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MAITHEAN NA GAELTACHD mustered in full
array to give George IV. a superabundantly loyal welcome on his visit to
Edinburgh in 1822, and, with hardly an exception, the Highland nobles,
chiefs, and landlords who put in appearance on the occasion, represented
families who owned land and held sway in the same districts 250 years before
then, and in not a few instances twice as long as that. Between 1560 and
1822 there had been many broils, forfeitures, and temporary displacements, followed by
changing back, first after the Revolution of 1688,
and finally by the restorations of their estates to the
families who had lost them after Culloden. As a
political force and factor for keeping the Highlands
separate from the rest of the country, Jacobitism
was killed long before the death of Prince Charles.
It was persistently assailed by the now dominant
Church of Scotland, and undermined by the teaching
given in the schools. Chatham's bold scheme of
raising the Highland regiments for national defence
gave rise to a welding imperial pride which never
existed among the Highlanders before, and which
from the military quarter co-operated with the
spiritual power in changing the situation. From
Fontenoy and the capture of Quebec to Waterloo,
Highland soldiers had pre-eminently distinguished
themselves for valour, discipline, and endurance.
They were proud to call themselves Breatunnaich
*The aristocracy of the Highlands", (Britons),
and to have done good service in defence
of the British Empire, and sustained the martial
fame of their ancestors. George IV. was not a bad
Constitutional King, although as a man he might be
said to well deserve all the contempt poured on him
by the Whig writers down to Thackeray, from the
time he had ceased to rattle dice with Charles
James Fox, their belauded, awfully-debauched and
debauching leader. George IV. was not personally
liked by his Highland people. They had heard
stories about his bad conduct to his wife, and of his
relations with other women, including, what they
could not forgive, other men's wives. They could be
and were far more tolerant than their ministers and
kirk-sessions about sexual immorality between
unmarried sprigs of the upper classes and peasant
girls, but they ground their teeth against adultery,
which was indeed an exceedingly rare vice among
themselves. What they felt due to George IV. was
a modified loyalty as the headman of the British
Empire. Had George III. come to Scotland after
the restoration of the forfeited estates, he would
have received from all classes of Highlanders as
heart-felt a "ceud mile failt" welcome as was given
to his grand-daughter, Queen Victoria, at Blair-Atholl, Taymouth, and Castle Drummond. Farmer
George, the "born Briton," through the reports of
homely virtues which reached them, obtained a real
hold on Highland loyalty. He was the first of his
race who did so.
I was present at the Taymouth gathering in
1842, and cannot yet recall without emotion how
we all, gentle and simple, old and young, were
carried out of ourselves, and thrilled into unity by
enthusiastic loyal and chivalrous devotion to our
young Sovereign Lady. His countrymen, forgetting
recent evictions and well-grounded fears of more to
come, were exultingly proud of the Marquis of
Breadalbane that day. He spent his money and
dispensed his hospitality lavishly, created fairyland
effects by flags and coloured lamps, and managed
the whole procedure connected with an unusual event
with organising skill and grand success. But when
criticism succeeded enthusiasm it was pointed out
that, compared with that of 1822, the impressive
muster of 1842 exhibited gaps which showed that
in the conflict between the old and the new land
systems the new was steadily gaining. Ross-shire,
Atholl, and Breadalbane gave excellent illustrations of how incoming feudal
magnates established their charter rights, and infused a clannish spirit in
native tenants of many surnames. Until the Macdonalds, Lords of the Isles, and Earls of Ross, were
suppressed, the Mackenzies of Kintail were their
vassals, and hardly reckoned among their chief
vassals. They made the most of their opportunities
on the fall of their over-lords to enlarge their
influence and possessions, and the Reformation turmoils later on enabled them to lay appropriating
hands on ecclesiastical and old Crown lands in
Easter Ross. How did they secure their new pos-
sessions? By planting out as little lairds or chief
tenants all the cadets and near kinsmen of the
house of Kintail. The Earldom of Atholl a much
smaller affair than the County of Atholl, which
embraced all the regions above Dunkeld between
the Garry and the Strathearn border was, from
the reign of King Duncan, the father of Malcolm
Ceannmor, an appanage of the Royal family. It
passed through many owners ere it was bestowed
on the half-brother of James II. What did the
wise son of the Black Knight of Lome do? He
strengthened the Wolf of Badenoch Stewart element
he found in Atholl by bringing in Appin kinsmen of
his own and giving them small properties. He also,
I think, instituted the policy, which his successors
long followed out, of acquiring superiorities by
buying or otherwise obtaining estates held of the
Crown, and then of selling them on subinfeudation
terms. He gave his daughters in marriage to the
smaller barons of his district, and by those wise
devices, Huntly was prevented from laying grasping
hands on forfeited Garth and other lands south of
the Grampian boundary. When the present Duke
of Atholl's father, then Lord Glenlyon, gave a most
hearty Highland welcome to Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert in 1842, he was still surrounded by
many of the lairds of old lineage who had formed
his predecessors' Comhairle Taighe, or provincial
court and family council, and were in war times the
officers of their host. The estates of these lairds are
now, with very few exceptions, owned by proprietors
who cannot, however good, as aliens in race, surnames, traditions and language, fill the places of the
vanished families. But in the ducal domains the
old kindly relations between the Castle and the
farmhouse and cottage, have been throughout the
whole long period of mutation and desolation so well
maintained, that an old Highlander like myself in
visiting Atholl feels himself taken back to the good
old days, and is warmed by a glow of admiration
which is in contrast to the cold shudder he has to
endure in much depopulated and much un-Celticised
districts of his native land.
