More Fruitful Than the Soil

Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715-1815

Andrew MacKillop

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9781862321618
• eBook ISBN: 9781788853927
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book analyses the origins, development and impact of British Army recruiting in the Scottish Highlands in the period from 1739 to 1815. It examines the interaction of government, landlords and tenantry. Recruiting is analysed within the context of rapid socio-economic change. The emphasis is on tenant reactions to recruiting, and the study concludes that this was a vital factor in bringing about change in the tenurial structure in the region. Both the decline of the tacksman and the emergence of crofting are linked to the process of regiment raising. Military recruiting involved a clear recognition on the part of the Highland landlords and tenantry that the Empire and the 'fiscal military state' offered alternative sources of revenue. Both groups 'colonised' various levels of the state's military machine. As a result of this close involvement, the government remained a vital influence in the area well after 1745, and a major player in the region's economy. Recruiting was not simply a residue of clanship, rather it was a form of commercial activity, analogous to kelping.

CHAPTER ONE

The Emergence of a British-Highland Military, 1715–46

The thirty years between the major Jacobite uprisings of the ’15 and the ’45 have been seen within the context of the Scottish Highlands as a relatively undramatic period during which the balance between integrative Hanoverian pressures and particularist Jacobite tendencies fluctuated constantly, but remained roughly in an overall equilibrium. From its apogee in 1715 Scottish Jacobitism seemed to decline in the 1720s into instances of localised Highland violence, or fitful, uncoordinated and poorly supported skirmishes, again confined to the north of Scotland. Over-reliance on foreign powers inconsistently hostile to the United Kingdom failed to provide the basis for a coherent long-term strategy and left those seeking the restoration of the Stuarts vulnerable to the deep anti-French and anti-Catholic sentiments that pervaded both Scotland and England. However, these undoubted weaknesses served to induce complacency within the factious Argathelian and Squadrone Whig interests that controlled Scotland and who remained bitterly divided throughout the 1715–1746 period. Thus, while forces of social and economic change slowly eroded clanship from within, no clear or consistent government policy of assimilating the Highlands emerged in this period. Conversely, Jacobitism retained important ideological coherence through the influence of entrenched Episcopalianism and gained additional sympathy from ongoing nationalist resentment stemming from imagined and real abuses of the Act of Union.¹

This political stalemate formed the backdrop to the emergence in May 1725 of the first post-Union Highland independent companies. While these military units appeared to constitute just another strand in the largely static balance of support between Jacobite and Hanoverian causes, they in fact entailed the beginning of a proactive relationship between the Highland periphery and a manifestly centralised British military. Although created initially to undermine Jacobitism and expedite political and economic integration, the development of a military establishment which guaranteed regionally specific patronage, for Hanoverian Highlanders at least, represented a conspicuous acknowledgement by the British state of its own internal diversity at a time when other areas of Scottish society were experiencing considerable albeit inconsistent assimilative pressures.² The emergence of such a customised institution was symptomatic of the state’s increasingly sophisticated managerial practices, and of its willingness to use a variety of often paradoxical methods to ensure the integration or, more immediately, containment of the north of Scotland. Military commissions represented one such mechanism and were seen as a relatively abundant political resource that could generate wider loyalties to the British state. The decision in September 1706, for instance, of John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll, to throw his interest behind the Union bill was expedited by the promise of a major-general’s commission, and demonstrated clearly how the army could be deployed in a Scottish context to supplant or at least circumvent older loyalties.³ In this broader sense independent companies were never limited to a wholly insular policing agenda, although, initially, the predominance of whig personnel underlined their immediate objective of destroying Highland disaffection and, in the longer term, clanship in general.⁴ Attention has, however, usually dwelt on their failure in this particular regard rather than on the longer-term implications for the region’s assimilation arising from the creation of an institution which appeared to entrench so many local and distinctive aspects of Highland society.⁵ Indeed, the emergence of these initially insignificant companies – not more than 270 to 315 men in 1725⁶ – raises much broader issues including how, exactly, the relationship between clanship and a ‘civilising’ and centralised Hanoverian military worked in practice. Moreover, the direct development of Highland regiments from these independent companies poses questions regarding the coherence of the assimilative political forces operating on Highland society, and the issue of how far the region’s strong particularisms brought adjustments within the process of integration itself.

