degrees replace the petty chieftains in any area he controlled with members of his family; and, every few generations, his successor would remove them in their turn to make way for his own close relatives. Finally, some of these daoine uaisle secured a more permanent claim to such lands; by the late seventeenth century, most of them held by written tacks (leases) and were kn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction: Sources and Acknowledgements
• 1. The Highlanders and the Nation (1590–1660)
• 2. Restoration without Settlement: the Campbells and their Enemies (1660–1680)
• 3. The Loyalist Revenge (1680–December 1688)
• 4. ‘The Last and Best of Scots’ (December 1688–July 1689)
• 5. Dunkeld (July–September 1689)
• 6. The Haughs of Cromdale (September 1689–June 1690)
• 7. The Williamite Offensive (June–December 1690)
• 8. The Road to Achallader (November 1690–June 1691)
• 9. Ratification and Sabotage (July–October 1691)
• 10. The Massacre (October 1691–February 1692)
• 11. The ‘Episcopalian’ Ministry (February 1692–October 1694)
• 12. The Inquiry (November 1694–February 1696)
• 13. Magnate Revival and Highland Disorder (1696–1702)
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography and Abbreviations
• Index