"Black Colin of Rome" and his descendants
invaded Breadalbane from Glenorchy, much in the
same manner as the Kintail Mackenzies invaded the
Black Isle and Easter Ross. The Glenorchy Camp-
bells began their "bris sios" or eastward progress
when, as a whole, the wide regions they were in due
time to acquire were King's lands, and monastic
lands belonging to the Abbot of Scone, and to
James the First's newly introduced and profusely
endowed Carthusians of Perth. By public services,
Court favour, and purchase, the Glenorchy Campbells, who were not only sturdy warriors, but men
wise in council, and educated beyond the greater
number of their aristocratic contemporaries, first got
the management and part-possession of the King's
lands, and forthwith commenced to lay the firm and
broad foundations of their future principality, by
giving out Lawers and Glenlyon to younger sons,
and using their influence to give their own followers
foothold on the lands of King and monks. To the
Glenorchy Campbells, as well as to the Mackenzies
of Kintail, the Reformation afforded a grand oppor-
tunity for adding Church lands to their already
considerable possessions. Infamous Hepburn, the
Abbot of Scone and Bishop of Moray, laden with the
burden of his sins and fearing coming events, sold
his Breadalbane monastic lands at a low price and
ready money to Sir Colin Campbell of Glenorchy
the "Cailean Liath" or Gray Colin of local songs and
stories but after Sir Colin's death, his son, Sir
Duncan "Donnachadh Dubh a Churraichd," "Black
Duncan of the Cowl," had, under the revocation
law, to pay another purchasing price to King James.
I think this same thing happened to the lands of the
Carthusians. Donnachadh Dubh and Kenneth of
Kintail were contemporaries. They were much
alike in policy and character, although Kenneth was
illiterate, and Sir Duncan was able to read arid
speak in so many languages that he gained the
reputation of being a formidable wizard. Both
these men were good to their own people and
oppressive to their neighbours and rivals. Besides
building castles and bridges, making roads, improving on the very good estate regulations issued by
James V., King of the Commons, to his Breadalbane
tenants, and introducing stallions of two sorts from
England to improve the native breeds of Highland
horses, Sir Duncan, without wronging his eldest son
and heir, Sir Colin, gave out estates to his host of
sons, legitimate and illegitimate; portioned his
daughters, legitimate and illegitimate, and by the
marriage of his sons and daughters with the sons
and daughters of other houses, or even chief tenants,
organised a semi-clannish league which once formed
should in perpetuity make the heads of it great
chiefs. But Sir Duncan was only fourteen years in
his grave at Finlarig when Montrose burned the
whole of the Glenorchy property from the junction
of the Lyon with the Tay to Lismore, without, how-
ever, having been able to take any of its places of
strength, Taymouth, the Isle of Loch Tay, Finlarig,
Isle of Loch Dochart, and the Castle of Glenurchy,
etc. A few years later Cromwell's soldiers, under
Monk, had seized on all the strengths, but did not,
like Montrose, ravage or oppress the country. No
military rule could indeed be milder or more justly
administered. But then and on two or three other
occasions there was no little danger of collapse for
the Glenorchy chiefs and their possessions. Yet
Restoration, Revolution, and the two eighteenth
century Jacobite Rebellions, finally left them with
widened possessions and well surrounded with satellites of their own blood and name, and the other
small proprietors connected with them by ties of
affinity and custom. Time, of course, had brought
about some changes. The Lairds of Lawers, having
become Earls of Louden, sold Lawers to the Chief of
their house, and Breadalbane knew them no more.