Companies and Criminals, 1715–1745

Justification for the re-estabhshment of Highland independent companies in 1725 revolved around two main constituent strands of a perceived ‘Highland problem’: namely, ‘barbarity’, expressed largely in the form of endemic criminal lawlessness, and, second, the region’s historic record of deep-rooted political disaffection and military insurrection. However, the neat coherence implied in such an all-encompassing phrase as ‘Highland problem’ should not be accepted uncritically. Despite Whig propaganda that portrayed banditry and political disaffection as one and the same, the region in fact suffered from legal and criminal problems that were often quite separate from the wider issue of military insurgency.⁷ The emergence of these new companies, therefore, took place within a disparate framework riddled with misconceptions and inconsistencies that were, ironically, vital in determining the nature and development of the region’s subsequent contribution towards Britain’s imperial army. A fundamental inconsistency within the notion of a ‘Highland problem’ sprang from the fact that issues of lawlessness and military insurrection divided primarily, though by no means absolutely, along local and central perspectives. Within the Highlands and on its Lowland periphery independent companies were seen primarily as reasonably effective instruments of social law and order. Albeit that Simon Fraser of Lovat’s lobbying in 1717 for the re-estabhshment of recently disbanded pre-Union companies centred upon the political issue of Jacobitism’s military containment, subsequent pressure for new units in the mid-1720s actually came from localities suffering from repeated small-scale cattle raiding. In February 1724 gentry and tenants in the parishes of Kilearn and Buchanan in Stirlingshire compiled rates of cattle loss since 1717 in order to provide information for Scottish M.P.s lobbying for new companies. These essentially local, legal and proprietorial concerns were reflected closely in the memorial submitted by the Court of Session judge and former Lord Justice Clerk, James Erskine, Lord Grange, at the end of 1724. Given his own legal background, it was not at all surprising that these apprehensions over ineffective judicial protection of property were echoed by Archibald Campbell, Earl of Ilay and later third Duke of Argyll, who surmised that the lack of impartial justice in the Highlands formed ‘the very essence of their barbarity’.⁸ While the initiatives of 1724–5 are generally accepted as the highest pre-Culloden point of government interest in the Highlands, London’s concerns were in fact centred upon the subtly different objective of military pacification and containment. Official memorials, for instance, exhibited a tendency to list the effective strength of clan manpower, quoted at between 24,100 and 22,100 men, as opposed to the equally problematic if somewhat more complex issue of legal jurisdictions and private, partial justice in the region.⁹ General George Wade in his 1727 report to the King exemplified these specific, military aims when he noted that the bearing of arms by Highlanders undoubtedly had unfortunate criminal and violent consequences, but that ‘the greatest inconveniency was their being proper and ready instruments [for] the Pretender’.¹⁰ Ilay, despite his concerns over legal conditions in the region, highlighted these very different local and central government agendas when he noted to Grange that the largely administrative and legalistic tone of his report had resulted in delay of its consideration in London, adding, ‘for all those views here are at present suspended, excepting the disarming [sic] the disaffected Highlanders which you will recommend as of the last consequence to the government in case of any new disturbance at home or abroad’.¹¹

Ilay’s advice not only demonstrated the conscious subordination of law and order issues in government circles to that of military affairs, but also that, as in the seventeenth century, few Scottish poloticians consequently found it in their interest to distinguish between purely criminal violence and political and armed disaffection. Only by drawing attention to the latter could concerned officials in Edinburgh get Westminster to consider policies to deal with the former. Nor indeed was this a practice limited to managerial elites in Edinburgh and London. Particular cases of disorder continued to be used freely for political advantage by chiefs themselves, be they Jacobite or Whig. Thus, while many senior members of Scotland’s legal establishment conceded that clan feuding had become a thing of the past, the deliberate misrepresentation of disorder reinforced metropolitan perceptions that robbery and ‘private scuffles’ kept Highlanders accustomed to arms in such a way that, under entirely different circumstances, they could then be deployed to devastating effect in a wider political crisis.¹² Indeed, manipulation of the region’s reputation for disorder and disaffection had become something of a standard political mechanism in Scotland, applicable within even a wholly Lowland context. At the height of the malt tax riots during the spring and summer of 1725, Wade, whilst deploying an additional English regiment to subdue Glasgow, avoided further provocation of Scottish sensibilities by announcing that his action was not an attempt to overawe the population of the city but was in direct response to a rumour, entirely unsubstantiated, that Russian arms had been landed on the Isle of Lewis.¹³ Albeit that in January 1744 the Camerons and Lochaber MacDonnells did use the need to settle outstanding cases of mutual cattle loss as a pretext to congregate for Jacobite activity, it was also just as likely that Highlanders themselves would not baulk at playing upon Lowland suspicion of Highland disorder.¹⁴ In September 1739 the imminent outbreak of war between Britain and Spain provided the Ross and Munro interest in Ross-shire with an opportunity to discredit Sir Alexander Mackenzie of Coul. While in fact a representative of an erstwhile Jacobite family, Mackenzie’s growing Whig credentials in Argathelian circles threatened to undermine the electoral supremacy of the Ross and Munro alliance. Poinding and counter-poinding of cattle by parties of armed men deployed by Coul and then by Ross of Balnagown ensured that Ross of Pitcalnie, together with Captain George Munro of Culcairn, commander of one of the independent companies, eventually intervened against the Mackenzie laird. The result was an appeal to Edinburgh by the Ross interest that couched what was essentially a local incident in terms more likely to solicit a positive response from the legal establishment in the south. Mackenzie of Coul was accused of sedition and of convening 200–300 men, armed with Spanish weapons and intent on acting against the national interest. That the charge was accepted and Coul arraigned at the Court of Justiciary demonstrates how the issue of law and order in the Highlands could be manipulated for political ends. The episode, however distorted, was typical in that it served to reinforce perceptions at the centre of criminal and political disorder in the region.¹⁵

It was unfortunate for the Highlands’ reputation throughout the rest of Scotland that such smear tactics formed a crucial aspect of lobbying for Hanoverian patronage. Most infamously, Simon Fraser of Lovat’s memorials to King George I in 1717 and 1724 played upon all the usual negative perceptions of the region.¹⁶ While any attempt at gaining government favour usually involved exposing some legal, financial or political irregularity, applications for company commissions, given the nature of their intended duties, invariably involved relating instances of extreme local violence. In September 1742 Mackenzie of Coul informed John Hay, fourth Marquis of Tweeddale and Secretary of State for Scotland, that parties of armed ‘loose men’ were terrorising Ross-shire even though independent company detachments were stationed within the county. In the spring of 1739, whilst attempting to counter accusations of their corrupt and ineffectual operations against thieves in Inverness and Ross-shire, both Lovat and Sir Duncan Campbell of Lochnell were seriously undermined by a memorial from Kenneth Mackenzie of Seaforth that requested and justified further local commissions in view of ongoing localised robbery and violence.¹⁷

Nor should it be assumed t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Emergence of a British-Highland Military, 1715–46
• 2. Imperial Specialisation: the British-Highland Military, 1746–1815
• 3. The Annexed Estates: Improvement, Recruitment and Re-settlement, 1746–1784
• 4. The Campbells of Breadalbane: Recruitment and Highland Estate Management, 1745–1802
• 5. Military Recruiting and the Highland Estate Economy, 1756–1815
• 6. The Military and Highland Emigration, 1763–1815
• 7. Military Service and British Identity in the Highlands, 1746–1815
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index