Two or three other cadet branches had become
extinct. But in 1782 when John Campbell of
Carwhin succeeded his kinsman as Fourth Earl of
Breadalbane, he found himself surrounded by a large
provincial court or assembly of landed kinsmen and
allies, and his tenant communities, in winter-towns
and shealings, living under the land settlement
system of James, which Black Sir Duncan had
revived and vastly improved. This Fourth Earl was
a truly kindly and thoroughly Highland-hearted
man, and a patriot who raised three fencible regiments during the war with France. He resided
very constantly at Taymouth, was a Whig and a
Presbyterian, and spent much money on wood-planting and other improvements. He was made a
Marquis in 1831. During his longer than half-a-
century of sway he saw, as if stricken by a strange
fatality, his house council satellites diminishing
rapidly to the vanishing point. Although he kept a
hospitable house, was a free hand giver, and added
to and improved his vast property, from living so
much at home among his people he accumulated
much wealth, which he divided among his three
children, to wit, his son and successor, and his two
daughters, Lady Elizabeth Pringle and the Duchess
of Buckingham. He was not, like his son, a
Manchester-school political-economist, and in sheer
kind heartedness he committed the blunder of
making holdings, which the changed conditions of
farming and the contracting value of domestic
industries had made already too small, more congested still by finding "rooms'" for such of his fencible men as were not the eldest sons of tenants.
Had the circle of smaller lairds attached to his
house not ceased before then to exercise the functions of informal yet very
practical family council, he would surely have been advised by them to leave
Black Duncan's land-settlement alone, or if he meddled with it at all, as
opportunities offered to increase instead of diminishing the size of the
holdings. The old Marquis lived and died as a great
and much-honoured Highland magnate. His son
was in personal conduct as good a man as his father,
and admittedly the abler man of the two, but he
never was the man for Gaeldom. In 1842 he made
a brave and, for the moment, a successful show of
being that man, and years afterwards, at the first
review of Volunteers in Edinburgh, he did, at the
head of his Breadalbane Volunteers, appear to be a
great Chief to people who did not know what an
isolated magnate lie was in his own country, and
how he had alienated the affections of his own folk.
It was no fault of his, indeed, that very few four or
five at most representatives of the thirty or forty
cadet lairds of his house, and affinity lairds of other
surnames who surrounded his father in 1782, were
about him to receive the Queen in 1842. The disappearance of these landed
families, some by natural extinction, and some by having got into money
troubles which compelled selling out, may, however, be taken to account in
some measure for the line of estate management he deliberately adopted. He
believed in the new political economy principles, and
consistently carried them out until he died a lonely
man and sad, although rich beyond the dream of
ordinary avarice, at Lausanne in 1862.
To the heads of noble houses, the small
lairds of their name and lineage, and those who were connected with them by affinity or feudal ties, were
bodyguards or criosleine (literally shirt girdles). They were then the
connecting links with the common people, and their advisers in the matters
which concerned the well-being of the whole community within the bounds of their lords' and their
own possessions. The magnate only gained mere
isolation when he acquired estates by honest
purchase of small estates which old bodyguard
adherents of his family found themselves compelled
to sell. Factors could not, and those of them who
could, would not, inform him so fully about matters
he ought to know, as the lairds who were in close
touch with the people, spoke their language, and
thoroughly understood their circumstances and
feelings. On the other hand the magnates used
their influence and patronage to open careers in the
Army, Navy, and Civil Service, and in the Church,
and legal and medical professions, to the sons of
the small lairds, and the sons of their own tenants,
crofters, and cottars. The unruly spirits among the
sons of the mansion-houses, who while sowing their
early wild oats at home, caused vexation to parents
and strict ecclesiastical disciplinarians, in many
instances illustrated the truth of Burns's lines:
"Yet oft a ragged cout's been known
To mak' a noble aiver,"
by blossoming out into sturdy warriors and
pioneers
of empire abroad, or by turning over new leaves
at home, and setting themselves resolutely and
doucely to useful pursuits. The lairds and their
families made life in the country attractive to the
magnates and their families by furnishing them
with a far less pleasure-jaded society than they
were accustomed to in London. The lairds were
the acting Justices of the Peace, and in some large
parts of the Highlands, as far as the common people
were concerned, almost the sole representatives of
civil power, while ministers and kirk sessions represented the spiritual power. For fifty years after
the restoration of the forfeited estates these two
powers, working amicably together, preserved good
order at small cost, and reduced crimes which had
to be dealt with by Sheriff and Assize Courts to a
minimum. Most of the then Highland lairds were
Presbyterians, and not a few of them elders of
the Church of Scotland. Only a few old Jacobite
families stuck to Episcopalianism as the pathetic badge of a lost cause.
Highland nobles, who were Church of England people in England, when at home
in their Highland castles worshipped contentedly in canopied pews in their parish churches.
Political and caste causes which, after the passing
of the Reform Bill, spoiled the previous harmony by
degrees, had yet to arise, and, practically, Highland
depopulation and the annual invasion of English
sportsmen and buying out of Highland proprietors
had almost yet to begin. Despite the invasion of
Lowland sheep, shepherds and renters of shealing
grazings, and disforested old deer forests, the
general situation to the superficial observer remained
unchanged, say up to 1832. |
